I’ve been in quite a few (mainly youtube comment section) discussions with various Christians talking about the historicity of Jesus. The standard reply comes back that obviously people like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote about Jesus, many Christians find it hard to accept that those 4 gospels were written anonymously, and decades later. And when i ask for their non biblical sources, i inevitably get the names Josephus, Tacitus, Philo, and various others. Looking briefly at Wiki, it has Josephus not being born until 37AD, if true, that was about 4 years AFTER Jesus had died if my simple maths is right.
What writers/historians actually wrote about Jesus during his lifetime?, are there any credible sources??
Doesn’t this then add fuel to the fire that possibly he did not exist, and he’s probably a composite of various stories and people who lived around that time. I know that Bart doesn’t think that Jesus Christ was the miracle worker/son of God guy who Christians claim he was. I guess our only true way to find out would be to invent a time machine and set the dials for the year 30AD. I think most Christians would be flabbergasted to find their spiritual healer wasn’t who he said he was, or perhaps wasn’t around at all. I wouldn’t call myself a mythicist though, i think it’s best to leave all options open.. even the option that he was the son of God, which i think is the least plausible of the 3 options. I think there is something to be said for Dennis R Macdonalds book The Homeric epics and the Gospel of Mark, the countless similarities between Mark’s gospel and Homers writings are too many to be discounted. All fascinating stuff.
Our esteemable host wrote a whole book on the topic that talks about precisely this issue. 
The upshot is that most people from first-century Palestine don’t have any surviving documents about them written during their lifetime, including people like Pontius Pilate who ran the whole country. Given that we wouldn’t expect to have that kind of evidence if Jesus existed, the lack of it can’t really be taken as evidence that he didn’t.
Note the argument isn’t necessarily that Jesus “wasn’t who he said he was” but that Jesus “wasn’t what people came to say about him later” which is not the same thing at all.
And of course, to paraphrase Dr. Ehrman, you’d think that Jesus’ brother would have known if Jesus didn’t exist and was just a story based on a composite of people who lived at the time…
Yes, good points. I’d always assumed there would be lots of available documents concerning Pontius Pilate and was more than a little surprised that we dont really know that much about him. Maybe we simply take things for granted.
It does seem strange to me that Jesus supposedly came down to earth with this message for all of humanity with all it’s ramifications of the death and resurrection. And the way he chooses to spread his message is by having people write about him decades after he’s gone ( getting facts wrong in the process), and then taking hundreds upon hundreds of years to make it’s way around the globe, in many cases forcing the indigenous populations to accept Christianity or die ( in places like South America). Surely to goodness God could have found a more conducive method to get his message to us. How was the world any different the day after Jesus had been crucified?, people in other countries would not get to hear about Jesus’s sacrifice for us for getting on 2,000 years. The North American indians for example knew nothing about Christ for countless generations, they lived and died for generations blissfully unaware that a man had died for their sins well over a thousand years before. In that sense, it seems rather pointless. And when eventually, the white Christians did make it over to North America via Europe, they ended up simply wiping the indigenous population of Indians off the map.
bonnie43uk said
It does seem strange to me that Jesus supposedly came down to earth with this message for all of humanity with all it’s ramifications of the death and resurrection. And the way he chooses to spread his message is by having people write about him decades after he’s gone ( getting facts wrong in the process), and then taking hundreds upon hundreds of years to make it’s way around the globe, in many cases forcing the indigenous populations to accept Christianity or die ( in places like South America).
I read a lot of books, scholarly and not so scholarly (Jesus Lived in India, Holy Blood Holy Grail) but what is finally conclusive to me when considering whether the New Testament is the inspired word of God and Jesus is his incarnation is the fact that Jesus died at app. age 30-35 or so. In other words there was a 15 year period (age 15-30) when Jesus as the incarnation of God on earth could have written the definitive book on God and humanity, salvation and redemption. But he didn’t, instead we got the New Testament.
bonnie43uk said
“The standard reply comes back that obviously people like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote about Jesus, many Christians find it hard to accept that those 4 gospels were written anonymously, and decades later.”
What surprises me is how many books by scholars still defend the traditional orthodox account of Christianity. I’m not talking about fundamentalists but critical scholars who review the history of whatever problem then gravitate toward the traditional accounts although with suitable variations. NT scholarship is still Christian scholarship by people born and raised in the church. Despite efforts at objectivity, movement away from the traditions of the church has been painful and slow. The history of critical scholarship for 250 years is that there is a consensus from which a critical scholar breaks. Until quite recently the scholar would be ridiculed and often lose his or her job. The interesting part is how often the consensus scholarship is wrong. The history of critical scholarship is the history of the errors of consensus scholarship.
Could Jesus write? Read? it seems highly unlikely that he could have. If he studied and or learned in synagogues he only new about the Jewish teachings from hearing them.
I have just started the books I have had for quite awhile that cover the earlier time period concerning that time and writings. You would think he would have written something if he was a real person and able to write.
Rosekeister said
I read a lot of books, scholarly and not so scholarly (Jesus Lived in India, Holy Blood Holy Grail) but what is finally conclusive to me when considering whether the New Testament is the inspired word of God and Jesus is his incarnation is the fact that Jesus died at app. age 30-35 or so. In other words there was a 15 year period (age 15-30) when Jesus as the incarnation of God on earth could have written the definitive book on God and humanity, salvation and redemption. But he didn’t, instead we got the New Testament.
Jesus could have written a book and it was lost. Probably not very likely, but still possible since we aren’t sure of Jesus’s level of literacy. Remember that we probably do have eyewitness accounts from the time of Jesus. Unfortunately they were orally transmitted over the course of many decades, in many forms (lists of sayings etc.) added to, mythologized, fictionalized and finally written down in a very changed form by writers with a specific religious agenda, not historians.
“Remember that we probably do have eyewitness accounts from the time of Jesus.”
Why do you think so?
“Unfortunately they were orally transmitted over the course of many decades, in many forms (lists of sayings etc.) added to, mythologized, fictionalized and finally written down in a very changed form by writers with a specific religious agenda, not historians.”
You believe this why?
I believe that to be a pretty standard scholarly viewpoint: that oral traditions regarding Jesus were later recorded by the writers of the Gospels.
We need to be careful not to conflate the claim that there was a historical individual Jesus of Nazareth with later claims that he was the son of God or God incarnate — the former in no way depends upon the latter
From a historical perspective Jesus not writing any books makes perfect sense: he probably couldn’t write, he was spreading his message to people who mostly couldn’t read, he seems to have taught that the kingdom of God would be coming in the lifetime of his hearers, so it’s not like there was a reason to spread the message to future generations.
There are many people that we have access to during the time of the Biblical Jesus. Foremost would probably be Philo of Alexandria. I believe we have nearly a million words written by him. He had traveled to Rome representing the cause of Jews, he had family that ruled in Judea during that time. He makes no mention of a Jesus figure as Christ, to the contrary he makes mention of no Christ figure existing yet. He died around 50 CE before the temple was destroyed in 70CE. Josephus most certainly had access to his writings some 30 years later. Josephus does not offer an attestation of a historical Jesus. He does, if one accepts his references as authentic, offer evidence that there were people who believed in a Jesus figure as Christ at that time. There is a plethora of writings about the authenticity of his references on both sides of the issue. The idea of an Oral account existing prior to the Gospel’s is an assumptive one. No evidence exists to confirm that as fact. Tacitus is often used to attest to the historical Jesus. He mentions the Great Fire of Rome which some accounts blame on Christians. Tacitus was about 7 years old when the fire happened in 64CE and did not write about the incident until many years later. Again he offers no evidence for the existence of a historical Biblical Jesus but rather an account that confirms there were many who believed in Jesus as Christ. We do know that the Jesus story emerges into history after Philo and during Josephus. That puts the dates roughly 50-70CE. There are dozens of prolific writers during the decades prior to that, none of which mention a single word. Gamaliel the Elder offers some interesting reading. Mentioned in Christian and Jewish tradition he appears sympathetic to many of the Biblical figures. He died about the same time Philo did. We do not have access to him directly as a historical figure but later references to him suggest it as much as any Gospel does the existence of a Biblical Jesus. I apologize for being rather verbose but I find the topic fascinating.
“Unfortunately they were orally transmitted over the course of many decades, in many forms (lists of sayings etc.) added to, mythologized, fictionalized and finally written down in a very changed form by writers with a specific religious agenda, not historians.”
Who wrote them down with a very specific religious agenda and what did they write? What was their specific religious agenda? Did they all have the same agenda?
“Could Jesus write? Read? it seems highly unlikely that he could have. If he studied and or learned in synagogues he only new about the Jewish teachings from hearing them.” mary
Who do you think crafted the words spoken in John chapters 11 through 15? He or she was quite brilliant I think. No one has ever spoken like that before or since, that I have found.
bonnie43uk said
I think there is something to be said for Dennis R Macdonalds book The Homeric epics and the Gospel of Mark, the countless similarities between Mark’s gospel and Homers writings are too many to be discounted. All fascinating stuff.
People find coincidences in everything. It’s human nature to want to bring order from chaos. Look at the popular urban legend that tries to link the presidencies of Lincoln and Kennedy as if they had some supernatural connection. The list of comparisons between the two goes on and on and on, but hardly anyone stops to consider the infinite number of ways in which the two men were dissimilar. Same applies to trying to find comparisons between anything Biblical related and any other work of fiction from human history.
Bethany said
“Josephus does not offer an attestation of a historical Jesus.”
Wait, what? He seems to have been under the strong impression that Jesus had a brother, which is hard for imaginary people to do.
Yes, that is my opinion of course. Josephus was writing about the event concerning James some 35 years after it happened. He most certainly had no first hand knowledge of the event. Festus was appointed around 59CE. Josephus wrote Antiquities around 94CE. I use the word attestation in the sense of evidence, testament, but most directly as witness. He does not offer any of these but rather does confirm that there were people who believed Jesus was Christ at that time. There are people who believe Joesph Smith had a revelation, that Ron Hubbard discovered Thetans, and that there was a shot from the grassy knoll. If I write that down as part of history, it does not make any of it true. What would be true is there are people who believe it. Thankx for your comment.
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