I was listening to one of Matthew Kelly’s CD’s a while ago, and he is commenting on the historical fact that Jesus was a real guy, and we need to remind people of that fact. Some atheists will say that there is NO historical evidence to support the fact that Jesus was real, and they will bring up Josephus (a Jewish historian), and how his writings are forgeries. Also, I thought I read that Pontius Pilate wrote about him.
So…who else wrote about Jesus and recorded him in the history books for all time?
Thanks- I don’t want to rely on Wikipedia for answers to this question!!
Let’s take a look at Julius Caesar, one of Rome’s most prominent figures. Caesar is well know for his military conquests. After his Gallic Wars, he made the famous statement, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Only five sources report his military conquests: writings by Caesar himself, Cicero, Livy, the Salona Decree, and Appian (and Appian was second century, more than 150 years after Julius died). Why didn’t more writers mention his great military conquests? In 150 years his death, more non-Christian authors alone comment on Jesus than all of the sources who mentioned Julius Caesar’s great military conquests within 150 years of his death.
Let’s look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar (Nov. 16, 42 BC – March 16, AD 37), was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus’ ministry and execution, and died less than 4 years after Jesus died in 33 AD. 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 time. 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 9 each. (Tiberius’s number reduces from ten to nine since Luke is a Christian source.)
Craig Bloomberg, who served as the editor for and contributor to a large scholarly work on the Gospels (Gospel Perspectives), provided four reasons why more was not written about Jesus in his time: “the
humble beginnings of Christianity, the
remote location of Palestine on the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire, the small percentage of the works of the ancient Graeco-Roman historians
which have survived, and the
lack of attention paid by those which are extant to Jewish figures in general” (Bloomberg,
Historical Reliability, 197. See Gary R. Habermas,
The Historical Jesus, 64-67).
What we have concerning Jesus is actually quite impressive. We can start with approximately
nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider critical thesis that other authors wrote 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. (Clement of Rome’s letter to the church in Corinth; 2 Clement whose author is unknown; the seven letters of Igantius; Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians; The Martyrdom of Polycarp; Didache; the letter of Barnabas; The Shepherd of Hermas; Fragments of Papias; the letter of Diognetus; the Apocalypse o Peter (not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi text of similar name); the Gospel of Peter; the Epistula Apostolorum; and the works of Justyn Martyr, Aristides, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Quadratus, Aristo of Pella, and Melito of Sardis. The four heretical writings are the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Apocryphon of John, and Treatise on Resurrection-see Habermas, Historical Jesus, 208-15.
Moreover,
nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within 150 years: Joseph, 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; the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion (highly regarded in a British Museum). In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death. (see Habermas, Historical Jesus, ch. 9).
You can even add more on top of that. We know
only about half of what Roman historian wrote in the first century about an ancient Mediterranean history has survived. Suetonius is aware of the writings of Asclepiades of Mendes, yet, his writings are no longer available. Herod the Great’s secretary, Nicholas of Damascus, wrote a Universal History in 144 books, none of which has survived. Livy, the great Roman historian, has suffered a similar fate. (Documented by Paul Maier, Distinguished Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, for the information on Nicholas of Damascus and Livy.)
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