"Who Do You Say That I Am?": The Historical Case for Jesus

Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" They said, "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven."  - Matthew 16:13-17

Who is Jesus? In Jesus’ own day, people had some theories: Maybe he’s John the Baptist come back to life. After all, he had started to become a lot more publicly known just as John had been arrested and then killed. Or maybe Jesus is the prophet Elijah returned from heaven, which would signal the coming Day of the Lord and His judgment upon the nations. Maybe he’s the second coming of Jeremiah or one of the other prophets--John’s Gospel reports that Jesus had demonstrated at the temple early on in his ministry, just like Jeremiah had centuries earlier. As creative as each of those answers were, as much as each explanation had something going for it, all of those explanations were wildly wrong. In our own day people still have their own answers to that question: Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus is really Michael the Archangel; Mormons believe that Jesus is a mere man (and half-brother of Lucifer) who became one of many gods; Deepak Chopra and Richard Rohr claim that Jesus was an Eastern mystic who achieved a higher state of consciousness, known as the “Christ consciousness,” which resulted in him becoming known as “Christ” as a signal of his accomplishment; some people say that he survived the cross and ran to France with Mary Magdalene; or that he was really the Apostle Paul. Scientology claims that Jesus is a viral idea that was forced upon an alien's spirit about a million years ago. I can't fully explain that position to you, because I don't have any experience with this next thing either: in 1970 John Allegro, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and lecturer at Manchester University, wrote an entire book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross arguing that the story of Jesus is really an allegorical code for using hallucinogenic mushrooms. Some internet personalities have even tried to argue that Jesus never existed. Given all of this confusion about Jesus, some purposeful, and some of it by people who are honestly misled, it would be worth our time this morning as Christians who are witnesses of Jesus, to understand more about what the historical case for Jesus really is.

HISTORICAL WITNESSES TO JESUS

The first piece of evidence is that there are a good number of historical witnesses to Jesus outside of the Bible. The Roman historian and high-ranking official, Tacitus, writing in 116 AD, in the middle of his comments on the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, wrote that “Christ, from whom the name [Christian] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.” Tacitus did not know Christians, he did not like them, and he was definitely not a Christian. But he did know about Jesus. And what he knows is that Jesus was a Jewish man from Judea, who was crucified by Pontius Pilate during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, and that a religion or “superstition” developed around him which temporarily halted after he was crucified, only to unexplainably come back and spread all the way to Rome--for reasons that he couldn’t speculate on. 

The Jewish general and historian Josephus wrote a long history of the Jewish people that he completed in 93 AD, and in it he mentions Jesus in two places: in one he focuses on James, who he points out was “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,” and in the other he writes an amazing passage about Jesus, which only survives with additions except in one manuscript, but here is a reconstruction of that passage by scholars: “At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out.” So Josephus confirms that Jesus lived during the time of Pilate; that he was considered a teacher, had a reputation as a miracle worker, and had followers among both Jews and Gentiles; that he was crucified at the suggestion of Jewish authorities. Added to that, Josephus also had his own separate sources about the death of James the brother of Jesus, because that death led to a complaint against the high priest of the day and resulted in a change in power, so it was politically significant. 

There are other references to Jesus by people outside of the Bible who were historically close to him, but between just Tacitus and Josephus we have a pretty good outline of some basics of Jesus’ life: He lived during the reign of Tiberius Caesar (who reigned from 14-37 AD); he was a Jewish man from Judea; he was called the Christ (which is the title of the Jewish Messiah); he had a brother; he had a group of followers; he was a well-known teacher; he was regarded as a miracle worker; he was accused by the Jewish leadership of the day of an offense which caused Pilate to have him crucified; and the movement around him was halted temporarily after his death, before gaining a new energy and spreading all the way from Judea to Rome itself.

BIBLICAL WITNESSES TO JESUS

So our first piece of evidence was historical witnesses outside of the Bible, which I only mentioned two for the sake of space. Our second piece of evidence is the witness of the Bible itself. It’s important to remember that the Bible isn’t just one book, but it’s an entire library of histories, and biographies, letters, and visions, poems, and sayings, by many different authors over a long period of time, over a huge geographical area. 

Now, it’s true that non-Christian historians don’t accept the truth of the whole Bible. But even they still have to accept that there is good historical material in the Bible. Here’s what the Atheist Bible scholar Bart Ehrman says about that: “[T]he Gospels, their sources, and the oral traditions that lie behind them combine to make a convincing case that Jesus really existed. It is not that one can simply accept everything found in the Gospels as historically accurate… At the same time, there is historical information in the Gospels. This historical material needs to be teased out by careful, critical analysis… [the Gospel writers] were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard.” He writes again, “These accounts did not appear out of thin air, however. They are based on written sources—a good number of them—that date much earlier… Even these sources… were based on [earlier] oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. These traditions were transmitted in various areas… throughout the Roman Empire… It appears that… many of them go back to the 30s CE. We are not, then, dealing merely with Gospels that were produced fifty or sixty years after Jesus’s death… We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’s life.”[1] 

In the academic world Historical Jesus scholars come from all sorts of different religions and perspectives, so they take an attitude of suspicion towards the Bible. At the same time they can’t deny that all of these Gospels were written about Jesus within 60 years after his death (30 years for Mark and 60 years for John), while many living witnesses to Jesus' life and death were still around, and that these written Gospels are themselves based on earlier sources. So non-Bible believing scholars have had to come up with a series of tests for what to accept from the Gospels. Different sayings and stories about Jesus have to pass through restrictive criteria before they’re accepted as genuine. Thankfully, even under these restrictive criteria, many of the Gospel’s traditions about Jesus pass the test. 

For example there’s the criterion of multiple attestation: This is when two sources who don’t know each other say the same thing. For example, for reasons that are kind of hard to go into now, it looks like Matthew and Luke didn’t know each others’ Gospels when they were writing. And yet, they have this amazing amount of material in common that they couldn’t have got from each others’ writings and which doesn’t appear in the Gospel of Mark, which both Matthew and Luke quoted from heavily and used as one of their sources. From a lot of these common materials, and others, scholars are able to tell for sure things like that Jesus spoke Aramaic, spoke in parables, taught about the kingdom of God, debated with the Pharisees about the Jewish law, had twelve disciples, and celebrated passover. 

Then there’s the criterion of embarrassment. This test is used by scholars to sift for historical material that would have been embarrassing to the first Christian leaders, and which wouldn’t have been included unless everybody already knew about it. This includes things like Jesus being crucified, which was a shameful method of execution reserved for only the worst criminals, traitors, failed insurrectionists, that kind of thing. This is not a detail that you make up if you want people to accept your message. It would be like spreading the message of a guy who was killed by electric chair, not just by the state [the Roman Empire], but at the request of the local neighborhood watch [the Jewish authorities]. Jesus’ baptism by John is another embarrassing detail, because it was a baptism for repentance from sin. Scholars point out that Matthew’s Gospel goes out of its way to mention that John the Baptist didn’t think Jesus needed to be baptized, and they say that Matthew is trying to save face for Jesus there because he can’t deny that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. Another thing from the life of Jesus that passes the criterion of embarrassment is Jesus causing a disturbance in the Temple, which is recorded in all four Gospels (so it passes the first criteria of multiple attestation) but it also would have been highly scandalous to Jews and the polytheistic Romans for a religious leader to cause a disturbance at a temple or sacred space. Nonreligious Bible scholars say that the Gospel writers couldn’t erase an incident like this which would have been well known, so they had to include it and try to clean it up a bit. 

There are also different criteria which point out that when something seems to reflect Jesus’ Jewish background in an incidental way, it’s more likely to reflect a genuine tradition about Jesus. So for example all of the Gospels were written in Greek, but historical Jesus scholar Craig Keener points out that there are certain words or turns of phrase that “make no more sense in Greek than in English, but… make perfect sense in Hebrew or Aramaic."[2] In addition there are many details in the Gospels where the writers seem very familiar with the geography of Galilee and Judea, or where some of the exchanges reflect Jewish concerns that are genuine for the place and time but are not really spelled out—they’re incidental details that come together to show that what’s being shared is genuine. 

Taken all together, here are 17 facts about Jesus that are so well-supported that the vast majority of even non-Christian scholars accept them: 

(1) He was a Gallilean Jewish man, 

 

(2) he grew up in Nazareth, 

 

(3) his native tongue was Aramaic, 

 

(4) he was baptized in the wilderness by John in the Jordan, 

 

(5) he had a traveling ministry through Galilee 

 

(6) he was followed by a group of disciples, both men and women, 12 of whom he named as his apostles 

 

(7) he taught about the kingdom of God, 

 

(8) he often spoke in parables, 

 

(9) he was reputed to be a wonder worker who cast out demons and healed people, 

 

(10) he showed and preached compassion to people whom Jews commonly regarded as unclean or wicked, 

 

(11) he engaged in debate over matters related to Jewish law, 

 

(12) he went to Jerusalem at Passover the week of his death, 

 

(13) he caused a disturbance in the temple, 

 

(14) he had a final meal with his inner circle of disciples that became the basis for what Christians call the Last Supper, 

 

(15) he was arrested at the behest of the high priest in Jerusalem, 

 

(16) he was crucified under Pontius Pilate in 30 or 33 AD, 

 

(17) he was genuinely believed by his disciples to appear to them shortly after his death, in experiences that convinced them that God had raised him from the dead. 

 

For those of us who read the Bible regularly, you might read that list and think, “Well, that sounds like just about everything.” And you would be right. I think this is part of why God arranged for four biographies of Jesus to make their way into the Bible—because these sources, compared with one another even by skeptical scholars who are suspicious of the Bible, make the majority of the details about the life of Jesus simply undeniable. Even Paul's letters, which are earlier than most or all the Gospels, are an important source in what they say about the historical Jesus, but unfortunately we don’t have space to get into that—though if you're interested, you can read about that by clicking here.

HISTORICAL JESUS SCHOLARSHIP IS MOVING IN A FAITH-AFFIRMING DIRECTION

The third and last piece of historical evidence for Jesus (for right now) is that the discussion is continuing to move in a faith-affirming direction. Historical Jesus studies are moving really fast—30 or 40 years ago scholars generally would have said that there’s not much you can say about Jesus, historically. Now it’s a lot different. A lot of Christians have gotten involved in the discussion and pushed their other scholars on things, and there’s a lot more consensus and a lot more details about Jesus that are being affirmed today than there used to be. 

There are still two rules for academic scholarship: (1) scholarship is not allowed to say that Jesus is God; and (2) scholarship is not allowed to support the existence of miracles. So for example, here’s the Atheist scholar Bart Ehrman again: “What is the historian to make of all these miracles [in the Gospels]? The short answer is that the historian cannot do anything with them… Suffice it to say that if historians want to know what Jesus probably did, the miracles will not make the list since by their very nature and definition, they are the most improbable of all occurrences [so he’s saying, you just have to assume that miracles don’t exist, and you have to build that assumption into your scholarship from the start]… [but] even though historians -when speaking as historians- cannot say that Jesus really did, for example, heal the sick and cast out demons, they can say that he had the reputation of having done so.”[3] So non-Christian historical Jesus studies will never affirm that Jesus is God, or that he rose from the dead because that’s a miracle. However...

Even here scholarship is moving right up to the line. A guy named Michael Licona has been working to build a historically-based case for the resurrection which has already succeeded at causing other scholars to say that Jesus’ disciples, brothers, and a large group of other people alive during the time honestly believed that Jesus had risen and appeared to them all again. That’s not saying that Jesus actually rose from the grave. But it’s as close as scholarship will ever get to affirming the resurrection. And for his part, professor Craig Keener is pushing other scholars to affirm that Jesus thought of himself as a king who would rule all of the nations at the end of history, thought of his death as important to succeeding in that mission, and then purposely provoked the leaders of the day into crucifying him. That’s not affirming that Jesus is divine or that his death covered all of the sins of the world, but it’s getting us into that territory. Finally, a highly respected scholar named Richard Bauckham has written a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which is influentially pointing out that in many places the Gospels carry many of the marks of using eyewitness testimony. By comparing the Gospels to other ancient biographies, Bauckham has even pointed out how the Gospels appear to use ancient writing techniques to point out and name their sources for specific things that they say about Jesus. I don’t really have the space here to describe how or why (check out his book in the link), but his arguments have been persuasive to a lot of other scholars. 

So this is a real encouragement to Christians: although you wouldn’t know it by spending time on social media or watching TV, scholarship is continuing to get closer to affirming many of the things that we as Christians believe about Jesus, not farther. And what’s currently coming down the pipeline, what’s currently being debated, is moving in an even more faith-affirming direction.

- Sean

--------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, p. 171

[2] Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 217-218.

[3] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, pp. 315-316