Are there any accounts of people meeting Jesus outside of the Bible?

by Alertcircuit

Are there any accounts of people meeting Jesus outside of the ones depicted in the bible? Were they positive or negative? Can they help us shape what Jesus was really like? Is there any weight to his "resurrection"?

The_Manchurian

There are many accounts of people meeting Jesus, accounts of his teachings and actions, etc, that are not in the Bible. However, these are texts which even the vast majority of Christians don't accept: mostly contradictory, largely written far later than the gospels, sometimes by people who clearly have a poor understanding of Jewish life. Quite a few present Jesus as a spiritual being who only appeared to have a body. And sometimes shapeshifted. This is why they were not included in the Bible, as it was assumed they were either deliberate fakes; essentially fan-fiction or to push a particular theological viewpoint. You can still read some of them, though a lot we only have short extracts from, and some we only know because of Christian writers criticising them. I recently read the Gospel of Thomas, for example, which might (might!) have been written before the other gospels. You can read it here: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html. It's not too long. But early Christians certainly didn't consider it reliable, hence the fact it's not included in the Bible.

I assume what you want is accounts not written by Christians (whether Orthodox or Gnostic) and not at worst deliberate fakes or at best wishful thinking like many of the infancy gospels of the 2nd century.

So, basically, all we have is this quote from Tacitus: "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 Judæa, 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. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind."

So, Tacitus does seem to believe that Jesus was indeed executed by Pontius Pilate. And so one could argue this is an non-Biblical account of Jesus meeting someone else (or at least, interacting indirectly with him, in terms of Pilate ordering his guards to do the execution), and then being executed by that person. But Tacitus wrote this in 116, nearly a century later, so it's possible this is just what he heard from Christians (though it'd be easy enough for earlier Romans in Judea to know that this never happened and tell people, which they don't seem to have done, implying that he was indeed executed by Pontius Pilate).

Josephus (another Roman historian, who wrote about 93AD) also refers to Jesus being executed by Pontius Pilate, specifically by crucifixion. However, this passage has oddities, as after that it explains how he was crucified it says he was resurrected. The reason this is odd is that Josephus was not a Christian. So the main consensus now is that probably Josephus did write about Jesus and his crucifixion, but the passage was later modified by Christians. (However, in another passage he does talk about the death of James, brother of Jesus, who was known as Christ. This is a lot less contraversial, most scholars think it hasn't been modified. But that's not really answering your question: it doesn't tell you anything about Jesus other than James was his brother)

That's it I'm afraid.

As to his resurrection... well, when you read that a person in ancient history came back to life, but his enemies paid guards to say his followers stole the body, you'd generally assume that it's most likely that his followers did indeed steal the body and then claim he'd been resurrected. But this is an assumption. We assume it didn't happen because we assume it can't happen. All we can say is that within twenty years of his death, there were Christians (they're mentioned in a few places as having been expelled from Rome in 49AD), and all the earliest Christian writings we have (mostly Paul) seem to believe that Jesus had been resurrected. And his disciples both told people he'd been resurrected, and were willing to suffer prison for it, implying (but not proving!) that they at least believed he'd been resurrected. So, all we can really say is that early Christians believed he had been resurrected (there are other things about Jesus that early Christians may not have believed, like the virgin birth, but they do seem to have definitely believed in his resurrection in some sense at least; it may or may not be the same sense later Christians believed it). At this point, it's not really something historians can prove one way or another, it's really just a matter of faith.

Erska

This can be answered through researching the Historicity of Jesus, available in FAQ is the answer which can be TL;DR into No, the non-biblical references to Jesus-ish stuff are references to Christians gathering and such stuff

bot asked me to add the users who have contributed to the FAQ in this post, so here goes:


  • /u/jasoncaspian
  • /u/talondearg
  • /u/talondearg

The_Manchurian

Since I was just answering the question about accounts of people meeting Jesus outside of the Bible (and said all there is are Apocrypha and Tacitus claiming Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate, and that's it), but this seems to have turned into a "did Jesus exist" discussion, I'm going to link to a couple of answers in the FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ip60t/is_tacitus_the_main_reason_historians_accept/cuiuf1i by u/jasoncaspian

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/259vcd/how_much_evidence_is_there_for_a_historical_jesus/chf3t4j?context=3 By u/talondearg