How Do We Know Christ Really Lived?
Every now and then we hear in various and sundry places one of the greatest blasphemies of them all: that Jesus never really lived and that the reports of his life and teachings, his death and resurrection, were all made up by unscrupulous men apparently bent on exploiting others for greed and power. At this very moment there is at least one such hawker of disbelief in Jesus on YouTube, offering evidence that Jesus was not a person, but a hoax.
This is, of course, the desperate and mean-spirited strategy of those who fear what may well become a resurgent power of Christianity in the modern world. Prove there is no evidence that Jesus really lived and the game is over, they say. Case closed. We can then all go on to live our lives with no hope for heaven and no fear of hell, they say. The universe and all of mankind are pointless accidents of history, they say. The promise of ultimate justice and ultimate mercy are pipe dreams, they say. Let us all just agree to be nice and kind to each other without religion getting in our way, they say.
But to paraphrase Psalm 14:1, “The fool in his heart says there was no Jesus.” He fools only himself.
How the Skeptics Reason
The claim is made by some that no sources independent of the followers of Jesus ever provided evidence of his existence. This is patently false. In his great work Antiquities, the Jewish historian Josephus documents in Book 18 Chapter 3 that Jesus was condemned and crucified by Roman authorities. Likewise in Book 20 Chapter 9 Josephus refers to the stoning of James, “the brother of Jesus.” Josephus was born about the time that Jesus was crucified and died around 100 AD, so that he was near enough in time to have been able to certify the life of Jesus without referring to the Gospels. Being the eminent historian that he was, if Jesus had never lived it would have been the obligation of Josephus to have known that for a fact and to have said so. It would also have been the obligation of the Sanhedrin Council in Jerusalem to have said so. There is no record that they ever did, and if they had, Josephus would certainly have known they had.
The great Roman historian Tacitus’ likewise wrote about Jesus and Christians (whom he despised) in book 15, chapter 44 of his Annals. In the following passage he talks about the great fire in Rome during the reign of Nero, which was being blamed on Christians:
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.
The mention of Christ here is minimal, to be sure, but there is no sign of doubt that Jesus lived. The official Roman record is that he was executed by Pontius Pilate, and Tacitus admits it. He was too good a historian to believe that Jesus never lived. But even if Jesus had never lived, it would have been the duty of Tacitus to have pointed that out. He did not.
As to why there are not more abundant sources other than the Gospels to prove that Jesus lived, the simple fact is that the Jews who prosecuted him had nothing to gain by recording his existence and their prosecution of him before Pilate, all the more so because Peter and the apostles were gaining converts by the thousands fairly soon after the resurrection of Jesus and it would have been a wise strategy to just keep up the prosecutions and executions of Christian converts. For this fact of persecution by the Jews we know that a Jew named Saul (later named Paul) urged the death by stoning of St. Stephen, the first martyr. Later Saul was sent to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. If Jesus never lived, Saul would have known that and would never have been converted by a vision of Christ on the Road to Damascus.
The apostles soon realized that, things being as dangerous as they were, they had to send missionaries to the gentile populations outside Jerusalem wherever they could find them. After Paul’s conversion this plan took on extra energy and commitment by the apostles and the disciples. The highly educated convert Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles, makes abundantly clear that Peter and Paul centered their teaching on a man named Jesus who really lived and was crucified in Jerusalem.
But those who say Jesus never lived want us to believe that all the writers of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James and Jude) collaborated in an elaborate plot to lie and cheat their way into the building up of a new religion based on a Jesus who never really lived. This, simply, is fantastic. Tradition has it that all but John suffered persecution and martyrdom for the faith. That is not the price con artists are willing to pay for their crimes. All the writings of the New Testament, when read carefully, point to holy men devoted to inspiring others to be holy. In this they succeeded magnificently, with the Church growing painfully yet by leaps and bounds into a long and glorious future.
Laudate Dominum!
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