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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
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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only when we abandon the baseless assumption of historical
documents.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
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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
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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).
Jesus in Extrabiblical Sources4
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
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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 Extrabiblical Sources6
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