Did Jesus exist?

Since its genesis, Christianity has been grounded on the historical claims of Jesus of Nazareth. For decades Christian advocates have been trotting out C.S. Lewis’ famous trilemma—that given the things Jesus said about Himself, he must be either a diabolical deceiver, psychologically unhinged, or else, God incarnate.

Supposedly those were the only three logical options: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.

But in recent years it has become increasingly popular in sceptical circles to suggest a fourth option: Legend. That the stories about Jesus are historical fabrications. That Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, or if he did he had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity, such that Christian faith is a castle built in the clouds: it has no solid historical foundation.

Those who promote this view are often termed Jesus Mythicists, and whilst its academic defenders—people like George Albert Wells, Richard Carrier, and Robert Price—are astonishingly few in number, when surveyed, a surprising number of adults across the Western world expressed serious doubt over whether Jesus of Nazareth ever even existed.

Despite the popularity of the non-existence hypothesis at a street level and on sceptical forums, it is important to note just how extreme fringe this view is when it comes to mainstream scholarship. Bart Ehrman, the famed biblical scholar who is himself sceptical of God’s existence, and certainly no friend of Christianity, nonetheless penned the book—Did Jesus Exist?—to explicitly refute Jesus mythicists, arguing that the evidence for Jesus is so overwhelming that he calls it silly to deny it.

John Dickson, an ancient historian who teaches on the historical Jesus, even went public on social media years ago with the challenge that he would eat a page of his Bible if someone could name a single credentialed professor of classics, ancient history, or new testament studies who has a post in a reputable university anywhere in the world that denies that Jesus existed. To date, John’s Bible remains whole.

Now the reason this point isn’t to belittle Jesus mythicists as foolish. There can be a real danger in simply flexing the academic muscles of the majority, where we can fall prey to simply appealing to authority, substituting real evidence for expert opinions as though academic credentials make the case.

When it comes to whether Jesus is history, though, the broad consensus is not ideologically driven. These academic fields are populated by non-religious scholars with no motivated axe to grind, and a whole range of opinions as to Jesus’ true identity. Rather their monolithic conviction that Jesus actually existed comes down to one simple reality: the strength of the historical evidence.

So what is the evidence for the historical Jesus?

Well, let’s start with the Christian sources, whether found in the New Testament documents or in the extra-biblical literature of the first and early second century Church.

Our earliest known sources for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth come from a series of letters written by the Apostle Paul. Penned within 3 decades of Jesus’ death, and some much earlier, Paul affirms the historical creed of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, that Jesus descended genealogically from King David, that Jesus was born of a woman, that Jesus had a brother named James, that Jesus had 12 disciples, along with a whole array of other historical facts. All of these claims are fleshed out in the Synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—which were penned roughly around the same time, and certainly within the living memory of the events they record.

Add to this the rest of the New Testament documents, including letters from James and Jude as two of Jesus’ half-brothers, and the first and early second century sources by the next generation of church leaders—people like Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Papias—and you have a wealth of Christian sources for the historical Jesus.

But let’s say you’re sceptical of Christian sources. After all, Christians are all biased, so we can’t really count them as evidence, right?

Only that is not the approach of secular historians. Just because people were persuaded that Jesus was who he claimed to be, Lord, does not nullify their worth as historical sources. Take Luke’s gospel, for instance. There the author expressly sets out to write an orderly account of Jesus ministry, having interviewed eyewitnesses carefully to determine what really happened. And when it comes to the fleshy details of his writing, Luke’s historical value has been repeatedly vindicated as we better piece together the past, and so is taken seriously as a source by secular historians.

That is not to say that sceptical scholars swallow miracle stories wholesale, taking everything these Christian sources say as gospel truth. If they did that, they’d all become Christians. No, what historians do is weigh individual claims, looking for a whole range of criteria across the sources to see what we can confidently affirm actually happened in history.

So we have good evidence that Jesus existed from Christian sources. But let’s say you didn’t trust the motives or intelligence of these morally upright people who penned incredible literature and spent their lives sacrificially serving the poor, and so threw out anything written by Christians. 

What is the non-Christian evidence for the existence of Jesus?

Well, you’re in luck, because Jesus is better attested to in non-Christian sources than nearly anyone outside of the Emperors, which is no small feat for an obscure itinerant preacher from a backwater Roman province. Search the records and there are numerous mentions of Jesus in sources like the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, the Roman historian Tacitus, the Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger, the Greek satirist Lucian, and the Babylonian Talmud. In fact no less than 12 non-sympathetic sources in the first two centuries AD mention the existence of Jesus, and often corroborate some of the New Testament’s claims.

Even if you cut out the secular sources that are disputed, like one passage in Josephus where it is thought that later copyists added to his original words, there is a mountain of historical sources that affirm that Jesus definitely existed.

Were you to pile them all together—the Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman accounts—there are 42 different sources for the historical Jesus that were all penned while Christianity was still a tiny rogue religious contingent of the ancient world. 

So the non-existence hypothesis, the idea that Jesus was just a historical fabrication, just does not stand up to scrutiny. There is a reason why secular scholars in this field consider Jesus mythicists to be the ideological equivalents of flat-earthers: they just don’t seem to be willing to accept where the evidence overwhelming points.

Jesus really did exist. And so, since truth invites questioning, you’re invited to explore the historical evidence about Jesus for yourself, asking: what makes the most sense of the claims in these sources?

Was Jesus a liar, cunningly deceiving those around him?

Was he a lunatic, psychologically unstable and so confused about his true identity?

Or was he truly Lord, and so worthy of our trust as the one who promises life?

Given the weight of historical evidence, it would seem the one thing we cannot say is that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than a legend.