Historical Jesus: One of the earliest drawings of Jesus – here he is healing a man who was paralyzed. Now he gets up and carries his own bed. (Dura Europos, Syria, ca. 232 AD)
Historical sources
Nobody knows whether anybody wrote anything about Jesus during his lifetime. If they did, we don’t have it anymore.
Who was Jesus?
The Apostles and Christianity
Religion in the Roman Empire
All our Ancient Rome articles
That doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t really exist. He probably did. But everything we know about him had to pass through several people before it reached us. It’s hearsay, not eyewitness accounts.
Josephus’s History of the Jews
Historical Jesus: This is the earliest known image of the three kings bringing gifts to the baby Jesus, from the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, in the 200s AD
Jesus probably was crucified about 30 AD. Josephus‘ History of the Jews is the oldest piece of writing that isn’t the Bible and mentions Jesus. Josephus was born about 38 AD. So that’s probably after the Crucifixion.
Josephus published his History in 93 AD. By that time everybody who could have personally known Jesus was dead. (It’s also not clear whether he really wrote the bits about Jesus. Other people may have stuck some or all of those sentences into Josephus hundreds of years later.)
Pliny the Younger and Tacitus on Christians
Pliny the Younger definitely wrote about Christians. The provincial governor Pliny mentions Jesus in a letter to the emperor Trajan written about 112 AD. We have that letter and Trajan’s answer to it. But that’s also after the death of anyone who could have personally known Jesus.
Pliny and the Christians
Who was Pliny the Younger?
More about Trajan
Historical Jesus: An early crucifixion: Jesus is on the cross, but Judas has hanged himself in shame. About 420 AD (The Maskell Ivories, British Museum)
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Jesus in his Annals, about 116 AD. Tacitus mentions that the Emperor Nero persecuted Christians in Rome in 64 AD.
Who was Tacitus?
Nero and the Christians
But that’s not the same as a source about Jesus himself. And it’s a reference to something that happened a generation after the Crucifixion.
Suetonius mentions “Chrestus”
Another Roman historian, Suetonius, writing about 120 AD, mentions Jews who followed “Chrestus” in Rome about 50 AD. But again, the events are twenty years after the Crucifixion. And Suetonius is writing almost a hundred years after the Crucifixion. The earliest pictures of Jesus that we still have today are even later, from the early 200s AD.
More about Suetonius
Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas
We do have independent knowledge of some other people mentioned in the Bible. We know from inscriptions and gravestones that Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas were real people. And there are written sources that tell us about King Herod.
Did you find out what you wanted to know about the historical Jesus? Let us know in the comments!
Bibliography and further reading about the historical Jesus:
Please disagree with each other all you like. Christianity is not a religion, its a relationship.
Seems like a religion to me.
It doesn’t matter when and where and if, it’s what has been invented afterwards that’s has been driven with no real proof. If he really existed, I’m sure he was an honorable man beyond his years in wisdom as many others that came before and after him. We just need to accept that and move away from the ridiculous supreme being theories.
Well, how about if we make our own decisions and let other people be free to believe what they like? Faith is not dependent on facts, so people can know the facts and still choose to have faith anyway.
If John was a teenager as is widely believed, when Jesus was still alive, and if he lived 90 years, as is also widely held, he could have been alive in the late 90’s.
The idea that John lived to be 90 may be “widely held” but there is no evidence to support it at all, or even (outside the Bible) to support the existence of John as a real person. And even if he did exist and lived that long, there’s no evidence that Josephus ever spoke to him, or anyone he knew. And even that is assuming that the parts of Josephus which refer to Jesus were actually written by Josephus and not stuck in later by Christian copyists, which is really more likely.