Did Jesus Exist?

In most of the places where this course is read, nobody doubts that Jesus lived. A Muslim neighbour holds that Isa son of Maryam was a real prophet, born of a virgin, who worked miracles by God's permission; the Qur'an names him some twenty-five times. A grandmother in a village church does not need persuading that there was a man from Nazareth. In much of Africa and Asia the live question is not whether Jesus existed but which Jesus: the prophet of Islam, the healer of a prosperity crusade, a great ancestor, a moral teacher, or the crucified and risen Lord. Most of this module is about that second question, and it is the more important one.

But the first question has arrived everywhere, carried by a phone. Videos claiming that Jesus is a copy of Egyptian or Persian gods, that no historian of the time mentions him, or that the whole story was invented by the Roman emperor Constantine, circulate in English, French, Swahili, Portuguese and Hausa, and they reach university students in Lagos and Nairobi as easily as in Leeds. A pastor who has never been asked the question will be asked it, often by a young person who has already half believed the video and is frightened to say so. The aim of this lesson is that you can answer calmly, accurately, and without claiming a single thing you cannot defend.

The New Testament Survey track has already done the detailed source work, in the third lesson of its module on Jesus, The Historical Jesus. There you will find the quests for the historical Jesus, the criteria historians use and their troubles, each non-Christian source examined one at a time with its date and weight, and the Testimonium Flavianum treated exactly. Read that lesson alongside this one if you have not; this lesson will not repeat it. Its job is different. It asks how that evidence works in an argument with someone who doubts, what the strongest form of the doubt is, and where the honest answer stops.

Begin by being clear what is at stake, because both sides tend to inflate it. If Jesus did not exist, Christianity is false; that is not in dispute. But if Jesus did exist, almost nothing distinctive about Christianity follows. A crucified Jewish teacher is compatible with Islam, with Judaism, with secular humanism and with the beliefs of every sceptic quoted in this lesson. Historical existence is the floor of the argument, not the building. A student who wins this round and thinks he has proved the faith has misunderstood the round.

The first rule is to be exact about dates, because the popular claims on both sides fail on dates. No non-Christian writer mentions Jesus during his lifetime. The earliest is Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in Rome, whose Antiquities of the Jews was finished around AD 93 to 94, some sixty years after the crucifixion. Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia and Pontus on the Black Sea coast, wrote to the emperor Trajan around AD 112 (Letters 10.96). Tacitus wrote his Annals around AD 115 to 120, and in book 15, chapter 44, describing Nero's punishment of Christians after the fire of Rome in 64, he explains that the name came from Christus, who had suffered the extreme penalty under Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suetonius, around AD 120, mentions disturbances among the Jews of Rome at the instigation of one Chrestus, which may or may not refer to Christ.

The second rule is to say what each one proves and stop there. Tacitus is the strongest Roman witness to the execution under Pilate, and he is hostile, calling the movement a deadly superstition, which makes it unlikely he took the fact from Christians without comment. Pliny proves something different: that by around 112 Christians in Asia Minor met on a fixed day before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as to a god, carmen Christo quasi deo in his Latin. That is first-rate evidence about early Christian worship and no evidence at all about Jesus' life. Josephus has two passages. The short one at Antiquities 20.200 names James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, in a sentence about the high priest Ananus' misconduct; the large majority of specialists accept it as genuine. The long one at 18.63-64, the Testimonium Flavianum, has plainly been touched by a Christian hand, since in its surviving form it says of Jesus that he was the Christ, which Josephus did not believe. Most specialists think Josephus wrote a shorter original that a copyist enlarged; a minority think the whole passage is a later insertion. The New Testament Survey lesson gives the evidence for each view, and it is a live dispute.

The third rule is never to overclaim, because one overclaim costs you every true thing you said before it. Do not say that Josephus confessed Jesus as Messiah, or that he reports the resurrection; the clauses that say so are exactly the ones every standard reconstruction removes. Do not cite Thallus, Phlegon or the letter of Mara bar Serapion as early independent testimony; Thallus and Phlegon survive only in quotations by later Christian writers, and Mara bar Serapion's letter is of uncertain date and speaks of a wise king of the Jews without naming him. Do not say there is more evidence for Jesus than for Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. There is not: Caesar left his own books, coins with his face, inscriptions and the testimony of Roman senators who knew him. The fair comparison is with people of Jesus' social rank, a provincial teacher with no office, no army and no writings, and for such people the usual amount of contemporary non-Christian evidence is none at all. Hardly anyone in first-century Galilee is mentioned by any historian. That Jesus is mentioned by three or four within a century is unusual, not ordinary.

The sceptic has two replies here, and both deserve a hearing. The first is that every one of these writers may simply be repeating what Christians said; Tacitus does not tell us his source, and a Roman governor who interrogated Christians, as Pliny did, learned his facts about Christ from them. That is true and it is the reason the outside sources are corroboration rather than foundation. Even so, the Josephus reference to James is not a report of Christian belief; it is Josephus' own identification of a man executed in Jerusalem in AD 62, a city where he himself had lived. The second reply is the argument from silence. Philo of Alexandria, who died around AD 50 and wrote voluminously about Jewish affairs, never mentions Jesus. Justus of Tiberias wrote a chronicle of Jewish kings, now lost, and the ninth-century patriarch Photius, who read it, remarked that it made no mention of Christ. An argument from silence is only as strong as the reason to expect speech, and neither man had much reason. Philo was a philosopher in Egypt writing about the law and about Jewish relations with Rome; nothing in his surviving work concerns obscure Galilean preachers, and John the Baptist, whom almost no one doubts, is also absent from him. Silence from a writer whose subject did not call for the topic tells you about his subject.

A minority argument about Tacitus is worth knowing, so that it does not surprise you. Richard Carrier argued in 2014, in the journal Vigiliae Christianae, that the sentence naming Christus is a later Christian insertion into the Annals, noting that the passage survives in a single eleventh-century manuscript in which the word Christians appears to have been altered from Chrestians. Most classicists accept the sentence as Tacitus' own, on the grounds that its tone is unmistakably his and hostile, and that a Christian adding to Tacitus would hardly add a sneer. Tell a questioner that the passage has been doubted and why, and then tell him why the doubt has not won. That is more persuasive than pretending it was never raised.

The strongest evidence that Jesus existed does not come from Rome. It comes from the earliest Christian writer, and its force does not depend on believing anything Paul says about God. Paul wrote his surviving letters in the late forties and fifties, within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion. He had been a persecutor of the movement, which means he knew what it claimed before he joined it. And he tells us, without any argumentative purpose, whom he met. 'Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to confer with Cephas, and I stayed with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother' (Galatians 1:18-19). Later, in Galatians 2:9, he shakes hands with James, Cephas and John, the reputed pillars.

Ask what kind of evidence that is. Paul is not trying to prove that Jesus existed; nobody in his world had suggested otherwise. He is trying to show the Galatians that his gospel did not come from the Jerusalem leaders, and so he minimises his contact with them. In the course of minimising it he mentions, as a man he met, the brother of the person he preaches. A historian can ask for little more than an early writer who personally knew the subject's brother and close companions, mentioned in passing in a letter whose purpose lay elsewhere. Josephus, writing independently and for different reasons, names the same James as the brother of Jesus.

Paul also drops details, and the inquiry had you list them. Jesus was born of a woman and under the law (Galatians 4:4), a descendant of David (Romans 1:3), a servant of the circumcised (Romans 15:8), betrayed on a particular night when he took bread and a cup (1 Corinthians 11:23-25), crucified, buried and raised. He had brothers, and they travelled with their wives (1 Corinthians 9:5). He had a named group of twelve. He used the Aramaic word Abba in prayer, which is why Paul's Greek-speaking converts are found crying it out (Galatians 4:6, Romans 8:15). The list is short, and section 4 will put the sceptic's reading of that shortness at full strength. But it is not a list of heavenly events. It is a list of things that happen to a Jewish man in a family, at a meal, under a law, at a particular time.

Then there is the cross itself. 'But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles' (1 Corinthians 1:23). Historians use what they call the criterion of embarrassment: a tradition that caused its own bearers trouble is unlikely to have been invented by them. The criterion has real weaknesses, which the New Testament Survey lesson describes, and it cannot be applied mechanically. But here it is at its strongest. No Jewish group expected a crucified Messiah; Deuteronomy 21:23 put a man hung on a tree under God's curse, and Paul faces that text head on in Galatians 3:13 rather than avoiding it. No Greek audience wanted a god who died as slaves and rebels died. If one were inventing a saviour, one would not invent this. The simplest explanation of why the earliest Christians preached a crucified Messiah, against every interest they had, is that their Messiah had in fact been crucified.

The view that Jesus never existed is called mythicism, and its best defenders should be heard in their own terms rather than through their weakest followers. It has a long history. Bruno Bauer argued a version of it in nineteenth-century Germany, Arthur Drews' The Christ Myth (1909) made it famous, and in the late twentieth century the British scholar of German G. A. Wells argued it across several books, though late in his career he allowed that a real Galilean preacher might lie behind some of the Gospel sayings while still denying that this man was Paul's Christ. Its present form is due chiefly to Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, a former Baptist pastor with doctorates in theology and New Testament, and above all Richard Carrier, who holds a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University and whose On the Historicity of Jesus (2014) was published by Sheffield Phoenix Press after peer review. Treat it as an argument, because Carrier offers it as one.

Here is the case at full strength. The earliest Christian documents are Paul's letters, and Paul never places Jesus in Galilee, never quotes a parable, never mentions a miracle, never names his parents, never mentions Pilate in an undisputed letter, and says in Galatians 1:12 that he received his gospel not from any man but by revelation. His other source is scripture: Christ died and was raised according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). On Carrier's reading the first Christians believed in a celestial Jesus, a heavenly being known through visions and through a fresh reading of the prophets, who was crucified by the demonic rulers of this age in a lower heaven; he points to 1 Corinthians 2:8, where the rulers of this age crucified the Lord of glory, and to a Jewish-Christian text called the Ascension of Isaiah, in which a divine figure descends through the heavens. Born of a woman and descended from David are, on this view, scriptural and theological statements about the heavenly figure's nature, made in a letter that, in the same chapter, reads its own story about two mothers figuratively (Galatians 4:24, where the Greek allegoroumena is rendered in the BSB as serve as illustrations). The brothers of the Lord are a group of believers, since all baptised Christians were the Lord's adopted brothers. Then a generation later, after the destruction of Jerusalem, Mark wrote an allegorical narrative placing this figure on earth, and the later Gospels read it as history.

Carrier frames this with probability theory. He estimates the prior probability that a figure like Jesus was historical by placing him in a reference class: heroes who fit the mythic pattern identified by Lord Raglan in the 1930s, of whom most are not historical. He then asks whether the evidence of Paul, the Gospels and the outside writers is more expected on historicity or on his celestial hypothesis, and concludes that historicity is improbable even when the inputs are set generously in its favour. Price argues more from the Gospels themselves, contending that almost every episode can be read as a rewriting of an Old Testament or Greek literary model, so that nothing remains once the borrowings are removed.

Then there is the popular version, which is what your students have actually met, and which the academic mythicists themselves largely disown. It holds that the story of Jesus was copied from the gods of the mystery religions: that Horus of Egypt, Mithras of Persia, Dionysus of Greece or Krishna of India was born of a virgin on 25 December, had twelve disciples, was crucified and rose after three days. The film Zeitgeist, released online in 2007, made these claims famous, drawing on the writer Dorothy Murdock under her pen name Acharya S, and older books going back to Kersey Graves in the nineteenth century. State it as its sharers state it: Christianity looks too much like what came before it to be anything new.

Start with who rejects mythicism, because that is the most telling fact about it. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic who has spent his career arguing against conservative Christian conclusions, wrote Did Jesus Exist? (2012) as a sustained reply. Maurice Casey, a scholar of Aramaic and the Gospels who was not a believer, wrote Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (2014). Reviews of Carrier's book in the academic journals, by scholars of every persuasion, have been overwhelmingly negative. This is not a case of believers closing ranks. The view is rejected most firmly by people who have no confessional reason to reject it, and who would gain a great deal of attention by accepting it.

Their reasons are worth having in your own words. First, James. Paul says he met the Lord's brother, and Josephus, independently, calls James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. The inquiry asked what would have to be true for Galatians 1:19 to mean a fellow believer. Paul would have to have used of James, as a distinguishing mark, a title that every Christian shared, in a sentence designed to show how few people he met; and in 1 Corinthians 9:5 he would have to list the Lord's brothers as a separate group from the apostles and Cephas while meaning merely Christians. The sibling reading needs nothing special at all. Second, the details in Paul are what a historical person leaves: a family, a meal on a night of betrayal, descent and law. Third, the cross. A celestial being crucified in the heavens by demons is a possible idea, but it is not an idea anyone has shown the earliest Christians held, and it does not explain why their opponents attacked them for preaching a man executed on a Roman cross. Fourth, the rulers of this age in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 are a disputed phrase, and serious exegetes read it of human rulers, of spiritual powers, or of both acting together; it cannot carry the whole weight that the celestial reading puts on it.

On the probability argument the critics make two points. A Bayesian calculation is only as good as the judgments fed into it, and Carrier's inputs are the very things in dispute. And the reference class is loaded: Jesus scores highly on Raglan's mythic pattern only if one counts features drawn from the later Gospels, such as the birth stories, while the evidence that matters for historicity is the earlier evidence of Paul, which scores low. On the Old Testament borrowings, the critics note that a Jewish writer describing a real man would naturally tell his story in scriptural language, so the presence of scriptural echoes shows how the story was told, not that there was no story. One more point is worth making with care, because it cuts in the sceptic's favour: a few scholars have argued that 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, where Paul says the Judeans killed the Lord Jesus, is a later insertion. Most do not, but you should not rest your case on that passage alone, and you do not need to.

The popular copycat version fails more simply, on its sources. Ask for the ancient text, not the modern book, that says Horus was born of a virgin on 25 December, had twelve disciples or was crucified, and the conversation usually ends. Roman Mithraism is first attested around the end of the first century AD and is known chiefly from temples and inscriptions of the second and third centuries, so its evidence does not come before the Gospels, and no ancient source describes Mithras dying and rising. The category of the dying and rising god was popularised by James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890 and later editions). Jonathan Z. Smith, a historian of religion with no apologetic interest, argued in the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987) that the category was largely a modern construction. Tryggve Mettinger, in The Riddle of Resurrection (2001), argued against Smith that some ancient Near Eastern gods were indeed thought to die and return, such as Dumuzi, Baal and Melqart, but concluded that these figures were bound to the seasonal cycle of the year and are not the background of the Christian claim about a man raised once in history. Note the honest shape of that: there are parallels, and serious scholars still disagree about them, and none of them is what the videos say.

Now say exactly what has been shown. That Jesus of Nazareth existed, was a Jewish teacher with followers, had a brother named James, and was executed under Pontius Pilate, is about as secure as any fact about a first-century provincial can be, and it is granted by believers, agnostics and atheists across the field. That is all it shows. It does not show that he worked miracles, claimed divinity or rose from the dead; those questions have their own evidence and their own lessons, and you will take them in turn in this module. When you have answered a doubter on this point, say so plainly: we agree now that he lived and died; the real question is what happened next, and who he was. That sentence moves the conversation from the floor to the building.

Every lesson in this module adds a paragraph to one page in your notebook. At the top of a fresh page write: My defence: Jesus. The last lesson of this track asks you to write answers to the three objections most often raised where you live, and for most students at least one of them will be about Jesus. This page is where that answer starts, and by the end of the module it will have six paragraphs.

First, go back to what you wrote in the inquiry about why you believe Jesus existed and what you would say about Horus. Mark every claim in it with one of three letters: S for a claim that rests on a source this lesson named, with its date; O for an overclaim this lesson warned against; and U for a claim you cannot yet support. Cross out every O. Do not be embarrassed by how many there are; most people's first answer is built from things they heard in sermons and never checked.

Second, write the first paragraph of your page, no more than 150 words, answering the question: did Jesus really exist? It must name Paul's meeting with James and give the reference, name at least two outside writers with their approximate dates, and include one sentence saying what this does not prove. Then read it aloud to one believer you trust, or to yourself, and time it. If it takes more than a minute and a half, cut it until it does not, because the person who asks this question rarely waits longer than that.