Dr. Bart Ehrman, author of several books such as “Did Jesus Exist?” and “How Jesus Became God”, says the following about the evidence for Jesus in the first century:
“In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!”
What do you think? Is his statement mistaken? Is there, in fact, such evidence?
I just reread Ehrman’s book on the subject, and you are quoting him out of context. He sometimes writes (as he will himself admit) in a manner that leaves himself open to ambiguity, but “a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet” meant, I think, only Greeks and Romans, not early Christian (which we do have), not Jewish (which we do have).
Ehrman is an agnostic, tending to atheism (as he describes himself), but he is an honest and scholarly one who wrote an entire book discrediting the Jesus Mythicist theory, which earned him the enmity of all the Richard Carrier fanboys, who waste endless bandwidth writing about how “their” Richard Carrier is right and Ehrman is wrong.
I disagree with him about Jesus’s divinity, of course, but give him credit for intellectual honesty and scholarship.
As he rightly points out, we have almost no surviving Roman documents from 1st century Palestine (some from Egypt, which aren’t relevant), so the argument that “Romans were good recordkeepers, so there should be records” is incorrect.
(We also have no independent contemporaneous historical attestation for Josephus himself, or for any number of other individuals that the Romans should have left records for, but didn’t, such as Spartacus. We have a much shorter period for the first historical attestation of Jesus than we do for Spartacus, a rebel who led thousands of rebellious slaves, defeated entire Roman Legions and captured or killed their generals, and almost conquered the capital of Rome itself. And this happened in Rome, not in the backwater province of Palestine. The number of contemporaneous Roman references? None.
For that matter, we would presume that Jesus was not the only person the Romans crucified in Palestine, but we have NO warrants, execution orders, or descriptions of crucifixions from there. When an actual crucified skeleton was found, it was reported worldwide (the frugal Romans removed the nails that were driven into the body after death, but these were so wedged into the ankle bones that they left them in.)
There is still very good evidence for the historicity of Jesus, which Ehrman describes at length in his book (“Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth”):
Roman References (Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Tacitus).
Jewish References (Josephus, whose two references to Jesus are hard to discount once the likely interpolations are removed, and later Rabbinic sources.
The canonical Gospels (and why they cannot be discounted as sources), as well as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, Papyrus Egerton 2, all arguably written within a hundred years of Jesus’s death. Although Catholics do not accept them as canonical, arguments have been made by scholars like April DeConick that the core of the Gospel of Thomas can be traced back to a non-surviving Gospel in circulation prior to 50 A.D.
Written sources for the surviving Gospels, such as the “Q” source, as well as the “M” and “I” source. These are documents that are believed to have existed to provide common sources for the Gospels.
Early Oral Traditions about Jesus, which must have existed at an earlier date before the Gospels and Epistles
Even earlier Aramaic oral traditions, which can be presumed based upon sections in the Gospel that only make sense if the original Aramaic words are used, as well as the oral traditions where surviving Aramaic words themselves are used (such as Mark 35:14).
Later sources from outside the New Testament (some of which are hostile, but none of which suggest that he is mythical)
The Christian oral sources that provided information to Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and Tacitus.
The Early Church Fathers: Papias, who collected oral traditions from the apostles or those who knew them; if not eyewitness testimony, it is pretty close; Ignatius of Antioch,whose lineage can be traced directly to the apostles, but cannot be shown to be relying on the Gospels; nor can Clement in the 90s A.D.), who quotes some of Jesus’s sayings but whose wording does not correspond to any of the surviving Gospels and who does not say they come from any written texts.
The Book of Acts, which preserves traditions about Jesus that Luke did not include in his Gospel and which most critical historians believe was based on traditions in circulation before the production of the Gospel of Luke,
The Non-Pauline Epistles
The Pauline Epistles
In addition to what Ehrman describes, there is also corroborating archaeological evidence that supports the Gospel accounts, and historical evidence for the other individuals named in the accounts (Pilate, Herod, etc.)
