Want some evidence?

“Jesus is just make-believe.” I see so many of these statements on social media that I’ve lost count. I just want to ask, “How do you know? Where are you getting your information from?” By the way, when you ask that, most people don’t have an answer other than “everybody knows that.”

Is there a more talked about person over the last 2,000-plus years than Jesus Christ, a man who said He was the Son of God? It’s a legitimate question because the Bible is still the bestselling book in the world. With that in mind, I see a lot of folks on social media who just don’t believe Jesus was real.

There’s a lot of evidence that testifies of a man named Jesus, put to death at the hands of the Jewish people. One of the biggest questions on the internet these days is “Where is the archaeological evidence of Christ’s existence?” Well, that got me thinking because I didn’t have an answer for it, so I did what any good journalist does. I dug into it.

There's historical evidence this happened.

After looking into the question, I found something interesting. In A.D. 70, GotQuestions.org says the Romans invaded, destroyed Jerusalem, and most of Israel, slaughtered its inhabitants, and burned whole cities to the ground in the process. The Romans were brutal and knew what they were doing. The Romans literally wanted to wipe you from existence.

Let’s follow that to its conclusion: If the entire civilized portions of Israel were razed to the ground, wouldn’t that most likely take out the evidence for Jesus Christ? Many people who witnessed the life of Jesus and His works were slaughtered. That likely limited the amount of surviving eyewitness testimonies of Jesus.

Even though His ministry activities were largely confined to a small portion of the Roman Empire, there’s still a striking amount of information available in secular (non-Christian) sources. The earliest of those sources is the Roman historian Tacitus.

Tacitus

He was considered one of the most accurate historians of the ancient world. His writings mention “superstitious Christians,” who suffered under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. One of his earliest writings, titled “Annals,” is one of the first non-Christian sources verifying the crucifixion of Jesus. “Nero fastened the guilt…on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus (Christ), from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty (crucifixion) during the reign of Tiberius.”

Tacitus also wrote about Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians. An enormous fire broke out in Rome in 64 A.D., and Tacitus wrote that Nero was suspected of starting it so he could blame the Christians and put them to death in the most awful ways.

Pliny the Younger

Another source of evidence about Jesus and early Christianity is found in letters that Pliny the Younger, a governor in Asia Minor, wrote to Emperor Trajan around A.D. 112. Bethinking.org says he was looking for Trajan’s advice on conducting legal proceedings against those accused of being Christians.

Pliny talked about the information he’d learned about these early Christians. “They were in a habit of meeting on a fixed day of the week before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath to never commit wicked deeds like fraud, theft, adultery, lying, or being untrustworthy.”

I want you to look at the most important part of that letter: “As to a God.” It looks as though Pliny thought that Christians were worshipping an actual person instead of a God. Doesn’t that agree with what the New Testament says when it calls Jesus “God and Man?”

Thallus

Thallus might technically be one of the earliest secular writers ever to mention Jesus. Unfortunately, he’s such an ancient writer that his work no longer exists. The website coldcasechristianity.com says a historian named Julius Africanus, writing around 221 A.D., quotes Thallus and tries to explain away the darkness that occurred during the crucifixion of Jesus.

Remember in Matthew 27: 45 From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46 About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,[a] lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).[b]

51 At that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. 

Here’s Thallus and his reaction: “On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness, and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down.” Africanus said “This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me, an eclipse of the sun.” (Julius Africanus, Chronography, 18:1)

By the way, the NASA website says a solar eclipse lasts from ten seconds to about 7.5 minutes, so that argument doesn’t appear to hold much water.

I see some consistency between Matthew’s description of the darkness during the crucifixion and the words of Thallus. Keep in mind that Thallus was NOT a Christian. He was simply reporting some amazing events unfolding before his eyes.

Josephus

Josephus writes about Jesus in much more detail than any other non-Biblical historian in his “The Antiquities of the Jews.” Under the Roman emperor Vespasian, Josephus was allowed to write a history of the Jews. This history includes three passages about Christians, one in which he describes the death of John the Baptist, one in which he mentions the execution of James, calling him ‘the brother of Jesus,’ and a final passage that describes Jesus as a wise man and Messiah.

Cold Case Christianity says, “There is much legitimate controversy about the writing of Josephus because the first discoveries of his writings are late enough to have been re-written by Christians, who were accused of making additions to the text. So, to be fair, we’ll examine a scholarly reconstruction stripped of Christian embellishment.”

“Now around this time lived Jesus, a wise man. For he was a worker of amazing deeds and was a teacher of people who gladly accept the truth. He won over both many Jews and many Greeks. Pilate, when he heard him accused by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, (but) those who had first loved him did not cease (doing so). To this day the tribe of Christians named after him has not disappeared” (This neutral reconstruction follows closely the one proposed by John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: The Roots of the Problem and the Person).

Talmud

Last but not least, let’s talk about the Jewish Talmud, a collection of rabbinical writings spread between A.D. 70-500. There are only a few clear references to Jesus, but this seems solid.

“On the eve of Passover, Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald…cried, “He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy.” The Babylonian Talmud, transl. by I. Epstein (London: Soncino, 1935), vol. III, Sanhedrin 43a, 281, cited in Habermas, The Historical Jesus, 203.

In case you were wondering, “Yeshu” or “Yeshua” is how the name Jesus gets pronounced in Hebrew.

Last but not Least

How many people have died for faith in Christ? Thousands. Millions? People don’t die for a lie, but they will surely die for something they believe in.

There's so much evidence supporting this Book!

The evidence is there, and I’d like to encourage you to take a look. A man named Jesus did walk the Earth, claimed to be the Son of God, and declared Himself the only way to God. Either He was completely insane or He was and is exactly who He claims to be.

Don’t take my word for it. Look into it yourself. You have nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain.