I AM EXPECTING TO GET a very different reaction from this book than from others I have written over the years. Typically, but to my honest surprise, I get accused—or thanked, depending on who is writing me—of being anti-Christian because of the things I say in my books. I find this surprising because I don’t consider myself anti-Christian. When I tell people this, I often get a disbelieving response: of course you’re anti-Christian. Look at all the ways you attack Christianity!
But I have never seen it this way. In my view, the only thing I attack in my writings (and not even directly) is a fundamentalist and conservative evangelical understanding of Christianity. But to say for that reason that I attack Christianity is like saying that if you don’t like raspberry sherbet you don’t like any kind of ice cream. You can make the case (and you would be right) that sherbet isn’t ice cream at all, so not liking it has nothing to do with ice cream. But even if you think sherbet is close enough to ice cream that you may as well call it ice cream, by saying you don’t like raspberry sherbet you’re simply saying that there is one flavor of it you would rather not eat, given the choice.
I certainly do not mean to say that I consider myself either a Christian or an apologist for Christian causes. I am neither. But in my writings I have never attacked Christianity itself. I have attacked a particular flavor of it. It is true that in my part of the world, the American South, the flavor I have attacked happens to be the flavor preferred by the majority of practicing Christians. But in a historical and worldwide perspective, highly conservative Protestant Christianity, whether fundamentalism or hard-core evangelicalism, is a minority voice. It is the voice that says that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, with no contradictions, discrepancies, or mistakes of any kind. I simply don’t think this is true. And neither have most Christians over the course of history.
I do happen to think that the Bible is a great book or set of books. With this I may be disagreeing with many of my atheist, agnostic, and humanist friends who have been cheering me on from the sidelines. But I personally love the Bible. I read it all the time, in the original Greek and Hebrew; I study it; I teach it. I have done so for over thirty-five years. And I don’t plan to stop any time soon. But I don’t think the Bible is perfect. Far from it. The Bible is filled with a multitude of voices, and these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues involving such basic views as what God is like, who the people of God are, who Jesus is, how one can be in a right relationship with God, why there is suffering in the world, how we are to behave, and on and on. And I heartily disagree with the views of most of the biblical authors on one point or another.
Still, in my judgment all of these voices are valuable and they should all be listened to. Some of the writers of the Bible were religious geniuses, and just as we listen to other geniuses of our tradition—Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Dickens—so we ought to listen to the authors of the Bible. But they were not inspired by God, in my opinion, any more than any other genius is. And they contradict each other all over the map.
Even though there are innumerable historical problems in the New Testament, they are not of the scope or character to call seriously into doubt the existence of Jesus. He certainly lived, and in my view he too was a kind of religious genius, even more than the later authors who wrote about him. At the same time, he probably was not well educated. He may have been only semiliterate. But he certainly lived, and his teachings have impacted the world ever since. Surely that is one gauge of genius.
Since that is the view I am sketching in this book, I can imagine readers who think me anti-Christian taking umbrage at my refusal to toe their line. And Christian readers may well be pleased to see that even someone like me agrees with them on key points (although they certainly won’t like other things I have to say in the book). My goal, however, is neither to please nor to offend. It is to pursue a historical question with all the rigor that it deserves and requires and in doing so to show that there really was a historical Jesus and that we can say certain things about him.
Preliminary Remarks
BEFORE I SHOW THE evidence for the existence of Jesus, I need to make a few preliminary remarks about historians and how they go about establishing what probably happened in the past. The first thing to stress is that this is, in fact, what historians do. We have no direct access to the past. Once something happens, it is over and done with. There is no way to repeat a past event all over again. This makes historical evidence different from the kinds of evidence used in the hard sciences. In science you can repeat an experiment. In fact, you have to repeat the experiment. Once an experiment is repeated sufficiently and with the same results, a kind of predictive probability is established that the same results will obtain if the experiment is conducted one more time. An example that I use with my first-year undergraduates: if I want to prove that a bar of iron sinks in lukewarm water but that a bar of Ivory soap floats, all I need are a hundred tubs of water and a hundred bars of each kind. When I start tossing them in the water, the iron will sink every time and the soap will float. This proves what will no doubt happen if I decide to repeat the experiment yet another time.
With history, though, we don’t have the luxury of being able to repeat an event once it happens, and so we look for other kinds of evidence. How do we know if we’ve proved something historically? Technically, we cannot prove a single thing historically. All we can do is give enough evidence (of kinds I will mention in a moment) to convince enough people (hopefully nearly everyone) about a certain historical claim, for example, that Abraham Lincoln really did deliver the Gettysburg Address or that Julius Caesar really did cross the Rubicon. If you want to demonstrate that either historical event actually occurred, you need to marshal some convincing evidence. In neither of these particular cases, of course, is there really much doubt.
What about the historical existence of Jesus? It has become somewhat common among mythicists to think that the default position on the question of Jesus’s existence should be that he did not exist unless someone can demonstrate that he did. This is the position expressed cogently by Robert Price: “The burden of proof would seem to belong with those who believe there was a historical man named Jesus.”1 I myself do not think that is true. On one hand, since every relevant ancient source (as we will see) assumes that there was such a man, and since no scholar who has ever written on it, except the handful of mythicists, has ever had any serious doubts, surely the burden of proof does not fall on those who take the almost universally accepted position. On the other hand, and to be a bit more generous to Price and his fellow mythicists, perhaps the matter should be put more neutrally. As my former colleague, E. P. Sanders, an eminent professor of New Testament studies at nearby Duke University, used to say, “The burden of proof belongs with whoever is making a claim.” That is, if Price wants to argue that Jesus did not exist, then he bears the burden of proof for his argument. If I want to argue that he did exist, then I do. Fair enough.
Price enunciates another historical principle that I do agree with, however, one that ties in closely with what I just said, that historians cannot repeat the past and so have to base their judgments on evidence that establishes most probably what happened. In Price’s clearly expressed judgment, “The historian does not claim clairvoyant knowledge of the past…. The historian, so to speak ‘postdicts’ based on traceable factors and analogy. But it is all a matter of probabilities.”2 Unlike scientists, who can with almost certain reliability “predict” what will happen based on their knowledge of what does happen, historians “postdict,” that is, they indicate what probably did happen based on their knowledge of the evidence.
But what kind of evidence is there? This is a basic methodological question: How can we establish with reasonable probability that anyone from the past actually existed, whether our aforementioned Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar, or anyone else: Harry Truman, Charlemagne, Hypatia, Jerome, Socrates, Anne Frank, or Bilbo Baggins?
The Kinds of Sources Historians Want
HISTORIANS CAN APPEAL TO many different kinds of evidence to establish the past existence of a person. First, there is a real preference for hard, physical evidence, for example, photographs. It is rather hard to deny that Abraham Lincoln lived since we have all seen photos. Of course, the photos could have all been doctored in some insidious plot to rewrite American history. And that is what the conspiracy theorists among us claim (not just about Lincoln but about even better documented events, such as the Holocaust). But for most of us, a stack of good photographs from different sources will usually be convincing enough.
In addition to physical evidence, we look for surviving products that can be traced with relative certainty back to the person. This might include pieces of construction in some cases: the houses and buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. But in even more cases it would include literary remains, writings. Julius Caesar left us an account of the Gallic Wars. Anne Frank left us a diary. And we have lots of writings that can be traced with some assurance back to a man (also photographed) named Charles Dickens. They all almost certainly existed.
Finally, historians look to other kinds of evidence not from the person but about the person—that is, reference to, quotations of, or discussions about the person by others. These are of course our most abundant kinds of historical sources, the kinds that we have for the vast majority of persons from the past, especially before the invention of photography. What do we look for in evidence of this kind, especially when dealing with someone like Jesus, a person who lived, if he lived, some two thousand years ago? What kinds of sources do historians need to be convinced of his existence?
Historians prefer to have lots of written sources, not just one or two. The more, obviously, the better. If there were only one or two sources, you might suspect that the stories were made up (although you would probably want to have some reasons for thinking so; it is not good enough to doubt a source simply because you have a mean, negative, or pessimistic streak and choose to do so). But if there are lots of sources—just as when there are lots of eyewitnesses to a car accident—then it is hard to claim that any one of them just happened to make it all up.
Historians also prefer to have sources that are relatively near the date of the person or event that they are describing. As time goes on, things do indeed get made up, and so it is much better to have near-contemporary accounts. If our first reports about Moses come from six hundred years after he allegedly lived, those reports are not nearly as trustworthy as reports that can plausibly be dated to six years after he lived. The closer in temporal proximity, the better.
Historians also like these numerous and early sources to be extensive in scope. If all you have is the mere mention of a person’s name in a source, that is not nearly as good as having long and extensive stories told (in lots of ancient sources). Moreover, it is obviously best if these extensive stories are reported in sources that are disinterested. That is to say, if someone is biased toward the subject matter, the bias has to be taken into account. The problem, of course, is that most sources are biased: if they didn’t have any feelings about the subject matter, they wouldn’t be talking about it. But if we find stories that clearly do not serve the purposes of the persons telling the story, we have a good indicator that the stories are (reasonably) disinterested.
Moreover, in an ideal situation, the various sources that discuss a figure or an event should corroborate what each of the others has to say, at least in major points if not in all the details. If one ancient source says that Octavian was a Roman general who became the emperor but another source says that he was a North African peasant who never traveled outside his native village, you know that you have a problem, either with Octavian himself or, as in this case, with the source. But if you have multiple sources from near the time that tell many stories about the Roman emperor Octavian—that is, that corroborate one another’s stories—then you have good historical evidence.
At the same time, it is important to know that the various sources are independent of one another and do not rely on each other for all of their information. If four ancient authors mention Marcus Billius as a Roman aristocrat in Ephesus, but it turns out that three of these authors derived their information from the fourth, then you no longer have multiple sources but only one. Their agreements do not represent corroboration but collaboration, and that is much less useful.
In short, if a historian were drawing up a wish list of sources for an ancient person, she would want a large number of sources that derive from near the time of the person they discuss; that are extensive in what they have to say about that person; that are disinterested, to some extent, in what they say; and that corroborate one another’s accounts without having collaborated.
With that wish list in mind, what can we say about the evidence for the existence of Jesus?
The Sources for Jesus: What We Do Not Have
IT MAY BE USEFUL to start by considering what we do not have by way of historical records for Jesus, to set the stage for a more detailed consideration in the next chapter of what we do have.
Physical Evidence?
To begin with, there is no hard, physical evidence for Jesus (eighteen hundred years before photography was invented), including no archaeological evidence of any kind. This is not much of an argument against his existence, however, since there is no archaeological evidence for anyone else living in Palestine in Jesus’s day except for the very upper-crust elite aristocrats, who are occasionally mentioned in inscriptions (we have no other archaeological evidence even for any of these). In fact, we don’t have archaeological remains for any nonaristocratic Jew of the 20s CE, when Jesus would have been an adult. And absolutely no one thinks that Jesus was an upperclass aristocrat. So why would we have archaeological evidence of his existence?
We also do not have any writings from Jesus. To many people this may seem odd, but in fact it is not odd at all. The vast majority of people in the ancient world could not write, as we will see in greater detail. There are debates about Jesus’s literacy, if of course he lived. But even if he could read, there are no indications from our early sources that he could write, and there is no reference to any of his writings in any of our Gospels.3 So there is nothing strange about having nothing in writing from him. I should point out that we have nothing in writing from over 99.99 percent of people who lived in antiquity. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they didn’t live. It means that if we want to show that any one of them lived, we have to look for other kinds of evidence.
Non-Christian Sources of the First Century?
It is also true, as the mythicists have been quick to point out, that no Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be very convenient for us if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages.
Moreover, it is an error to argue, as is sometimes done by one mythicist or another, that anyone as spectacular as Jesus allegedly was, who did so many miracles and fantastic deeds, would certainly have been discussed or at least mentioned in pagan sources if he really did exist.4 Surely anyone who could heal the sick, cast out demons, walk on water, feed the multitudes with only a few loaves, and raise the dead would be talked about! The reason this line of reasoning is in error is that we are not asking whether Jesus really did miracles and, if so, why they (and he) are not mentioned by pagan sources. We are asking whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed. Only after establishing that he did exist can we go on to ask if he did miracles. If we decide that he did, only then can we revisit the question of why no one, in that case, mentions him. But we may also decide that the historical Jesus was not a miraculous being but a purely human being. In that case it is no surprise that Roman sources never mention him, just as it is no surprise that these same sources never mention any of his uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, or nephews—or in fact nearly any other Jew of his day.
In that connection, I should reiterate that it is a complete “myth” (in the mythicist sense) that Romans kept detailed records of everything and that as a result we are inordinately well informed about the world of Roman Palestine and should expect then to hear about Jesus if he really lived. If Romans kept such records, where are they? We certainly don’t have any. Think of everything we do not know about the reign of Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea. We know from the Jewish historian Josephus that Pilate ruled for ten years, between 26 and 36 CE. It would be easy to argue that he was the single most important figure for Roman Palestine for the entire length of his rule. And what records from that decade do we have from his reign—what Roman records of his major accomplishments, his daily itinerary, the decrees he passed, the laws he issued, the prisoners he put on trial, the death warrants he signed, his scandals, his interviews, his judicial proceedings? We have none. Nothing at all.
I might press the issue further. What archaeological evidence do we have about Pilate’s rule in Palestine? We have some coins that were issued during his reign (one would not expect coins about Jesus since he didn’t issue any), and one—only one—fragmentary inscription discovered in Caesarea Maritima in 1961 that indicates that he was the Roman prefect. Nothing else. And what writings do we have from him? Not a single word. Does that mean he didn’t exist? No, he is mentioned in several passages in Josephus and in the writings of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and in the Gospels. He certainly existed even though, like Jesus, we have no records from his day or writings from his hand. And what is striking is that we have far more information about Pilate than about any other governor of Judea in Roman times.5 And so it is a modern “myth” to say that we have extensive Roman records from antiquity that surely would have mentioned someone like Jesus had he existed.
It is also worth pointing out that Pilate is mentioned only in passing in the writing of the one Roman historian, Tacitus, who does name him. Moreover, that happens to be in a passage that also refers to Jesus (Annals 15). If an important Roman aristocratic ruler of a major province is not mentioned any more than that in the Greek and Roman writings, what are the chances that a lower-class Jewish teacher (which Jesus must have been, as everyone who thinks he lived agrees) would be mentioned in them? Almost none.
I might add that our principal source of knowledge about Jewish Palestine in the days of Jesus comes from the historian Josephus, a prominent aristocratic Jew who was extremely influential in the social and political affairs of his day. And how often is Josephus mentioned in Greek and Roman sources of his own day, the first century CE? Never.
Think of an analogy. If a historian sixty years from now were to write up a history of the American South in, say, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is he likely to mention Zlatko Plese? (Zlatko is my brilliant colleague who teaches courses in ancient philosophy, Gnosticism, varieties of early Christianity, and other subjects.) Almost certainly not. What does that prove? Technically speaking, it proves nothing. But it does suggest either that Zlatko never existed or that he did not make a huge impact on the political, social, or cultural life of the South. As it turns out, Zlatko does exist (I bought him dinner last night). So if he is not mentioned in a future history of the South, it will no doubt be because he did not make a big impact on the South. To show he existed, one would have to look at other evidence, for example, copies of the two books he has written. (Unlike Jesus, Zlatko can write. And unlike the first century, we have the mass production and distribution of books plus libraries to house them in.) So too with Jesus. If he is rarely mentioned, it is barely relevant to the question of his existence. It is possible that he simply made too little impact, just like the overwhelming mass of people who lived in the Roman Empire of the first century. Many Christians do not want to hear that Jesus did not make an enormous splash on the world of his day, but it appears to be true. Does that mean he did not exist? No, it means that to establish his existence, we need to look to other kinds of evidence.
Eyewitness Accounts?
Still, to press yet further on the issue of evidence we do not have, I need to stress that we do not have a single reference to Jesus by anyone—pagan, Jew, or Christian—who was a contemporary eyewitness, who recorded things he said and did. But what about the Gospels of the New Testament? Aren’t they eyewitness reports? Even though that was once widely believed about two of our Gospels, Matthew and John, it is not the view of the vast majority of critical historians today, and for good reason.
The early church tradition held that the four Gospels of the New Testament were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Even in that tradition, Mark and Luke were not themselves eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. Mark was allegedly the (later) companion of Peter, who heard him preach about Jesus and reorganized his teachings into a narrative that became the Gospel that goes under his name; even if we accept the tradition that Mark was indeed the one who wrote the Gospel, his information came secondhand. Luke was yet further removed: he was said to be a companion of the apostle Paul, who was himself not one of Jesus’s earthly followers. Luke was allegedly a Gentile physician who researched the life of Jesus and then wrote up his account. If the tradition about Luke is true, we are dealing with an author who was a disciple of someone who was not a disciple. Matthew, by contrast, was widely claimed to be one of the twelve disciples, the tax collector Jesus called to be one of his followers (see Matthew 9: 9–13). And John was thought to be the mysterious “Beloved Disciple” of the Fourth Gospel (see, for example, John 19:26–27), identified as one of Jesus’s closest followers, John the son of Zebedee.
Scholars today, outside the ranks of fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, are virtually unified in thinking that none of these ascriptions of authorship is probably correct. One important point to notice is that none of the Gospel writers ever identifies himself by name or narrates any of his stories about Jesus in the first person. The Gospels are all written anonymously, and the authors describe the disciples, including the disciples Matthew and John, in the third person, talking about what “they” did (not what “I” or “we” did). Even more important, the immediate followers of Jesus were, like him, lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural Galilee. Could they have written Gospels?
Several significant studies of literacy have appeared in recent years showing just how low literacy rates were in antiquity. The most frequently cited study is by Columbia professor William Harris in a book titled Ancient Literacy.6 By thoroughly examining all the surviving evidence, Harris draws the compelling though surprising conclusion that in the very best of times in the ancient world, only about 10 percent of the population could read at all and possibly copy out writing on a page. Far fewer than this, of course, could compose a sentence, let alone a story, let alone an entire book. And who were the people in this 10 percent? They were the upper-class elite who had the time, money, and leisure to afford an education. This is not an apt description of Jesus’s disciples. They were not upper-crust aristocrats.
In Roman Palestine the situation was even bleaker. The most thorough examination of literacy in Palestine is by a professor of Jewish studies at the University of London, Catherine Hezser, who shows that in the days of Jesus probably only 3 percent of Jews in Palestine were literate.7 Once again, these would be the people who could read and maybe write their names and copy words. Far fewer could compose sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. And once again, these would have been the urban elites.
The issue becomes even sharper when one other consideration is thrown into the mix. The native tongue of Jesus, his disciples, and most people in Palestine was Aramaic. But the Gospels were written not in Aramaic but in Greek. And in very good Greek. Highly proficient Greek. The authors of the Gospels were unusually well-educated speakers and writers of Greek. They must have been from the relatively higher classes, and they almost certainly were from urban areas outside Palestine. Scholars typically date these Greek compositions to the end of the first century, with Mark probably being the first Gospel, written around 70 CE or so; Matthew and Luke being a bit later, possibly 80–85 CE; and John being last, around 90–95 CE. The authors of these books were not the original followers of Jesus or probably even followers of the twelve earthly disciples of Jesus. They were later Christians who had heard stories about Jesus as they circulated by word of mouth year after year and decade after decade and finally decided to write them down.
It is true that the Gospel writers may have had written sources in front of them as well as oral traditions they had heard, as we will see at greater length in the next chapter. Luke explicitly states that he knows of earlier written accounts of Jesus’s life (1:1–4), and there are very good reasons for thinking that both he and Matthew had access to a version of Mark’s Gospel, from which they derived many of their stories. They probably also both had access to a document that scholars have labeled Q (from the German word for “source,” Quelle). This is a document that no longer survives, but it appears to have once existed, in Greek, and consisted of a number of sayings and a few of the deeds of Jesus. Along with these two documents, Matthew and Luke may have had yet other sources for their accounts; we do not know what sources Mark had for his. John is a different case altogether, as the stories he narrates about Jesus are so different from those found in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.8
My point in this discussion, in any event, is that the Gospels of the New Testament are not eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. Neither are the Gospels outside the New Testament, of which we have over forty, either in whole or in fragments.9 In fact, we do not have any eyewitness report of any kind about Jesus, written in his own day.
This fact too, however, should not be overblown when considering the question of whether or not Jesus lived. The absence of eyewitness accounts would be relevant if, and only if, we had reason to suspect that we should have eyewitness reports if Jesus really lived. That, however, is far from the case. Think again of our earlier point of comparison, Pontius Pilate. Here is a figure who was immensely significant in every way to the life and history of Palestine during the adult life of Jesus (assuming Jesus lived), politically, economically, culturally, socially. As I have indicated, there was arguably no one more important. And how many eyewitness reports of Pilate do we have from his day? None. Not a single one. The same is true of Josephus. And these are figures who were of the highest prominence in their own day.
In no small measure this relates, again, to the problem of literacy in that time and place. Hardly anyone could write, and most of the people who could write did not produce writings that have survived from antiquity. As it turns out—this is as astounding as it is true—from Roman Palestine of the entire first century we have precisely one, only one, author of literary texts whose works have survived (by literary texts I mean literary books of any kind: fictional, historical, philosophical, scientific, poetic, political, you name it). That one author is Josephus. We have no others. What is equally striking, in all of our historical records we know the name of only one other author of such writings, a man named Justin of Tiberius; his books, obviously, have not survived.10
So would we expect eyewitness accounts about Jesus if he had lived? How could we possibly expect them? The one and only Palestinian author of books of any kind that we have was an author (Josephus) who was born several years after Jesus died.
Non-Christian References to Jesus
NOW THAT WE HAVE considered at some length the sources we do not have for establishing whether Jesus lived, we can begin to look at the sources we do have. I start with a brief survey of sources that are typically appealed to as non-Christian references to Jesus. I will restrict myself to sources that were produced within about a hundred years of when Jesus is traditionally thought to have died since writings after that time almost certainly cannot be considered independent and reliable witnesses to his life but were undoubtedly based simply on what the authors had heard about Jesus, probably from his followers. The same may be true with even the non-Christian references I discuss here, as we will see. For the sake of convenience I will categorize these non-Christian references as Roman, on the one hand, and Jewish, on the other.
Roman References
Within a century of the traditional date of Jesus’s death, he is referred to on three occasions by Roman authors. None of them wrote, as we have seen, during Jesus’s lifetime or even in the first Christian century. They were all writing about eighty to eighty-five years after the traditional date of his death.
Pliny the Younger
The first surviving reference to Jesus by a non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger, the governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Pliny is called “the Younger” in order to differentiate him from his even more famous uncle, Pliny “the Elder,” who is best known to history not as a Roman administrator but as a natural scientist who wrote many scientific tomes that still survive. Pliny the Elder was inveterately curious, as scientists tend to be, and when he learned that Mount Vesuvius was erupting in 79 CE, he decided to get as close as he could in order to investigate. Unfortunately, his ship got too close, and he perished in the fumes. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, also observed the eruption, but from a considerable distance, and wrote about it in one of his surviving works.
Among scholars of early Christianity, the younger Pliny is best known for a series of letters that he wrote later in life to the Roman emperor, Trajan, seeking advice for governing his province. In particular, letter number 10 from the year 112 CE is important, as it is the one place in which Pliny appears to mention the existence of Jesus. The letter is not about Jesus himself; it is dealing with a political problem. In Pliny’s province a law had been passed making it illegal for people to gather together in social groups. This may seem like an odd law, but it had a very practical function. The Roman authorities were afraid that people in that locale might band together for political reasons and that this might lead to armed uprisings. But by forbidding groups from coming together for any purpose whatsoever, the Romans had created a problem, though not one you might expect. The law applied to every social group, including fire brigades. As a result, there were no effective measures in Pliny’s province to deal with the outbreak of fires, and so villages were burning.
In his letter 10 to the emperor Pliny discusses the fire problem, and in that context he mentions another group that was illegally gathering together. As it turns out, it was the local community of Christians.11
Pliny learned from reliable sources that the Christians (illegally) gathered together in the early morning. He provides us with some important information about the group: they included people from a variety of socioeconomic levels, and they ate meals together of common food. Pliny may tell the emperor this because of rumors, which we hear from other later sources, that Christians committed cannibalism. (They did, after all, eat the flesh of the Son of God and drink his blood.) Moreover, Pliny informs the emperor, the Christians “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.”
That is all he says about Jesus: the Christians worshipped him by singing to him. He does not, as you can see, even call him Jesus but instead uses his most common epithet, Christ. Whether Pliny knew the man’s actual name is anyone’s guess. One might be tempted to ask as well whether he knew that Christ was (at one time?) a man, but the fact that he indicates that the songs were offered to Christ “as to a god” suggests that Christ was, of course, something else.
This reference is obviously not much to go on. But it does tell us that there were Christians worshipping someone named Christ in the early second century in the region of Asia Minor. We already knew this, of course, from other (Christian) sources, as we will see in a later chapter. In any event, whatever Pliny knows about Christ he appears to have learned from the Christians who informed him, and so he does not provide us with completely independent testimony that Jesus actually existed, only the testimony of Christians living some eighty years after Jesus would have died. These Christians might have read some of the Gospels, and they certainly heard stories about Jesus. So at the least we can say that the idea of Jesus having existed was current by the early second century, but the reference of Pliny does not provide us with much more than that.
Suetonius
Even less helpful is a reference found in the writings of the Roman biographer Suetonius, often also cited in discussions of the existence of Jesus. Suetonius is most famous for having produced twelve biographies of Roman emperors. His Lives of the Caesar, written in 115 CE, still makes for interesting reading today. It was, in fact, the basis for Robert Graves’s historical novel, I Claudius (1934), on which the even better-known BBC miniseries of the same name was based. It is in Suetonius’s biography of Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41 to 54 CE, that a second reference to Jesus is sometimes thought to occur. Suetonius indicates that at one point in his reign Claudius deported all the Jews from Rome because of riots that had occurred “at the instigation of Chrestus.”
He says nothing more about the man. But a large number of scholars over the years have thought that the situation in Rome is relevant for understanding early Christian history. In this theory, it was Roman Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah, or Christ (Chrestus), who had stirred up the passions of Jews who did not believe. This led to violent reactions that got out of hand: the riots mentioned by Suetonius. And so Claudius expelled the whole lot of them.
The reading of the situation may receive some support from the New Testament book of Acts, which also refers to the incident (18:2). One problem with this reconstruction of events is that if Suetonius did have some such situation in mind, he misspelled Jesus’s epithet, since Christ in Latin would be Christus, not Chrestus (although this kind of spelling mistake was common). Moreover, since Chrestus itself could be a name, it may well be that there simply was a Jew named Chrestus who caused a disturbance that led to riots in the Jewish community.
In any event, even if Suetonius is referring to Jesus by a misspelled epithet, he does not help us much in our quest for non-Christian references to Jesus. Jesus himself would have been dead for some twenty years when these riots in Rome took place, so at best Suetonius would be providing evidence, if he can count for evidence, that there were Christians in Rome during the reign of Claudius. But this could have been the case whether Jesus lived or not, since mythicists would argue that the “myth” of Christ had already been invented by then, as had the supposed life of the made-up figure of Jesus.
Whereas these first two sparse references are of limited use, a third by the Roman historian Tacitus seems more promising.
Tacitus
Tacitus wrote his famous Annals of Imperial Rome in 115 CE as a history of the empire from 14 to 68 CE. Probably the best-known single passage of this sixteen-volume work is the one in which he discusses the fire that consumed a good portion of Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero, in 64 CE. According to Tacitus, it was the emperor himself who had arranged for arsonists to set fire to the city because he wanted to implement his own architectural plans and could not very well do so while the older parts of the city were still standing. But the plan backfired, as many citizens—including those, no doubt, who had been burned out of house and home—suspected that the emperor himself was responsible. Nero needed to shift the blame onto someone else, and so, according to Tacitus, he claimed that the Christians had done it. The populace at large was willing to believe the charge, Tacitus tells us, because the Christians were widely maligned for their “hatred of the human race.”
And so Nero had the Christians rounded up and executed in very public, painful, and humiliating ways. Some of them, Tacitus indicates, were rolled in pitch and set aflame while still alive to light Nero’s gardens; others were wrapped in fresh animal skins and had wild dogs set on them, tearing them to shreds. It was not a pretty sight.
In the context of this gory account, Tacitus explains that “Nero falsely accused those whom…the populace called Christians. The author of this name, Christ, was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city [of Rome].”
Once again, Jesus is not actually named here, but it is obvious in this instance that he is the one being referred to and that Tacitus knows some very basic information about him. He was called Christ, he was executed at the order of Pontius Pilate, and this was during the reign of Tiberius. Moreover, this happened in Judea, presumably, since that was where Pilate was the governor and since that was where Jesus’s followers originated. All of this confirms information otherwise available from Christian sources, as we will see.
Some mythicists argue that this reference in Tacitus was not actually written by him—they claim the same thing for Pliny and Suetonius, where the references are less important—but were inserted into his writings (interpolated) by Christians who copied them, producing the manuscripts of Tacitus we have today. (We have no originals, only later copies.)12 I don’t know of any trained classicists or scholars of ancient Rome who think this, and it seems highly unlikely. The mythicists certainly have a reason for arguing this: they do not want to think there are any references to Jesus in our early sources outside the New Testament, and so when they find any such reference, they claim the reference was not original but was inserted by Christians. But surely the best way to deal with evidence is not simply to dismiss it when it happens to be inconvenient. Tacitus evidently did know some things about Jesus.
At the same time, the information is not particularly helpful in establishing that there really lived a man named Jesus. How would Tacitus know what he knew? It is pretty obvious that he had heard of Jesus, but he was writing some eighty-five years after Jesus would have died, and by that time Christians were certainly telling stories of Jesus (the Gospels had been written already, for example), whether the mythicists are wrong or right. It should be clear in any event that Tacitus is basing his comment about Jesus on hearsay rather than, say, detailed historical research. Had he done serious research, one might have expected him to say more, if even just a bit. But even more to the point, brief though his comment is, Tacitus is precisely wrong in one thing he says. He calls Pilate the “procurator” of Judea. We now know from the inscription discovered in 1961 at Caesarea that as governor, Pilate had the title and rank, not of procurator (one who dealt principally with revenue collection), but of prefect (one who also had military forces at his command). This must show that Tacitus did not look up any official record of what happened to Jesus, written at the time of his execution (if in fact such a record ever existed, which is highly doubtful). He therefore had heard the information. Whether he heard it from Christians or someone else is anyone’s guess.
These three references are the only ones that survive from pagan sources within a hundred years of the traditional date of Jesus’s death (around the year 30 CE). At the end of the day, I think we can discount Suetonius as too ambiguous to be of much use. Pliny is slightly more useful in showing us that Christians by the early second century knew of Christ and worshipped him as divine. Tacitus is most useful of all, for his reference shows that high-ranking Roman officials of the early second century knew that Jesus had lived and had been executed by the governor of Judea. That, at least, is a start.
Jewish Sources
As I have already indicated, we do not have nearly as many Jewish sources from within a hundred years of Jesus’s life as we have pagan sources (Greek and Roman). The Dead Sea Scrolls, which do not mention or allude to Jesus, despite what you might read in sensationalist books, were probably written in the first century BCE. We do have the writings of the important Jewish philosopher Philo from the early to mid-first century. He never mentions Jesus, but we would not expect him to do so, as Christianity had probably not reached his native Alexandria by the time of his death in 50 CE, whatever one thinks of the mythicist view of Jesus. From within Palestine, the only surviving author of the time is Josephus, as we have seen. The matter is hotly disputed by mythicists, but it appears, at least from the remains that survive, that Josephus does refer to Jesus twice.
Josephus
Flavius Josephus is one of the truly important figures from ancient Judaism. His abundant historical writings are our primary source of information about the life and history of Palestine in the first century. He himself was personally involved with some of the most important events that he narrates, especially in his eight-volume work, The Jewish Wars.13
Josephus was born to an aristocratic family in Palestine some six or seven years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death. Before he was an author he became actively involved in the political and military affairs of Jews in Palestine. In 66 CE there was a major uprising in which the Judeans sought to throw off the yoke of their Roman overlords. Josephus was appointed to be the general of the Jewish troops in the northern part of Palestine, Galilee. The Romans responded to the uprising by sending in the legions from Syria. To get to the heart of the rebellion they had to pass through Galilee, and they did so with relative ease, as Josephus’s forces were no match for the Roman armies. As Josephus himself later tells us in his autobiography, he and his remaining troops were surrounded and chose to make a suicide pact rather than surrender to the enemy. The men each drew a numbered lot; the first man was to be killed by the second, who was to be killed by the third, and so on until only two remained, and these two were then to take their own lives. The troops did as they were told, and by luck or design, Josephus drew one of the final two lots. When all the other soldiers were dead, he then convinced his partner not to commit suicide but to turn themselves in to the Romans.
As an aristocrat and military leader, Josephus was brought before the Roman general in charge of the assault, a man named Vespasian. With his wits about him, Josephus did a very smart thing. He informed Vespasian that he had learned in a revelation from God that he, Vespasian, was destined to become the future emperor of Rome. As it turned out, Josephus’s prophecy came true. After the emperor Nero committed suicide in 68 CE, there was a series of very brief reigns by three other emperors, after which Vespasian’s troops declared him emperor. He returned to Rome to assume the position, leaving his son Titus in charge of the assault on Jerusalem.
Josephus himself was used as an interpreter during the three-year siege of the city. After it fell, the Jewish opposition was slaughtered and the holy Temple as well as much of the city was destroyed. Josephus was taken to Rome and given a prestigious place in the court of Vespasian, and with imperial support he then wrote his various historical works. The first was his account of all that had happened during the war in which he himself had played such an important part. About twenty years later (around 93 CE) he completed his magnum opus, a twenty-volume account of the history of the Jewish people from the time of Adam (the very beginning!) down to his own day, called The Antiquities of the Jews.
In his various writings Josephus mentions a large number of Jews, especially as they were important for the social, political, and historical situation in Palestine. As it turns out, he discusses several persons named Jesus, and he deals briefly also with John the Baptist. And on two occasions, at least in the writings as they have come down to us today, he mentions Jesus of Nazareth.
It is somewhat simpler to deal with these two references in reverse order. The second of them is very brief and occurs in Book 20 of the Antiquities. Here Josephus is referring to an incident that happened in 62 CE, before the Jewish uprising, when the local civic and religious leader in Jerusalem, the high priest Ananus, misused his power. The Roman governor had been withdrawn, and in his absence, we are told, Ananus unlawfully put to death a man named James, whom Josephus identifies as “the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah” (Antiquities 20.9.1). Here, unlike the pagan references we examined earlier, Jesus is actually called by name. And we learn two things about him: he had a brother named James, and some people thought that he was the messiah. Both points are abundantly attested as well, of course, in our Christian sources, but it is interesting to see that Josephus is aware of them.
Mythicists typically argue that this passage was not originally in Josephus but was inserted by later Christian scribes. Before dealing with that claim I should consider the second passage, the one over which there is the most debate. This passage is known to scholars as the Testimonium Flavianum, that is, the testimony given by Flavius Josephus to the life of Jesus.14 It is the longest reference to Jesus that we have considered so far, and it is by far the most important. In the best manuscripts of Josephus it reads as follows:
At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one should 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 among many of Greek origin. He was the messiah. 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. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wonderous things about him. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out. (Antiquities 18.3.3)
The problems with this passage should be obvious to anyone with even a casual knowledge of Josephus. We know a good deal about him, both from the autobiography that he produced and from other self-references in his writings. He was thoroughly and ineluctably Jewish and certainly never converted to be a follower of Jesus. But this passage contains comments that only a Christian would make: that Jesus was more than a man, that he was the messiah, and that he arose from the dead in fulfillment of the scriptures. In the judgment of most scholars, there is simply no way Josephus the Jew would or could have written such things. So how did these comments get into his writings?
It needs to be remembered that Josephus, by his own admission, was something of a turncoat in the war with Rome. This is how most Jews throughout history have remembered him. Among his own people he was not a beloved author read through the ages. In fact, his writings were transmitted in the Middle Ages not by Jews but by Christians. This shows how we can explain the extraordinary Christian claims about Jesus in this passage. When Christian scribes copied the text, they added a few words here and there to make sure that the reader would get the point. This is that Jesus, the superhuman messiah raised from the dead as the scriptures predicted.
The big question is whether a Christian scribe (or scribes) simply added a few choice Christian additions to the passage or whether the entire thing was produced by a Christian and inserted in an appropriate place in Josephus’s Antiquities.
The majority of scholars of early Judaism, and experts on Josephus, think that it was the former—that one or more Christian scribes “touched up” the passage a bit. If one takes out the obviously Christian comments, the passage may have been rather innocuous, reading something like this:15
At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. 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 among many of Greek origin. 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.
If this is the original form of the passage, then Josephus had some solid historical information about Jesus’s life: Jesus was known for his wisdom and teaching; he was thought to have done remarkable deeds; he had numerous followers; he was condemned to be crucified by Pontius Pilate because of Jewish accusations brought against him; and he continued to have followers among the Christians after his death.
Mythicists have argued, however, that the entire passage was made up by a Christian author and inserted into the writings of Josephus. If that is the case, then possibly the later reference to James as “the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah” was also interpolated, in order to reinforce the point of the earlier insertion. One of the fullest arguments for this position is offered by Earl Doherty, both in his original work, The Jesus Puzzle, and in an amplified form in his more recent Jesus: Neither God nor Man. In his view, “a good case can be made for saying that Josephus wrote nothing about Jesus and was probably unaware of any such figure.”16 Doherty mounts argument after argument against the view that Josephus made any reference at all to Jesus, often repeating the arguments of others, sometimes coming up with his own. Here I will consider his most important points.
First, some (such as G. A. Wells) have maintained that if one removes the entire Testimonium from its larger context, the preceding paragraph and the one that follows flow together quite nicely. This one seems, then, intrusive.17 As Doherty rightly notes, however, it was not at all uncommon for ancient writers (who never used footnotes) to digress from their main points, and in fact other digressions can be found in the surrounding context of the passage. So this argument really does not amount to much.
More striking for Doherty is the fact that no Christian authors appear to be aware of this passage until the church father Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century. In the second and third centuries there were many Christian writers (Justin, Tertullian, Origen, and so on) who were intent on defending both Christianity and Jesus himself against charges leveled against him by their opponents. And yet they never, in defense of Jesus, mention this passage of Josephus. Is that really plausible? Wouldn’t Christian apologists want to appeal to a neutral witness in support of their claims about Jesus in the face of pagan opposition?
This too does not strike me as a strong argument. The pared-down version of Josephus—the one that others have thought was original, without the Christian additions—contains very little that could have been used by the early Christian writers to defend Jesus and his followers from attacks by pagan intellectuals. It is a very neutral statement. The fact that Jesus is said to have been wise or to have done great deeds would not go far in the repertoire of the Christian apologists. We have no way of knowing if they were familiar with this passage from Josephus, but if they were, I don’t see that it would have seemed so striking to them that they would have used it to defend Jesus against pagan accusations. These accusations typically included such claims as that he was born out of wedlock to a peasant Jewish woman who was seduced by a Roman soldier; that he was an unskilled carpenter; that he could not control his temper; and that he died a shameful death on the cross.18 Nothing in the possibly original statement of Josephus seems relevant to any of these charges.
Doherty goes on to claim that the passage does not ring true to Josephus otherwise, in part because “in the case of every other would-be messiah or popular leader opposed to or executed by the Romans, he has nothing but evil to say.”19 This is the case with all messianic pretenders of Josephus’s day: he was completely opposed to anyone who might foment an uprising against Rome (remember: he was writing as a privileged guest in the court of the Roman emperor). But it needs to be stressed that in the possibly original form of the Testimonium there is not a word about Jesus being a messiah figure or even a political leader. He is simply a teacher with followers, accused on unknown grounds by (specifically) Jewish leaders and then executed. Moreover, if one reads the passage without the rose-tinted lenses of the Christian tradition, its view of Jesus can be seen as basically negative. The fact that he was opposed by the leaders of the Jewish people would no doubt have shown that he was not an upright Jew. And the fact that he was condemned to crucifixion, the most horrific execution imaginable to a Roman audience, speaks for itself. Even though Jesus may have been a good teacher, he was a threat to the state, or at least a nuisance, and so the state dealt with him fairly and strongly, by condemning him.
Doherty also objects to the idea that Josephus could call Jesus “wise” and one who appears to have taught the “truth.” If Josephus knew the teachings of Jesus—with which he surely would have vehemently disagreed—then he never could say any such things. To this it can easily be objected on one hand that there is no reason for thinking that Josephus knew any of the things that Jesus taught, and on the other that many of the things Jesus taught were in fact what many other famous teachers of Judaism taught: for example, that followers of God should love God above all else; that they should love their neighbors as themselves; that they should do good unto others; that they should feed the hungry and care for the poor and oppressed; and, well, lots of other things that have seemed through the ages to Christian believer and unbeliever alike as both wise and true.
Doherty makes many other points, but most of them, frankly, are even weaker than these and do not need to be given serious attention here. In the revised edition of his book, however, he does devote an extended discussion to summarizing the views of Ken Olson, a graduate student at Duke University, who argues that the language of the Testimonium does not appear to be stylistically consistent with the language Josephus uses throughout his other works. Olson has been a student of mine (taking some of my graduate seminars at UNC) and is a very sharp fellow. For what it is worth, he is not a mythicist. Olson’s Ph.D. dissertation is devoted to the Testimonium, and many of his key arguments are summarized in an article that he published in the academic journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1999.20 In this article Olson argues that the first author to mention the Testimonium, the Christian church father Eusebius (who was writing before any of our manuscripts of Josephus was produced), was in fact the one who forged it and so was ultimately responsible for its being inserted into Josephus’s writings. The basis for the argument is a very careful analysis of the words and phrases used in the Testimonium. Olson argues in case after case that the wording and phrasing of the passage has numerous parallels with Eusebius’s writings but not with those of Josephus. In other words, the vocabulary and style of the passage suggest that it was written by Eusebius.
Olson has made an intriguing case in his article, but I am afraid—as impressed by him as I am—that it has not held up under critical scrutiny. The responses to it by such scholars of Josephus and of early Christianity as J. Carleton Paget and Alice Whealey have been compelling.21 There is in fact little in the Testimonium that is more like Eusebius than Josephus, and a good deal of the passage does indeed read like it was written by Josephus. It is far more likely that the core of the passage actually does go back to Josephus himself.22
An additional reason for thinking so is this: if a scribe (or Eusebius or anyone else) wanted to insert a strong testimony about the virtues of Jesus into the writings of Josephus (so that the Testimonium is a later interpolation), he surely would have done so in a much more glowing and obvious way. Those who wrote apocryphal stories about Jesus are flamboyant both in what they relate (recounting lots of Jesus’s miracles, for example) and in how they say it (stressing his divine nature, not simply that he was the messiah). The Testimonium is so restrained, with only a couple of fairly reserved sentences here and there, that it does not read like a Christian apocryphal account of Jesus written for the occasion. It reads much more like what you get elsewhere throughout the manuscript tradition of ancient writings: a touch-up job that a scribe could easily do.
The payoff is that most scholars continue to be convinced that Josephus did indeed write about Jesus, probably in something like the pared-down version that I quote above.
But that is not the main point I want to make about the Testimonium. My main point is that whether the Testimonium is authentically from Josephus (in its pared-down form) or not probably does not ultimately matter for the question I am pursuing here. Whether or not Jesus lived has to be decided on other kinds of evidence from this. And here is why. Suppose Josephus really did write the Testimonium. That would show that by 93 CE—some sixty or more years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death—a Jewish historian of Palestine had some information about him. And where would Josephus have derived this information? He would have heard stories about Jesus that were in circulation. There is nothing to suggest that Josephus had actually read the Gospels (he almost certainly had not) or that he did any kind of primary research into the life of Jesus by examining Roman records of some kind (there weren’t any). But as we will see later, we already know for lots of other reasons and on lots of other grounds that there were stories about Jesus floating around in Palestine by the end of the first century and much earlier. So even if the Testimonium, in the pared-down form, was written by Josephus, it does not give us much more evidence than we already have on the question of whether there really was a man Jesus.
If, by contrast, the Testimonium was not written by Josephus, we again are neither helped nor hurt in our quest to know whether Jesus lived. There is certainly no reason to think if Jesus lived that Josephus must have mentioned him. He doesn’t mention most Jews of the first century. Recent estimates suggest that there were possibly up to a million Jews living in Palestine at any one time in the early first century. (If you add up the different persons living in any given year, as new people are born and others die, the total numbers of Jews living throughout the period are obviously much higher.)23 Josephus does not mention 99 percent of them—or rather, more than 99 percent. So why would he mention Jesus? You cannot say that he would have mentioned Jesus because anyone who did all those amazing miraculous deeds would surely be mentioned. As I pointed out earlier, the question of what Jesus actually did has to come after we establish that he lived, not before. As a result, even though both the mythicists and their opponents like to fight long and hard over the Testimonium of Josephus, in fact it is only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.
Rabbinic Sources
In order to complete my tally of early references to Jesus, I need to say a few words about the Jewish Talmud. This is not because it is relevant but because when talking about historical references to Jesus, many people assume it is relevant.24 The Talmud is a collection of disparate materials from early Judaism: legal disputes, anecdotes, folklore, customs, and sayings. Most of the material relates directly to teachings of and stories about the early rabbis, that is, Jewish teachers. The collection was put together long after the days of Jesus.
The core of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic teachings about the Jewish law, based on oral traditions that had long been in circulation, and written in the early third century, some two hundred years after Jesus would have died. Most of the Talmud, however, consists of a series of commentaries by later rabbis on the Mishnah, called the Gemara. There are two different sets of these commentaries, one produced in the fourth century by Jewish scholars who lived in Palestine, the other produced in the fifth century by scholars of Babylon. The latter is considered the more authoritative.
For a long time scholars treated the Talmud as if it presented historically accurate information about Jewish life, law, and custom from a much earlier period, all the way back to the first century. Few critical scholars take that view today. In both its iterations, it is a product of its own time, even though it is based on earlier oral reports.
Jesus is never mentioned in the oldest part of the Talmud, the Mishnah, but appears only in the later commentaries of the Gemara. One of the problems even with these very late references is that Jesus is not actually called by name even though it is reasonably clear that he is the one being referred to. There are some passages, for example, that refer to a person named “Ben [son of] Panthera.” Panthera was the name traditionally given to the Roman soldier who was said to have seduced Mary, who in these passages is called a hairdresser. Her child, then, was born out of wedlock. Scholars have long recognized that this tradition appears to represent a subtle attack on the Christian view of Jesus birth as the “son of a virgin.” In Greek, the word for virgin is parthenos, close in spelling to Panthera.
In other references in the Talmud we learn that Jesus was a sorcerer who acquired his black magic in Egypt. Recall the Gospel accounts of how Jesus fled with his family to Egypt soon after his birth and his abilities later in life to perform miracles. He is said in the Talmud to have gathered five disciples and to have been hanged on the eve of the Passover, after a herald proclaimed the charges of sorcery against him for forty days. Here again we may have a biased version of the Gospel accounts, where Jesus is killed during the Passover but with injudicious speed after a very quick trial, his execution occurring some twelve hours after his arrest.
These Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really of very little use for us in our quest. By the time they were set down, Christianity was a major force in the Roman Empire, and every single Christian telling stories about Jesus naturally assumed that he had really existed as a historical person. If we want evidence to support the claim that he did in fact once exist, we therefore have to turn to other sources.