Jesus Outside the New Testament

By Neil Earle

The Christmas season brings Christianity into focus as a historical religion. The Wise Men, the Star of Bethlehem, Caesar’s census, etc have always attracted criticism as well as confirmation. Recent furors over The Da Vinci Code and The Judas Gospel, for example, have focused an important question: What historical proof is there that Jesus Christ existed apart from the New Testament? This is a fair question that deserves an answer.

  1. Pliny the Younger was Roman legate in north-west Turkey (Bithynia). About 111 AD he wrote to Emperor Trajan (98-117AD) on numerous groups called “Christians” who refused to “invoke the gods” or “do reverence with incense and wine to your image.” Some recanted and “also cursed Christ.” Says Pliny: ”They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before sunrise and reciting a hymn to Christ…After this it was their custom to separate, and then meet again to partake of food.” To find out more about their rituals, Pliny subjected to torture “two female slaves, who were called deacons.”
  1. About 120 AD Roman historian Suetonius in his Life of Claudius alluded to the emperor’s banishing of all Jews from Rome (Acts 18:2). He states: “He expelled the Jews from Rome, on account of the riots in which they were constantly indulging, at the instigation of Chrestus.” This is probably a garbled account of Roman-Jewish tensions about 50AD. In his Life of Nero, Suetonius writes: “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a body of people addicted to a novel and mischievous superstition.”
  1. Fellow-historian Tacitus also wrote about Nero’s persecution in his Roman Annals (115-117 AD): “They got their name from Christ, who was executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius…but it broke out afresh – not only in Judaea, where the plague first arose, but in Rome…”
  1. Justin Martyr, while living in Rome, wrote a Defence of Christianity addressed to Emperor Antonius Pius about 150 AD. He argued that the prophecy of Psalm 22:16 was fulfilled in the crucifixion of Christ. “That these things happened you may learn from the ‘Acts’ which were recorded under Pontius Pilate.” And later, “That he performed these miracles you may easily satisfy yourself from the ‘Acts’ of Pontius Pilate.” Justin also added, as did Tertullian two generations later, that the census of Augustus, stored in the Roman archives, would contain the names of Joseph and Mary.

Flavius Josephus (85 AD) definitely mentions John the Baptist and James but his references to Jesus are disputed as later additions. Another writer named Julius Africanus (about 210 AD) quotes an earlier historian named Thallus, a freed slave of Emperor Tiberius, writing in 52 AD who mentions the darkness over the earth upon Christ’s death. There are regular references to Jesus in the Koran usually as Isa ibn Maryam (Jesus son of Mary) and numerous references to him in later Islamic writings. See much more in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and F.F. Bruce’s Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament and The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?