THE QUESTION:

Did Jesus Exist?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

Yes.

It would be the ultimate blow to the Christian religion if Jesus, and with him the entirety of the New Testament, is totally fictional.

However, the strong consensus among historians, including non-Christians and skeptics, is that, yes. Jesus was an actual person of the 1st Century (Anno Domini!!). Yet an Ipsos poll for the Episcopal Church, released last month, showed only 76% of Americans "believe in the historical existence" of Jesus, with 89% of self-identified Christians, 43% for adherents of other religions and 38% among the non-religious.

Among scholars, across the years certain "mythicists" have contended that he never existed. 

University of North Carolina Professor Bart Ehrman, author of "Did Jesus Exist?" (2012) and rather skeptical himself, knows of only one such thinker among thousands of scholars with Ph.D. degrees who are working in the New Testament field. He's Robert Price, a onetime Baptist minister, member of the radical "Jesus Seminar," and author of "The Historical Bejeezus" who teaches at Johnnie Coleman Theological Seminary, a "New Thought" school.

Other mythicists have included Frank Zindler, a science educator, Jesus Seminar participant, and an editor with American Atheists. In 1970, Doubleday published an eccentric book by Britain's John M. Allegro, who thought there never was a Jesus and Christianity originated as a drug cult. John Remsburg, a 19th Century superintendent of public instruction for Kansas, backed mythicism by listing 42 ancient authors never wrote about Jesus. (A newsman like The Guy would figure that's what you'd expect with an itinerant teacher executed as a criminal in a backwater of the Roman Empire.)

But Remsburg raised an interesting question. Let's say for the sake of argument we totally exclude the New Testament as evidence (which historians would never do in judging the existence of other figures from ancient times). Do we have any other relevant documentation?

The answer: Yes, though it's sketchy. The following draws from "Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament" by F.F. Bruce of England's University of Manchester. (Yes, he was a Christian who also wrote the related and relevant "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?"}

Start with the Annals (xv, 44) by the Roman historian Tacitus, written in A.D. 115-117 a century after Jesus' career. He notes the Emperor Nero tried to blame the ruinous Rome fire of A.D. 64 on the Christians, a group Tacitus says "got their name from Christ, who was executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. That checked the pernicious superstation for a short time but it broke out afresh, not only in Judea where the plague first arose but in Rome itself. …"

Seem familiar?

Another Roman historian in that era, Suetonius, wrote in Claudius (25, 4) that this emperor "expelled the Jews from Rome, on account of riots in which they were constantly indulging at the instigation of Chrestus." (Bruce said that was a common misspelling of "Christ".)

We also have a letter (Epistles, x, 33-34, 96-97) from that time frame by Pliny the Younger, the empire's legate over a sector of present-day Turkey. He wrote to the Emperor Trajan about executing those who believed in "Christ" if they refused to recant. Pliny reported that these people would meet "on a fixed day, before sunrise," took "oaths" of moral behavior, and would together eat food of "an ordinary and innocent kind."

(A timely side note, since Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists are currently discussing whether women should be deacons. Pliny noted the torture of "two female slaves who were called 'deacons'." They are the first Christian martyrs to be mentioned in texts after the New Testament period.)

We'll bypass a possibly relevant letter of Mara bar Serapion to his son, which does not mention Jesus Christ by name and has an uncertain date of composition.

The great 1st Century Jewish historian Josephus is obviously important, but problematic.

CONTINUE READING: “Did Jesus exist?”, by Richard Ostling.

FIRST IMAGE: Public-domain art — “This painting of Christ’s Resurrection was hiding in plain sight for decades” — feature at Aleteia.org