While in class my professor decided to trail off from his lecture on Genesis to comment on Jesus. To his credit, he claimed that there is “pretty good documentation” that Jesus did exist. Yet he also claimed that we’re still “unsure” about his existence. Though he gave the impression that the evidence weighed slightly in the Jesus-did-exist camp, his language implied that the scholarly community was still divided on the issue. As someone who has researched Jesus’s historicity multiple times, I was annoyed. He was parroting the incessant online cliches of unwarranted religious skepticism. It was like a fork dragging across china. The class of a couple dozen students, however, seemed to unquestionably agree with him, nodding their heads, passively conceding that “everybody knows Jesus’s existence is uncertain.”

Virtually All Experts Agree Jesus Existed

The non-existence of Jesus doesn’t even enter scholarly circles. Skeptical historians like John Dominic Crossan believe that Jesus’s existence is undoubtedly certain. Bart Ehrman, another skeptical scholar, and one of America’s leading experts on the New Testament manuscripts, says in his book Did Jesus Exist?, that the idea Jesus didn’t exist is “extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts.” Now keep in mind that Bart Ehrman isn’t a Christian scholar; he’s an agnostic who just abhors the skeptical fringe literature which promotes Jesus’s non-existence. As he warns in his book, “none of this literature is written by scholars trained in the New Testament or early Christian studies.” Bart compares these skeptics to seven-day creationists who refuse to accept evolution by calling it “just a theory.” While the existence of Jesus is just a theory—just as the existence of Plato, Aristotle, or Caesar is just a “theory”—there’s good reason to believe this theory is true, in the same way there’s good reason to believe that evolution is true. For instance, while one can shirk evolution by calling it a theory, they can’t deny the fact that the vast majority of individuals trained in the sciences are convinced of its veracity. Similarly, Jesus’s existence is appreciated by “virtually everyone,” as Bart puts it, that has “spent many years preparing to be experts.”



Many internet-dwellers have simply assumed the age-old, regurgitated information from skeptic laymen who promulgate Jesus’s non-existence. And of course, on the World Wide Web, whatever tends to breed scandal for religion (Christianity in particular) draws the most attention. Many, then, are led to believe that modern scholarship is split on this issue, when in fact it’s not. Modern scholarship couldn’t be more unanimous in their conclusion: Jesus of Nazareth was an historical figure. Now, of course, simply holding a fringe view doesn’t automatically make this position null. But it does require substantial explanation. When one rejects the view of nearly all experts, both skeptic and Christian, one better be able to defend his view with evidence strong enough to show that nearly all New Testament scholars are wrong. I think the historical evidence we do have, however, rides contrary to the mythicist view.



Testimony of Ancient Non-Christian Writers

Pliny the Younger was a Roman legate who wrote to Emperor Trajan in the early second century, informing him of stubborn Christians refusing to revere Caesar and instead give worship “to Christ as if to a god.” Pliny’s statement “as if to a god” implicitly expresses Pliny’s view that Christ was an actual person, a mere man, and the Christians had mistaken him as divine. We also have, in the early second century, testimony from the Roman historian Tacitus who describes Christ, in his history of the Roman Empire titled Annals, as one who was “executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.” And Just five years after Tacitus’ writing, we have the writing of another Roman historian, Suetonius, who informs us, in his biography of Emperor Claudius (aptly titled Claudius), that within a decade of Jesus’s death, there was rioting among the Jews “at the instigation of Chrestus.” Many scholars interpret “Chrestus” as a variant spelling of “Christus”(Christ). Furthermore, the satirical second-century Greek writer, Lucian of Samosata, ridicules Christians for worshipping a man who was crucified.



One of the earliest non-Christian historians that mentions Jesus is Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote during the first century. In his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus mentions how “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” was stoned by the Jewish Sanhedrin in the 60s. Josephus also gives us a long summary of Jesus’s ministry in 18:63-64 of his Antiquities. Though these passages have been criticized by most scholars as having later Christian interpolations, there’s a broad consensus among scholars that Josephus’s passage on Jesus did contain certain core elements such as the execution of Jesus under Pilate. Here is what James D.G. Dunn, a British New Testament Scholar, thinks Josephus’s original passage looked like:

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who received the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. 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. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out.

One may object that Josephus was simply pulling his historical content about Christianity from the already “mythicized” New Testament documents. But this accusation is shallow because Josephus’s passage on James “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” mentions his martyrdom by the Sanhedrin. This is never mentioned in any of the New Testament documents, so Josephus is undoubtedly pulling from other historical data.

In conclusion, extra-biblical historical sources never mention there being a mythicist Jesus. All the historical sources never indicate that Christians actually believed in some cosmic, celestial, unseen Jesus—as some mythicists maintain—instead of an historical person. The historical sources we do have collectively indicate that Jesus was a man who had at least one well-known close relative, and who started a new religious movement, which he was later crucified for under the authority of Roman procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Emperor Tiberius.



Saint Paul Knew Jesus’s Closest Disciples

All historians, including mythicists, will agree that Paul existed. Disputing this fact would be blatantly ludicrous, considering we have his various letters to different Christians and Christian churches. Paul gives us very early witness to Jesus’s existence, his ministry, and his execution. Paul gives us the early Christian creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 which mentions the death, burial, and resurrection of an historical Jesus in space-time, not some mythical, cosmic, unseen Jesus. The majority of historians date Paul’s reception of this creed to within several years of Jesus’s crucifixion. So this provides us with very early historical data that Christians, from the beginning, believed that Jesus was an historical person (See my post on Jesus’s Resurrection for a fuller explanation of the creed). Additionally, Paul knew Jesus’s closest disciples. In Galatains 1:18-19 Paul tells us that he went up to Jerusalem and stayed there for “fifteen days” with Peter and James “the Lord’s brother.” Surely if Jesus didn’t exist his “brother” would know about it.

The expected layman’s objection to Paul’s strong and early witness to an historical Jesus is that we can’t trust Paul’s writings because he’s biased to the Christian movement. This should be no surprise because all history is written from a viewpoint. There’s no such thing, British Historian N.T. Wright says, as a picture without a perspective. All photos are taken from some angle. If one were to discount Paul’s writings because he’s biased, they would have to discount a lot of history. Are the mythicists really willing to discount renowned Roman historians, or Jewish historians like Josephus simply because they describe Roman and Jewish events while also being supporters of some of these events? If one were to reject the veracity of historical accounts because of suspected bias, then they best prepare themselves for a rampant worldview of wild skepticism. No historian discounts historical sources like this; this is why most historians consider the gospels as ancient biographies, because, despite the bias of the authors, the gospels contain useful historical information about the life of Jesus.



The Unexpectedness of Jesus’s Death

There are aspects of Jesus’s life which we wouldn’t expect to find if he were simply a made up savior figure. For instance, Jesus’s first followers preached him as a crucified Messiah. This is an oxymoron in the context of Judaism. The Jews were expecting a Messiah that would throw off the chains of pagan Rome and liberate the Jewish people, not die the shameful death of a criminal under the rule of Rome. So why is this embarrassing aspect of Jesus’s ministry included in the stories of his life? Because, in all likeliness, he was an actual man who was criminally executed under the authority of a Roman procurator.



Now some mythicists hold the view that Jesus’s death is simply a reflection of the well-known dying and rising gods in the ancient world. Firstly, this comparison of Christianity to ancient dying and rising cults, is severely spurious. The dying and rising deities symbolically represented the continual crop cycles, with the gods acting as divinized representations of seasonal change. Jesus’s death was a one-time event in space-time. He was crucified once. These other deities die and rise and die again and rise again. Jesus’s death happened once and was never interpreted as some symbolic representation of seasonal change. Jesus’s death doesn’t fit comfortably within a pagan context.

Secondly, there’s no causal connection between Christianity and these pagan myths. Christianity was born out of a Jewish context. Jews knew of Emperor worship and the dying and rising gods, and they absolutely abhorred them. Judaism prided itself as being a holy people, meaning they were set apart from the rest of the pagan world. Furthermore, there’s no evidence that Jews ever engaged in worship of dying and rising gods in first-century Palestine. It would be absolutely unhistorical to suggest that Jews modeled their messianic figure after pagan myths which they would have despised.

The mythicist should be informed that this garble of pagan-Christian origins isn’t supported by modern scholarship. In fact, comparative religion collapsed about a century ago. Now New Testament scholarship is engaging in what has been called the Jewish reclamation of Jesus. Scholars have recognized that Jesus and his disciples were Jews who lived in a Jewish context and engaged in common Jewish praxis. It’s unhistorical to suggest that they would have been prone to adopt pagan beliefs. The only places you’ll find this claim repeated is in sensationalist media and among the banter of uninformed online communities—communities which merely assume the validity of these myths because they conveniently feed an agenda.

Where’s the Evidence?

The mythicist idea that Jesus began simply as a fictional cosmic savior, and that Christians later wove more realistic elements into the myth, seems unwarranted given the evidence (and lack thereof for the mythicist case). This claim is more in line with conspiracy theories than actual history. And like most conspiracy theories, it suffers from a lack of evidence, instead making claims without any good reasons for said claims. For instance, the idea that Jesus began as a fictional cosmic savior can’t be found in the gospels, Paul’s letters, extra-biblical sources, or any of the early Church Fathers’ writings. In fact all of the sources I just mentioned point in the opposite direction—towards an historical Jesus.

Conclusion

I think the mythicist account of Jesus is unrealistic and unhistorical. The mythicist needs to realize that his view, to genuine scholars, is seen as ridiculous. Though he may strut along in some aura of alleged intellectualism granted to him by his haughty skepticism, his belief in Jesus’s non-existence is superficial and uninformed.