Did Jesus Exist?

I’ve been on Instagram all of six months and that is long enough to help me understand why people feel frustrated with social media.

I don’t plan on quitting because in any given month I get almost 80% of my web traffic now from organic social clicks. That means most of my readers are now coming from unpaid, nonpromoted posts on Instagram (that seem to also get ported over to Facebook even though I don’t use Facebook). Basically, a reader like you shares one of my posts and someone else finds this site because of it. So, a big thanks to all of you who share and help me grow my readership. And even though I don’t post on IG very often, you can follow Humble Walks on Instagram. You can also get an email every time I post, which is typically Monday mornings.

So why do I think it’s normal to feel frustration with social media if I’m benefitting from it? Mainly it’s easy to get exposed to a lot of negativity. Unsurprisingly I follow a lot of scholarly and liberal Christians and invariably their posts get brigaded by right-wing Christians telling us who they think we should hate this week, or by atheists telling us why we’re not as smart as they are. One common atheist comment goes something like this, “everything you’re saying is meaningless nonsense anyway because there never was real Jesus, they’re all just made-up stories.” For now, let’s set aside questions about why such an atheist who doesn’t even believe there was a Jesus would be spending any time at all on a Christian IG profile, let alone take the time to write comments that expose their uneducated guesses about history, the New Testament and ancient culture. I thought I would address the question here because it flames up so frequently online.

Did Jesus actually exist?

Uh, no doy.[1]

The overwhelming consensus among modern scholars is that there certainly was an historical Jesus. In fact, the author and historian John Dickson once famously wagered that he would eat a page out of his Bible (specifically Matthew’s birth narrative baked inside a Christmas pudding if I recall the anecdote correctly) if someone could simply find a full Professor of Ancient History, Classics, or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived. To my knowledge, Dickson’s Bible remains unreduced. He also holds a PhD in Ancient History, so he is no ordinary social media troll.

Still, just as there are people you meet in life who doubt the efficacy of vaccines or fluoride, think Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, believe the Earth is flat, think Paul McCartney was killed and replaced by an even better Paul McCartney, and any number of kooky conspiracy theories, you will find people espousing what is known as the mythicist position. That is, there are mythicists who think that there was no historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth and that what we know of Jesus is a mythological construct.

Why do they think that? I cannot possibly get into their thoughts, just as I cannot understand why someone is against fluoride. Grasping their arguments is like trying to catch smoke in your hands. Still, they are largely skeptical of historical evidence in general and think it isn’t sufficient to establish Jesus’ existence. The writings in the New Testament are not eye-witness accounts and are written decades after Jesus (true). They are theological writings to a community not historical documents (true). They contain mythical elements and interpretations of previous traditions such as virgin births, miracles and unaccounted ancestries (true). There are not a lot of extra-biblical sources that mention Jesus (true). The Gospel stories and writings of Paul contain contradictions (true).

Wait, Matt, if you’re saying all their evidence is true, then why should we believe Jesus actually existed? I agree with the vast majority of scholars here that making that leap goes way too far. And personally, I have a very real experience of the living Christ that convinces me no matter what. Now that won’t convince a dedicated atheist mythicist, but it’s quite convincing to my most important audience: me.

There are a lot of reasons to believe that Jesus existed even if you don’t have a resurrection faith and experience like my own. In fact, I’m going to bring up an important book by an esteemed atheist/agnostic to make most of my points herewith. In his book, “Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument of Jesus of Nazareth,” Bart Ehrman presents a clear argument for the historical existence of Jesus. I will summarize some of the important points here, but again my usual caveat – I am one blogger, my comments are distorted by my own bias and experiences, please read his book on your own and support his scholarship.

Ehrman emphasizes historical methodology. That refers to the way scholars try to sift fact from theologized history to outright myth in any ancient text, not just the Bible. As Christians, we have a devotional approach to the Bible, but scholars set that aside and employ a wide range of tools to test the text.

A great example is the principle of multiple attestations. In other words, if the Jesus factoids pop up in multiple places as they do in the Gospels, the letters of Paul and in some non-Christian works like Tacitus and Josephus, then it becomes more plausible to think that person existed. Note, we’re not arguing the truth of each factoid, but if they appear all over the place they just might be based on a real person. Weird, huh? A mythicist might argue that the synoptic Gospels are copying each other anyway, so they cannot be used as independent attestation. But it is still a marker.

Setting aside the synoptic Gospels, just look at Paul’s letters. These are some of the earliest writings we have about our faith and are typically dated around 20 years after Jesus’ death. If you had never heard of Barack Obama and read someone writing today about his senate run, you’d be in the ballpark. It seems reasonable Paul has some crucial historical placement here. In his letters, Paul frequently references a very real person of Jesus, including life, death, burial and resurrection and mentions that Jesus appeared to various people after the resurrection. If someone argued that Obama turned water into wine in 2005, I might argue that he didn’t, but I’d be hard pressed to say Obama didn’t exist at all. It’s just a weird claim to make if it was well known at the time that there was no such thing as a Barack Obama.

Paul’s reference to the crucifixion as a key event in our faith is noted in multiple sources including outside of the Bible. So, the crucifixion is a widely accepted historical fact. It’s hard to crucify someone who never existed. Of course, the resurrection is a theological claim and claiming that Jesus lived is very different than claiming he was resurrected. But Paul’s frequent mention of the resurrection points to a belief among the early church that not only did Jesus live and die, but he was also raised. Whatever you think of this theological claim, it does seem to point to a real-life figure. Historians also refer to the crucifixion through the criterion of embarrassment. In other words, it’s a weird fact to make up about a figure who is completely unhistorical. It’s embarrassing that the leader of your faith, your messiah, was put to death as a political criminal. You just wouldn’t tell the story that way if there was any way to avoid it.

Additionally, the Jesus factoids in the New Testament seem to be wrapped up with some known factoids about first century Judea. This is called contextual credibility. It doesn’t mean the Jesus stuff is conclusively true, but it is interesting that many points of Jewish culture, Roman rule and religious practices are true alongside the Jesus factoids. Sure, things get embellished, but these ideas are foundational to studying any ancient figure so it’s fair to apply them to Jesus.

Ehrman underscores that these methods are not unique to studying Jesus—they are foundational to historical research on any ancient figure. By applying them to the evidence for Jesus, historians can move beyond subjective opinion and build a case grounded in widely accepted scholarly practice. This methodological approach, Ehrman argues, is precisely what sets the study of the historical Jesus apart from myth or legend, laying a foundation for more nuanced debates about what can be known of his life and impact.

Then you get to the cultural and historical impact of Jesus and His teachings. I agree with NT Wright that the amazing cultural changes in the early church actually point to a strong belief in the resurrection. I also think that the theological embellishments we get to the story are also evidence of early witnesses trying to make sense of the resurrection. But you don’t have to take it as far as I do. The rapid spread of Jesus’ peculiar sayings and teachings suggest there was a real figure at the center of it all. Some of the sayings are even in Aramaic, or at least make more sense in Aramaic than in Greek. That doesn’t prove anything, but it points to an actual speaker of Aramaic named Jesus.

Which leads me to a very unscholarly but deeply held belief of mine, that Jesus just feels real. The story is so odd, it’s not how you’d make it up unless you were forced to include some things because they were known fact. The crucifixion as mentioned above is one such embarrassing fact. But it’s weird that a group of people suddenly started believing that the last shall be first, and wealth is dangerous, and peacemakers are blessed and any number of radical counter-cultural ideas that would be hard to sell if not attached to a beloved historical figure. Jesus’ parables are shocking and subvert cultural ideas of the time. Why would you make up a religious figure who hangs out with sinners, preaches that God loves the outcast and then dies? It’s a weird story with weird details to make up.

The Christians I see making up weird stories today base those stories on wealth, greed, American exceptionalism, fear and well, a bunch of stuff you’d expect. Jesus instead subverts our expectations at every turn, and I think that’s a great reason to think the stories are true. Maybe what the mythicists are chafing against is the modern, false, white Christian nationalist view of Jesus. That Jesus never existed. Jesus would not recognize himself in the words of these alt-right racists. Jesus would be shocked at the bids made by mega-church, conservative, prosperity gospel styles of preachers. The real historical Jesus doesn’t argue against abortion, immigration or taxes; Jesus argues for mercy, compassion, love, forgiveness. There is a real conflict between His beliefs and values and the values of so-called Christians today.

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[1] It was brought to my attention once that the meaning of the phrase, “no doy,” is not always apparent to people who didn’t grow up in California, although I think Los Angeles slang tends to reach universality through the acculturative power of film, music and television. In a Spanglish speaking world, the phrase, “no doy,” which means, “I don’t give,” in Spanish, and is intuitively understood as a refusal to help. Because of its proximity to the more common American English phrase, “no duh,” California kids started using it to mean, “obviously,” long before I arrived on the playgrounds. Now, other parts of the USA may use this phrase, too, but since I’ve had to explain it previously, I thought I would offer this brief etymology here.