Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

by Bart D. Ehrman

  In that connection, I should reiterate that it is a complete “myth” (in the mythicist sense) that Romans kept detailed records of everything and that as a result we are inordinately well informed about the world of Roman Palestine and should expect then to hear about Jesus if he really lived. If Romans kept such records, where are they? We certainly don’t have any. Think of everything we do not know about the reign of Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea. We know from the Jewish historian Josephus that Pilate ruled for ten years, between 26 and 36 CE. It would be easy to argue that he was the single most important figure for Roman Palestine for the entire length of his rule. And what records from that decade do we have from his reign—what Roman records of his major accomplishments, his daily itinerary, the decrees he passed, the laws he issued, the prisoners he put on trial, the death warrants he signed, his scandals, his interviews, his judicial proceedings? We have none. Nothing at all.

  I might press the issue further. What archaeological evidence do we have about Pilate’s rule in Palestine? We have some coins that were issued during his reign (one would not expect coins about Jesus since he didn’t issue any), and one—only one—fragmentary inscription discovered in Caesarea Maritima in 1961 that indicates that he was the Roman prefect. Nothing else. And what writings do we have from him? Not a single word. Does that mean he didn’t exist? No, he is mentioned in several passages in Josephus and in the writings of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and in the Gospels. He certainly existed even though, like Jesus, we have no records from his day or writings from his hand. And what is striking is that we have far more information about Pilate than about any other governor of Judea in Roman times.5 And so it is a modern “myth” to say that we have extensive Roman records from antiquity that surely would have mentioned someone like Jesus had he existed.

  It is also worth pointing out that Pilate is mentioned only in passing in the writing of the one Roman historian, Tacitus, who does name him. Moreover, that happens to be in a passage that also refers to Jesus (Annals 15). If an important Roman aristocratic ruler of a major province is not mentioned any more than that in the Greek and Roman writings, what are the chances that a lower-class Jewish teacher (which Jesus must have been, as everyone who thinks he lived agrees) would be mentioned in them? Almost none.

  I might add that our principal source of knowledge about Jewish Palestine in the days of Jesus comes from the historian Josephus, a prominent aristocratic Jew who was extremely influential in the social and political affairs of his day. And how often is Josephus mentioned in Greek and Roman sources of his own day, the first century CE? Never.

  Think of an analogy. If a historian sixty years from now were to write up a history of the American South in, say, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is he likely to mention Zlatko Plese? (Zlatko is my brilliant colleague who teaches courses in ancient philosophy, Gnosticism, varieties of early Christianity, and other subjects.) Almost certainly not. What does that prove? Technically speaking, it proves nothing. But it does suggest either that Zlatko never existed or that he did not make a huge impact on the political, social, or cultural life of the South. As it turns out, Zlatko does exist (I bought him dinner last night). So if he is not mentioned in a future history of the South, it will no doubt be because he did not make a big impact on the South. To show he existed, one would have to look at other evidence, for example, copies of the two books he has written. (Unlike Jesus, Zlatko can write. And unlike the first century, we have the mass production and distribution of books plus libraries to house them in.) So too with Jesus. If he is rarely mentioned, it is barely relevant to the question of his existence. It is possible that he simply made too little impact, just like the overwhelming mass of people who lived in the Roman Empire of the first century. Many Christians do not want to hear that Jesus did not make an enormous splash on the world of his day, but it appears to be true. Does that mean he did not exist? No, it means that to establish his existence, we need to look to other kinds of evidence.

  Eyewitness Accounts?

  Still, to press yet further on the issue of evidence we do not have, I need to stress that we do not have a single reference to Jesus by anyone—pagan, Jew, or Christian—who was a contemporary eyewitness, who recorded things he said and did. But what about the Gospels of the New Testament? Aren’t they eyewitness reports? Even though that was once widely believed about two of our Gospels, Matthew and John, it is not the view of the vast majority of critical historians today, and for good reason.

  The early church tradition held that the four Gospels of the New Testament were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Even in that tradition, Mark and Luke were not themselves eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. Mark was allegedly the (later) companion of Peter, who heard him preach about Jesus and reorganized his teachings into a narrative that became the Gospel that goes under his name; even if we accept the tradition that Mark was indeed the one who wrote the Gospel, his information came secondhand. Luke was yet further removed: he was said to be a companion of the apostle Paul, who was himself not one of Jesus’s earthly followers. Luke was allegedly a Gentile physician who researched the life of Jesus and then wrote up his account. If the tradition about Luke is true, we are dealing with an author who was a disciple of someone who was not a disciple. Matthew, by contrast, was widely claimed to be one of the twelve disciples, the tax collector Jesus called to be one of his followers (see Matthew 9: 9–13). And John was thought to be the mysterious “Beloved Disciple” of the Fourth Gospel (see, for example, John 19:26–27), identified as one of Jesus’s closest followers, John the son of Zebedee.

  Scholars today, outside the ranks of fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, are virtually unified in thinking that none of these ascriptions of authorship is probably correct. One important point to notice is that none of the Gospel writers ever identifies himself by name or narrates any of his stories about Jesus in the first person. The Gospels are all written anonymously, and the authors describe the disciples, including the disciples Matthew and John, in the third person, talking about what “they” did (not what “I” or “we” did). Even more important, the immediate followers of Jesus were, like him, lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural Galilee. Could they have written Gospels?

  Several significant studies of literacy have appeared in recent years showing just how low literacy rates were in antiquity. The most frequently cited study is by Columbia professor William Harris in a book titled Ancient Literacy.6 By thoroughly examining all the surviving evidence, Harris draws the compelling though surprising conclusion that in the very best of times in the ancient world, only about 10 percent of the population could read at all and possibly copy out writing on a page. Far fewer than this, of course, could compose a sentence, let alone a story, let alone an entire book. And who were the people in this 10 percent? They were the upper-class elite who had the time, money, and leisure to afford an education. This is not an apt description of Jesus’s disciples. They were not upper-crust aristocrats.

  In Roman Palestine the situation was even bleaker. The most thorough examination of literacy in Palestine is by a professor of Jewish studies at the University of London, Catherine Hezser, who shows that in the days of Jesus probably only 3 percent of Jews in Palestine were literate.7 Once again, these would be the people who could read and maybe write their names and copy words. Far fewer could compose sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. And once again, these would have been the urban elites.

  The issue becomes even sharper when one other consideration is thrown into the mix. The native tongue of Jesus, his disciples, and most people in Palestine was Aramaic. But the Gospels were written not in Aramaic but in Greek. And in very good Greek. Highly proficient Greek. The authors of the Gospels were unusually well-educated speakers and writers of Greek. They must have been from the relatively higher classes, and they almost certainly were from urban areas outside Palestine. Scholars typically date these Greek compositions to the end of
the first century, with Mark probably being the first Gospel, written around 70 CE or so; Matthew and Luke being a bit later, possibly 80–85 CE; and John being last, around 90–95 CE. The authors of these books were not the original followers of Jesus or probably even followers of the twelve earthly disciples of Jesus. They were later Christians who had heard stories about Jesus as they circulated by word of mouth year after year and decade after decade and finally decided to write them down.

  It is true that the Gospel writers may have had written sources in front of them as well as oral traditions they had heard, as we will see at greater length in the next chapter. Luke explicitly states that he knows of earlier written accounts of Jesus’s life (1:1–4), and there are very good reasons for thinking that both he and Matthew had access to a version of Mark’s Gospel, from which they derived many of their stories. They probably also both had access to a document that scholars have labeled Q (from the German word for “source,” Quelle). This is a document that no longer survives, but it appears to have once existed, in Greek, and consisted of a number of sayings and a few of the deeds of Jesus. Along with these two documents, Matthew and Luke may have had yet other sources for their accounts; we do not know what sources Mark had for his. John is a different case altogether, as the stories he narrates about Jesus are so different from those found in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.8

  My point in this discussion, in any event, is that the Gospels of the New Testament are not eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. Neither are the Gospels outside the New Testament, of which we have over forty, either in whole or in fragments.9 In fact, we do not have any eyewitness report of any kind about Jesus, written in his own day.

  This fact too, however, should not be overblown when considering the question of whether or not Jesus lived. The absence of eyewitness accounts would be relevant if, and only if, we had reason to suspect that we should have eyewitness reports if Jesus really lived. That, however, is far from the case. Think again of our earlier point of comparison, Pontius Pilate. Here is a figure who was immensely significant in every way to the life and history of Palestine during the adult life of Jesus (assuming Jesus lived), politically, economically, culturally, socially. As I have indicated, there was arguably no one more important. And how many eyewitness reports of Pilate do we have from his day? None. Not a single one. The same is true of Josephus. And these are figures who were of the highest prominence in their own day.

  In no small measure this relates, again, to the problem of literacy in that time and place. Hardly anyone could write, and most of the people who could write did not produce writings that have survived from antiquity. As it turns out—this is as astounding as it is true—from Roman Palestine of the entire first century we have precisely one, only one, author of literary texts whose works have survived (by literary texts I mean literary books of any kind: fictional, historical, philosophical, scientific, poetic, political, you name it). That one author is Josephus. We have no others. What is equally striking, in all of our historical records we know the name of only one other author of such writings, a man named Justin of Tiberius; his books, obviously, have not survived.10

  So would we expect eyewitness accounts about Jesus if he had lived? How could we possibly expect them? The one and only Palestinian author of books of any kind that we have was an author (Josephus) who was born several years after Jesus died.

  Non-Christian References to Jesus

  NOW THAT WE HAVE considered at some length the sources we do not have for establishing whether Jesus lived, we can begin to look at the sources we do have. I start with a brief survey of sources that are typically appealed to as non-Christian references to Jesus. I will restrict myself to sources that were produced within about a hundred years of when Jesus is traditionally thought to have died since writings after that time almost certainly cannot be considered independent and reliable witnesses to his life but were undoubtedly based simply on what the authors had heard about Jesus, probably from his followers. The same may be true with even the non-Christian references I discuss here, as we will see. For the sake of convenience I will categorize these non-Christian references as Roman, on the one hand, and Jewish, on the other.

  Roman References

  Within a century of the traditional date of Jesus’s death, he is referred to on three occasions by Roman authors. None of them wrote, as we have seen, during Jesus’s lifetime or even in the first Christian century. They were all writing about eighty to eighty-five years after the traditional date of his death.

  Pliny the Younger

  The first surviving reference to Jesus by a non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger, the governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Pliny is called “the Younger” in order to differentiate him from his even more famous uncle, Pliny “the Elder,” who is best known to history not as a Roman administrator but as a natural scientist who wrote many scientific tomes that still survive. Pliny the Elder was inveterately curious, as scientists tend to be, and when he learned that Mount Vesuvius was erupting in 79 CE, he decided to get as close as he could in order to investigate. Unfortunately, his ship got too close, and he perished in the fumes. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, also observed the eruption, but from a considerable distance, and wrote about it in one of his surviving works.

  Among scholars of early Christianity, the younger Pliny is best known for a series of letters that he wrote later in life to the Roman emperor, Trajan, seeking advice for governing his province. In particular, letter number 10 from the year 112 CE is important, as it is the one place in which Pliny appears to mention the existence of Jesus. The letter is not about Jesus himself; it is dealing with a political problem. In Pliny’s province a law had been passed making it illegal for people to gather together in social groups. This may seem like an odd law, but it had a very practical function. The Roman authorities were afraid that people in that locale might band together for political reasons and that this might lead to armed uprisings. But by forbidding groups from coming together for any purpose whatsoever, the Romans had created a problem, though not one you might expect. The law applied to every social group, including fire brigades. As a result, there were no effective measures in Pliny’s province to deal with the outbreak of fires, and so villages were burning.

  In his letter 10 to the emperor Pliny discusses the fire problem, and in that context he mentions another group that was illegally gathering together. As it turns out, it was the local community of Christians.11

  Pliny learned from reliable sources that the Christians (illegally) gathered together in the early morning. He provides us with some important information about the group: they included people from a variety of socioeconomic levels, and they ate meals together of common food. Pliny may tell the emperor this because of rumors, which we hear from other later sources, that Christians committed cannibalism. (They did, after all, eat the flesh of the Son of God and drink his blood.) Moreover, Pliny informs the emperor, the Christians “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.”

  That is all he says about Jesus: the Christians worshipped him by singing to him. He does not, as you can see, even call him Jesus but instead uses his most common epithet, Christ. Whether Pliny knew the man’s actual name is anyone’s guess. One might be tempted to ask as well whether he knew that Christ was (at one time?) a man, but the fact that he indicates that the songs were offered to Christ “as to a god” suggests that Christ was, of course, something else.

  This reference is obviously not much to go on. But it does tell us that there were Christians worshipping someone named Christ in the early second century in the region of Asia Minor. We already knew this, of course, from other (Christian) sources, as we will see in a later chapter. In any event, whatever Pliny knows about Christ he appears to have learned from the Christians who informed him, and so he does not provide us with completely independent testimony that Jesus actually existed, only the testi
mony of Christians living some eighty years after Jesus would have died. These Christians might have read some of the Gospels, and they certainly heard stories about Jesus. So at the least we can say that the idea of Jesus having existed was current by the early second century, but the reference of Pliny does not provide us with much more than that.

  Suetonius

  Even less helpful is a reference found in the writings of the Roman biographer Suetonius, often also cited in discussions of the existence of Jesus. Suetonius is most famous for having produced twelve biographies of Roman emperors. His Lives of the Caesar, written in 115 CE, still makes for interesting reading today. It was, in fact, the basis for Robert Graves’s historical novel, I Claudius (1934), on which the even better-known BBC miniseries of the same name was based. It is in Suetonius’s biography of Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41 to 54 CE, that a second reference to Jesus is sometimes thought to occur. Suetonius indicates that at one point in his reign Claudius deported all the Jews from Rome because of riots that had occurred “at the instigation of Chrestus.”

  He says nothing more about the man. But a large number of scholars over the years have thought that the situation in Rome is relevant for understanding early Christian history. In this theory, it was Roman Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah, or Christ (Chrestus), who had stirred up the passions of Jews who did not believe. This led to violent reactions that got out of hand: the riots mentioned by Suetonius. And so Claudius expelled the whole lot of them.