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In this episode Trent shows how one claim about Jesus’ historical status backfires on Christians.
Counterfeit Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors
Transcription:
Trent:
It’s great when Christians stand up to extreme skeptics who say Jesus never existed, but sometimes they make a misstep and say things about Jesus that aren’t true and it makes them look historically naive. So in today’s episode, we’ll find out what that misstep is and how to make a case for the historicity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But before we do that, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and support us at trenthornpodcast.com where you get access to bonus content and help us keep creating awesome episodes. All right, so I’ll see Christians respond to critics who say Jesus never existed with memes like this one that say Jesus is the most recorded figure in the ancient world or videos where people say Jesus’ life is one of the best established facts of the ancient world, but that’s not true. And you risk getting exposed by a skeptic who knows how the evidence stacks up.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of this.
CLIP:
If you asked your friends who are thinking this way, if they think Alexander the Great is a fairytale, what would they say? If you ask that if George Washington, the first president of our country was a fairy tale, would they say yes, he’s a fairytale? Both of those, Alexander the Great and George Washington, the amount of historical documentation about them is paltry compared to what we have about Jesus. We have documents not just from Jesus’s closest friends, the apostles, right? The Apostle Peter, Apostle Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus, the apostles. We have documentation about Jesus from his enemies.
Trent:
Except we don’t have documents from Jesus’ first century enemies like the Sanhedrin or Pontius Pilate. The so- called report from Pilate to Emperor Hiberius is a well-known fourth or fifth century forgery. And we obviously have more evidence for the life of George Washington than we have for the life of Jesus Christ. We have portraits of George Washington, his diary entries, his personal papers, contemporary newspaper accounts, and accounts from British newspapers and commanders who oppose Washington, and we don’t have similar sources like that for Jesus. That doesn’t mean we have bad evidence for Jesus. It just means we should not overstate our case about the good evidence for Jesus we do have by claiming it’s the best evidence of all the cases. In this next clip, Jeremiah Johnson does this when talking about the evidence for Jesus’ death by crucifixion.
CLIP:
It’s the best established fact of the ancient world Jesus death by Roman crucifixion.
Trent:
What does that mean?
CLIP:
Meaning that if we can’t know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record, we shouldn’t believe anything from history at all. We have as much evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus that we have from Roman empires or the Roman emperors of the same period.
Trent:
Now on the one hand, you can say that if you follow the standards of history, then we can be confident Jesus was crucified just as we can be confident in many other ancient events and skepticism of Jesus would cause us to reject much of ancient history if you’re being consistent. John Dominic Crossen, for example, denies Jesus’s resurrection, but still says, “Jesus’ death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be. ” On the other hand, Jesus’s crucifixion is not the best established fact of the ancient world. For example, there’s more evidence for Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon and starting the Civil War between himself and Pompe than for Jesus being crucified in Jerusalem. This includes evidence from other historians alive at the time, letters from Caesar’s enemy, Pompe, and testimony from Caesar himself who records the event in his work entitled Civil War.
Caesar also minted coins commemorating the event with an elephant on them to Be homage to Hannibal who accomplished a similar feat when he crossed the Alps. Now, in other videos, Christians say that Jesus is the best documented figure of the ancient world because there are more manuscript copies of the New Testament than other ancient works. Like this video comparing 12 manuscripts for Julius Caesar to 25,000 manuscripts for Jesus.
CLIP:
You want to know how many Jesus Christ has?This is unbelievable. 5,800. I was reading that. I’m like, “That can’t be right.” So I researched it. 5,800 Greek that we have in total out of all of them, over 25,000. Unbelievable blew my mind. And they were written a few years after his death to a century, to a hundred years. So he has the most out of anybody wouldn’t even come close. Plus, they were written closer to his life than any other person alive.
Trent:
The number of manuscript copies of a text only tells us the reliability of how the text was transmitted through history, not the number of sources that gave us the text in the first place. For massively influential figures in the ancient world like Julius Caesar, we have many different sources, including sources from when he was alive. We may not have as many manuscript copies of those sources as we do for the New Testament, but we have enough to reliably know what those sources said about someone like Julius Caesar. That’s why I tend to bring up manuscript evidence of the New Testament, not as a positive argument for Christianity, but as a response to critics who say we can’t possibly know what the original New Testament document said and that they’re just copies of copies of copies. If you don’t trust the New Testament that has much better manuscript evidence than other ancient works, then you couldn’t trust anything from the ancient world or do any ancient history.
However, it is absolutely not true to say that these 25,000 manuscripts were all written within a century of Jesus’ life. The majority of manuscript copies of the New Testament come from the Middle Ages. According to this graph of the 5,800 Greek manuscripts in the New Testament, only about 100 come from the first three centuries after the crucifixion, and almost all of these are partial fragments, but that’s not surprising because the fragmentary nature of manuscripts is true for most ancient works. Homer’s Iliad, for example, was written in the eighth century before Christ, and a few fragments of it can be dated to within 500 years of Homer, but the oldest complete copy of the Iliad, a manuscript scholars call Venitus A, was written in the 10th century AD, 1800 years later. This stands in sharp contrast to the first complete copy of the New Testament written just 300 years after the time of the apostles.
Biblical scholar F.F. Bruce put it bluntly. “There is no body of ancient literature in the world, which enjoys such a wealth of good textural attestation as the New Testament. And we have to remember a lot of the New Testament was quoted in the writings of the church father, so we have further corroborating evidence of what these original documents said. But this manuscript evidence doesn’t mean that Jesus was more documented than other ancient figures at the time, because as I said, manuscript copies only told us how stories were preserved, not how they were composed. Of course, we would not expect an itinerant preacher from a backwoods province like Judea, Jesus, to have lots of people writing about him. I mean, Pontius Pilate was a procurator of a whole region, and yet archeological evidence for him was not found until 1961, and only one non-Jewish Roman source, Tacsitus, mentions Pilate, and that is in relation to Pilate being the one who sentenced Christ to death.
Now, some skeptics like to list dozens of ancient historians and say Jesus Christ never existed because these ancient non-Christian historians never mentioned Jesus. However, some of the people on this list do mention Jesus like Tacsitus and Josephus and probably Satonius. But the others also never mentioned Christians, but obviously Christians existed because Pliny the Younger talks about how to police them in an early second century letter, and we have first century writings from Christians like St. Paul, which no serious scholar doubts. That means we can be confident that Jesus and his followers, Christians, existed in the first century, even though these ancient non-Christian historians did not mention either of them. And for many of these writers, Jesus wasn’t a subject they would be concerned about. For example, Palsanis and Pompanmello wrote Greek and Roman geographies. Talami and plenty of the elder were scientists who recorded things about the natural world.
Theono Smirna, Favorinis and Gelius wrote about philosophy, Hermoganis, Quintillian, and Deochrisisum focused on things like speechmaking and Kalamella only wrote about different types of trees in the Roman Empire. I could go on and on, but you get the point. We can say though that Jesus was well documented relative to other members of the non-ruling class of his time. Now, as we saw, Tacidus mentions Jesus being crucified and the Jewish historian Josephus testifies to Jesus having a relative that was executed and that Jesus accomplished startling deeds and won over people before he was killed, but that his followers did not abandon him. Plus, as I mentioned in a recent episode that I’ll link to below, new evidence suggests that Josephus’s account of Jesus is completely accurate. And the older view that it is a partial forgery doesn’t account for all the data. Finally, it’s prejudicial to not include the authors of the New Testament as ancient witnesses who attest to the existence of Jesus.
Just because some of these sources describe miracles doesn’t mean we should reject them because many ancient historians believed in the supernatural and things like omens, but we don’t throw out their works. Instead, we weigh the evidence for unusual claims and see which unusual claims are more likely to be true. And the most unusual and extraordinary claim would be that a massive movement in the first century that resulted in churches rapidly coming into existence throughout the Roman Empire, along with documents describing the founder of this movement being widely distributed in this community, even though the founding figure of this movement never existed in the first place. Those who deny Jesus existed, answer this argument by saying that Christianity began with a few people like Peter and Paul having hallucinatory visions about a heavenly Jesus. Over the next few decades, these stories turned into legends about an earthly Jesus, but the earliest sources we have about Jesus, the writings of St. Paul, describe Jesus having an earthly existence.
Paul makes it clear that Jesus was a man who is descended from David, he was born of a woman, had a last supper with his disciples, was crucified and rose from the dead, and Paul knew those who knew Jesus, including James, one of the Lord’s own brothers, which a Hebrew Greek speaker could use to mean cousin or half brother. Now it’d be difficult to have all of that if you never existed in the first place. That’s why no one in the entire history of Christianity, not even early pagan critics like Kelsus or Lucian argued for a mythical Jesus. That didn’t happen until the 18th century. Alternate theories about Christianity plagued the church for century after century, but mythicism, the claim Jesus never existed at all, is not among them. The evidence is clear that Christians always believed in an historical Jesus because such a person really did exist and we can know basic facts about him, such as that he had a group of dedicated followers and that he had a reputation for being a miracle worker.
These are bedrock facts that even skeptical scholars admit to being part of our foundational understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. So when debating people on the evidence for Jesus, you should point out that the claim Jesus never existed is pseudoscience rejected by basically everyone, even academic non-Christians. According to respected New Testament scholar Bard Erman, the view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet. And because of this, you don’t need to overstate your case by saying Jesus is the best attested figure of the ancient world. You just need to say we have well established evidence that Jesus of Nazareth lived, died by crucifixion, and as I’ve shown in other videos, so I’ll link to below, his followers claim to see him alive after his death. The question then becomes what theory best accounts for all of this data without trying to explain away the unique impact of Jesus of Nazareth.
If you like more resources related to today’s episode, I recommend my book Counterfeit Christ linked in the description below. And I hope you can join us April 11th in Dallas for our evangelism conference, which myself and over 30 other Catholic creators will be attending. Over 60% of tickets have already been sold, so get yours today at conferenceoftrent.com. Or if you can’t attend, consider supporting this channel at trenhornpodcast.com. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.