Paul Maier
The emporer Tiberius. His image was on the coin Jesus referred to in Matthew 22:18–21, when he said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s.” Istanbul Museum.
No figure in all of history has provoked such extreme reactions. While believers acclaim Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and Savior of the World, others have disputed or misinterpreted His teachings, rejected them entirely, or even denied that the man ever existed. It hardly seems possible, in view of the overwhelming evidence, that His historicity should be questioned or denied, and yet I continue to get messages on the internet from skeptics, apparently blind to the facts and motivated by some forlorn hope that there never was a Jesus, who parrot the worthless arguments of past atheists. Sad.
Today, the vast majority of non-Christians share, in various ways, the following opinion: Jesus certainly existed, but He was not who believers claim He was, since His words and deeds were augmented or invented by Gospel writers many years after the events they reported, a time frame in which myth had overlaid the facts.
Many wonderous events in Jesus’ ministry occurred on or near the Sea of Galilee, a place one can still visit 2000 years later.
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The Jordan River as it emerges from the Sea of Galilee. The hills in the background are the Golan Heights.
Quite apart from a believer’s vested interest in the reliability of the New Testament record, anyone interested in the past should wish to know if the accounts of Jesus that have come down to us in the Gospels are trustworthy or have been encrusted with fantasy. Comparing Biblical and non-Biblical evidence—the sacred and the secular—is one important way to gauge the reliability of evidence on Jesus. In fact, such a comparison yields three added benefits by providing: 1) additional color, depth, and dimension to the New Testament accounts; 2) solutions to some of the difficulties in those accounts; and 3) a means of filling in some of the gaps in the Gospel records.
The secular sources most helpful for this purpose are geography, archaeology, and extra-Biblical historical evidence. In using these, we will see that the New Testament accounts of Jesus, far from being warped by myth, report just as historical a personality as the Roman emperor Augustus in whose reign He was born. This statement—so obvious to Christians and the fair-minded anywhere—needs to be emphasized in a secular world in which improbable claims from competing, non-historically-based, religious systems have created a link in many minds between religion and mythology. Instead, Christians have every reason to welcome when and where questions about Jesus, since they can be answered so easily.
Jesus and Time
Mythical personalities and events are not open to questions involving time. One does not ask, for example, “In what year did Zeus and Hera get married?” Historical figures, on the other hand, should be generally datable within a reasonable range of years if the sources provide enough evidence. After the Patriarchs in the Old Testament and across the rest of the Bible, such dating of most major personalities and episodes in Scripture is not only possible but even expected in our Biblical dictionaries and commentaries.
Jesus of Nazareth is a case in point. His Nativity can reliably be placed between June and December of 5 BC (Maier 1989). The start of His public ministry is also datable, thanks to Luke, who is at pains to give us a specific time for the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry and therefore of Jesus’ also:
In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert (Lk 3:1).
Since the dates of the Roman emperor Tiberius are “set in concrete” by ancient historians, Luke has provided six documentary “footnotes,” as it were, to fix the year as AD 28/29, according to our present calendar (of which Luke knew nothing in his day). This is unusual precision for an ancient source, especially when compared with the hazy chronologies of such other religious luminaries as Gautama Buddha or Zoroaster.
As for the close of Jesus’ earthly ministry, various chronological clues in the New Testament and surrounding evidence point to 3 April, AD 33, as the date for His crucifixion at Golgotha (Maier 1968). Accordingly, the chronological references involving Jesus presuppose Him to be an authentic personality living at a specific time in history.
Jesus and Place
Since reality involves a “time-space continuum,” geographical considerations are also important in weighing the historicity of Jesus. Legends and mythologies have settings in Shangri-La, Nirvana, Never-Never lands, Oz, Valhalla or other illusory places, while the holy books of some “made-in-America” religious systems supply dubious names of imaginary locations that have never been discovered or referred to anywhere else.
The Old and New Testaments, on the other hand, are studded with authentic place names: names of countries, provinces, regions, cities, and villages; names of seas, lakes, rivers, brooks, and streams; names of mountains, hills, plateaus, plains, and valleys. Such proper names fill our Bible dictionaries, and all of them are standing challenges to any who doubt that the stage for the many divine-human encounters in Scripture is rock solid.
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Most of the place names in Scripture are readily identifiable today, and many have been excavated archaeologically. In the case of Jesus, His journeys through life are traced by armies of pilgrims to the Holy Land to this day, from His birth at Bethlehem in Judea, through His youth at Nazareth in Galilee, across His public ministry in Capernaum, Samaria, and Judea, along His travels to Tyre, Sidon, and Caesarea-Philippi, and on to the culmination of His ministry in Jerusalem. All the locations associated with Jesus are authentic and situated just as described in the New Testament. The Pool of Siloam, for example, where Jesus healed the blind man of John 9, still exists in Jerusalem and still contains water, as does the Pool of Bethesda (Jn 5).
Following Jesus’ ministry, St. Paul’s mission journeys are so accurately described by Luke in the Book of Acts and Paul’s own letters that the itineraries can be confirmed today as absolutely accurate both in terms of location and in order of place names. From the Patriarchs in the Old Testament, then, to the apostles in the New, God’s people always seemed to be moving from one place to the next. But such restless travelers also served a higher purpose that they could hardly have envisioned at the time: they provided authentic locational bases that are very helpful for gauging the reliability of the Bible in general and the life and ministry of Jesus in particular. The stage for the many, colorful Biblical episodes is very solid indeed.
All time and place references associated with Jesus of Nazareth, then, presuppose an authentic personality, living at a definite time in history, and moving between specific sites that easily can be identified 2000 years later.
Archaeology and Jesus
Life stories pervaded by myth, like the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, are notoriously deficient in terms of any “hard evidence” that they leave behind by way of artifacts above or below ground. In the case of Jesus and His times, however, scientific archaeology, though a very young discipline, has delivered a spectacular amount of hard evidence from the ancient world that correlates admirably with information inside the New Testament. A whole series of articles would be possible on this theme alone, as, indeed, journals like Bible and Spade or Biblical Archaeology Review can more than attest. However, a brief listing, limited to discoveries relating directly to the life of Jesus, must suffice.
The census edicts of Augustus cited at the beginning of Luke’s version of the Nativity are borne out by an inscription at Ankara, Turkey, the famous Res Gestae (“Things Accomplished”), in which the Roman emperor proudly claims to have taken a census three times. That husbands/fathers had to register their families by returning to their home villages for the Roman census is also mandated by several census papyri discovered in Egypt.
In John 9:6, Jesus told the blind beggar, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.” So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. The pool of Siloam still receives water delivered through an 1800 ft (548.6 m) long tunnel carved under Jerusalem during Hezikiah’s reign (2 Kgs 20:20).
That Herod the Great ruled at the time Jesus was born is demonstrated by the numerous excavations of his massive public works in the Holy Land, including the great Temple in Jerusalem cited so frequently in the Gospels. When Jesus’ disciples exclaimed, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” (Mk 13:1), the huge ashlars at the Western Wall and elsewhere bear mute testimony today to the accuracy of the New Testament record.
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The inscription on this 2 x 3 ft stone verifies the name of Pontius Pilate. It was found in Caesarea in 1961.
That Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, ruled Galilee is shown in similar digs at Sepphoris and Tiberias, where a stadium he built has just been discovered. Coins from these and other Herodian rulers are a commonplace in numismatics.
As for Jesus’ public ministry, parts of the foundation of the synagogue at Capernaum where He taught still exist below the present ruins of the fourth-century synagogue there. The remains of Peter’s house at Capernaum, where Jesus cured the paralytic let down through the roof, have been uncovered. The house was later converted into an octagonal Christian sanctuary, and the plaster on its inner walls contains graffiti in nine languages, doubtless inscribed by visiting pilgrims.
In 1986, the hull of a first-century boat that plied the waters of the Sea of Galilee in Jesus’ time was discovered buried in newly exposed sea bottom, since a drought that spring had dropped the lake’s water level. Carefully excavated by marine archaeologists, the liberated hull was surrounded by a fiberglass cocoon and brought to a specially constructed pool so that the wood could be resubmerged and not dry to powder. Carbon-14 tests determined that it was ca. 2000 years old, in other words, the very sort of craft that Jesus and His disciples used. We now have new information on how Jesus could have slept through a storm during the famous episode of the stilling of the tempest (Mk 4:35 ff.), as well as the pillow or cushion on which He slept. The boat hull has since been permeated with preservative resins, and can now be seen at Kibbutz Ginnosar at the northwestern corner of the Sea of Galilee (Wachsmann 1988).
Relating to Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem, an ancient flight of stairs down to the Brook Kidron has been excavated, doubtless used by Jesus and His disciples on the evening of Maundy Thursday when they made their way to Gethsemane at the base of the Mount of Olives, where ancient olive trees still thrive. An inscription naming His judge on Good Friday, Pontius Pilate, was discovered at Caesarea in 1961, giving the lie to critics in the last century who claimed that Pilate was only a legendary figure (Frova 1961). The very bones of the chief prosecutor at Jesus’ trial, the high priest Joseph Caiaphas, came to light inside an ossuary—a small stone chest for skeletal remains—that was accidentally discovered inside a burial cavern in 1990, the first bones of a Biblical personality ever discovered (Greenhunt 1992; Reich 1992).
That victims were nailed to crosses, as in Jesus’ case, was proven when another ossuary was opened north of Jerusalem in 1968, and the heel bones of a 24-to-28-year-old man inside were transfixed with a 7 in iron spike (Davis 2002). Burial in tombs closed up with rolling stone disks is more than apparent today in similar sepulchers carved into hillsides in Judea and even Galilee.
Roman road flanked by mosaic sidewalks at Sepphoris.
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In addition, many of the sites in Jesus’ ministry, such as Bethsaida, Nazareth, Chorazin, Capernaum, Caesarea Philippi, Bethany, and, of course, Jerusalem are in process of excavation, promising even more archaeological discoveries relating to the life of Jesus. Other sites that Jesus most probably frequented as a youth, such as Sepphoris in Galilee, may well part the curtains on His so-called “silent years” and offer an urban dimension to the essentially rural horizons associated with His ministry. If the past is any precedent, almost all of these will confirm the New Testament accounts.
The archaeological supports in the case of Jesus’ greatest follower, Paul of Tarsus, are especially impressive. Ruins in Cyprus, Asia Minor, Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome and elsewhere all bear out the many references to Paul in the New Testament.
As hard evidence from the past, “the very stones cry out” the reliability of the Biblical record on Jesus. It is amusing to note that m any of the last century’s most trenchant critics of Jesus and the New Testament refused at first even to consider the results of archaeology—so counter to their opinions was its evidence! Today, no one—friend or foe of the faith—would be stupid enough to hold so foolish an attitude. The best that Biblical minimalists, as they are called, can now do is to dispute inscriptions, claim fraudulent “planting” of evidence, or generate time grids that differ radically from archaeological standards.
The so-called “Jesus boat,” found in the Sea of Galilee and dated to the first century AD.
History and Jesus
Mythical personalities are not involved in authentic episodes from the past, and so, while their names may appear in legend, they are absent in histories. In the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, however, there are many points of tangency between His record in the New Testament and the surrounding history of His times. Just as the Gospels are studded with authentic geographical locations, they are also full of genuine personalities who are well known from secular sources outside the Biblical record, including some that are even hostile to Christianity.
All of the following are New Testament personalities about whom we find even more information in purely secular ancient historical records:
• Roman emperors: Caesar Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius
• Roman governors: Quirinius, Pontius Pilate, Sergius Paulus, Gallio, Felix, Festus
• Local rulers: Herod the Great, Archelaus, Herod Antipas, Philip, Herod Agrippa I, Herod Agrippa II, Lysanias, Aretas IV
• High priests: Annas, Joseph Caiaphas, Ananias
• Prominent women: Herodias, Salome, Bernice, Drusilla
• Prominent men: John the Baptist, James the Just, Gamaliel
In some cases, the additional, non-Biblical, information on these personalities is immense. For example, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37–100) supplies about a thousand times as much data on Herod the Great as does Matthew’s Gospel.
In other cases, the secular facts are indispensable. Were it not for Josephus, we would not know that the dancing daughter of Herodias who secured the beheading of John the Baptist was named Salome. Everyone assumes, of course, that she is so identified in the Gospels, but she is not.
Again, the New Testament does not tell us what became of Jesus’ half-brother, James the Just of Jerusalem, the first bishop of the is Christian church (Acts 15). Josephus, however, gives us the details of how he was stoned to death by the high priest Ananas, son of Annas, and the Sanhedrin in AD 62 (Antiquities 20:200).
In October 2002 it was announced that another ossuary had surfaced in Israel bearing the inscription, in Aramaic: Ya ‘akov bar Yosef akhui diYeshua, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The ossuary and its inscription both appear to be authentic and derive from the first century AD, although the three names involved may or may not be the familiar New Testament personalities. Against such identification is the fact that all three names are common for that era, and the context of the ossuary has been hopelessly lost because it was purchased on the Jerusalem antiquities market after its bone contents had been discarded. Supporting a Biblical identification is the small percentage of names that would have exactly the proper cited relationship, and the fact that a brother’s name is also included in the inscription, indicating his importance. If the three are Biblical in fact, this will mark the first time Jesus’ name has appeared in stone from the first century.
Twice Josephus refers to Jesus Christ. His second reference concerns the episode involving James, whom he defines as “the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ” (Antiquities 20:200). But earlier, in the middle of his reports on Pontius Pilate’s administration, Josephus has a longer passage on Jesus. For centuries this has been dismissed as a Christian interpolation, but what is doubtless the original wording—the so-called Agapian version discovered in 1972 by Professor Schlomo Pines of Hebrew University in Jerusalem—has now been restored (1971). In view of its importance, the entire passage follows:
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At this time there was a wise man called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day (Antiquities 18:63; cf. Maier 1994:269–70, 282–85).
Other non-Biblical, non-Christian ancient references to Christ occur in the pagan Roman authors Cornelius Tacitus (Annals 15:44), Gaius Suetonius (Divus Claudius 25), and Pliny the Younger (Letter to Trajan), as well as in the Jewish rabbinical traditions.
Traces of the Miraculous
The last, in fact, even admit that there was a supernatural dimension involved in Jesus’ ministry! John’s Gospel tells us:
Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know, so that they might arrest Him (11:57).
We may have some idea of how the arrest notice read. A rabbinical tradition recorded in the Talmud spells out an indictment against Yeshu Hannotzri (Hebrew for “Jesus the Nazarene”):
He shall be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and lured Israel into apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf. Anyone who knows where he is, let him declare it to the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem (The Mishnah tractate, Sanhedrin 43a).
The reference to stoning rather than crucifixion is extremely credible. The future tense is used: Jesus had not yet been arrested, and had He been seized anywhere or anytime the Romans were not present, He would most probably have been stoned to death, as in the case of Stephen (Acts 7). Earlier attempts to terminate Jesus had involved stoning, and had the notice said instead, “He shall be crucified,” most scholars would discount it entirely as written after the fact.
Furthermore, the reference to “sorcery” is quite remarkable. By definition, sorcery is something extraordinary or supernatural accomplished with help “from below.” A miracle is the same, though achieved with help “from above.” In both cases, however, the supernatural is conceded. This admission gains even greater importance from the fact that it comes from a hostile source. Positive testimony in a negative or hostile context becomes self-authenticating, an “admission against interest” in legal terms. It would have been understandable if the rabbinic traditions against Jesus had not mentioned the supernatural dimension at all, or regrettable if they had lied about it or denied it, but in honestly conceding it, they provided very powerful evidence for the preternatural in Jesus’ case.
This ossuary (stone chest) contained the bones of Joseph Caiphas, the ruling high priest before whom Jesus was tried.
This arrest notice also totally accords with the Gospel accounts of how Jesus’ enemies responded to His miracles by claiming that they were accomplished not through God but Beelzebul (Lk 11:17; cf. Mt 12:24; Mk 3:22). It was the only way they could try to neutralize the powerful impact Jesus’ miracles had on the people of His day. Clearly, then, this notice is strong evidence for the miraculous.
Other traces of the supernatural dimension in Jesus’ ministry appear in the topography or nomenclature in the Holy Land. Bethany, where Lazarus was raised from the dead, according to John 11, is still called “Betanya” by Israelis. But to the majority Arab population of that Jerusalem suburb, the name of the town is El-Lazariyeh, “The Place of Lazarus.” That name change was known as far back as Eusebius (AD 260–339), the “father of church history,” which is what one might indeed expect if Bethany had witnessed so great a wonder as the dead being raised (Onamasticon).
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A similar instance is a southwestern suburb of Damascus. To this day, that location at the edge of the Syrian capital is named Deraya—”The Vision” in Arabic—because of what happened to Saul (the future St. Paul) at his conversion on the Damascus Road (Acts 9). And this is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Islamic Arabs in Damascus are hardly defenders of the Christian faith! While these topographical examples do not themselves prove the miraculous events at these places, they surely are instances of “fallout” from something quite explosive that must have occurred.
In terms of the ultimate sign—Jesus’ own resurrection—the Easter Gospels and the even earlier records in Paul’s epistles provide powerful circumstantial evidence. The transformation of the apostles from depressed disciples to courageous conquerors for Christ would be impossible had they hatched the story of His resurrection, since “myths don’t make martyrs.” The conversion of many Jewish priests (Acts 6:7), the shift from the Sabbath to Sunday as the day of worship, the existence of the church itself, and many other circumstantial proofs are familiar enough to Christians.
The non-Biblical evidence for the empty tomb, however, is quite intriguing. Neither the Gospels nor the early church paid much attention to the empty tomb because it paled in significance when compared with the resurrection. But if the resurrection truly did happen, the tomb must have been empty as its first symptom. And from non-Biblical, rabbinical, and strong circumstantial evidence, Jesus’ sepulcher can be proven to have been empty on that Sunday morning (Maier 1997:197ff.). To be sure, an empty tomb does not prove a resurrection, but the reverse is certainly true: you can’t have a genuine resurrection without a vacant tomb.
Clear evidence that Christianity developed because of the resurrection comes also from Josephus. In his famous earlier passage on Jesus, the Jewish historian states that the apostles “reported that [Jesus] had appeared to them three days after His crucifixion, and that he was alive” (Antiquities 18:63).
The Roman pagan historian, Tacitus, referring to Jesus’ death (and probably His resurrection) states that the Christian “superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself [Rome]” (Annals 15:44).
Accordingly, the sum total of the geographical, archaeological, and historical-literary evidence from the ancient world dramatically supports the New Testament record not only on the absolute historicity of Jesus, but also on crucial aspects of His extraordinary ministry. The many points of tangency between the Biblical and non-Biblical evidence show corroborative correlation in nearly every instance, the secular facts from the ancient world easily supporting the sacred records. Those who claim otherwise are sadly misinformed, tragically closed-minded, or dishonest.
“When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was extremely large” (Mk 16:4, NASB). This is a rolling-stone before a tomb at Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem.
Bibliography
Davis, J.J.
2002 Rethinking the Crucified Man from Giv’at ha-Mivtar. Bible and Spade 15:119–20.
Frova, A.
1961 L’Iscrizione di Ponzio Pilato a Cesarea. Rendiconti Istituto Lombardo 95:419–34.
Greenhut, Z.
1992 Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family. Biblical Archaeology Review 18.5:8–37.
Maier, P.L.
1968 Sejanus, Pilate, and the Date of the Crucifixion. Church History 37:1–11.
1989 The Date of the Nativity and the Chronology of Jesus’ Life. Pp. 113–30 in Chronos, Kairos, Christos, eds. J. Vardaman and E. M. Yamauchi. Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns.
1994 Josephus—The Essential Works, ed. Grand Rapids MI: Kregel.
1997 In the Fullness of Time. Grand Rapids MI: Kregel.
Pines, S.
1971 An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and Its Implications. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Reich, R.
1992 Caiaphas Name Inscribed on Bone Boxes. Biblical Archaeology Review 18.5:38–44.
Wachsmann, S.
1988 The Galilee Boat—2,000-Year-Old Hull Recovered Intact. Biblical Archaeology Review 14.5:18–33.
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