jesus in extra biblical sources

8/13/2019 Jesus in Extra Biblical Sources

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/jesus-in-extra-biblical-sources 1/5

chapter 2JESUS IN

EXTR BIBLIC l

SOURCES

Is it possible that Jesus never existed? A

half-century ago doubts about the historical existence of Jesus

were earnestly voiced by certain historians and theologians, most

notably by Arthur Drews (1865-1935)2 in Germany and by hisdisciple, William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934),3 in America.

These men claimed that Jesus was a mythical figure invented by

propagandists for the developing Christian faith, who built on

the strand in the Jewish tradition (especially after the time of the

Maccabees) that sought to bring the Gentiles as proselytes into

the community of Israel. According to Smith, the effort to achieve

universal salvation was the essence of nascent Christianity, but

the Old Testament prophecies and conceptions were not sufficiently concrete to appeal as widely as was necessary to accomplish

Gentile conversion:

There was one and only one device that could meet the demand

of the situation and at the same time lay close at hand: and that

1 See the discussion in Maurice Goguel, Jesus de Nazareth: mythe au

histoire? [Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or history?] (Paris: Payot, 1925).• Die Christusmythe [The Christ myth], 2 vols. Jena: Diederichs, 1909

11).

a The Birth at the Gospel: A Study at the Origin and Purport at the

Primitive Allegory at the Jews New York: 1927; New York: reprinted, Philo·

sophical Library, 1957).

29

"Jesus in History: An Approach to the Study of

the Gospels" by Howard Clark Kee



was to follow the precedent of Isaiah, so native and familiar to

the Hebrew mind, so appealing to the oriental fancy, and to pre

sent the Righteous Servant, the Torch-Bearer, the Light for the

Gentiles, as a Man, a suffering son of the earth, tempted in all

points in our likeness without sin."

The process of creating the gospels began with the story of the

passion, to which were added the accounts of the ministry and

later of the prehistory of Jesus. Smith reported,

The final product, the symbolic quasi-biography which the world

knows as the Gospels, we have found was the literary precipitate

of a long-continued pictorial teaching that stretched all round the

Mediterranean. These writings becotpe self-luminous when and

only when we abandon the baseless assumption of historical

documents. . . . The story of Jesus is, therefore, an idealization

of the destiny of the nation Israel in its universal inclusiveness.a

Smith's contemporaries did not dismiss his work as nonsense,

nor should we today. He had far too many accurate insights and

far too firm a grasp of historical facts about Christian origins to

be labeled a crank. His intuition that some of the gospel narra·

tives were created or at least modified in order to demonstrate the

fulfillment of the Old Testament was propounded by David

Friedrich Strauss in the nineteenth century in Das Leben Jesu

[The life of Jesus], a book that has continued to cast its sober

influence over gospel studies down to the present day. Smith's

awareness of the Hebrew practice of depicting a group under the

figure of an individual, a corporate personality, is an

that, developed by others, has been of fundamental importance

for Old Testament studies in recent decades.6

• Ibid., p. 651.Ibid., pp. 141-42 (Smith's italics).

• The classic study of corporate personality isCorporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Press, 1964);see also his Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 69-74. See also the discussions in Johannes

Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture 4 vols. (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1926, 1940; Vols. 1 and 2 reprinted, 1964; Vols. 3 and 4 reprinted

with additions, 1959).

30 . Jesus in Extrabiblical Sources

The two major flaws in Smith's thesis result from (1) his

assumption that, since some materials included in the gospels

were shaped by the claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of Old

Testament prophecy, all the gospels must be so regarded;7 and

(2) his neglect of the evidence pointing to Jesus' historicity in

the form of allusions to him in Jewish and pagan sources.s

EVIDENCE IN NON-CHRISTIAN HISTORICAL

WRITING

Historians, including Christian historians, would surely

welcome direct mention of Jesus in some Roman legal documents

of his day. Lacking authentic reports, early Christian imagination

produced the Acts of Pilate, an apocryphal narrative that built

on the brief mention of that Roman procurator in the gospels in

an attempt to depict his reaction to Jesus and to reproduce the

content of his official report on the execution. But most of the

references to Jesus in the Greek and Latin writings of the first

and the early second centuries are no more than brief allusions

to the movement that began in his name-so brief that we can

repro.duce most of them in their entirety (except for the letters of

Pliny) in this chapter.

The Jewish Historian Josephus

In his Antiquities of the Jews (written in Greek) the Jewish

historian Josephus (A.D. 37-100?), who turned collaborationist atthe time of the Roman invasion of Palestine in A.D. 67-70, refers

to Jesus twice: once in a list of notorious Jewish nationalists and

other troublemakers and again in connection with the execution

of James, a leader of the Jerusalem church, who is identified as

7 On the effects of Old Testament prophecy on the gospel narrative,

see Chapter 5.

8 For other assessments of some of these sources, see Maurice Goguel,

Life of Jeslts trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 70-104;

and Joseph Klausner, Jeslts of Nazareth trans. Herbert Danby (New York:

Macmillan, 1926), pp. 17-62.

Evidence in Non-Christian Historical Writing 31



r

the brother of Jesus. The first of these passages has almost cer

tainly been worked over by Christians, who tried to make

Josephus bear Christian witness to Jesus:

About this time [that is, during the procuratorship of Pilate, A.D.

26--86, although Josephus here refers to the early phase of his

rule] there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call

him a man. For he was one who wrought surpr ising feats and was

a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over

many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When

Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing

among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had

in the first place come to love him did not give up their affectionfor him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life,

for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other

marvellous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so

called after hi m • has still to this day not disappeared.9

t is incredible that Josephus could have written this ac

count of Jesus exactly as it stands, since he would have had to

be a Ghristian believer to have affirmed unequivocally that Jesus

was the Messiah. The recognition of Jesus as the Messiah is

doubtless a Christian interpolation. However, in his translation

of the Antiquities L. H. Feldman suggests that the rest of the

account that has come down to us may not be essentially differ ent

from what Josephus wrote. In its present form the passage is

ambiguous and lends itself to Christian interpretation. This

ambiguity may have originated with Josephus, and if so, the

Christians may have found it necessary to change only a halfdozen phrases in order to make the account serve their propa

ganda aims. The Christian reader of Josephus, for example,

interprets if indeed one ought to call him a man as a suggestion

of Jesus' divinity. But if the emphasis falls on the "surprising

feats" mentioned in the next sentence, then the inappropriateness

of calling Jesus merely a man may have meant, not that Jesus

was divine, but that he was a magician under demonic control.

• Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 18. 63, Loeb edition, Vol. 9 trans.

L H. Feldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).

Jesus in Extrabiblical Sources2

As we shall see, this was precisely the charge most commonly

leveled against Jesus in the rabbinic sources. f we assume that

in making explicit statements about Jesus as Messiah and about

the resurrection Josephus is merely conveying what Jesus' fol

lowers claimed in his behalf, then there would be no reason to

deny that he wrote them nearly as they stand.10 It seems very

unlikely that the passage in its entirety is a Christian interpola

tion; thus it can serve..as evidence outside Christian writing for

the existence of Jesus.

Even if we assume that the passage has come down to us

almost as Josephus wrote it, however, it still provides us only

limited information about Jesus. t presupposes that he lived

and attests that he conducted a ministry that attracted considerable attention, even among those who thought him to be a

wizard, that the Romans condemned him-presumably as a

threat to the peace and therefore probably as an insurrectionist

and that the belief in his resurrection developed soon after his

death. The information from Josephus confirms the main points

in the gospel account, but i t in no way supplements it, since even

in the gospels Jesus' opponents accuse him of performing his

exorcisms by being in league with the prince of demons (Mark

3:22). It is also obvious that, although Josephus thought mention

of Jesus worthwhile, he gave i t no more place in his narrative

than his accounts of other conRicts between the Jews and their

Roman overlords, and far less space than his spicy story of the

goings-on in the temple of Isis in Rome.H

The second of Josephus' references to Jesus12 occurs in a

section dealing with the struggles for power that characterized

life in Judea in the years prior to the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66.Jesus' brother, James, had succeeded to the leadership of the

(:hurch in Jerusalem and was apparently highly regarded by the

majority of the Jewish community as well. No information what

,. See the discussion of the authenticity of this passage in Vol. 9 ofL H. Feldman's translation of Josephus' Antiquities pp. 48--51 and notes

on pp. 48 and 49. Feldman reproduces and evaluates an attempt by Robert

Eisler to restore the passage to its original form.11 Ibid. 18. 65-80

12Ibid. 20. 200.

Evidence in Non-Christian Historical Writing 33

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/stand.10





soever about Jesus is provided by this passage in Josephus, but

it does confirm the general picture presented in the gospels that

Jesus was a well-known figure in first-century Judaism, who

could be identified in a passing reference as the Jesus who was

called the Messiah by his followers. There is no hint here of a

Christian interpolation, which adds more weight to this as an

important historical allusion and renders untenable the allegation

that Jesus was a fictional figure invented by the Christians. Since

mention of Jesus at this point in his narrative serves only to

identify James and contributes nothing substantial to his account,

Josephus certainly leaves his readers with the impression that

Jesus is a historical person like any other of whom he writes.

The Roman Historians: Pliny Suetonius and Tacitus

Among Roman writers, the oldest reference to Jesus that has

survived is found in one of the letters that Pliny the Younger

(A.D. 62-113) wrote to Emperor Trajan. Around A.D. 110, writing

from the seat of his governorship in Bithynia, a Roman province

on the Black Sea coast in Asia Minor, Pliny asked for guidance in

dealing with Christians, whose numbers and influence seem to

have been on the rise in the area at this time. So greatly had the

impact of the Christian faith been felt throughout the Black

Sea provinces that the temples of the officially sanctioned gods

were nearly deserted.1s Christ was worshipped as a god and both

the Eucharist and the love feast, the joyous fellowship meal that

preceded it, were being celebrated by adherents of the new faith.

Pliny's evidence shows us, therefore, that Christianity had astrong foothold on the Black Sea coast about eighty years after

the crucifixion, although his description of Christian practices

adds nothing to our knowledge of the life of Jesus.

The Roman historian Suetonius, a contemporary of Pliny,

mentions in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars that under the reign

of Claudius (A.D. 41-54), there was a disturbance among the Jews

13 Pliny Letters 10. 94. The full text in English, with ample commentary,

is in A. N. Sherwin-White, Fifty Letters of Pliny (New York: Oxford Uni

versity Press, 1967).


that reached such a peak of intensity that they had to be expelled

from the city. The instigator of this internal struggle was some

one named Chrestos. Suetonius reports, Since the Jews con

stantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestos, he

[Claudius] expelled them from Rome. 14

It is generally acknowledged that Chrestos, a common

name, was used by Suetonius instead of Christos, which would

not have been at all' familiar to most Latin-speaking people.

Perhaps the cause of the disturbance among the Jewish commu

nity in Rome was the coming, not of Christos, but of Christian

preachers with their message that Jesus was the Christ(os). Al

though it is possible that Suetonius had his date confused and

that the disturbance actually occurred during the reign of Tiber

ius (A.D. 14-37), it is more likely that the expulsion of the Jews

from Rome was the occasion for the migration from Rome to

Corinth of Priscilla and Aquila, the Christian couple who aided

Paul in founding and building up the Corinthian church (Acts

18:2-26; Rom. 16:3; I Cor. 16:19). As in the case of the evidence

from Pliny, all that we learn from Suetonius is that there was

a Christian community in Rome as early as A.D. 49-50.15

In his Annals Tacitus (A.D. 55?-1l7?), a third Roman writ

ing early in the second century, describes in vivid detail the fire

that destroyed much of Rome during the reign of Nero (A.D. 54

68). In order to divert suspicion from himself as the one who had

ordered the city set afire, Nero placed the blame on the Chris

tians, of whom a multitude were convicted.

Neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modesof placating heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that

the fire had taken place by order, i.e. of Nero. Therefore, to

scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with

H Suetonius Lives of the Twelve Caesars 25. 4 trans. Joseph Gavorse

(New York: Modern Library, 1931; reprinted, 1959), p. 226. Chrestos would

be the Greek form, Chrestus the Latinized form.W A discussion of the date of Claudius' decree concerning the Jewish

disturbance is given in F. J Foakes-Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Begin-nings of Christianity Vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 4 5 9 ~ 6 0 For

a different interpretation of the evidence, see John Knox, Chapters in a ife

of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950), pp. 81-83.

E'vidence in Non-Christian Historical Writing 35

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/deserted.1s



http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/49-50.15






the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their

vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder

of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of

Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the

pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to breakout once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but

in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the

world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members

of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers

were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for the

hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end:

they were covered with wild beasts' skins and torn to death by

dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and when daylight failed

were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his gar

dens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus,

mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on

his car.16

Allowing for exaggeration, we can still infer that the Christian

community was at least large enough in Rome to attract public

notice and aggressive enough to invite the hatred of the masses.In identifying the Christians among the many religious sects

he scorned, Tacitus mentions that "Christus" was executed

during the reign of Tiberius, probably about 29, having been

sentenced by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Tacitus' account is

the most precise and extensive information that the pagan

authors provide about Jesus. Although his details match exactly

what is known from Christian accounts, Tacitus, like Pliny and

Suetonius, provides us with nothing that supplements what weknow of Jesus from the gospels. The writings of the Roman his

torians are, however, important evidence for Jesus' existence as

a historical person: They show that non-Christian historical writ

ers, and by inference their audiences, believed Jesus to have ex

isted, and that they considered his death and his continuing

inHuence after death to be significant enough to rate a few brief

references.

16 Tacitus nnals 15. 44, Loeb edition, trans. J Jackson (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931).


jesus in extra biblical sources

Documents