Did Jesus truly exist?
Are there non-Christian sources that provide some information about Jesus?
Historical sources about Jesus, confirming His existence?
Other testimonies outside of the Gospels?
1 • Historicity of Jesus, the paradoxical man!
Jesus.
A man more famous than known.
So paradoxical that in three years of public life, he tore through history, dividing our calendar between what was before him and what came after.
A man who didn’t take care of a flock of sheep but of a beehive, people who woke up in the morning with devout thoughts, then got strange ideas by lunchtime, and by midafternoon, heresy had already spread throughout the Middle East.
2 • Did Jesus Really Exist? Interlude
Let’s be clear: I’m a poor donkey who doodles cartoons in my free time, and reads books in the free time of my free time (*).
(*) (On the scale of “historical reliability” – I’m barely ranking in the fourth-to-last position, just above the Loch Ness Monster theories but one spot below those Bigfoot documentaries.)
And needless to say, if you want to delve into the historicity of Jesus, press ALT+F4 and go read a serious book.
But there are two things I want to share that really struck me when I started looking for answers to the question of the historical existence of Jesus…
First thing: the multitude of historical sources on Jesus (from non-Christian origins).
Second thing: the date of the earliest complete texts we have that talk about Jesus, compared to the date of the earliest complete texts of other great figures in history (Caesar, Demosthenes, Tacitus, Plato, …).
3 • Non-Christian Sources on Jesus
Probably none of you think this way, and I don’t want to resort to the generic “people say that”.
So let’s imagine that only Saruman, the corrupted wizard who embraced the Darkness, bending to the will of Sauron, is saying the following:
In my search for traces of the existence of Jesus, I discovered (to my great surprise) that there are many non-Christian sources (fragments, letters, complete texts) that mention Him.
I’ll mention a few examples below (for those who want to delve deeper, I’ll leave the Wikipedia link).
3.1 • Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (93-94 AD)
The information we have about Flavius Josephus (born Yosef ben Matityahu) comes from his autobiography.
In a nutshell, Yosef was a Jew who held various political positions in Israel, eventually becoming the commander of the Jewish army during the First Jewish War (66-70 AD), a fierce rebellion against the Romans.
According to what he wrote in Antiquities of the Jews (93-94 AD) (if you don’t believe what I’m about to write, go to Wikipedia under “Flavius Josephus”. It’s exactly like that)…
In time, Yosef emerged from prison, managed to gain favor with the emperor, and changed his name to Flavius Josephus.
In his work Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus recounts many events also found in the Gospels (such as John the Baptist, Herod Antipas divorcing his wife, the daughter of Aretas, the king of Nabatea, to marry Herodias – his brother’s wife -, etc.).
While narrating the history of Israel from the generation before his time, he provides information about Jesus:
At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out.
(JOSEPHUS FLAVIUS, Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII, 63-64)
3.2 – Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan (111-112 AD)
Around 112 AD, Pliny the Younger (“Legatus Augusti” of the provinces of Pontus and Bithynia) had an exchange of letters with the Emperor Trajan.
In one of these letters, Pliny asks the emperor how he should deal with the Christians who refuse to worship Trajan and instead pray to Jesus:
Christians… They further asserted that their entire guilt or error consisted in being accustomed to gather before dawn and chant in alternating verses a hymn to Christ as if he were a god, and to bind themselves by an oath not only to commit any crime, but also to refrain from theft, fraud, and adultery, to keep their promises, and to not refuse the return of a deposit if requested.
(PLINY THE YOUNGER to Emperor Trajan, Letters 10.96-97)
3.3 • Gaius Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (112 AD)
In his work, the historian Suetonius testifies (with a somewhat altered tone) to the presence of Christians in ancient Rome… and refers to a certain Chrestus… could this be a distortion of “Christ”?
Since the Jews were constantly causing disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.
…and again…
[Nero] inflicted the most exquisite tortures on those people who, hated for their abominations, were commonly called Christians.
(CAIUS SUETONIUS, Life of Nero XVI, 2)
3.4 – Tacitus, Annales (114-120 A.D.)
Even the historian Tacitus does not hold back in describing what he thinks of the “ferment” that arose around Jesus:
The originator of this designation, Christ, under the rule of Tiberius, had been condemned to the punishment by the Procurator Pontius Pilate. However, suppressed for a time, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the source of that evil, but also in the city, where from every side, all things atrocious and shameful flow together.
3.5 • And many others…
If you go to Google and type Non-Christian historical sources on Jesus, you’ll find the Wikipedia page from which I copied these passages.
On the same page, you’ll find many others (from Latin, Greek, and Jewish origins): Thallus, Dio Cassius, Arrian, Galen, Justin, Fronto, Lucian of Samosata, …
So, summing it up…
- Option number one: a collective hallucination struck all populations around the Mediterranean basin—Jews, Greeks, Latins, barbarians…
- Option number two: Saruman is wrong.
4 • The date of the earliest complete texts we have that speak of Jesus, compared to the date of the earliest complete texts of other great men in history
Clearly, we don’t have the original texts of the Gospels, just as the original works of Cicero, Plato, and all the other “greats” of the past have been lost.
However, we possess very ancient manuscripts of the New Testament.
For instance, in Manchester (at the Rylands Library), there are two papyrus fragments from the 2nd century, containing passages from the Gospel of John.
Other scrolls (from the 3rd century) contain various passages from the New Testament.
Finally, we have two complete copies of the New Testament, written in the 4th century:
– The Codex Vaticanus, so named because it is housed at the Vatican Library (dating from the first half of the 4th century);
– The Codex Sinaiticus, kept in Oxford (probably written in
the mid-4th century).
Between the writing of the New Testament texts (the Gospels and the Apostolic Letters were written more or less in the second half of the 1st century) and the first complete manuscripts, there are indeed three centuries.
(Note: I emphasize that I am talking about complete works that contain the entire New Testament, not complete copies of individual books of the New Testament. For example, to find a nearly intact copy of the Gospel of John – Papyrus 66 – we go down to 200 AD.)
And at this point, Saruman might say:
The difference is minimal if we compare it to that of many other ancient texts, considering the gap between their composition date and the date of the oldest copy we have found:
- 400 years for the works of Virgil, Cicero, Livy, and Pliny;
- 700 years for the comedies of Terence;
- 900 years for the texts of Caesar (De Bello Gallico), Ovid, Horace, Plato, Seneca, Suetonius, and Tacitus (Histories, Annals);
- 1200 years for the speeches of Demosthenes;
- 1300 years for the dialogues of Plato;
- 1400 years for the tragedies of Sophocles or Aeschylus and the comedies of Aristophanes;
- 1600 years for the tragedies of Euripides or the poems of Catullus.
5 • Did Jesus really exist? – Conclusions
…well, anyway.
…that’s it. Everyone can draw their own conclusions.
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(Fall 2016)