Did Jesus Really Exist?

Hello friend! My name is Matt Spinelli. I’m a college intern here at Grace and have been given the privilege to write the next blog entry on the Grace blog! For those of you who don’t know me I’m kind of a New Testament research junkie. I visit a New Testament blog everyday to see what developments are happening in the New Testament research world. This January I learned of the formation of "The Jesus Project". This is a collection of Biblical Scholars, mostly from the more liberal side of scholarship, that will debate at seminars during the year whether Jesus actually existed or not. This follows on the heels of the highly publicized Jesus Seminar. So in light of this I thought it would be good to answer the question, "Can we be sure that Jesus really existed?"

One way to investigate this question is to search for sources that are outside of the New Testament and do not have a Christian bias to them. The reason we look for sources like this is that we can be fairly confident that the evidence they present for the existence of Jesus is sound and not merely trying to bolster the Christian movement. An example of such a source comes from the Roman historian Tacitus.

Tacitus lived from 56 AD to 117 AD and wrote a history examining the reigns of several Roman emperors. The text that we are going to focus on for our purposes is in his Annals 15.44:
"Consequently, 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 centre and become popular."

One of the first things that we need to notice is that Tacitus was not a Christian. So we can be pretty sure that whatever he said about Jesus was not slanted toward the Christian movement. So what does he say about Jesus? Notice the line where he mentions "Christus" who "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius". The overwhelming majority of scholars think that this is one of the few secular references to Jesus. From this we can learn that Jesus was crucified during the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate. This information, while brief, does help to answer the question of the existence of Jesus, as well as the historical validity of his crucifixion. Would a Roman Historian who has no interest in promoting Christianity comment on an individual who didn’t exist? I don’t think so.

This means that there is good evidence for the existence of Jesus outside of the New Testament. This should help bolster our confidence in the Gospels and in the one whose "word is truth" (John 17:17.)

Matt Spinelli