Christians believe that Jesus existed—as in He really walked the earth. But did you know that even most atheists believe He did too? Let’s explore the evidence behind this belief. Here’s a warning: After reading this article, you’ll no longer be able to keep treating Jesus as a made-up character in a fantasy book. You’ll have the evidence. But then the question will be, what will you do with something so valuable?
Although there are a few vocal skeptics who deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, what would lead someone like Dr. Bart Erhman, a scholar who does not follow Jesus, to say, “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees”?1 What evidence is there to prove that Jesus certainly existed?
Now, we could turn to the gospel accounts to provide this evidence. As a Christian, not only do I know and believe that the gospel accounts are historically accurate, but I also believe that they are inspired by God. However, critics and skeptics will not be as quick to accept that Jesus existed simply because the Bible says so. After all, they claim, the Bible has a motive to make Jesus up. The Bible is biased to believe that Jesus existed. So, what about other accounts? What about historians and writers who were not Christians who had no reason to make someone like Jesus up? Are there any extra-biblical historical documents that help us to see that Jesus truly existed? We’ve got not just one or two. We’ve got dozens. While we won’t take the time to examine them all in this article, we can briefly think about three of them. These three are what are known as hostile witnesses, or people who were enemies of Christ who still testified to His existence.
The first person we will think about is the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. In his Annals of Roman History, published around AD 115, Tacitus wrote:
Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilot, procurator of Judah in the reign of Tiberius.2
Tacitus was writing about the fires in Rome that took place around AD 64, which many people blamed the emperor Nero for. Nero, in turn, decided to make the Christians in the city out to be the enemy. While his purpose was not to defend Christ or Christians, what Tactitus did was tell us that not only did Christ exist, but He was executed by Pilate, just as the gospel narratives show us. He would have had no advantage to make up the person of Christ. He was a historian. He would have lost all credibility if he wrote something that was not true. And yet he wrote that Christ existed.
Not only do we have the writings of Tacitus to rely on, but also the writings of a Jewish historian named Flavius Josephus. In AD 93, in his Jewish history named Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus made this statement about a new Jewish leader:
He assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.3
Now, notice that Josephus did not say that Jesus was the Christ. Rather, that people called Him the Christ. Josephus was not a follower of Jesus. He was still a religious Jew. Yet he still had to report the historical truth—Jesus of Nazareth lived in the first century, began a new religious movement, and was killed under the Roman government.
The same could be said for our next ancient writer, Lucian of Samosata. Lucian was a Greek writer in about AD 165. In a letter that he wrote to his friend, Cronius, he told about a man named Peregrine. Peregrine was quite the interesting fellow. He murdered his father and was exiled from his hometown. Lucian detailed some of the things that happened in Peregrine’s life, which ended when he lit himself on fire at the Olympic Games of AD 165. Lucian is writing to Cronius to make fun of Peregrine, almost like a person texting their friends today when they see someone do something ridiculous.
The reason that I bring this up is that at one point in Peregrine’s life, he ended up in a community of Christians. Lucian, while retelling this guy’s story to his buddy, took the opportunity to poke fun both at Peregrine and at Christians. Lucian wrote:
The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day, the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rights and was crucified on that account.4
He would go on to call Christians “misguided creatures” and mock some of their beliefs, such as believing that they are brothers in Christ or how Christians deny worldly goods. This was obviously not a man who supported Christianity whatsoever. He laughed at Christ and mocked Christians for following Him. But again, he still called Jesus a historical man. All of these writers would have had no motivation to invent Jesus. There was no reason that one of them would fabricate this story, much less all three of them. These three sources, plus the many more that we could consider, prove that Jesus Christ walked this earth.
Scholar F.F. Bruce puts it this way:
Some writers may toy with the fancy of a Christ-myth, but they do not do so on the grounds of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the Christ-myth theories.5
We can be certain that Jesus lived. But so what? Why does it matter that there was a Jewish man from Nazareth two thousand years ago? What does that change?
It changes everything. Without Jesus, there is no hope, love, or salvation possible in the world. Without Jesus, there wouldn’t even be a world at all. The Bible tells us in John 1:3 that without Jesus, nothing that was made would have been made. A world without Jesus is no world at all, much less a world I want to live in.
Because Jesus is real, everything changes, and that should include us. Paul—a man who had previously doubted the reliability of Jesus—said:
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
Galatians 2:20
The historicity of Jesus didn’t end with Jesus’ death. No, without His historical resurrection, we would still be in our sins. Ready to study the historical evidence for the miracle of the resurrection? Begin with this study.
- Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. (HarperOne, 2012), 12. ↩︎
- Tacitus, Annals 15.44. ↩︎
- Josephus, Antiquities 20.200. ↩︎
- Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus 11. ↩︎
- F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 65. ↩︎