Roman History Verifies Jesus's Existence
Tacitus and Josephus give evidences for Jesus which vary in authenticity.
Can you prove that Jesus was real without citing the Bible?
My friend, who happens to be a devout atheist, casually asked me this question last week, unwittingly sentencing me to a deep dive into Tacitus, Flavius Josephus, and Pliny the Younger, a trio of non-Christian historians in Ancient Rome, and the allegations of forgery surrounding their work.
In full disclosure, I’m a scientist and an apologist, not a historian; I rely on philosophy validated by evidences (another word for historical defenses) to support Christian theism rather than on evidences alone. I hold to Van Til’s assertion that evidences by themselves do not constitute complete or effective apologia. But there comes a time when all apologists are asked to present historical support of Jesus’s existence and/or resurrection— and this was my time.
Without extensive historical knowledge, I began as a good scientist would: by defining the parameters of my literature search. I searched for a source that would meet the following requirements to prove — or rather, to lend support— to the existence of Jesus of Nazareth:
Hard requirements:
Worldview: the writer in question must not identify as a Christian. An atheist would not trust a source attesting to Christianity’s authenticity from a party with vested interest in the matter, no matter how academic.
Identity: the writer must be a historian or a public writer.
Content: the writing must contain an explicit mention of Jesus.
Soft requirements (suggestive of authenticity; relating to the writer’s access to relevant information):
Date: the writer would preferably be alive during the first century A.D. Such a source would presumably have heard about the early Church, and would have had to be at reasonably close range to hear about it in detail.
Location: the source would have lived in an area to which Christians had travelled or which would have had knowledge of Christianity; likely in Ancient Rome.
Unfortunately, even if I were to succeed in finding such a source, evidence of Jesus’s residence on Earth does not prove His divinity; it only proves that a human named Jesus of Nazareth existed and pioneered the Christian religion. Nonetheless, the question of Jesus’s existence is certainly a valid one, and its resolution may give a sliver of confidence to the doubter. So let us commence our search!
The first candidates were the letters of Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor, to Emperor Trajan. These letters meet some, but not all, of our criteria; they fail in that they were written in 112 A.D. and do not mention Jesus himself. However, they describe in detail the practices of early Christians, including their singing, moral standards, feasting, and worship practices. And Pliny is certainly NOT sympathetic to Christianity, calling it a “depraved, excessive superstition”:
They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. […] Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.
Pliny the Younger represented at the Cathedral of S. Maria Maggiore in Como, Italy. 1
Fortunately, two other sources meet our criteria: Tacitus’s Annals and Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Tacitus was a Roman historian and politician who provides a non-Christian account of Jesus’s crucifixion. In book 15, chapter 44 of Annals, Tacitus mentions the execution of “Christus” at the hand of Pontius Pilate:
Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.
Bart Ehrman, a prominent New Testament scholar and alleged agnostic atheist, writes on his blog about how Tacitus’s mention of Jesus validates Jesus’s existence:
This much information does not help us much at all (in fact, almost not at all) in knowing what Jesus said and did during his life. But it is useful for realizing that Jesus was known by historians who had reason to look into the matter. No one thought he was made up.
[…] But their central claims about Jesus as a historical figure – a Jew, with followers, executed on orders of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius – are borne out by these later sources with a completely different set of biases. That and more is borne out even more fully by Josephus, a Jewish historian with yet other axes to grind, but who also knows that Jesus existed and that we can say something about his teaching, reputation, and death.
Tacitus’s Annals, including his mention of Jesus (using the Latin term for Christ), is widely accepted by scholars to be a trustworthy historical document. It provides strong evidence for Jesus’s existence from a non-Christian, extra-Biblical source. But what about Josephus? His books on the Antiquities of the Jews contains two passages which mention Christians, one of which— the Testimonium Flavianum— is hotly debated.
Josephus mentions Jesus in books 18 and 20 of Antiquities. Book 18, chapter 3 contains the Testimonium, which is thought to be partially authentic, meaning that the chapter is original to Josephus but also contains adjustments and additions made by later Christian scribes. The entire Testimonium is reproduced below:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man; if it be lawful to call him a man. For he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross; those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. For he appeared to them alive again, the third day: as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Before we begin our dissection of Antiquities, watch this brief video on a summary of the authenticity of Josephus’s accounts of Jesus; it will provide a simple anchor before we delve into details below.
The first question you may have is this: how can a passage contain authentic material and interpolation at the same time? The first sentence of the Testimonium is a prime example. Scholars believe that the latter part of the first sentence (“if it be lawful to call him a man”) was added to correct Josephus’s Jewish labelling of Jesus as a “wise man”— a label which would not have satisfied a Christian as it did not acknowledge Jesus’s deity. Removing overtly Christian statements from the text, several scholars claim that we are left with a core reference to Jesus which is authentic to Josephus.2 An example of a reconstructed, plausibly authentic Testimonium is provided from J.P Meier, a prominent scholar on early Christianity:
At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise 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. And when [or better: although] 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.
Yet despite its deletions and controversy, the Testimonium still meets our needs as a non-Christian testimony to Jesus’s existence. But while scholars debate the Testimonium, the reference to Jesus in book 20 of Antiquities is considered authentic by most secular and religions scholars alike (see the History for Atheists blog for a deep dive on these scholars). The reference to Jesus from book 20 is below:
So he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James: and some others; [or, some of his companions.]
Here we have an unadorned and factual statement about Jesus’s brother James; Jesus here is not the focus of the passage, but he is mentioned to offer a reference point for James’s identity. No forgery here.
In the end, we have two historians, Tacitus and Josephus, who are able to offer us strong historical support for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century A.D. As stated above, historical support for Jesus’s existence and his link to Christianity does not prove that he was a divine being. That “proof” we shall leave for another day…
Miscellaneous facts:
Pliny the Younger wrote two letters about his first-hand witness of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
An alternative theory for the Testimonium, termed the “paraphrase model,” was proposed by Gary Goldberg, a physicist who has studied Josephus for many years. This model suggests that the Testimonium was actually Josephus’s paraphrase of the Gospel of Luke or a similar text.
Josephus was not an eyewitness to Jesus, Goldberg notes, but his father Matthias was one of the “principal men” mentioned in his Testimonium, and he was friends with a friend of the high priest who condemned Jesus’s brother to death; in other words, he had certainly heard about Jesus from personal contacts.
JoJan - Self-photographed, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25812394
Meier, A Marginal Jew, pp. 56–78.