The Ancient Evidence for Jesus! (Pt1)

I’ll start right off with something of a whopper: I’m not sure Jesus existed. 

Boom! Mind blown, right? I read and reviewed a book last year where the author posited, pretty convincingly, that Jesus started out as spiritual being in the minds of early Christians, and only later was a transition made in the minds of most people that he was a real person. 

This, by the way, is a pretty fringe position to take. The historicity of Jesus is the consensus of the vast majority of bible scholars, Christian, non-Christian, it doesn't matter. Almost no one working in the field believes otherwise. 

The fringe group that do question the existence of Jesus are referred to as Mythicists. It's made up mostly of layperson atheists and aren't really held in very high regard by the more scholarly community. But there has been at least a hint of respectability in the position in the past several years. Robert M. Price is a bonafide bible scholar of the highest sort, and he's been on board with this for a while. Richard Carrier, whose book I mentioned reviewing above, is a real-live, Phd'd historian who specializes in ancient Roman history and the birth of Christianity. He's a legit expert. 

There are others, I think you can find a list by clicking here. 

But the Carrier book made an argument that resonated with me for a whole bunch of reasons. And to be honest, I thought Billy the Kid and The Lone Ranger were contemporaries and both equally historical when I was like, 6 or 7 years old.  I mean, both were often portrayed in Western movies or TV shows I watched as a kid. Makes sense. I didn’t really think of it at all after that until I was probably 15 or so and I was sitting in Spanish class and my teacher said that Tonto (the name of The Lone Ranger’s Native American sidekick) meant something similar to ‘stupid.’ Then that Kemosahbee (what Tonto called The Lone Ranger) meant ‘one who knows all.’

I started to think that maybe I’d misunderstood the historicity of the character. I was so sure he was a real person that it never occurred to me consider that he’d been completely fictitious.

So, it doesn’t at all seem impossible to me that something similar could be the case regarding Jesus. I mean, I've been fuzzy on Johnny Appleseed (real) and Paul Bunyan (half-real). Who knows about John Henry, King Arthur or Robin Hood. Hell, I even had an English prof when I was younger claim that Will Shakespeare was a pen name of another playwright of the time.

Point being, when you go back in time a few thousand years, it’s hard to be super sure about anything. Part of the rhetoric I’ve heard from apologists, and even mentioned myself a few times when I was a believer, is that there is more extra-biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for any other famous person of antiquity. I’ve heard specific comparisons to Julius Cesar and Socrates.

So I thought I'd go through all the extra-biblical texts that were contemporaneous* to the time of Christ and see what I can find. So here I am, ready to start. I'm on the fence with the larger argument about the historicity of Jesus, but the extra-biblical evidence, well, think of it as a place for me to collect my thoughts and collect data. Kind of like a wiki that is only for me, but anyone can look at.

I think my list will be roughly chronological, so it may look something like this:

• Thallus ~ 50's - 120 c.e.
• Mara bar Serapion ~ early 70's c.e.
• Josephus ~ early 90's c.e.
• Pliny the Younger  ~ 112 c.e
• Tacitus ~ 116 c.e.
• Suetonius ~ 120 c.e.

First up on the list: Thallus.

The claim: That he wrote of Jesus sometime during the mid-first century (around the time of Paul’s letters) and tried to explain away the darkness that covered the whole world at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion by claiming it was a normal everyday eclipse.

I don’t really engage in debates, at least not in any sort of rigorous type. A great debator can win an argument even when they are factually wrong. It’s an exercise in persuasion, not in rational judgement. I’m more interested in figuring out what is true, or most likely to be true, given the information I have. So I’m not sure if Thallus is ever brought up in apologetic circles as evidence to support the historicity of Jesus. 

However, I can tell you that he shouldn’t be.

In Jesus Outside the New Testament, a book that states unequivocally that Jesus was a real historical person, author Robert E Van Voorst presented this Thallus as “the first ancient writer known to us to express literary opposition to Christianity.” And also slides into the text that he was the only Non-Christian to write of Jesus before the Gospels. (Pg 23)

Sounds pretty cut and dried. But it’s also here that I feel like the Voorst made a leap of logic that I can’t follow. 

For example, what did Thallus say? Oh, no one knows. Turns out his work has been lost to history. What we do have is Julius Africanus telling us a few centuries later that Thallus tried to downplay the darkness that covered the whole world after the crucifixion of Jesus by claiming it was a mere eclipse.

Well, that’s not technically correct. Because the Julius Africanus work I mentioned? Also lost to history. What we actually have is a fragment from a 9th century apologist (Georgius Syncellus) that says Africanus referenced Thallus making this claim.

The problems with this should abundantly obvious. We know almost nothing about Thallus except that Eusebius (the father of early Christian history, who lived and wrote sometime in the 4^th century) said that Thallus wrote a three compendium set on the history of Rome from the fall of Troy (around 1100 b.c.e) to the 167the Olympiad (around 109 b.c.e). How he came to be used in the context of arguing about the darkness that covered the world is unknown, but it seems not only likely to me, but almost certain, that the eclipse that occurred in 29 c.e. in Samaria was recorded. Maybe by Thallus. I don’t care that much about how true that part is, except to say that we know there was a total solar eclipse then in the region (you can review it if you want here SEsearchmap.php).

It's a long way from Jerusalem. But nonetheless. It's the closest real world event I could find where the daytime sky darkened in any unusual way.

This is it! Verified by NASA and recorded by all sorts of record keepers of the time.

I bring this up because as of this writing, I’m less than two weeks away from a total eclipse appearing over my own house. It’s a rare thing. I’m excited and hope it’s not cloudy that day.

So, yeah, I can see an apologist a few hundred years later finding a reference to an eclipse in the region within the vicinity and then he really wanted to that to be the darkness mentioned in Matthew. 

I dunno, that’s about it. If you’re interested, I think every ancient fragment or text that has even mentioned Thallus is listed here (jacoby.html). My take-away is that Thallus is a relatively common name during the first couple of centuries c.e. and that almost every Christian apologist has assumed any mention of Thallus in any ancient text is just assumed to be the same person - even when it is absurd to think so. 

Richard Carrier wrote a very thorough takedown of this line or evidence and showed pretty conclusively that it was ridiculous to consider seriously. Read that here (thallus.html).

In all, I think there is a reason that this isn’t used as clear evidence of the historicity of Jesus. I mean, if there was a real letter, or fragment of one, that referenced Jesus while Jesus was alive - it would turn the world on its ear even if it was simply mundane info (like, “Jesus came to town, ate at a pub, talked for four hours, and declared himself the Christ before leaving the next day”). 

Instead we got a guy nearly a thousand years after Jesus saying he read a thing that was nearly seven-hundred years old that mentioned another thing that was two-hundred years old that said something about an eclipse… it very well may simply be that Thallus did record an eclipse, like I mentioned above, and Christians later ran with the idea that it was a reference to the world falling into darkness. 

Whatever. That isn't evidence. It's wishful thinking. 

*There are none, so I'm going to have to do the best I can