Is this true?

by TheMagicNoodle

There was this comment on a post about the oldest mention of Jesus Christ and I was wondering if it was true.

Comment:

This is genuinely a favorite subject of mine.

What you are undoubtedly asking are for non-Christian sources, as the gospels themselves are proven to be very old (an extant scrap of the Gospel of John, "Papyrus P52," has been proven to be as old as 90 CE, though debatable).

There are two, and both hold significant value to academia.

The first is Flavius Josephus. He was a first century Jewish historian, and boy did he history. He wrote two large works made up of several smaller books. Today, the works are published together in really small print, double-columned, and it is still larger than the average textbook. Which is probably how you would describe it--it was a World History textbook that started from the creation narrative of Genesis (according to how Jews believed) and told of just about every known event to Jerusalem up through the sacking of 70 CE.

He directly names Jesus twice: in his "Book 20" of Antiquities of the Jews, he gives a lengthy description of the stoning of "James the Just," the brother of "Jesus who was called Christ."

But a little earlier, in "Book 18," is where you have the "Testimony of Josephus." The passage is short enough that I can quote it here:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds 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 Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Right away, there are questions. If you've been following, you will note that Josephus was not a Christian--he was Jewish. It stands as odd that he would say "He was the Christ." This is what makes the passage the most debated of all of Josephus's writings.

There are of course only two possibilities: he either wrote the passage or he didn't. Stylistically, nothing in the paragraph appears out of line from how Josephus otherwise wrote. By the time we have extant ("surviving") copies of Josephus's works, you get into the 14th century, so it's not like we can just go back to the original.

Still, the amount of detail leading up to and following the passage in surviving copies (spread out over large geographic areas and not limited to Christian sources) lead us to believe that had the passage been altered entirely, it would become obvious. Yet it cannot be discounted that a Jewish man, who would be waiting for the appearance of the Christ, would not likely "testify" of Jesus with so little fanfare. Was this Christian revisionist history, or was Josephus making a public profession of faith in Jesus in his own way? A 1900-year-old question.

Thus, the scholarly argument lands in the middle, as these things often do: Josephus must have written some core truth in those passages, but perhaps Christians (and it would have to be very early in the second century) transcribing their own copies sort of "helped a brother out" by interpolating bits here and there while keeping the rest of the work unchanged.

There is a third passage of note from Josephus, also in Book 18, that speaks in detail of John the Baptist who was performing baptisms in the desert and was executed by Herod Antipas, an account corroborated (but interpreted slightly differently) by the Gospels

I mentioned two sources. The second actually is a Roman source, though not one contemporary with Jesus, like you said. This is written circa 116 AD--still very close to actual events. The author was a Roman Senator named Tacitus.

His passage in his book was written to describe events after Rome was burned in a great fire during the reign of Nero. While we don't know why the fire happened, you may have heard of Nero's callousness (he allegedly--but probably didn't--fiddled on his balcony while watching Roman society collapse). But one thing we know about Nero is his persecution of Christians. According to Tacitus, Nero believed Christians both started the fire and fingered him as the source to advance the Christian message, and Tacitus' account of what was next thus reads:

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.

What makes this interesting is there is no pro-Christian spin on Tacitus's works. Here we have a Roman writing of events that his audience (or at least their parents) could have been alive to remember. He mentions not only Jesus, but we know we have the "right" Jesus (as "Yeshua," or the modernized "Joshua" was actually a not-uncommon name at the time) because of mentions of his followers and his death at the hands of one Pontius Pilate.

What is notable of these extra-Biblical accounts is that they can be read in parallel with actual Biblical accounts, and the sources will not disagree (from a historical perspective). Thus, non-Christians will use the Bible to a degree for its historical value.

By the time you get into the second and third century, you have more surviving accounts-of-accounts that mention Jesus that I won't go into here, as I think we have enough evidence to show a conclusion for your purposes:

The earliest mentions of Jesus are so varied and survived from so close to the actual events they record that it is considered a univeral truth that:

There was a specific man named Yeshua.
He was baptized.
He had followers of at least some number.
He was crucified.

Now, the interpretation of the significance of Jesus rests on you to figure out.

Is this info true??

This is mostly accurate, except that the conclusions at the end do not follow from the evidence presented. The analysis of the Tacitus passage is correct-- Tacitus did mention Christus, so he had certainly heard the story. Although it was almost 100 years later and very far away, so I am less convinced than the author of this post that it means that Christus was real: it may simply mean that people in Rome talked about him and Tacitus is recording that, in the same way that this sub often has questions based on false information about things less than 100 years old.

The analysis of the Josephus passage is also fair. As it concludes, the most common scholarly opinion is that Josephus wrote some of it, but later Christians edited it and added the most explicitly Christian parts, because it would be too strange for Josephus to have believed that the Messiah (the Christ) had arrived, and then only mention it in one place. The most likely candidates for later additions are " if indeed one ought to call him a man" and "He was the Christ" although many scholars believe that more of the later part is added as well.

However, neither of those sources proves that " 1. There was a specific man named Yeshua. 2. He was baptized. 3. He had followers of at least some number. 4. He was crucified." Maybe 3 and 4, potentially 1 (Tacitus doesn't mention his first name, and Josephus mentions only its Greek form, which doesn't necessarily correlate to Yeshua), and certainly not 2, which is not attested to by either source.

Many scholars do believe that those facts about the historical Jesus are correct, but they deduce that through the gospels using the criteria of multiple attestations and of "double dissimilarity." Multiple attestations just means that something is more likely to be true if multiple sources that didn't know about each other independently say it, such as the name "Jesus" appearing in both the gospels and Josephus. "Double dissimilarity" means that something in the gospels is most likely to be true if it is different from both what ordinary 1st century Jews did and what early Christians would have wanted Jesus to be like. So the crucifixion happened to some other Jews but not many, and it would probably have been embarrassing to the early church that Jesus was killed so easily by people, so it is relatively likely that Jesus was actually crucified, because no one trying to invent a persuasive myth would come up with that.