Is there any historical evidence for Jesus? Yes. There are a few mentions of him in other documents, but they all come from after he died. If you can ignore the biases in the Bible, then that is evidence as well.
The vast majority of scholars believe that Jesus was a real, historical person. Yet, because Jesus has become such an enormous symbol of one of the largest religions on Earth, we tend to fall into thinking that he is just a myth, invented for the purpose of Christianity. If people say that he was a real person, then we ask for evidence. I think that there are a few problems with this question I have asked myself. Firstly, when Jesus was alive, during the first century BC, far fewer things were written down than are now. Something had to be a fairly large event for it to be written down. There were no newspapers, very few books, and few records were kept. We didn’t really become a society of writing down so much until after the printing press was invented. The fact that there are so few records of one man’s life is no surprise given the time that he lived in. Jesus was a poor man of not much importance to the Roman society he lived in. Secondly, Jesus has become far more than he probably ever was when he was alive. We are thinking about the version of Jesus we have now and planting that version on the Jesus who was alive at the time.
So, what historical evidence is there for Jesus? Well, the first source would be the Bible, although a lot of people don’t count this as evidence. The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written from AD 70 to 110, so a half century to a century after Jesus was crucified. The first of the gospels to be written was Mark. There is an obvious gap between his writing it and the death of Jesus, but it is thought that he was providing a type of biography of Jesus. What he based his writings on is probably unknown, but he uses language that shows he is probably referring to written accounts from Jesus’s life, possibly first-hand accounts. He was also writing to explain a historical figure, not to inflate a person. He had no idea what Christianity would become. The letters of Paul are also used to prove the existence of Jesus. Paul wrote his first letters in 48 AD, a mere twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s crucifixion. He wrote to spread the teachings of Jesus and he treated him as a historical figure. As well as this, he was writing as an eye witness. The writers of the Bible were obviously biased and the things they attribute to Jesus may not all be true, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t real.
Then there are two other written mentions of Jesus. The first comes from a Jewish historian called Flavius Josephus. He wrote a twenty volume history of the Jewish people in AD 94 and he mentions Jesus in it twice. In the first instance he mentions him in reference to his brother James and in the second he writes a little more, but there is evidence to show that the second reference was rewritten by early Christians to make it more positive. They may have altered it, but the fact that it was already a reference to Jesus is true. The second account of Jesus comes from the Roman historian Tacitus in AD 115. He mentions that Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate and that he was the founder of the Christian sect. He writes it as a historical fact and he would have had no reason to make anything up.
The most likely evidence for a historical Jesus is in the character itself. If the early Christians were going to invent a leader of their sect, they wouldn’t have chosen a simple carpenter. Also, they wouldn’t have invented someone who was Jewish. There was a strong suspicion of Judaism in the Roman Emperor and there was a lot of animosity between the Jewish people and the early Christians as well. Also, they probably wouldn’t have designed such a humiliating and painful death for their leader if Jesus wasn’t real and the crucifixion hadn’t happened.
In the early days of the Christian church people argued for against the teachings of Jesus and followed or persecuted the Christians for following Jesus, but nobody ever claimed that he was a made-up figure. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crucifix-illustration-208216/
Ssources
https://bigthink.com/thinking/was-jesus-real/
https://www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/new-testament/context
https://www.bethinking.org/is-the-bible-reliable/mark-reliability