The Year God Died

One

Did Jesus Exist?

I have authored many histories and biographies and never, until now, had to spend a single word making the case that the subjects of my books were real persons who actually existed. Historians and their audiences take it for granted that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were men who walked the earth. The same historical courtesy is often not given to Jesus. While most of the scholarly community concedes that Jesus was a real person who walked the earth, there is a significant segment of scholars who have cleared entire forests to supply paper to publish works denying Jesus’s historical existence. As this book requires that Jesus existed as a real flesh and blood man, it is worth reviewing the evidence of his existence.

Unfortunately, one of the first things one discovers when studying the ancient world is that precious little of what the ancients wrote has made its way down through the ages. For instance, scholars possess less than a third of what Aristotle wrote. Only 35 volumes of Livy’s 142-volume magisterial history of Rome survive intact, and we only have seven of the more than eighty plays written by Aeschylus. Through tantalizing fragments and mentions of earlier books in later Byzantine volumes, historians know of hundreds of major historical works written by ancient authors that are no longer available.

Over the years, I have contributed several chapters to edited volumes on Alexander the Great without anyone ever concerning themselves with Alexander’s actual existence, even though every ancient reference we have to Alexander was written 250 or more years after his death.* Why? Mainly because we know that the later historians used multiple sources written by persons who are also part of the historical record and that these ancient writings, despite many contradictions among them, all confirm the central narrative of elements of Alexander’s life. Moreover, these surviving narratives are buttressed by substantial archaeological evidence attesting to Alexander’s existence and importance in his own time.

* That Alexander did exist is attested in biographies written by such ancient historians as Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Arrian, Plutarch, and Justin. None of these writers, however, lived while Alexander was alive. The closest, Diodorus Siculus, was born approximately 250 years after Alexander’s death, and most of the others were writing one or two centuries later than that. They did, however, employ sources handed down by persons who knew Alexander, such as Callisthenes, Alexander’s official historian, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals. Unfortunately, only minute fragments of these earlier original works survive.

Still, for other events and persons in ancient history, we have far less evidence than we do for the life of Alexander. For instance, historians only have a single account, by Herodotus, to prove that the Battle of Marathon ever took place. If Herodotus’s account is wrong, we must admit that we know nothing about what was arguably the most important battle of the ancient world. Historians, however, believe Herodotus presents an accurate account of the battle. Why? There are several reasons, but the most crucial is that we know how history was related during the period. Greece did not harbor thousands of scribes patiently transcribing Herodotus’s work for distribution to a mass audience. Instead, Herodotus earned his silver by reciting passages from his work to paying audiences. As his audiences demanded wonder and entertainment, Herodotus filled his works with fantastic stories about gold-mining ants in India and the rising of the phoenix in Egypt.

But they also paid to hear their own stories’ histories, paying to have them recorded by poets and historians. Fathers who fought at Marathon or in the battles of the Second Persian War—Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea—would bring their children to hear the stories of these battles and expect them to be truthful as well as correct in every particular. If Herodotus dared to tell a story that did not align with the known facts, there were literally thousands of eyewitnesses to the events he was narrating who would not hesitate to correct him.

Herodotus was not the only historian who earned his living in this way. In a mostly illiterate society without television, smartphones, and all the other entertainments of modern life, storytellers were always in demand. Many historians discount historical narratives rooted in a prior oral tradition, claiming they are prone to letting in changes with every retelling. In this regard, historians view oral traditions through the prism of the grade school game of telephone. In that game, one child is given a statement to be whispered in succession to all the students in the class. Inevitably, when the final student repeats the message, it has little resemblance to the original statement. But this discounts the importance that such societies placed on the oral transmission of ideas. Novice storytellers were drilled for years by master storytellers until they could recite every story entrusted to them word for word. Moreover, these stories were recited before sophisticated audiences who had heard most of them many times before and fully expected to listen to them without errors each time. These were societies that valued their traditions and were quick to spot any deviation from the accepted canon. If we extend the telephone game analogy just a bit, picture the game where everyone in the class has already heard the message and where each successive student must repeat the message aloud for all to hear. In this version of the game, the entire student body is on hand to correct anyone who deviates from the original canon immediately.

This is almost certainly how the Gospel stories were spread among the first generation of Christians. Before they were written down, these stories circulated among the small Christian community that was already intimately familiar with them. Most of them, in fact, had lived through these stories either as participants or interested onlookers. These early Christians were not making up stories as the basis of a new theology; they were retelling their lived experiences. Moreover, as we will discuss later, this oral storytelling was written down within a generation of Jesus’s death when their exactness could be verified by still-living participants in the events surrounding Jesus’s life. Given how the Gospels came into existence, historians should give them a better reception as accurate historical documents than is typically the case. Likely because the Gospels are also the foundation of Christian theology, historians, instead, tend to look for any and all possible reasons to dismiss the New Testament books as historical documents. In doing so, historians employ methods that are the reverse of those they use for all other ancient texts. Typically, when historians encounter ancient works that tell two different versions of the same event, their correct and immediate impulse is to try to merge the two accounts into a seamless narrative. What they do not do is toss aside the contradictions as fabrications of the author’s imagination. For instance, Polybius and Livy’s accounts of the Second Punic War vary remarkably. No reputable historian ever considers throwing out those portions where the two authors disagree. Instead, they work to discover evidence to help develop reasonable explanations for the differences, hoping to synthesize narratives into a seamless tale. Where that is impossible, historians present both versions to their readers, usually along with some analysis of which version is likely more accurate based on the preponderance of all available evidence.