Why I Trust My Bible - Lesson 2

Dr. Bill Mounce 
Why I Trust My Bible 
nt119-02 
Did Jesus Live? 
Lesson Transcript

1. Challenge

Well, the first topic we’re going to look at is the most fundamental question of ‘did Jesus ever actually live?’ I mean, if Jesus never lived, then obviously the Bible is not trustworthy. Now you may be scratching your heads and go like, ‘who would question that?’ Well, they’re actually, there are people who are out there saying that Jesus is a totally mythical character and he that never actually lived, and everything we read in the Bible is made up by the church. And what is sometimes said, ‘How can you believe that Jesus is a real historical character when there is only one reference to him outside of the Bible and outside of Christian literature?’ That’s how it’s often stated, and they’re talking about a statement that’s in Josephus that we’ll look at in a second. Well, the fact of the matter is that we have about twelve references to Jesus from outside of the Bible. And it gives us pretty good attestation and actually some basic awareness of who Jesus was.

2. Two Clear statements

a. Josephus

So, let’s look at those. And the first comes from Josephus, a Jewish historian of the 1st century. And here’s what he says, and you’ll notice the italics, and we’ll come back and talk about the italics in a second (this is from his book Antiquities): ‘Now, there was about at 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 received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to himself both many of the Jews and many of the gentiles. He was the Christ; when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principle 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 on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these things and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. 

Now the reason that some of those phrases are in italics, is because it can be argued, and they are probably correct in doing so, that those phrases were added later by people in the church. In other words, Josephus never wrote them. And the problem is, if you look just at the italics, and you say, ‘well obviously we can’t trust this.’ some people want to throw all of it out. So even if you just remove the suspect parts, the italicized parts you have a very clear attestation by someone who was no friend of the Christians, He was a Jew, who tells us some information about Jesus. And in fact, on the website there is a link to a discussion with a classical scholar as to the value of Josephus’ witness to Jesus. So, if you want to look at it more, it’s there.

b. Josephus on James

But Josephus has another comment about Jesus, specifically, Jesus’ brother, James. In there Josephus writes, ‘Festus was now dead and Albinus (who was a high priest – Mounce comment), was but upon the road; so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James (in other words, the brother of Jesus is somebody called James – Mounce comment),and some others, and when he had formed an accusation against him as breakers of the law, he, meaning Albinus, delivered them (specifically James – Mounce comment) to be stoned. So, there you have references to Jesus by way of James. So, second reference in Josephus. So, that’s two pretty strong attestations that there was an historical person named Jesus.

3. Other Sources

When you turn to other kinds of literature, specifically the Jewish literature, you’ll find that there are references to Jesus in the Talmud, which is a bit surprising because you would think that the Jewish writings would just want to ignore Jesus because of the conflict between Jews and Christians. But there are references in the Talmud, and you can get them from the website. But I wanted to look specifically today at the whole issue of Greek and Roman writers. So let me just give you some of the highlights of these writers. Tacitus was the most reliable Roman historian. He wrote early 2nd century. He’s the guy that says that Nero blamed the fire in Rome on the Christians. And Tacitus writes that ‘Christians have their name from “Christ” who had been executed by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius.’ So, Tacitus, a very well-respected historian, gives us that reference.

Suetonius is another Roman historian of the early 2nd century. He is the one who mentions the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in the time of Claudius, a really important thing for dating Acts and different things that puts it sometime between 41AD and a little later. Anyway, Suetonius says that this expulsion was due to the rioting ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’; probably either a variant or the misspelling of the Roman spelling of the Latin spelling of Christus; But anyway, certainly is Jesus. And so, you have Suetonius making a reference to him. 

Thallus was the 1st century Greek historian and we get to his writings through a 3rd century author. But he mentions the darkness that occurred at Jesus’ death, which is really interesting. 

Lucian is a 2nd century writer of satires, and he was no friend of Christians. He did not like Christians. He made fun of Christians for worshipping a man as if he were God, and then he goes on to say that Jesus was “a distinguished person who instituted their novel rights and who was therefore crucified.” And then later on he calls Jesus a sage. 

And just one more: Pliny the Younger is a 2nd century Roman politician. He wrote to the Emperor Trajan about how to deal with Christians who didn’t revere Caesar’s image. He wasn’t sure what to do with these folks. And it’s interesting that Pliny didn’t get his information by hearsay. He actually got his information from an apostate Christian, so it’s a very direct connection with Christianity even though the Christian was an apostate. Anyway, Pliny says that Christians meet together regularly and they sing hymns “to Christ as if to a god.”

4. Summary

Ok, so those are some pretty secure, trustworthy, historical references showing that there was an historical person named Jesus in about the time frame that we believe that Jesus lived from the Bible. Now, if you take all those references, and some of the other ones, and put them in a list, I want to show you what we can know historically about Jesus (and Craig Blomberg, in his discussion, goes into some detail on this), but let me show you what we can know historically about Jesus, ok?: So . . .

• We know that he lived;

• That’s he’s Jewish;

• That he lived in the first third of the first century;

• That some people believed he was born out of wedlock, which is interesting; the repercussions of the virgin birth continued to stay with Jesus;

• His ministry intersected with that of John, who was baptizing people for the repentance of sins;

• He had a brother named James who was martyred in 62 AD by the High Priest Albinus;

• That Josephus says that Jesus worked “wondrous feats”, Josephus’ words for what we know to be miracles;

• We’re told by the secular sources said Jesus gathered disciples, and, in fact, five of the disciples are given by name;

• That he was in conflict with the Jewish authorities;

• He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, which puts Jesus’ death somewhere between 26 – 36 AD;

• There is one Talmudic tradition from the Talmud that says that Jesus was ‘hung’, but we know from some other early Christian writings that they would use, sometimes, the verb ‘hung’ to refer to suspension on a pole, which is what you would do with a Cross;

• We read that Jesus was a sorcerer who led Jesus astray;

• He was believed to be the Messiah by some, and he is believed to have been seen raised from the dead by his followers who now worship him as God.

5. Why Aren’t There More References

So, if you look at reliable, historical, non-Christian sources, that’s what we’re told about Jesus, which is actually quite a lot of information. Now, you may be asking the question well, why aren’t there more references to him historically. Well, no one in the ancient world wrote biographies about common people. And Jesus would have been viewed historically as a very common person. They wrote about rich people, and influential people, and warriors, and soldiers, and politicians, and what not. I mean, that’s what they were writing biographies about. You know, in today’s Facebook world, some people seem to have this fetish that they want to know every little thing about everybody, and that’s just a modern oddity. That’s not the way biographies were done originally. They were written about the rich, and the famous, and the powerful people, and Jesus was none of that, at least not historically. And so, it’s not a surprise that we don’t have more secular references to him.

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, let me just say a couple things. As I said before, it would be really odd if the single most significant influential person in the history of the world wasn’t real. I mean, that would just be odd. And so, these people that question whether Jesus even lived, sometimes you kind of wonder if there’s something else going on that would drive them to that point. And really, to say that the historical references that we have are not enough to prove that Jesus actually lived, that’s such a cynical view of history, that you’re not going to be able to prove much of anything from history. But, given the normal standards we use for determining the authenticity of historical people and historical writings, there’s plenty of historical references to Jesus, not just one, that he actually did exist. So that’s one question that we can simply put to bed very quickly. Jesus did exist. He was a real person. Thank you.