Did Jesus Exist?
Or is Christianity a hoax, an ancient example of fake news?
Recently, a reader chastised me for writing a story about the early Christian movement.
According to this person, Christianity was a hoax, the product of different groups who had created a messiah out of their imaginations. There was, claimed the writer no proof that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, or any other “Christian character” ever existed. The version of Jesus offered in the New Testament “is a complete fraud and a hoax.” It was time, concluded the author, that “Christians grow up.”
Whew.
I must admit that my first inclination was to simply ignore the comment: in my experience, people who hold strong views about religion are unusually resistant to argument. Folks believe what they believe, and you are unlikely to rattle a deeply-rooted opinion.
But, as I pondered this, I wondered if moving on in silence was the most useful response to the experience. As it turns out, this is a question that sits squarely in my area of expertise. I am a historian of the Later Roman Empire and the Early Church. And while I have no expectation that a reasoned response to this reader will have much effect, there is value in clearing some of the underbrush and placing a few points on the record.
In fact, there is a great deal of early evidence to support the claim that there was a Jewish teacher named Jesus and that his life and death spawned a new religion in the first century.
Christian Sources
Since I expect that my reader would dismiss early Christian accounts of the movement — the twenty-seven books of the New Testament and the Christian writings of the early-second century — as “fake,” I will not spend much time considering them.
There was, however, a great deal of material composed within a century after the death of Christ. The number of literary artifacts suggests a rapidly growing Christian movement. In addition to the New Testament writings, scholars date Clement of Rome’s Epistle to the Corinthians to the end of the first century. Other early works include the Didache (second century) and the Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch (also second century).
The witness of the New Testament and the earliest post-apostolic writers would compel most historians to accept the idea that Jesus was a historical figure. They might quibble about details of his life or the way those details were used by later writers, but the simple existence of this massive trove of writings suggests existence. After all, we have far less contemporary evidence for the existence of Socrates, but few would argue that the great philosopher did not exist.
Nevertheless, assuming that my interlocutor would argue that all Christian evidence is simply the product of a massive conspiracy and therefore must be rejected for cause, we can move ahead and consider non-Christian evidence for the existence of Jesus.
Roman, non-Christian Sources
The best evidence for the existence of Jesus comes from those who had no sympathy for the Christian movement: elite Roman authors.
Two Roman historians, a government bureaucrat, and a Roman emperor all have something to say about the new faith. The evidence these four writers offer is valuable because they have no motivation to spread a hoax.
They are against the Christian movement and write as adversaries. Their testimony is not positive, but it firmly establishes the existence of Jesus and the spread of his movement.
Suetonius
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was a Roman historian who lived in the second half of the first century (ca. 69–122), Suetonius wrote a series of imperial biographies entitled The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.
This work, which was finished around the year 119, began with Julius Caesar and ended with the Emperor Domitian. Although Suetonius is not considered as fine a historian as his contemporary Tacitus (see below) he still provides many important stories that would have been lost without him.
The earliest reference to the Christian movement appears in his biography of the Emperor Claudius (ruled AD 41–54). In chapter 25 of his account, he wrote:
Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he (Claudius) expelled them from Rome. –Suet. Claudius, 25.
This reference, which refers to events that probably occurred in the year 49, suggests an uproar in a local religious community. Rome’s Jewish community had established a synagogue in the city. There was a tumult of some nature that was attributed to a man named Chrestus.
Who was this Chrestus, and why did he cause so much trouble? Chrestus is one vowel away from Christus, the Latin rendition of Christ’s name. Many scholars, myself included, believe that this is a simple spelling error. The evidence from Suetonius suggests that Rome’s Jewish community was outraged by the arrival of Christian evangelists.
While a dogmatic atheist might reject evidence from a Christian source, it is helpful to remember that the Acts of the Apostles describes very similar reactions from local Jewish communities when missionaries arrived bearing the Christian message. The Apostle Paul’s usual practice, upon entering a new town, was to first visit the local Jewish synagogue and preach the message of the risen Christ (see, for example Acts 18). This often produced a violent response: “Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was left for dead (2 Cor. 11:25).”
It takes little imagination to envision a similar series of events here. Christian missionaries had reached the city of Rome in AD 49, and, following a pattern that Paul would employ, took their message to the local Jewish community. The Jews rejected this message — violently in this case — and when the conflict boiled out into Rome’s streets, Emperor Claudius responded by expelling the tumultuous people from this city.
So what do we have? The earliest data point for the existence of Christianity from a non-Christian writer. These “Christian characters” made enough of a stir in the city of Rome, sixteen years after the death of their messiah, to attract the attention and intervention of a Roman emperor.
Suetonius offers a second data point, and this one comes in his account of the infamous Emperor Nero. In a list of new laws issued by the emperor (cracking down on charioteers who were abusing their immunity from prosecution, bolstering Rome’s fire codes, etc.), Suetonius offers the following sentence:
Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstitio. –Suet. Nero 16.2
This may be a reference to Nero’s attempt to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome, or, as Brent Shaw argues, it may simply refer to an imperial attempt to circumscribe the activities of a new Jewish sect (Shaw, “Neronian Persecution”, 86). In either case, it suggests that Suetonius believed that there was a Christian presence in the city of Rome during Nero’s reign (AD 54–68).
Tacitus
Suetonius’ brief entry — although it does place Christians in the city of Rome during Nero’s reign — does not explain Nero’s animosity toward the faith.
The traditional explanation is that Nero attempted to shift blame onto the Christians for causing a great fire in the city during his reign. On July 19, 64, a fire erupted in the city and over a ten-day period, burned most of the wooden buildings to the ground.
The people of Rome believed that their emperor, who hoped to renovate and design a glorious new capitol, was behind the fire. According to the historian Tacitus, writing in the second decade of the second century (ca. 112–120), Nero attempted to shift the blame for the fire onto a new religious group, the Christians. As Tacitus wrote in his Annales:
To get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures 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 broke out not only in Judaea, 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.
Therefore, all who pleaded guilty were arrested; then, based on the information they supplied, a large number of people were convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
–Tacitus, Annales, 15.44
Tacitus places the Christians in a historical context — the great fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64. Recent scholarship has questioned the veracity of this account.
Shaw argues that although the emperor did not actually persecute Christians, Tacitus’ account was not fiction. The Roman historian employed “either written or oral sources, what he believed to be credible and compelling grounds to accept the stories that linked the Christians, Nero, and the fire at Rome as elements of a true narrative.” (Shaw, “Neronian Persecution,” 96).
In other words, although Nero probably didn’t persecute Christians, the new religious movement had intruded upon the consciousness of the Roman political class by the 110s. Tacitus’ Annales are useful for what they tell us about what early second-century Romans knew about Christianity.
Tacitus knows that Christianity originated in Judaea; that Jesus lived during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius (AD 14–33); that he was tried and executed at the hands of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate. He also notes that since Christ’s death, the movement had spread throughout the empire, and has arrived in Rome.
It is important to note that Tacitus, as a conservative Roman senator, is not a fan of Christianity. In his opinion, Christians, like their executed leader, were “criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment.” Tacitus did not write this passage to advance the Christian cause or promote the new faith: he doesn’t like Christianity; he believes it should be punished.
He is a hostile witness, and extremely important for that very reason. Tacitus, through his animosity, attests to Christ’s existence, and offers confirmation that the new religion was spreading so rapidly that it had appeared on his radar.
Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan
Our exposition has run backward in time: Suetonius wrote his biographies last; Tacitus was slightly earlier, in the mid-teens of the second century; our final authors wrote in 112. In that year, Emperor Trajan dispatched Pliny the Younger to the Roman province of Bithynia to serve as a provincial governor. Bithynia lay just below the Black Sea, in modern Turkey.
The mediation of justice was one of the important functions of a provincial magistrate. Pliny spent part of his term traveling between towns and hearing legal cases. In one town, which he sadly failed to name, he encountered criminal activity that was outside his experience: some of the townspeople accused others of practicing Christianity. Uncertain of what the law required in the case of Christians, Pliny wrote a letter to the emperor, seeking his advice:
I have never participated in trials of Christians. I therefore do not know what offenses it is the practice to punish or investigate, and to what extent. And I have been not a little hesitant as to whether there should be any distinction on account of age or no difference between the very young and the more mature; whether pardon is to be granted for repentance, or, if a man has once been a Christian, it does him no good to have ceased to be one. –Pliny Ep. 10.96.
Pliny, despite his years in Rome, had never been present at the trial of Christians. He knew that Christianity was illegal, but he was not certain why it was illegal or how trials should be handled.
He, therefore, referred his actions to the Emperor Trajan, hoping that the emperor would endorse the judicial procedures that Pliny had improvised in the field. In short, he executed those who admitted to practicing the faith and refused to return to proper worship of the Roman gods.
Those who denied being Christians, or who claimed that they had abandoned the faith, were offered a chance to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods, which Pliny believed a Christian could not do. It is evident that Pliny hoped to rehabilitate as many of the accused as possible. Only those who stubbornly clung to the faith, refusing to recant their beliefs, were punished with execution.
The Emperor Trajan endorsed Pliny’s approach:
You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it — that is, by worshiping our gods — even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. –Pliny, Ep. 10.97
Trajan’s letter to Pliny defined the official imperial policy toward Christians until the reign of the Emperor Decius (249–251). Once again, as with the histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, this exchange points to a growing recognition among Rome’s leaders that the empire had a “Christian problem.” Pliny did not tell Trajan that he had never heard of Christians before his arrival in Bithynia — he clearly had. His problem was that he had no experience trying Christian cases. He needed guidance in order to do his job properly.
It is also worth pointing out that the province of Bithynia was far removed from both the center of the empire (Rome) and the birthplace of Christianity (Jerusalem). The fact that this remote land already had a sizable Christian population seventy-nine years after the death of Jesus attests to the antiquity and quick spread of the religion; Bithynia would have been one of the last places it reached, but it was clearly flourishing in that distant region by the beginning of the second century.
Irrefutable Evidence
Was Christianity the later invention of conspiracy theorists anxious to thrust a new faith on a gullible world?
It is highly unlikely; reliable, non-Christian writers tell us that less than a century after the death of Christ, there was growing concern about the faith among Rome’s elite. Suetonius mentioned the faith, while Tacitus was able to place Jesus in the reign of Tiberius and tell his readers that the religious leader had been executed by Pontius Pilate. And finally, Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan were aware of the growing faith as early as 112.
Second century Romans believed that Christ had existed and that other “Christian characters” were busily spreading his message. When confronted with such evidence, it seems very odd that we would doubt it today.
Sources: Pliny the Younger, Epistles. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Tacitus, Annales. Brent Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 105 (2015): 73–100.
Thanks for reading this story. If you enjoyed it, you might also like one of my books — Comet Madness: How the 1910 Return of Halley’s Comet (almost) Destroyed Civilization or L. A. Birdmen. Learn more about these books, read free stories, or join my monthly newsletter through my website: https://richardjgoodrich.com/index.html.Interested in early Christianity? You might also enjoy:
