Did Jesus Exist? Evidence For and Against | Middle East And North Africa

DIFFICULTY OF FINDING EVIDENCE ABOUT JESUS

Was Jesus a myth like Hercules, pictured here

Professor Harold W. Attridge told PBS: “The problem in understanding Jesus as a historian begins with the fact that we have rather limited sources for reconstructing his life. Those sources are primarily the gospel traditions that we have in the New Testament, some apocryphal materials from the early Christian tradition, and some sources external to the New Testament. Those sources external to the New Testament are particularly valuable because they're not directly statements of faith, the way the New Testament materials are. Chief among those external sources is Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote at the end of the first century and who in book 18 of his "Antiquities of the Jews," has a small passage about Jesus. He also reports about John the Baptist, and about James, the brother of Jesus. And those passages constitute the first external testimonies to the existence of Jesus by someone who was not a follower. They may have been tampered with in the transmission, but at the core there probably is a reliable historical account by Josephus of the existence of Jesus. [Source: Harold W. Attridge, Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale Divinity School, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“Professional historians, I think, try to assemble all of the evidence that's available for reconstructing an event. And they're concerned about the bias in any of those sources that they use. And at the first stage in reconstructing an event is to analyze the bias of sources. We had to do so both with the sources internal to Christianity as well as the sources external to Christianity. So the gospels, for instance, are clearly statements of faith and they have certain takes on who Jesus was and what he meant to his followers. External sources like Josephus don't have the same faith commitment, they may have some other axes to grind, but in any case you have to see what the biases of the sources are, and try to take those into account as you do your reconstruction.

Professor Shaye I.D. Cohen told PBS: “Scholars have long debated what we know and what we think we can know about the historical Jesus. The quest for the historical Jesus has claimed many, many victims. Scholars have trotted out their favorite theories, and theories come and go. My own approach is to say that while we cannot possibly know the historicity of any single incident related in the gospels, we can't possibly know the authenticity of any single saying attributed to him. We can't possibly identify the truth of any given verse in the gospels, nevertheless, certain large patterns do emerge, and those patterns seem to me to likely to be true, or likely to have a certain amount of historical veracity, even if you might not be happy with the patterns as being too vague or too general, but at least here I think we can see a clear consistent pattern of evidence in all the four gospels. [Source: Shaye I.D. Cohen, Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies Brown University Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“The core of the gospels is Jesus as the miracle worker, Jesus as a man who made a deep impression upon those who he came in contact with, his ability to attract large crowds, his ability to attract a dedicated core group of followers or disciples, and then a much larger group of people sort of in the margins of the core group who saw him as somebody special. After all, there presumably were many Galilean teachers or preachers in the first century of the Common Era. There will have been many who were executed by Rome as trouble makers or people who are threats to the social order. They will have been many wandering holy men around about Judea or even the Roman Empire. But this man clearly was peculiar. This man clearly made a mark, left an impression, somebody you didn't forget. Somebody who had power in a social sense. Someone who actually was able to somehow attract, enchant, and hold a large group of followers already in his lifetime. And this point, I think clearly must be true. I don't see how else we can understand the stories that are told in the gospels, even if the stories themselves may not be true, but the pattern, I'm arguing, has some truth to it.

“So what pattern do we see? He's a holy man, a miracle man, someone who gets in trouble with the authorities, whoever they may be - Pharisees, scribes, priests, elders, he is constantly in trouble with them as a free-spirited individual. Someone who apparently preaches in the synagogue. All of [these activities] I think are the function of his power, the power as he has as a miracle worker and a holy man. And in the final analysis this is what does him in. This is what gets him into trouble with the authorities. At some point, such a restive individual simply could no longer be tolerated by the powers that be.

Websites and Resources: Jesus and the Historical Jesus Britannica on Jesus britannica.com Jesus-Christ ; Historical Jesus Theories earlychristianwritings.com ; Wikipedia article on Historical Jesus Wikipedia ; Jesus Seminar Forum virtualreligion.net; PBS Frontline From Jesus to Christ pbs.org ; Life and Ministry of Jesus Christ bible.org ; Jesus Central jesuscentral.com ; Catholic Encyclopedia: Jesus Christ newadvent.org ; Christianity BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Christian Classics Ethereal Library www.ccel.org ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com ; Candida Moss at the Daily Beast Daily Beast Christian Answers christiananswers.net ; Christian Classics Ethereal Library www.ccel.org ; Bible: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks Biblical History: Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Maybe Jesus Didn’t Exist?

David Gibson of the Religion News Service wrote: “An increasingly persistent line of argument is taking the quest for the historical Jesus in a whole different direction and claiming that we actually don’t know much about Jesus himself because, in fact, Jesus never existed. Or, say the debunkers, even if there was a Jesus of Nazareth, he was an ordinary rabbi whose identity was essentially hijacked after his death to invent a divine messiah, Jesus Christ. “There are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence — if not to think it outright improbable,” Raphael Lataster, a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney, wrote in a column published in The Washington Post. [Source: David Gibson, Religion News Service, December 19, 2014 +++]

“Lataster is the author of “There Was No Jesus, There Is No God,” one of a growing number of books and blog posts by Jesus “mythicists” who question the very existence of the man from Galilee. “Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than an urban (or desert) legend, likely an agglomeration of several evangelic and deluded rabbis who might have existed,” Michael B. Paulkovich, author of “No Meek Messiah,” wrote in an article in June 2013 in Free Inquiry magazine titled, “The Fable of the Christ.” +++

“Other books in this genre include “Christ’s Ventriloquists” by Eric Zuesse (2012); “Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus” by Richard Carrier (2012); “Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All” by David Fitzgerald (2010); “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?” by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy (2001); and “Deconstructing Jesus” by Robert Price (2000). +++

“Their thesis generally includes a number of arguments: 1) The Gospels were written decades after Jesus supposedly lived. 2) They are unreliable because they were written by promoters of the Christian myth. 3) The Gospel accounts are suspiciously incomplete, with few details of Jesus’ life. 4) Many elements of the Gospels conflict or contradict each other. 5) There are no contemporary references to Jesus from non-Christian sources. 6) The death and resurrection of Jesus mirrors other pagan myths of the time.” +++

Argument Against Jesus’s Existence

Raphael Lataster wrote in the Washington Post, “Numerous secular scholars have presented their own versions of the so-called “Historical Jesus” – and most of them are, as biblical scholar J.D. Crossan puts it, “an academic embarrassment.” From Crossan’s view of Jesus as the wise sage, to Robert Eisenman’s Jesus the revolutionary, and Bart Ehrman’s apocalyptic prophet, about the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus’ historical existence. But can even that be questioned? [Source: Raphael Lataster, Washington Post, December 18, 2014. Lataster is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney. He is author of “There Was No Jesus, There Is No God.” ^*^]

“The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein. ^*^

“The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose. The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea. The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent. ^*^

“Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus.” Even when discussing what appear to be the resurrection and the last supper, his only stated sources are his direct revelations from the Lord, and his indirect revelations from the Old Testament. In fact, Paul actually rules out human sources (see Galatians 1:11-12). ^*^

“Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased. Little can be gleaned from the few non-Biblical and non-Christian sources, with only Roman scholar Josephus and historian Tacitus having any reasonable claim to be writing about Jesus within 100 years of his life. And even those sparse accounts are shrouded in controversy, with disagreements over what parts have obviously been changed by Christian scribes (the manuscripts were preserved by Christians), the fact that both these authors were born after Jesus died (they would thus have probably received this information from Christians), and the oddity that centuries go by before Christian apologists start referencing them. ^*^

“Agnosticism over the matter is already seemingly appropriate, and support for this position comes from independent historian Richard Carrier’s recent defense of another theory — namely, that the belief in Jesus started as the belief in a purely celestial being (who was killed by demons in an upper realm), who became historicized over time. To summarize Carrier’s 800-page tome, this theory and the traditional theory – that Jesus was a historical figure who became mythicized over time – both align well with the Gospels, which are later mixtures of obvious myth and what at least sounds historical. ^*^

“The Pauline Epistles, however, overwhelmingly support the “celestial Jesus” theory, particularly with the passage indicating that demons killed Jesus, and would not have done so if they knew who he was (see: 1 Corinthians 2:6-10). Humans – the murderers according to the Gospels – of course would still have killed Jesus, knowing full well that his death results in their salvation, and the defeat of the evil spirits. ^*^

“So what do the mainstream (and non-Christian) scholars say about all this? Surprisingly very little – of substance anyway. Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times. Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them. Who produced these hypothetical sources? When? What did they say? Were they reliable? Were they intended to be accurate historical portrayals, enlightening allegories, or entertaining fictions? Ehrman and Casey can’t tell you – and neither can any New Testament scholar. Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.” ^*^

Jesus: a Myth Because No One Wrote About Him?

In his book “No Meek Messiah”, Michael Paulkovich argues that Jesus never existed because“one-hundred-twenty-six authors from the time of Jesus who should have, but did not record anything about the Christian godman.” Candida Moss and Joel Baden wrote in the Daily Beast: Paulkovich’s case rests on three main pillars. First, the discovery that no ancient writers from the first few centuries CE mention Jesus. Second, the assumption that most writers should have mentioned Jesus, since he was the Son of God and all that. Third, the keen observation that Jesus never wrote anything himself. Although an undeniably compelling trinity of argumentation, it is not without its logical problems. [Source: Candida Moss, Joel Baden, Daily Beast, October 5, 2014]

Let’s get one thing straight: There is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars—the authentic ones, anyway—that Jesus was, in fact, a real guy. They argue over the details, of course, as scholars are wont to do, but they’re pretty much all on the same page that Jesus walked the earth (if not the Sea of Galilee) in the 1st century CE. So that brings us to Paulkovich’s list: 126 ancient writers, 0 references to Jesus. The list has a few issues. Although everyone on it is indeed ancient, some are a little too ancient—as in, lived-a-hundred-years-before-Jesus too ancient (Asclepiades of Prusa, for example).

A great many of the writers are philosophers, some quite famous (Epictetus). Philosophers aren’t really known, now or then, for their interest in current events. Some writers are mathematicians, rhetoricians, satirists, poets, or epigrammatists (Martial). Unless we’re looking for an ancient limerick about Jesus, these are probably the wrong authors to be reading. Fully fourteen of the 126 are doctors, including a dermatologist, an ophthalmologist, and a gynecologist (Soranus). We can first point out that Jesus was supposed to have a gift for healing, so he probably didn’t take his annual checkup seriously.

Why didn’t people write about Jesus then? The answer is very simple: in his own day Jesus wasn’t that important. He was just another wannabe messiah who ended up on the wrong side of the authorities. The prime candidate for “Son of God” in the Roman world was the emperor himself, who had coins, statues, and temples to back those claims up. Jesus had a small band of followers and a lot of stories about sheep. It took decades for the group of Jesus followers to grow large enough to gain the attention of local authorities and be given the slur-ish epithet “Christian.” And it’s only after that happened that people outside the group gave the slightest damn what—or whom—these eccentrics were talking about.

Debunking the Debunkers Who Claim Jesus Christ Didn’t Exist

David Gibson of the Religion News Service wrote: “Needless to say, the vast majority of Bible scholars disagree with these arguments, whatever they think about Jesus as a religious figure. Yet the Jesus-as-myth meme is so persistent that many of them are publicly pushing back in order to debunk the debunkers. Purdue University scholar Lawrence Mykytiuk, for example, has a lengthy feature story in the January/February 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review that examines the extra-biblical sources — contemporary writers outside the New Testament — who attest to the existence of Jesus. “As far as we know, no ancient person ever seriously argued that Jesus did not exist,” Mykytiuk writes, and he cites pagan and Jewish writers of the time who did affirm Jesus’ existence. [Source: David Gibson, Religion News Service, December 19, 2014 +++]

“University of North Carolina’s Bart Ehrman, a leading New Testament scholar — and an evangelical-turned-agnostic who has no Christian ax to grind — grew so exasperated by the Jesus-hoax arguments that he wrote a detailed refutation in his 2012 book called “Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.” Believers and skeptics can argue with each other, and among themselves, about exactly who Jesus was and what he meant, Ehrman said in an interview. But arguing that Jesus did not exist “is such a ridiculous proposition.” +++

“Ehrman said beyond the non-Christian references to Jesus from the era, scholars can plausibly trace elements in the Gospels to shortly after the time Jesus was killed. That fact, and the historical details in the Gospels, have convinced “virtually every scholar ... in the Western world” that Jesus existed. He also noted that while the Apostle Paul never met Jesus in the flesh — a point the Jesus deniers often make — in his many New Testament writings Paul mentions that he does know Jesus’ brother, James. “If Jesus didn’t exist, you’d think his brother would know about it!” Ehrman said with a laugh. +++

“But to Ehrman, the most convincing argument that Jesus was a real person is that it would have made no sense to invent a crucified messiah because that is the opposite of what everyone was expecting at the time. In other words, it wasn’t a good sales pitch. Besides, if Jesus was the product of a conspiracy, one would think that the conspirators would have gotten their stories straight and not have left lots of conflicting details. Moreover, Ehrman said — contrary to the claims of the mythicists — there is no analogy in the pagan world of the time to a human being who was killed and rose from the dead and then exalted as a divine being. +++ “So why do arguments that Jesus was a hoax persist? For one thing, Ehrman said, “there are a lot of people who love conspiracy theories, and this is a brilliant one.” The broader context, however, is the emergence of the assertive “New Atheists” who are both vocal and visible in seeking to criticize and undermine religion and to fight back against the culture warriors of the religious right. A subset of those neo-atheists, as they are sometimes called, seems to want to take a shortcut in the fight against Christianity by arguing that Christ did not exist, thereby kicking the legs out from under the whole enterprise. “I think the people who are taking that view are really shooting themselves in the foot,” Ehrman said. “If what they want to do is to counter Christianity, then they really ought to do it on some intellectually solid basis rather than arguing something that’s downright silly.”“ +++

Biblical Archeologists Generally Agree That Jesus Did Exist

Kristin Romey wrote in National Geographic: “Might it be possible that Jesus Christ never even existed, that the whole stained glass story is pure invention? It’s an assertion that’s championed by some outspoken skeptics—but not, I discovered, by scholars, particularly archaeologists, whose work tends to bring flights of fancy down to literal earth. “I don’t know any mainstream scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus,” said Eric Meyers, an archaeologist and emeritus professor in Judaic studies at Duke University. “The details have been debated for centuries, but no one who is serious doubts that he’s a historical figure.” I heard much the same from Byron McCane, an archaeologist and history professor at Florida Atlantic University. “I can think of no other example who fits into their time and place so well but people say doesn’t exist,” he said. [Source: Kristin Romey, National Geographic, November 28, 2017 ^|^]

“Even John Dominic Crossan, a former priest and co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, a controversial scholarly forum, believes the radical skeptics go too far. Granted, stories of Christ’s miraculous deeds—healing the sick with his words, feeding a multitude with a few morsels of bread and fish, even restoring life to a corpse four days dead—are hard for modern minds to embrace. But that’s no reason to conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious fable. “Now, you can say he walks on water and nobody can do that, so therefore he doesn’t exist. Well, that’s something else,” Crossan told me when we spoke by phone. “The general fact that he did certain things in Galilee, that he did certain things in Jerusalem, that he got himself executed—all of that, I think, fits perfectly into a certain scenario.” ^|^

Written Evidence of Jesus

The Jewish historian Josephus, born in 37 or 38 A.D. and educated as a Pharisee, completed two very detailed works (authenticated by archaeology), and made mention of Jesus. So did the great second-century Roman historian Tacitus, who referred to "Christ, [who] had been executed...by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate."

Matt Andrews wrote in Midwest Today, “Although none of the Dead Sea Scrolls mentions Jesus by name, they do speak of the coming Jewish Messiah. According to Michael Wise of the University of Chicago, the texts also contain passages which closely resemble the words of Jesus as contained in Luke. Just as the discovery of the scrolls demonstrated that the books of the Old Testament had suffered little textural change over many centuries, so the New Testament manuscript discoveries over the years have exhibited a reassuring general consistency. On the whole, errors and textural variations are relatively minor, and supporters say the canonical gospels can be judged to be very much as their authors wrote them. It is interesting to note that while there exists only a single copy of a manuscript of the great Roman historian Tacitus, dating from about the 12th Century, of canonical works attesting to Jesus' existence there are some 274 vellum manuscripts, dating from between the fourth and 11th Centuries, and no less than 88 papyrus fragments datable to between the second and fourth Centuries. [Source: Matt Andrews, Midwest Today, March 1994 ^=^]

“As Ian Wilson, author of "Jesus: The Evidence" (Harper & Row), argues, even critics have "been prepared to acknowledge that the gospel material that is most likely to be authentic to Jesus (though probably not without some fabrication and re-touching) is his parables, some 30 or 40 of which are to be found in the synoptic gospels. This view," claims Wilson, "is borne out by the fact that if he, as a flesh and blood historical figure, had not invented them, we should be obliged to look for someone equally remarkable who had. In fact, they have precisely the same individual quality that distinguishes his teachings. If they were facile forgeries, put into the mouth of a man who never existed, we would expect the rich man always to be the villain, the self-righteous man always to be the hero - but this is far from being the case: they always have an element of the unexpected..." ^=^

Jesus-Era Historical Evidence

Tens of thousands of relics have been found across Israel that date to the period that Jesus is believed to have lived. According to the Washington Post: Archaeologists say the excavated items might give an indication of how Jesus lived 2,000 years ago, but they aren’t physical evidence of his existence. “He was one of more than a million people living here then, an ordinary Jew who had original ideas and attracted some followers,” said Gideon Avni, head of archaeology at the Israel Antiquities Authority. “His fame only really started after his death.” [Source: Ruth Eglash, Washington Post, March 20 2017]

Avni said it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to find proof of one ordinary person from thousands of years ago. But based on finds from hundreds of archaeological digs, he believes archaeologists can accurately reconstruct Jesus’ life from the Church of the Nativity, the site revered as his birthplace, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he is believed to have been buried after the Crucifixion.

Eugenio Alliata, a professor of Christian archaeology at the Franciscan biblical school in Jerusalem, said that what has been found to date corroborates biblical accounts of Jesus’ life and puts his existence into a real context. “We have not found any evidence of the person of Jesus, but we have found lots of things about what happened at the time he lived, such as the population and the material culture that grew because of him,” Alliata said.

Artifacts stored at the Israel Antiquities Authority warehouse also provide insight into those who followed Jesus after his death. The earliest evidence of Christianity as a movement is from the end of the 1st century, Avni said. After that, throughout the Byzantine period and during the Crusades, Christian pilgrims regularly traveled to Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Archaeologists are now using the day-to-day items and rare commodities from those ancient times to study Jesus and his teachings.

Jesus-era Historical Evidence from Galilee

Daniel Estrin of Associated Press wrote: “Israel is one of the most excavated places on the planet. Some 300 digs take place each year, including about 50 foreign expeditions from as far away as the United States and Japan, the Antiquities Authority said. About 40,000 artifacts are dug up in Israel each year. A third of all the antiquities found attest to the ancient Christian presence in the Holy Land, [Source: Daniel Estrin, Associated Press, March 19, 2017]

Gideon Avni, head of the archaeological division of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said. Historians now know how long it took to travel between cities and villages where Jesus preached, and what those places looked like at the time. Avni said knowledge of the period has advanced over the past 20 years. "We can reconstruct precisely how the country looked," he said.

One of the main hunting grounds for clues about Jesus is the “evangelical triangle” of Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida — an area around the Sea of Galilee that embraces the villages where, according to the Gospels, Jesus led his followers, performed miraculous and taught. One of the most important places there is a small town Israelis still call Migdal, because it was the presumed site of Magdala, the ancient fishing city that was home to Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s most loyal followers. The Galilean Jews that lived in this area — mostly poor peasants and fishermen — were about a week’s walk from Jerusalem, close enough for regular pilgrimages to Herod the Great’s magnificent temple there. [Source: Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian magazine, January-February 2016]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); King James Version of the Bible, gutenberg.org; New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org , Frontline, PBS, “Encyclopedia of the World Cultures” edited by David Levinson (G.K. Hall & Company, 1994); Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024