Did Jesus Really Exist? Do we have early Testimony about Jesus?
The Answer is YES!
Including Josephus, there are ten known non-Christian writers who mention Jesus within 150 years of his life. By contrast, over the same 150 years, there are nine non-Christian sources who mention Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus. So discounting all the Christian sources, Jesus is actually mentioned by one more source than the Roman emperor. If you include the Christian sources, authors mentioning Jesus outnumber those mentioning Tiberius 43 to 10!
[These are the ten known non-Christian writers who mention Jesus within 150 years of his life.]
The ten non-Christian sources are:
- Josephus;
- Tacitus, the Roman historian;
- Pliny the Younger, a Roman politician;
- Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories;
- Thallus, a first-century historian;
- Seutonius, a Roman historian;
- Lucian, a Greek satirist;
- Celsus, a Roman philosopher;
- Mara Bar-Serapion, a private citizen who wrote to his son;
- and the Jewish Talmud.
Some of these non-Christian sources—such as Celsus, Tacitus, and the Jewish Talmud—could be considered anti-Christian sources. While these works do not have any eyewitness testimony that contradicts events described in the New Testament documents, they are works written by writers whose tone is decidedly anti-Christian. What can we learn from them and the more neutral non-Christian sources? We learn that they admit certain facts about early Christianity that help us piece together a storyline that is surprisingly congruent with the New Testament.
Piecing together all ten non-Christian references, we see that:
- 1. Jesus lived during time of Tiberius Caesar.
- 2. He lived a virtuous life.
- 3. He was a wonder-worker.
- 4. He had a brother named James.
- 5. He was acclaimed to be the Messiah.
- 6. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
- 7. He was crucified on the eve of the Jewish Passover.
- 8. Darkness and an earthquake occurred when he died.
- 9. His disciples believed he rose from the dead.
- 10. His disciples were willing to die for their belief.
- 11. Christianity spread rapidly as far as Rome.
- 12. His disciples denied the Roman gods and worshiped Jesus as God.
In light of these non-Christian references, the theory that Jesus never existed is clearly unreasonable. How could non-Christian writers collectively reveal a storyline congruent with the New Testament if Jesus never existed?
But the implications run even deeper than that. What does this say about the New Testament? On the face of it, non-Christian sources affirm the New Testament. While the non-Christian authors don’t say they believe in the Resurrection, they report that the disciples certainly believed it.
I dont have enough faith to be an Atheist.
By Frank Turek and Norman Geisler.
In addition, There is a near universal majority of scholars in many fields—historians, Bible scholars, New Testament scholars, philologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, literature, folklore and oral history specialists, paleographers, linguistics scholars in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, those in the field of the Classics, a Dead Sea scroll specialist or two, and many others—from atheist to Jew to liberal to fundamentalist Christian, who all agree Jesus existed.
