Did Jesus Exist?

Mythicists' Claims & Historical Sources

In the Spring of 2024, I presented an original paper at a conference in Provo, Utah. My paper focused on the trial narrative in the Gospel of Mark and suggested that much of that narrative is fabricated. Presenting a paper at an academic conference can be exhilarating and stressful, because after reading a paper aloud to a room of experts, the presenter may be grilled with questions. After presenting my paper, fifteen hands shot into the air. The first remark came from an older man near the back of the room who compared me to a well known mythicist,¹ a comparison which I kindly rejected before taking more questions. That day had been the first time in a while that I was reminded of the mythicist paradigm, a fringe though still present way of thinking about Jesus of Nazareth which doubts his existence. Maybe you’re surprised to hear that there are people, even reasonably-well informed ones, who doubt the existence of Jesus. Maybe you are not surprised and you would include yourself in the mythicist camp. While there are arguments to be made on both sides, virtually every scholar in the field agrees that Jesus did exist and I’d like to go through some of our best sources to demonstrate why that is the general consensus.

The Limitations of History & the Mythicist Perspective

Doing history as a scholarly discipline is about probability not certainty. It differs from scientific experiments which can test hypotheses over and over again to achieve results. Historians do not have this luxury but must engage with the available evidence to make educated conclusions about the past. But the past cannot be experienced exactly as it was, nor can we ever precisely recreate every facet of past events. In many ways, historians are storytellers who choose what things to say and what things not to say, what things to put under a spotlight and what things to keep in the shadows. This is not always done with malicious intent, but it is a simple reality of human capacity and the capacity of the discipline itself. But these limitations do not nullify the probable results that historical research gives us, research which has led nearly every scholar of the New Testament and related disciplines to agree that Jesus was a real person.

The mythicist view essentially asserts that Jesus was a myth, a fabrication of later minds about someone who didn’t exist in historical reality. Mythicists tend to claim that the Gospels are theologically motivated ahistorical accounts and are therefore not trustworthy sources. To some mythicist scholars, the Jesus we get in the Gospels is an amalgamation of prophets and messianic claimants.² Others have asserted that the Jesus myth, like the myths of King Arthur, “sold a particular product.”³ In other words, stories about a fictional Jesus may have been a type of propaganda pushed for societal or material gains. There is a healthy dose of work from the mythicist perspective, some of which I’ll list in the reading suggestions at the end.

-A depiction of Jesus in catacombs in Rome, c. 4th century CE. Source: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=509516.

Evidence for Jesus’ Existence

The vast majority of reliable evidence we have for Jesus is written material.⁴ We do not know where Jesus’ tomb is (if he had one) or the location of the house he lived in and despite some claims from ardent Christians, well-known religious relics are almost never shown to be legitimate. You could probably build a forest from all the pieces of the Cross that have been relics throughout history. So, most of what we have is literature, none of which was written by Jesus himself. This might sound rather meager and unhelpful, but our evidence for Jesus is quite staggering considering the obscurity he lived within. Jesus was a lower-class Galilean Jew living in a Roman-controlled territory. It’s safe to say we don’t even know the names of 99% of the people from that time and place. By comparison, we have great material for this person’s existence.

-Paul of Tarsus-

Paul wrote seven letters which serve as evidence for Jesus’ existence.⁵ As I’ve mentioned several times before in other posts, he is our earliest source for Jesus. Even though Paul never met the historical Jesus, he writes frequently about Jesus’ death which assumes that Jesus really was alive at some point. Furthermore, Paul did know Jesus’ brother James, his disciples Peter and John,⁶ and was opposed to the early Jesus Movement in its fledgling form, so he likely encountered other unnamed individuals who had known Jesus as well. If Jesus never existed, it seems likely that Paul would have been one of the first people to figure that out.

-Josephus-

Perhaps our best source of historical information for first century Judaea comes from the Jewish historian Josephus. After initially fighting against Rome in the First Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE), Josephus acted rather unsuccessfully as a mediator between the Romans and the Jewish rebels. After the war ended, he spent the rest of his life writing extensively under the patronage of Rome. His most well-known works are The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews, the second of which references Jesus. Josephus and these references to Jesus deserve their own series of posts, but I will touch on them briefly:

“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.” -Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews: Book XVIII, Chapter 3⁷

“…so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others…”-Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews: Book XX, Chapter 9⁸

The second passage is referring to an incident when the High Priest decided to have James, the brother of Jesus, put to death for lawbreaking. The passing nature of Josephus’ reference to Jesus here seems noteworthy, not the kind of thing a later copyist might slip in if they were trying to invent a mythical person. So, it seems reasonable that Josephus and his audience would have known this Jesus who some called “Christ” well enough to link James to him.

The longer passage above is often referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum, and while it likely contains historically reliable information about Jesus, most scholars agree that the version we have today (and that you see above) is a later Christian interpolation (something added to the original text by someone other than the original author).⁹ It is important to note that there is no evidence anywhere in Josephus’ other writings to suggest that he was a Christian, but parts of this passage sound very much like they come from the pen of a Jesus follower, almost like something you’d find in one of the Gospels or Paul’s letters. For our purposes here today, however, we can add Josephus to our list of reliable sources for the existence of Jesus.

-The Gospels-

The Gospels¹⁰ were written several decades after Jesus died by unknown authors in unknown places. Most critical scholars agree that the authors were not eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus either, and they certainly are theologically motivated. While some may see these observations as enough of a reason to totally disregard the Gospels as reliable sources, I want to offer a middle way. First of all, we have many figures in history, particularly ancient history, whose life story has been embellished for one reason or another (Alexander the Great, Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc, George Washington, Donald Trump, etc.) but those embellishments are layers on top of the real person, not evidence of non-existence. Secondly, I do not think that the Gospels being theologically motivated precludes them from incorporating historical realities. If you’re familiar with me and my work you’ll know that I say this as someone devoid of personal religious devotion. But to me, the Gospels are not an either or but a both and, not history or fiction but history and fiction. There are certainly things within them that are better understood as literary or theological invention, but the existence of Jesus is not one of them.

-Tacitus-

Tacitus was a first century Roman historian and politician. In his Annals, he mentions Christians during the reign of the emperor Nero, and a “Christus” for whom the Christians were named who was crucified under the orders of Pontius Pilate.¹¹ This reference does come from a disinterested source, though its reliability as an independent witness to Jesus’ existence is not without its detractors.¹² Most, however, see this reference as evidence that Tacitus believed that a real person, whom he refers to as Christus, was at the core of the Christian movement.

-Suetonius-

There is a possible reference to Jesus in the writings of Suetonius, another Roman historian. Writing of the expulsion of Jews from Rome during the reign of the emperor Claudius, he writes, “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he (Claudius) expelled them from Rome.”¹³ It is unclear whether Suetonius was referring to someone named Chrestus living in Rome at the time he was writing (which could not have been Jesus) or if he was implying that the disturbances revolved around “preaching about Jesus as Christ,”¹⁴ as James Dunn suggests.

Let’s Debate About Something Else

The texts we’ve looked at today were all composed in the first or early second century and are generally thought to be among the most reliable sources for Jesus’ existence. They have limitations and perform some acts of fictionalization, but one thing none of them do is create Jesus out of thin air. There are plenty of interesting and important debates to have about these sources and about what type of person the historical Jesus was, but the debate about his existence may be one we should leave behind.

Reading Suggestions:

-Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman

-On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier

-Deconstructing Jesus by Robert M. Price

-The works of Josephus. You can be selective and cautious with these (Josephus has his flaws as a historian) but reading Josephus fills in the world of the first century like few things can.

1. Those who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not a real person.

2. See, for example, Robert M. Price. Deconstructing Jesus. Amherst: Prometheus Books. 2000.

3. Richard Carrier. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2014. 9.

4. Occasionally, archaeological discoveries will pop up which seem to give credence to Jesus’ existence. One of the more recent examples is the “James Ossuary”, a stone burial box with an inscription which claimed that the bones of James, the brother of Jesus were inside. This ossuary is not currently accepted as authentic by most of the scholarly community. For more on this, see Ryan Byrne and Bernadette McNary-Zak. Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Relics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

5. Critical scholars accept that Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans.

6. An example of Paul knowing Peter (Cephas) and James can be found in Galatians 1:18-19, and in Galatians 2:9 he refers to John, usually thought to be Jesus’ disciple by that name, along with Peter and James.

7. Translated by William Whiston.

8. Translated by William Whiston.

9. There is a lot of literature out there about this passage. Honora Howell Chapman gives a solid explanation of the current scholarly perception in A Companion to Josephus. Newark: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. 2016.

10. For the sake of time and space, I am not saying anything here about non-canonical Gospels, of which there are many. Or the various literary components of the Synoptics like Q, or the Didache, or the writings of early Church leaders, all of which take the existence of Jesus for granted.

11. See Tacitus. Annals: Book 15, Chapter 44.

12. See, for example, C. M. Hansen (2023). The Problem of Annals 15.44: On the Plinian Origin of Tacitus’s Information on Christians. Journal of Early Christian History, 13(1), 62–80. https://doi-org.du.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/2222582X.2023.2173628.

13. Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Book V, Chapter XXV. Translated by John Carew Rolfe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

14. James D. G. Dunn. Jesus Remembered. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. 142.