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Part 1: Like No One Else | Part 2: Deity 1 | Part 3: Deity 2 | Part 4: Deity 3 | Part 5: Deity 4 | Part 6: Deity 5 | Part 7: Deity 6 | Part 8: Deity 7 | Part 9: Deity 8 | Part 10: Deity 9
Waaay back at the beginning of this series I listed 3 propositions that we would be demonstrating here:
- Jesus is God
- Jesus is Man
- Jesus is both
So far we’ve reviewed the clearest evidence that Jesus is God; it’s time now to turn to the second proposition, that he is man.
You might think that’s too obvious even to investigate. But there have been those who denied Christ’s humanity, and as we’ll see, his humanity is every bit as important as his deity, though less controversial. We do the truth no favors if we highlight the deity of Christ but ignore his humanity.
I’m going to begin with the very basic fact of the incarnation: there was once a human being who walked on this earth, whose name was Jesus (bar Joseph) of Nazareth. There are also those—not many, but a few—who would deny this as well.
Is Jesus just a fable, like Hercules or Rip van Winkle or the boy who cried wolf?
It’s a question worth answering.
It’s a historical question, one we should answer the way a historian does, by looking at the various historical documents (and perhaps artifacts) available to us.
For the moment I’m going to exclude the Bible, since we’ll be getting to that later. I’m also going to exclude all of the Christian writings throughout church history, because they’re based on the Bible. It’s historically noteworthy, of course, that this allegedly mythical person has incited such a flood of literature, but for now we’ll focus on very early secular records.
Josephus, the first-century Jewish writer and collaborator with the Romans, mentioned Jesus in two passages. I think one of them was later edited by a Christian to make it sound as though Josephus was a believer, and I would view that edited version as spurious. We have it as Antiquities 18.3.3; if you’re interested, you can read more details here and even more here (free login required).
There’s a second passage in Josephus that appears genuine. In Antiquities 20.9.1 Josephus describes a trial of James, “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,” before Ananus the high priest and the Sanhedrin. This reference is significant because it’s off-handed; neither Josephus nor the Sanhedrin were addressing the question of the historical Jesus, but were just assuming it as fact. Their focus of interest was the historical James. Given that this is a first-century account of an earlier first-century event, at which the historical existence of Jesus was assumed without controversy, this is a noteworthy testimony.
Another first-century writer, Tacitus, in his Annals.15.44, describes Nero’s response to the fire at Rome in AD 64. He notes that many citizens suspected Nero himself of having set the fire—to which he responded this way:
Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with 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 Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.
This seems to be a genuine reference particularly because Tacitus is not friend of the Christians; he would have no interest in giving their Messiah undeserved historical authenticity.
Those few who deny the historical existence of Jesus will typically dismiss these historical references outright as “copyists’ errors” or “interpolations.”* While I’m happy to grant that the first reference in Josephus is deeply suspect at best, there is no scholarly historical evidence for dismissing the others.
And in any case, there are other secular references. We’ll get to them next time.
* The essay linked here includes some other arguments that are demonstrably inaccurate or weak. That’s outside the scope of this series, but scholarly responses are readily available. If you want to wade into those weeds, please let me know.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
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