CLEARING THE PATH

There are really no legitimate doubts raised by any unbiased investigator as to the historicity of Jesus.  Obviously the New Testament is the most trustworthy, complete and reliable source of information related to Jesus.  The reliability of both the Old and New Testaments have been demonstrated without question. They can no longer be doubted as historically accurate and can be trusted more than any book of antiquity. 

One of the popular misconceptions about Jesus, however, is that there is no mention of Him in any ancient sources outside of the Bible. The fact is that there is an abundance of extra-biblical writings that attest to the historical nature of Jesus.  His existence, ministry, crucifixion and the actions of those around him are well documented..

There are considerable reports from non-Christian sources that supplement and confirm the Gospel accounts.  These largely come from Greek, Roman, Jewish and Samaritan sources of the first century.  They include Tacitus (a first-century Roman who is considered one of the more accurate historians of the ancient world);  Pliny the Younger (a Roman author and administrator);  Lucian of Samosata (a second-century Greek writer), and Josephus, who was a Pharisee of the priestly line and a Jewish historian, though he worked under Roman authority. 

These various historical sources show widespread agreement about the basic details of Jesus’ life, especially His death and its causes, with some consideration given to the belief that he rose from the dead. 

In his book, The Verdict of History, Gary Habermas details a total of thirty-nine ancient sources documenting the life of Jesus, from which he enumerates more than one hundred reported facts concerning Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. (1)   What’s more, twenty-four of the sources cited by Habermas, including seven secular sources and several of the earliest creeds of the church, specifically concern the divine nature of Jesus.

Thirty nine sources may not seem like a much attestation. However, you cannot expect to find much 1st century writings, outside the Gospels, referring to Jesus. The fact is, not much about anything of that day has survived to the present time.  What did survive indicates the writers of that time would not have been interested religious events that did not directly concern them. 

A reading of works of some of the 1st century historians reveals very quickly that they concerned themselves almost completely with the major political and international events of the day. When it came to religious events, only those which had bearing on the “more important” national and international affairs were mentioned. (1)

An incontrovertible reference to Jesus would have to be from an eyewitness.  But outside of Christian testimony, no surviving historical literature could even be expected to contain eyewitness references to Him.  So the modern historian must seek non-Christian evidence for Jesus the same way he does for every other person of antiquity who was considered insignificant by the authorities of his day.  He must analyze the credibility of secondhand 

reports. (2)

If you combine the secondhand reports of Jesus (both non-Christian and Christian) with the eyewitness accounts recorded in the Gospels, you will find that Jesus compares extremely favorably with other people in history whose historicity is not in doubt.  Concerning Jesus, Gary Habermas, professor of Philosophy and Religion at Liberty University states:

While some believe that we know almost nothing about Jesus from ancient, non-New testament sources, this plainly is not the case. Not only are there many such sources, but Jesus is one of the persons of ancient history concerning whom we have a significant amount of quality data. His is one of the most-mentioned and most-substantiated lives in ancient times. (3) 

The fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica uses 20,000 words in describing Jesus. His description took more space than was given to Aristotle, Cicero, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed or Napoleon Bonaparte.  Concerning the testimony of the many independent secular accounts of Jesus, it states:

These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries. (4)

So there is clearly an abundance of evidence that Jesus was an historical figure. 

For more information on the writings of Tacitus, Pliny the, Lucian of Samosata, and Josephus follow this link to the Archaeology and the New Testament section of the Archaeology page. Follow the same link for specific archaeological finding regarding the New Testament and Jesus.

One section from that page that I find particularly compelling has to do with the darkness that befell the earth during Jesus’ crucifixion, as mentioned in the Gospel accounts: 

The Gospel writers claim that the earth went dark during part of the time that Jesus hung of the cross.  If darkness had fallen over the earth as was written, wouldn’t there be at least some mention of this extraordinary event outside the Bible? 

Dr. Gary Habermas has written about a historian named Thallus who in AD 52 wrote a history of the eastern Mediterranean world since the Trojan War.  Although Thallus’s work has been lost, it was quoted by Julius Africanus in about AD 221.  It made reference to the darkness that the gospels had written about !!  In this passage Julius Africanus wrote: 

Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away the darkness as an eclipse of the sun—unreasonably, as it seems to me. (5)

Africanus then argues that it couldn’t have been an eclipse, because an eclipse could not have taken place during a full moon, as was the case during the Jewish Passover season.  Backing this up is scholar Paul Maier, who says in his 1968 book Pontius Pilate:

This phenomenon, evidently, was visible in Rome, Athens, and other Mediterranean cities. According to Tertullian…it was a “cosmic” or “world event.” Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria writing a chronology soon after 137 AD, reported that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e., 33 AD) there was “the greatest eclipse of the sun” and that “it became night in the sixth hour of the day [i.e., noon] so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea. (6)

So this is extremely powerful evidence confirming the biblical account of details relating to the crucifixion of Jesus.   The date and time are pretty much exact.  Although some tried to give it a natural explanation calling it an eclipse, that could not have been the case due to the full moon that is always present during the Jewish Passover season.

The next page covers the dating of the Gospel accounts of Jesus.  As is true with any work of literature from antiquity, the nearer to the actual events a document is written, the more reliable that document can be considered.