"Zeitgeist" Online Movie: Part One
Refuted©
Posted: August 23, 2007
Did Jesus Even Exist?
The narrator states “there are very high odds that Jesus never existed.” He also says that “none of the many historians documented the existence of Jesus.” He says that Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius mentioned the word “Christ,” but that none of them mentioned anything else about Jesus. However, this is false. Multiple writers from the ancient world mentioned Christ, and the Roman historian, Tacitus, certainly included more details than merely the word “Christ.”
Tacitus: The first-century Roman Tacitus is considered one of the more accurate historians of the ancient world.
Tacitus writes:
"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures of a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, 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." [ Annals 15.44]
For a defense of the reliability of this extra-biblical evidence for Jesus’ existence, see J.P. Holding’s web article, “Nero’s Scapegoats: Cornelius Tacitus.”
I recommend that the reader consult “Silence of the Hams,” by J.P. Holding for an in-depth analysis of each of the other ancient writers who “should have” mentioned Jesus.
If one insists that these writers (Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius)’s testimonies are invalid simply because they were not eyewitnesses, then one should throw out most of ancient history.
Historian and Christian apologist, Michael Licona explains:
“If you have to be an eyewitness in order to give an accurate account of history, then no one could write a text today providing a history of the American Civil War and, indeed, much of what we know historically would have to be discarded.”
Why didn’t more people write about Jesus?
People in the first century C.E. did not possess the means to record and preserve information as easily as people in the 21st century. Further, historians know that a considerable amount of what was recorded has been lost. The New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg provides four reasons for why more historians did not write about Jesus:
“the humble beginnings of Christianity, the remote location in Palestine on the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire, the small percentage of the works of ancient Greco-Roman historians which have survived, and the lack of attention paid by those which are extant to Jewish figures in general.” 1
For example, historians are aware that over half of what the Roman historian Tacitus compiled is no longer available. 2 Merely a fragment of what Thallus authored in the first century C.E. concerning ancient Mediterranean history has survived. 3 Suetonius references the writings of Asclepiades of Mendes, but none of these writings are available. 4 Herod the Great’s secretary, Nicholas of Damascus, wrote a Universal History in 144 books 5 , but none of these books have been preserved.
Dr. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona write:
“What we have concerning Jesus actually is impressive. We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we’d have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross. Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion. In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death.” 6
“…Let’s look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus’ ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke. Compare that to Jesus’ forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That’s more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each 7 .” 8
The documentation for a historical Jesus is actually much more compelling than the documentation for some other ancient figures. Some examples include: Confucius, Buddha, and Honi the Circle Drawer. Dr. Ben Witherington III writes the following regarding Honi the Circle Drawer:
“Even Josephus was writing over one hundred years after Honi’s day, and the Mishna is dated over one hundred years later than Josephus. This should be contrasted to the mere forty or so years between Jesus’ life and the composition of the earliest Gospel, Mark” (TJQ:111).
Finally, as historian Michael Grant writes:
“But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.” 9
Endnotes:
1. Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1987), 197.
2. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 127.
3. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 127.
4. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 127.
5. Paul Maier, Distinguished Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, consulted by Dr. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.
6. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 127.
7. Tiberius’s number reduces from ten to nine since Luke is a Christian source.
8. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 128.
9. Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 199-200.
Continue to: Did Josephus Mention Jesus?
