Did jesus exist?

 

JESUS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

Even though there’s a large amount of supporting evidence for the existence of Jesus in non-Christian sources, the best evidence is found in the New Testament. The New Testament is made up of twenty-seven different documents (ancient biographies, letters, apocalyptic writings), all written in the first century.

You might be thinking, What about the writers’ prejudices and impartialities? Yes, the New Testament is biased because Christians composed it, but every text is biased. Bias does not necessarily equal unreliability; if this were the case, every ancient (and modern) text would be considered unreliable.

So why do historians believe that the New Testament is the best evidence for the existence of Jesus? The strongest argument is that before and during the time of Jesus, Jews did not believe that the Messiah (or Christ) was going to die. 

They believed that the Messiah was going to rise up and conquer the Romans, taking back Jerusalem, where the Messiah would replace Caesar as king. It doesn’t make sense that the early Christians (a group of first-century Jews) would have made up a fictional story about a Messiah who dies. Even the skeptical New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan wrote, “That [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”8

New Testament historians use the historical fact of the death of Jesus as a criterion for determining historically reliable material (the sayings and deeds of Jesus) in the New Testament Gospels. There must have been a reason Jesus was put to death by the authorities. 

He must have said and done certain things to infuriate the establishment. University of Notre Dame New Testament scholar John P. Meier is famous for saying that “a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field—such a Jesus would threaten no one.”9 He wasn’t crucified for telling people to love one another. He said a few other more provocative things, and scholars find these in the New Testament Gospels.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

One of the other ways we know about Jesus is from the writings of Paul. The conversion of Paul took place around the year AD 32 or 33, or within two or three years of the life of Jesus. He went from persecuting Christians and trying to stomp out the Jesus movement to becoming one of the most famous Christians in history. 

Paul mentions in his letter to the church in Galatia that a few short years after he began following Jesus, he traveled to Jerusalem to meet with two very important people: James (the brother of Jesus) and Cephas, who is also known by his Greek name, Simon Peter (see Galatians 1:18–20; John 1:42). 

In the words of the skeptical New Testament historian Bart D. Ehrman, “These are two good people to know if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus.”10 The reason this is so important is because we actually have Paul’s own account of his meeting with Peter and Jesus’ own brother James. Echoing Ehrman once more, “It is hard to get much closer to the historical Jesus than that. If Jesus never lived, you would think that his brother would know about it.”11

PASSING THE TEST

It’s important to add that the reason historians are more than confident about using the New Testament to construct a historical portrait of Jesus is that it passes one of the most important tests that can be asked of any ancient text: Does the document demonstrate verisimilitude? (Try dropping that word at your next party and impress your friends!) 

Verisimilitude means that the contents of a particular piece of historical writing match what we know about the culture, people, place, and period that it claims to describe. 

In other words, if an ancient document doesn’t match with what we know of archaeology, geography, given names in a certain time period, or even the types of plants and animals that inhabited a certain region, this lack of verisimilitude shows that the text may not be historically reliable.

The good news is that we have what appears to be a reliable text in the New Testament because its authors showed a great deal of verisimilitude. They refer to real people such as Pontius Pilate (see Mark 15:1), Herod Antipas (see Luke 23:7), Caiaphas (see Matthew 26:3), Felix (see Acts 23:24), and Festus (see Acts 24:27) as well as real events such as the death of John the Baptist (see Mark 6:14–29) and the death of Agrippa I (see Acts 12:23). 

The New Testament authors also speak about real places (villages, cities, roads, lakes, mountains), customs from the first century (Passover, purity, Sabbath, divorce law), institutions (the synagogue and temple), offices (priests, tax collectors, Roman governors, Roman centurions), and beliefs (like those of the Pharisees and Sadducees).12 

These people, places, and customs have been corroborated by other ancient texts and archaeological discoveries. Serious students of the New Testament recognise that the New Testament is quite trustworthy because it demonstrates such a high level of historical verisimilitude.

THE EXISTENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

One final argument for the existence of Jesus is, quite simply, the existence of Christianity. It’s a historical fact that Christianity exploded in growth in the second half of the first century and continues to grow today.15 How does a movement create itself out of thin air only to grow into the largest religion in the world with more than two billion followers?16 It’s very difficult to imagine that Christianity got started without the one who gave it its name!

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

All in all, I have yet to hear an intellectually plausible reason why we should believe Jesus never existed. Can you imagine if people started writing books about Caesar Augustus or Alexander the Great never having existed? No serious historian doubts that these famous men from the past truly lived, and it’s been said there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth than for any other person from the ancient world. Historians in other fields would love to have the evidence New Testament historians have to work with when they construct historical portraits of Jesus of Nazareth. Given the abundant evidence, the burden of proof falls on anyone claiming that Jesus never existed.

8 John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 145.

9 See John P. Meier, “The Criterion of Rejection and Execution,” in A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1, (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 177 (emphasis added).

10 Ehrman, 144.

11 Ehrman, 148.

12 Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2012), 9.

13 Byron R. McCane, “Ossuaries,” in John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow, The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 1009. For more information on Jewish ossuaries, see Craig A. Evans, Jesus and the Ossuaries: What Jewish Burial Practices Reveal About the Beginning of Christianity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2003).

14 For more information, see Hershel Shanks, “Verdict Not Guilty,” Bible History Daily, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/verdict-not-guilty/.

15 For more information, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton, NJ: HarperCollins, 1997).

16 “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” The Pew Forum, December 19, 2011, http://www.pewforum.org/christian/global-christianity-exec.aspx, accessed December 10, 2012.

Monette, G. (2014). The Wrong Jesus: Fact, Belief, Legend, Truth … Making Sense of What You’ve Heard (pp. 31–35). NavPress.