Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (ebook reader browser .TXT) 📗

to look at the sources we do have. I start with a brief survey of sources that are typically appealed to as non-Christian references to Jesus. I will restrict myself to sources that were produced within about a hundred years of when Jesus is traditionally thought to have died since writings after that time almost certainly cannot be considered independent and reliable witnesses to his life but were undoubtedly based simply on what the authors had heard about Jesus, probably from his followers. The same may be true with even the non-Christian references I discuss here, as we will see. For the sake of convenience I will categorize these non-Christian references as Roman, on the one hand, and Jewish, on the other.

Roman References

Within a century of the traditional date of Jesus’s death, he is referred to on three occasions by Roman authors. None of them wrote, as we have seen, during Jesus’s lifetime or even in the first Christian century. They were all writing about eighty to eighty-five years after the traditional date of his death.

Pliny the Younger

The first surviving reference to Jesus by a non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger, the governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Pliny is called “the Younger” in order to differentiate him from his even more famous uncle, Pliny “the Elder,” who is best known to history not as a Roman administrator but as a natural scientist who wrote many scientific tomes that still survive. Pliny the Elder was inveterately curious, as scientists tend to be, and when he learned that Mount Vesuvius was erupting in 79 CE, he decided to get as close as he could in order to investigate. Unfortunately, his ship got too close, and he perished in the fumes. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, also observed the eruption, but from a considerable distance, and wrote about it in one of his surviving works.

Among scholars of early Christianity, the younger Pliny is best known for a series of letters that he wrote later in life to the Roman emperor, Trajan, seeking advice for governing his province. In particular, letter number 10 from the year 112 CE is important, as it is the one place in which Pliny appears to mention the existence of Jesus. The letter is not about Jesus himself; it is dealing with a political problem. In Pliny’s province a law had been passed making it illegal for people to gather together in social groups. This may seem like an odd law, but it had a very practical function. The Roman authorities were afraid that people in that locale might band together for political reasons and that this might lead to armed uprisings. But by forbidding groups from coming together for any purpose whatsoever, the Romans had created a problem, though not one you might expect. The law applied to every social group, including fire brigades. As a result, there were no effective measures in Pliny’s province to deal with the outbreak of fires, and so villages were burning.

In his letter 10 to the emperor Pliny discusses the fire problem, and in that context he mentions another group that was illegally gathering together. As it turns out, it was the local community of Christians.11

Pliny learned from reliable sources that the Christians (illegally) gathered together in the early morning. He provides us with some important information about the group: they included people from a variety of socioeconomic levels, and they ate meals together of common food. Pliny may tell the emperor this because of rumors, which we hear from other later sources, that Christians committed cannibalism. (They did, after all, eat the flesh of the Son of God and drink his blood.) Moreover, Pliny informs the emperor, the Christians “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.”

That is all he says about Jesus: the Christians worshipped him by singing to him. He does not, as you can see, even call him Jesus but instead uses his most common epithet, Christ. Whether Pliny knew the man’s actual name is anyone’s guess. One might be tempted to ask as well whether he knew that Christ was (at one time?) a man, but the fact that he indicates that the songs were offered to Christ “as to a god” suggests that Christ was, of course, something else.

This reference is obviously not much to go on. But it does tell us that there were Christians worshipping someone named Christ in the early second century in the region of Asia Minor. We already knew this, of course, from other (Christian) sources, as we will see in a later chapter. In any event, whatever Pliny knows about Christ he appears to have learned from the Christians who informed him, and so he does not provide us with completely independent testimony that Jesus actually existed, only the testimony of Christians living some eighty years after Jesus would have died. These Christians might have read some of the Gospels, and they certainly heard stories about Jesus. So at the least we can say that the idea of Jesus having existed was current by the early second century, but the reference of Pliny does not provide us with much more than that.

Suetonius

Even less helpful is a reference found in the writings of the Roman biographer Suetonius, often also cited in discussions of the existence of Jesus. Suetonius is most famous for having produced twelve biographies of Roman emperors. His Lives of the Caesar, written in 115 CE, still makes for interesting reading today. It was, in fact, the basis for Robert Graves’s historical novel, I Claudius (1934), on which the even better-known BBC miniseries of the same name was based. It is in Suetonius’s biography of Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41 to 54 CE, that a second reference to Jesus is sometimes thought to occur. Suetonius indicates that at one point in his reign Claudius deported all the Jews from Rome