Today is Christmas Eve. Tomorrow is the official Christmas day, which is the date to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Is that enough to convince everyone that Jesus is a real person who appeared in actual history?
Not really. There are people who claim that Jesus is just a myth.
Is it true that Jesus is just a myth? There are a lot of materials we can study for this question. The following describes two pieces of non-Christian historical documents that provide evidence to the historicity of Jesus. In fact, they tell us more than just Jesus’ actual existence in history. They also confirm part of what we learn from the Bible about Jesus as we described in our previous post.
Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian who lived between AD 56 and 120. His publication Annals is considered to be the best source of information about the period from the Roman emperors Augustus to Nero. Nero was accused of causing a devastating fire in AD 64 during his reign. He in turn blamed the Christians. Tacitus wrote what happened:
"Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero created scapegoats and subjected to the most refined tortures those whom the common people called 'Christians,' hated for their abominable crimes. Their name comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the land which originated this evil, but also in the city of Rome, where all sorts of horrendous and shameful practices from every part of the world converge and are fervently cultivated."
Friends, do you notice that Tacitus described Christians as part of “horrendous and shameful practices”? Tacitus clearly was no friend of Christians. However, Tacitus confirms that Jesus was crucified when Tiberius was emperor and Pilate was the appointed leader in Judea as the Bible described. “Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again” vaguely points to the resurrection of Jesus as the “superstition”, and the continued growth of Christianity shortly after Jesus’ execution.
Another piece of historical document is from Flavius Josephus. He was a Jewish politician and historian lived around AD 37 to 100. He wrote Antiquities of the Jews to explain the Jewish belief to the Romans. In one of the passages in Antiquities, Josephus wrote about the death of Jesus’ brother James at the instigation of the Jewish high priest Ananus:
"...a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity [to exercise his authority]. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others…he delivered them to be stoned."
Josephus offers a clear non-Christian attestation of the historicity of Jesus and that James was Jesus’ brother as the Bible describes.
While some people may doubt whether Jesus is a real person or not, there is little disagreement that he actually lived in history among scholars of the Bible.
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