In this two-part devotion we will only be examining the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus of Nazareth from non-Christian sources. Clearly there are dozens of Christian writings, that when added to the non-Christian sources for the existence of Jesus as a historical person, make for a very solid case for a historical Jesus. So just how confident can we be that Jesus Christ actually lived?
Before we get into some of the specific ancient non-Christian sources that reference Jesus it is important to note that today we have almost unanimous agreement by New Testament scholars as well as even atheist scholars that Jesus did indeed exist as a real person in history. Below are just a few quotes from some of the most eminent authorities in this field. (All five quotes below are from the website: beliefmap.org)1
Bart Ehrman (Outspoken critic of Christianity, NT & religion professor at UNC): “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
Mark Allen Powell (NT professor at Trinity Lutheran, a founding editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus): “A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today – in the academic world at least – gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.”
Michael Grant (Atheist professor at Edinburgh, Classicist): “To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has ‘again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars.’ In recent years, ‘no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus’ or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.”
Craig Evans (NT professor at Asbury; Founder of Dead Sea Scrolls Inst.): “No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria. Though this may be common knowledge among scholars, the public may well not be aware of this.”
Richard Burridge (Biblical exegesis professor at King’s College, Classicist): “There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that anymore.”
According to Geisler and Turek there currently are ten known non-Christian writers who mention Jesus within 150 years of his life.2 Geisler and Turek go on to make this interesting comparison: “By contrast, over the same 150 years, there are nine non-Christian sources who mention Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus. So, discounting all the Christian sources, Jesus is actually mentioned by one more source than the Roman emperor.”3
Geisler and Turek go on to list these ten non-Christian sources as follows:4
Josephus – a Jewish historian (1)
Tacitus – a Roman historian (2)
Pliny the Younger – a Roman politician (3)
Phlegon – a freed slave who wrote histories (4)
Thallus – a first century historian (5)
Seutonius – a roman historian (6)
Lucian – a Greek satirist (7)
Celsus – a Roman philosopher (8)
Mara Bar-Serapion – a private citizen who wrote to his son (9)
The Jewish Talmud (10)
In tomorrow’s Part II of this devotion, we will share some interesting comments these ten non-Christian sources make, to help us understand why we believe Jesus was a real historical person.
1 Did Jesus exist as a real historical figure? | BeliefMap.org
2 Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004), p. 222.
3 Ibid., p 222.
4 Ibid., p 424.
YES Curt!..He was very real then, and He is very real now…at least He is…in my life.