There are non-Biblical references to Jesus. There are many references to Jesus in the works of Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, and other classical writers.
The 1995 Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica says of these: "These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries."
You may try to bring up opinions and speculations of some modern scholars but they are only pointless doubts and unfounded theorizing. In a sense, they are guilty of the mythmaking of which they falsely accuse the Gospel writers. Some are so eager to feed their own reputation and to link their name to a startling new theory that they fail to examine honestly the evidence about Jesus. In the process, they create a "Jesus" that amounts to a figment of scholarly imagination.
For those who want to find him, the real Jesus can be found in the Bible. It may be interesting to examine social, political, anthropological, and cultural context of Jesus' life and era but the point of scripture is more concerned with describing the character, his message, and role as Redeemer.
It would be nearly impossible for four different writers to describe the same person and consistently paint the same picture of him if that character never really existed.
Historian Michael Grant asks a thought-provoking question: "How comes it that, through all the Gospel traditions without exception, there comes a remarkably firmly-drawn portrait of an attractive young man moving freely about women of all sorts, including the decidedly disreputable, without a trace of sentimentality, unnaturalness, or prudery, and yet, at every point, maintaining a simple integrity of character?" The reasonable answer is that such a man really existed and acted in the way the Bible says. |
