Transcript
Welcome to the Kathleen Noller Podcast brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Dr. Noller, former atheist turned Christian and biomedical scientist. Join me as we interrogate Christianity together and see if it can stand up to some of our toughest objections.
So, this is a new sub series to Questioning Belief, where we have shorter solo episodes. So, most of the time I have an episode for about one to two hours with a guest expert where I interview them on their latest book or on a particular apologetics topic. However, now I'm going to start making some very short, solo episodes where I dive into my own research on a particular apologetics question. And this apologetics question will be taken from the real world. It'll be something that people have asked me multiple times or something that I've seen pop up on the internet very, very frequently. And so, I'm going to dive into the primary sources for you all and really do a lot of hard, difficult digging to try to find the answer to this question. Not only just a superficial answer, but hopefully an answer that's supported by scholarship. So, I hope you enjoy this new format. We'll air these occasionally. And so, we have one on if the resurrection myth is just a copy of other resurrection myths found much earlier in history, for example, the resurrection of Krishna or the Osiris myth.
So that was our first episode. And then in this episode, we're going to tackle a question which I've been asked a lot, but I feel like it is very well settled within the scholarly community, but I feel like it just deserves to be addressed in detail. So this question is, can you prove that Jesus was real without citing the Bible? So, if you would like a transcript of this episode, also, I'll just note that you can go to my sub stack, the Reformed Gadfly, and you can find this transcript or this article about Roman history verifying the existence of Jesus the person. So how I ended up getting on this track of this question, I’ve been asked this question multiple times, and the latest time I was asked it was maybe about a year ago by a friend of mine who's a devout atheist, and she essentially asked me if Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. And if I could prove that, and if the early Christians actually, were, uh, real genuine followers of his, they weren't just folks that sort of knew that they were telling a lie about Jesus's resurrection and about Christianity and wanted to perpetuate this religion for the sake of power, influence, or delusion or whatever might have you. Right. So today we're going to go into a deep dive to answer the question of was Jesus a real person who existed as a historical figure? So, we're going to go into a deep dive into Tacitus, Flavius Iosephus, and Pliny the Younger so, these are three non-Christian historians that were found in ancient Rome. And we're going to discuss their work and how it supports or answers this question. So, I just note that before I started doing research on this question, I wanted to find the parameters of my literature search. So, I'm a scientist, right? So, I must search through literature all the time on PubMed or these databases of published papers. But I also have access to databases of primary sources through my university that can help me through vanities research as well as scientific research. So I use these databases to try to answer some of these apologetics questions. But before I went about my research, I wanted to really define the parameters of my literature search. So, I set a few hard and soft requirements for sources that would help to quote unquote, prove the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the person. So, the hard requirements that I had were first worldview.
So, my friend, she’s an atheist and she wasn't really going to trust a source attesting to Christianity's authenticity from a devout Christian. I'm not going to say that that's a correct way to go about it because we of course trust work from atheist scholars on matters of anything non-Christian, right? And there are many Christian historians, Christian scholars who take their job very seriously, who are very academic and professional and would not forge something for the sake of their theological beliefs. However, I completely understand not wanting someone to have a vested interest in proving something or having a conflict of interest. So, my first hard requirement is a worldview. So, the writer in question must not identify as a Christian. The second hard requirement was the identity of the writer. So, I wanted them to be a historian or a public writer. Third is the content requirement. So, the writing must contain an explicit mention of Jesus. I don't want to mention of Jesus. Someone who you know scholars might surmise could be Jesus. I wanted it to explicitly mention Jesus of Nazareth and then I set out several soft requirements which I thought were suggestive of an authenticity. And they each relate to the writer's ability to access relevant information. So, the first is the date. So, I wanted the writer to preferably be alive during the first century AD. Why did I set this? Because probably they would have at least heard about the early church and they would have had to be at reasonably close range to hear about it in detail, as it wouldn't have spread very far at that time. And then the second requirement is location. So, I wanted the source, the writer, to have lived in an area where Christians had traveled to, or an area which would have had knowledge of Christianity. So, this is going to be likely in ancient Rome.
Unfortunately, even if I were going to find such a source, of course, the caveat to this is we're trying to answer the question of did Jesus of Nazareth exist as a historical figure? We're not asking if he was God. We were not asking if he was the son and there were a father and Holy Spirit. We're not asking any philosophical questions here. So, proving Jesus's resurrection is a different matter. Looking at miracles is a different matter, and we've handled those in other episodes. But really, evidence of Jesus's residence on earth doesn't prove his divinity. It only proves that a man named Jesus of Nazareth existed and pioneered the Christian religion. So, nonetheless, it's a valid question and it's a good starting point for folks who might be very, very highly skeptical of Christianity. So, let's talk about the first candidate for discussion. So first I looked at the letters of Pliny the Younger. So, Pliny the Younger was a Roman governor to Emperor Trajan. These letters meet some, but not all our criteria. They fail in that they were written in AD. So, it was a little bit later than we desired. And they also don't mention Jesus himself. However, they do describe in detail the practices of early Christians, including singing, moral standards, feasting, and worship. And Pliny is certainly not sympathetic to Christianity. He calls it, quote, a depraved, excessive superstition. So, he's certainly not going to alter the facts to try to play in Christianity's favor. So let me read you a quote from one of his letters. This is a direct quote.
They asserted, however, that the s and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsibly a hymn to Christ as to a God and bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not to falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. Accordingly, I judged it more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses, but I discovered nothing else but depraved excessive superstition. So, this is a quote where Pliny the Younger is talking about early Christians and he's found some deaconesses. So, this is really attesting to sort of the presence of the early church and the veracity of their belief, right? They were tortured. but they still held their beliefs. However, it doesn't meet all our criteria, so we must keep looking. So, I found two other sources that meet our criteria. First is Tacitus' Annals, and the second is Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. So first, Tacitus was a Roman historian and politician. He is not a Christian, and he provides an account of Jesus's crucifixion. So, in Book, Chapter of Annals, Tacitus mentions the execution of, quote, Christus at Chapter off Pontius Pilate. So let me read you again a direct quote from this primary source.
Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite torturers on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again brought up broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. So, what do we have to say about this? So again, I didn't want to use a Christian scholar in the modern day to find commentary on this passage. So, I went to Bart Ehrman. He's a very famous New Testament scholar, and he is, as defined by himself, an agnostic atheist. And he has a blog where he writes about Tacitus' mention of Jesus, and he writes that it validates Jesus' existence as a historical person so, I'll read you a quote from Bart Ehrman here. This much information does not help us much at all. In fact, almost not at all in knowing what Jesus said and did during his life. But It is useful for realizing that Jesus was known by historians who had a reason to investigate the matter. No one thought he was made up. But their central claims about Jesus as a historical figure, a Jew with followers executed on orders of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, are borne out by these later sources with a completely different set of biases even Bart Ehrman, who's not a Christian, so even Bart Ehrman who's not a Christian says that no one thought that Jesus was made up. And he's speaking of historians who had quotes, reason to investigate the matter.
So, Tacitus's annals, including his mention of Jesus using the Latin term for Christ, is very widely accepted by scholars like Ehrman, but also a lot of other scholars to be a trustworthy historical docent and to provide very strong evidence for Jesus's existence from, again, an extra biblical non-Christian source. So now let's look at Eusefus. So, he writes a book called Antiquities of the Jews, and that has two passages which mention Christians, and one of which is very hotly debated. It's called the Testimony Flavian. So Eusefus mentions Jesus in books and of Antiquities. Book, chapter contains the Testimony. which is thought to be partially authentic. And what does that mean? So that means that the chapter is original to Josephus, but it also contains later adjustments and additions that were made by Christian scribes who were transcribing the work, and they added in things that Josephus didn't originally say. So, they added in falsehoods. So, I'm going to read you the entire testimony first, and then we'll discuss which parts are thought to be falsified and which parts are thought to be original. Quote, now there was about this time Jesus a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man for he was a doer of wonderful works a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure he drew over to him both many of the jews and many of the gentiles he was Christ And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and other and wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day. So, I give on my blog a brief video, I think it's a couple minutes long, about this just summarizing the authenticity of Josephus' account of Jesus. So, I suggest if you want something quick, go and look up that link. It's within the transcript that we have for this episode. And so, the first question you're going to have might be this. How can this passage contain authentic material but interpolation at the same time? And how on earth do we trust that, right? How do we not just throw out the baby with the bathwater and say, well, we know that it contains some falsehoods that were added in by folks later who were not the original author. Why don't we just scrap the whole thing?
So, if we look at the first sentence of the testimony that’s a good example. So, scholars believe that the last part of the first sentence where it says, quote, if it be lawful to call him a man was added. So, Josephus, they believe, originally called Jesus a wise man, but that label wouldn't have satisfied a Christian because it didn't say that Jesus was God. It didn't acknowledge his deity so, they wanted to sort of compensate for that, these later Christian scribes. So, what folks have done now is really try to remove statements like that, that are overtly Christian from the text. And then many scholars state that we are left with a core piece of the text. which has a reference to Jesus, which is authentic to Josephus. So, I'm going to read you a reconstructed testimony which is provided by someone named JP Meyer, who's a prominent scholar in early Christianity on early Christianity. So let me read you a direct quote of this original reconstructed testimony. At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man for he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who received the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day, the tribe of Christians named after him had not died out. So, you can see that even after we've deleted a lot of insertions by later Christian scribes, you still have this core testimony that still meets our criteria as a non-Christian testimony of Jesus's existence as a historical figure. So, I mentioned there were two references to Jesus. One was the testimony which we’d already discussed. The other one is in book of Antiquities, and it is not as debated. So, it's considered authentic by most secular religious scholars and so I'm going to read you this reference to Jesus from book. It's much shorter quote. 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 or some of his companions. So, this is just a brief description. It's unadorned. It's factual. It just talks about Jesus who was called Christ and his brother, whose name was James. There's not thought to be any forgery in this passage. And it just mentions Jesus's existence and his identity. And so, from here again, this serves our point of helping to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure. We have two historians, Tacitus and Josephus, who were able to do this for us and offer strong historical support for this existence of Jesus in the first century AD. However, of course, historical support for his existence as a man or historical figure and his proving his link to Christianity doesn't prove he was divine. It doesn't prove he was God. So, if you're interested in that question, I would suggest looking at the solo episode on the resurrection myth. I would suggest looking at our episode on miracles. There are a lot of other episodes that we have that can hopefully help you attack that question from multiple different angles, whether it's historical or philosophical or theological. So, we'll leave that for another day. And I hope this deep dive into the primary sources has been helpful for addressing this question.
See you next time.
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