What Do Historians Say About the Evidence for Jesus?

Among scholars of the New Testament there is little disagreement that Jesus actually lived. Lawrence Mykytiuk of Purdue University notes that the question was not debated in ancient times either: Jewish rabbis hostile to Jesus accused him of being a magician and of leading people astray, but never said he did not exist. The evidence is mostly written, not physical, and what scholars can say about the details of his life is much less certain than the fact of his existence. [1]

There is no definitive physical or archaeological evidence of Jesus. Mykytiuk says he would not expect any, since peasants do not normally leave an archaeological trail. Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina makes the same point, saying that virtually no one from Jesus' time and place left such records, and that the absence of evidence does not mean a person did not exist. Relics such as the Shroud of Turin and the reputed crown of thorns remain of questioned authenticity. Archaeologists have, however, corroborated some background details: they have found a courtyard house, tombs and a cistern at ancient Nazareth, whose existence some had disputed, and physical evidence of Roman crucifixions. [1]

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing around A.D. 93 in his Jewish Antiquities, mentions Jesus twice. In one passage he calls the executed James the brother of Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah, and few scholars doubt that passage is authentic. The longer passage, the Testimonium Flavianum, is more debated. Mykytiuk agrees with most scholars that Christian scribes altered parts of it but did not insert it wholesale. [1]

The Roman senator Tacitus, writing around A.D. 116, says that Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. Ehrman notes that Tacitus was disdainful of Christians, yet his account coincides with the New Testament on the main points. Ehrman adds that Pliny the Younger and Suetonius also mention Christ or Christians within about eighty years of Jesus' death, and that these authors had no stake in inventing the story. [1] [2]

Ehrman stresses the limits of these sources. They tell us almost nothing about what Jesus said and did. Their value is that historians with reason to investigate treated him as a real figure. [2]

The fullest record is in the Gospels and other New Testament writings. Ehrman calls these biased and says they must be evaluated very critically, though he argues that their central claims, that Jesus was a Jew with followers who was executed on the orders of Pilate under Tiberius, are borne out by later sources with different biases. A PBS Frontline interview with a historian makes a related point: the traditions were preserved to instruct early churches, not to inform us about the historical Jesus, so each piece of tradition has been transformed. [1] [3]

Scholars disagree more about which details are reliable. Many treat material from the hypothesized Q source as most reliable and Mark's Gospel as a second tier. Almost all historical scholars accept the authenticity of the bulk of Jesus' ethical teaching, such as the Sermon on the Mount. By contrast, several recent scholars have broken with the former consensus that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, attributing the end-times material in the Gospels to later Christians responding to crises such as the Jewish war with Rome. Methods for judging authenticity, the status of Q and the value of noncanonical books are also under discussion. [4] [5]