LIKE MOST AUTHORS, I receive tons of e-mail. Every now and again I receive a query, normally
from a Christian believer, that I find completely puzzling. What is puzzling is my correspondent’s
puzzlement. Many people simply can’t understand why I would teach the Bible in a university
setting if I don’t believe in the Bible.
I find this puzzling because I am so accustomed to the life of the university, where professors
teach all kinds of things they don’t “believe in.” In most major universities, professors of classics
teach the works of Plato, but the professors are not themselves necessarily Platonists, and
professors in political science teach the writings of Karl Marx, but they do not have to be Marxists.
So too English professors teach great literature even though they themselves are not practicing
novelists or poets, and criminologists teach the history of crime, but they aren’t mass murderers. Why should it be different with the Bible? I teach the Bible not because I am personally a
believer in the Bible but because, like all these other topics, it is important. In fact, it is unusually
important. One could easily argue that the Bible is the most important book in the history of
Western civilization. What other book comes even close in terms of its historical, social, and cultural
significance? Who wouldn’t want to know more about a book that has transformed millions of lives
and affected entire civilizations? It is important not only for believers. Far from it. It is important for
all of us—at least for all of us interested in human history, society, and culture.
One could argue as well that Jesus is the most important person in the history of the West,
looked at from a historical, social, or cultural perspective, quite apart from his religious significance.
And so of course the earliest sources of information we have about him, the New Testament Gospels,
are supremely important. And not just the Gospels, but all the books of the New Testament.
I have to admit that when I teach my Introduction to the New Testament course to
undergraduates, I spend more time on Jesus and the Gospels than on the rest of the New Testament,
including the writings of Paul. It is not that Paul is unimportant. Quite the contrary, he too is
enormously significant in every way. But given the choice, I personally am more interested in and
compelled by the Gospels and Jesus. That is not true of many of my friends who teach New
Testament in the colleges, universities, seminaries, and divinity schools throughout North America.
A lot of them are completely enamored with Paul and focus all of their research and a good deal of
their teaching on Paul. Paul too had a tremendous impact on the West, and in many respects his
writings are much more difficult to interpret than the Gospels. Some scholars devote their entire
scholarly lives to trying to fathom the teachings of a single one of Paul’s letters.
Paul, as we will see in this chapter, is highly relevant for establishing the historical existence of
Jesus, as are many other sources outside the Gospels. This chapter will be devoted to this evidence. We will begin our considerations with later sources and then move to the testimony of our earliest
surviving Christian author, Paul.
Later Sources from Outside the New Testament
AT THE OUTSET I should emphatically state the obvious. Every single source that mentions Jesus
up until the eighteenth century assumed that he actually existed. That is true no matter what period
you choose to examine: the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Late Antiquity, and
before. It is true of every source from our earliest periods, the fourth century, the third century, the
second century, and the first century. It is true of every author of every kind, Christian, Jewish, or
pagan. Most striking, it is true not just of those who came to believe in Jesus but also of
nonbelievers in general and of the opponents of Christianity in particular. Many scholars have found
this significant. Not even the Jewish and pagan antagonists who attacked Christianity and Jesus
himself entertained the thought that he never existed. This is quite clear from reading the writings
of the Christian apologists, starting with such authors as the anonymous writer of the Letter to
Diognetus and the more famous writers Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen (all from the second
and early third centuries), all of whom defend Jesus against a number of charges, many of them
scandalous. But they do not drop one hint that anyone claimed he did not exist. The same is clear
from the fragments of writings that still survive from the opponents of the Christians, such as the
Jew Trypho, discussed by Justin, or the pagan philosopher Celsus, cited extensively by Origen. The
idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion. It has no ancient precedents. It was made up in the
eighteenth century. One might well call it a modern myth, the myth of the mythical Jesus. We have already seen that at least seven Gospel accounts of Jesus, all of them entirely or
partially independent of one another, survived from within a century of the traditional date of his
death. These seven are based on numerous previously existent written sources and on an enormous
number of oral traditions about him that can be dated back to Aramaic sources of Palestine, almost
certainly from the 30s of the Common Era. If we stay within those same time restrictions, what can
we say about sources attested from outside the Gospels?
Non-Christian Sources
We should first return to the writings of Josephus and Tacitus. Tacitus almost certainly had
information at his disposal about Jesus, for example, that he was crucified in Judea during the
governorship of Pontius Pilate. Josephus appears as well to have known about Jesus, both some
major aspects of his life and his death under Pontius Pilate. What I did not stress earlier but need to
point out now is that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the pagan Tacitus or the Jewish
Josephus acquired their information about Jesus by reading the Gospels. They heard information
about him. That means the information they gave predated their writings. Their informants were no
doubt Christians, or—even more likely—(non-Christian) people they knew who themselves had heard
stories about Jesus from Christians. It is impossible to know whether these Christians had been
influenced by the sources we have already discussed, but it is completely possible that they
themselves had simply heard stories about Jesus. Indirectly, then, Tacitus and (possibly) Josephus
provide independent attestation to Jesus’s existence from outside the Gospels although, as I stated
earlier, in doing so they do not give us information that is unavailable in our other sources.
Christian Sources
There are also important independent sources among Christian writers from about the same time as
Tacitus, writers who convey information about the historical Jesus and certainly attest to his
existence. They do so without deriving all, or even most, of their information from the Gospel
sources. Three of these are especially significant.
Papias
Papias was a church father of the early second century whose writings survive for us only in
fragments, as they are quoted by later Christian authors.1 From these later sources we learn that
Papias had written a five-volume work called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord; this (very?)
large book is normally thought to have been written around 120–130 CE. We do not know for certain
why Christian scribes did not copy the book and so preserve it for posterity. But it appears that some
of the views that Papias advanced were seen to be offensive or at least naive. The great church
historian of the fourth century, Eusebius, dismissed Papias by saying that he was “a man of very
small intelligence” (Church History 3.39).
Intelligent or not, Papias is an important source for establishing the historical existence of
Jesus. He had read some Gospels although there is no reason to think that he knew the ones that
made it into the New Testament, as I will show in a moment. But more important, he had other
access to the sayings of Jesus. He was personally acquainted with people who had known either the
apostles themselves or their companions. The following quotation of his work, from Eusebius, makes
the point emphatically:
I also will not hesitate to draw up for you, along with these expositions, an orderly account of all
the things I carefully learned and have carefully recalled from the elders; for I have certified
their truth…. Whenever someone arrived who had been a companion of one of the elders, I
would carefully inquire after their words, what Andrew or Peter had said, or what Philip or what
Thomas had said, or James or John or Matthew or any of the other disciples of the Lord, and
what things Aristion and the elder John, disciples of the Lord, were saying. For I did not suppose
that what came out of books would benefit me as much as that which came from a living and
abiding voice.2
Eusebius summarizes what Papias claimed about his sources of knowledge about Jesus, a
passage worth citing at length:
This Papias, whom we have just been discussing, acknowledges that he received the words of
the apostles from those who had been their followers, and he indicates that he himself had
listened to Aristion and the elder John. And so he often recalls them by name, and in his books
he sets forth the traditions that they passed along. These remarks should also be of some use to
us….
And he sets forth other matters that came to him from the unwritten tradition, including
some bizarre parables of the Savior, his teachings, and several other more legendary accounts….
And in his own book he passes along other accounts of the sayings of the Lord from
Aristion, whom we have already mentioned, as well as traditions from the elder John. We have
referred knowledgeable readers to these and now feel constrained to add to these reports
already quoted from him a tradition that he gives about Mark, who wrote the Gospel. These are
his words:
And this is what the elder used to say,
“When Mark was the interpreter [or translator] of Peter, he wrote down accurately
everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds—but not in order. For he neither
heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used
to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of
the Lord’s sayings. And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he
remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose: to leave out nothing that he heard or
to include any falsehood among them.”
So that is what Papias says about Mark. And this is what he says about Matthew:
“And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [or
translated] them to the best of his ability.”
And he set forth another account about a woman who was falsely accused of many sins
before the Lord,3 which is also found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews…. [Eusebius,
Church History 3.39]
This is such a valuable report because Eusebius is quoting, and then commenting on, the actual
words of Papias. Papias explicitly states that he had access to people who knew the apostles of Jesus
or at least the companions of the apostles (the “elders”: it is hard to know from his statement if he is
calling the companions of the apostles the elders or if the elders were those who knew the
companions. Eusebius thinks it is the first option). When these people would come to his city of
Hierapolis in Asia Minor, Papias, as leader of the church, would interview them about what they
knew about Jesus and his apostles. Many conservative Christian scholars use this statement to prove
that what Papias says is historically accurate (especially about Mark and Matthew), but that is going
beyond what the evidence gives us.4 Still, on one point there can be no doubt. Papias may pass on
some legendary traditions about Jesus, but he is quite specific—and there is no reason to think he is
telling a bald-faced lie—that he knows people who knew the apostles (or the apostles’ companions).
This is not eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus, but it is getting very close to that. Where conservative scholars go astray is in thinking that Papias gives us reliable information
about the origins of our Gospels of Matthew and Mark. The problem is that even though he “knows”
that there was an account of Jesus’s life written by Mark and a collection of Jesus’s sayings made by
Matthew, there is no reason to think that he is referring to the books that we call Mark and
Matthew. In fact, what he says about these books does not coincide with what we ourselves know
about the canonical Gospels. He appears to be referring to other writings, and only later did
Christians (wrongly) assume that he was referring to the two books that eventually came to be
included in scripture.5
This then is testimony that is independent of the Gospels themselves. It is yet one more
independent line of testimony among the many we have seen so far. And this time it is a testimony
that explicitly and credibly traces its own lineage directly back to the disciples of Jesus themselves.
Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius was one of the most significant authors of early Christianity from outside the New
Testament. He was bishop of the large and important church of Antioch in Syria and was caught up
in a persecution of Christians that happened there, probably in 110 CE. The persecution had some
kind of official Roman sanction. Ignatius himself was arrested for Christian activities. We do not
know the specific charges that were leveled against him, but he was sentenced to be sent to Rome
and to be executed in the arena by being thrown to the wild beasts. While he was en route to his
martyrdom, he wrote seven letters, which we still have today. Six of these letters are written to
churches of Asia Minor that had sent representatives to meet him on his way and provide moral
support. One other was written to the Christians of Rome urging them, surprisingly enough, not to
interfere in the proceedings against him. Ignatius desperately wanted to die a gory, martyr’s death,
thinking that then he would be a true imitator of Jesus, who also had been convicted and condemned
to a bloody death.
The letters of Ignatius are nothing if not interesting.6 The ones he wrote to the various
churches are filled with exhortations to strive for unity and to follow the leadership of the bishop.
Moreover, they attack the views of Christians who in the opinion of Ignatius represent “false
opinions,” that is, heresies. Some of the letters oppose forms of Christianity that continued to insist
on keeping Jewish laws and customs. The ones I am most interested in here, however, are those that
oppose Christians who insisted that Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human. These opponents of
Ignatius were not ancient equivalents of our modern-day mythicists. They certainly did not believe
that Jesus had been made up or invented based on the dying and rising gods supposedly worshipped
by pagans. For them, Jesus had a real, historical existence. He lived in this world and delivered
inspired teachings. But he was God on earth, not made of the same flesh as the rest of us.
Ignatius finds this view repugnant and completely at odds with who Jesus really was, as he
states in the most emphatic terms possible in the following passages, once again worth quoting in
full. First, from a letter that Ignatius wrote to the Christians in the city of Smyrna:7
For you are fully convinced about our Lord, that he was truly from the family of David according
to the flesh, Son of God according to the will and power of God, truly born from a virgin, and
baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him. In the time of Pontius Pilate
and the tetrarch Herod, he was truly nailed for us in the flesh—we ourselves come from the fruit
of his divinely blessed suffering—so that through his resurrection he might eternally lift up the
standard for his holy and faithful ones, whether among Jews or Gentiles, in the one body of his
church.
For he suffered all these things for our sake, that we might be saved; and he truly suffered,
just as he also truly raised himself—not as some unbelievers say, that he suffered only in
appearance. They are the ones who are only an appearance; and it will happen to them just as
they think, since they are without bodies, like the daimons. For I know and believe that he was
in the flesh even after the resurrection. (Ignatius to the Smyrneans 1–2)
From these quotations it is crystal clear what Ignatius thought of the real existence of Jesus.
He was fully human; he was really born; he was really baptized; he was really crucified. Even though
there are allusions to traditions that made it into the Gospels, there is no conclusive evidence to
suggest that Ignatius is basing his views on the books that later became part of the New Testament.
The same can be said of his plea to the Christians of the town of Tralles:
And so, be deaf when someone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was from the race of
David and from Mary, who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted at the time
of Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died, while those in heaven and on earth and under the
earth looked on. (Ignatius to the Trallians, 9)
Ignatius, then, provides us yet with another independent witness to the life of Jesus. Again, it
should not be objected that he is writing too late to be of any value in our quest. He cannot be
shown to have been relying on the Gospels. And he was bishop in Antioch, the city where both Peter
and Paul spent considerable time in the preceding generation, as Paul himself tells us in Galatians 2.
His views too can trace a lineage straight back to apostolic times.
1 Clement
The letter of 1 Clement was written by the Christians in Rome to the church of Corinth in order to
straighten out what was to them an unsatisfactory turn of events. The leaders of the Corinthian
church had been ousted from power and replaced by others, and the Roman Christians, at least
those responsible for the letter, did not like the situation. The letter is meant to urge the church in
Corinth to return their “elders” to their rightful place.
It is a long letter filled with warnings against jealousy and the thirst for power. It is attributed
by tradition to the fourth bishop of Rome, Clement, even though the letter itself does not claim to be
written by him. Clement is never even mentioned in the letter. Be that as it may, there are
compelling reasons for thinking that the letter was written sometime during the 90s CE, that is,
some twenty years before Ignatius and at about the time some of the later books that made it into
the New Testament.8 The letter quotes extensively from the Greek Old Testament, and its author
explicitly refers to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But he does not mention the Gospels of the
New Testament, and even though he quotes some of the sayings of Jesus, he does not indicate that
they come from written texts. In fact, his quotations do not line up in their wording with any of the
sayings of Jesus found in our surviving Gospels.
It is all the more impressive that the author of 1 Clement, like Ignatius and then Papias, not
only assumes that Jesus lived but that much of his life was well known. Among the many things he
says about the historical Jesus are the following:
Christ spoke words to be heeded (1 Clement 2.1).
His sufferings were “before your eyes” (2.1).
The blood of Christ is precious to the Father, poured out for salvation (7.4).
The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7).
Jesus taught gentleness and patience; the author here quotes a series of Jesus’s sayings similar
to what can be found in Matthew and Luke (13.1–2).
The Lord Jesus Christ came humbly, not with arrogance or haughtiness (16.2).
Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2).
The Lord adorned himself with good works (33.7).
Another quotation of “the words of our Lord Jesus” (46.8, comparable to Matthew 26:24 and
Luke 17:2).
Those who experience love in Christ should do what Christ commanded (49.1).
Out of his love, the Lord Jesus Christ “gave his blood for us, his flesh for our flesh, his soul for
our souls” (49.6).
Here again we have an independent witness not just to the life of Jesus as a historical figure
but to some of his teachings and deeds. Like all sources that mention Jesus from outside the New
Testament, the author of 1 Clement had no doubt about his real existence and no reason to defend
it. Everyone knew he existed. That is true of the writings of the New Testament as well, outside the
four Gospels that we have already considered.
Canonical Sources Outside the Gospels and Paul
IT IS A LARGE mistake to think that when it comes to the New Testament, only the Gospels attest to
the historical existence of Jesus. This is sometimes claimed, or at least implied, by mythicists intent
on narrowing down our sources for Jesus to just a few—or even to just one, the Gospel of Mark. So
far as we can tell, all the authors of the New Testament knew about the historical Jesus. One
exception might be the writer of the letter of James, who mentions Jesus only twice in passing (1:1
and 2:1) without saying anything about his earthly life. But even in a letter as short as Jude, we find
the apostles of Jesus mentioned (verse 17), which presupposes, of course, that Jesus lived and had
followers. The one book that talks at length about these apostles is the book of Acts, which was
written by the author of the Gospel of Luke but which preserves traditions about the life of Jesus
that are both independent of anything said in the Gospel and, in the judgment of most critical
historians, based on traditions in circulation before the production of the Gospel.
The Book of Acts
The Acts of the Apostles provides a narrative of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman
Empire in the years after Jesus’s death. Whereas in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is the principal figure,
in this, the author’s second volume, it is Jesus’s followers who take center stage. In particular, the
author is interested in the missionary activities of Peter (mainly in chapters 1–12) and Paul (chapters
13–28). In his account he shows how the Christian movement went from being a small group of
Jesus’s followers immediately after his death to becoming a worldwide phenomenon, a religion that
was open not only to Jews like Jesus himself and his disciples but also to Gentiles, as God (according
to the narrative) used the apostles to spread the good news of Jesus “to the ends of the earth”
(1:18).
Jesus Tradition in Acts
The first important point for our quest to establish the historicity of Jesus is that the author of Acts
has access to traditions that are not based on his Gospel account so that we have yet another
independent witness. For the writer of Acts, Jesus was very much a man who really lived and died in
Judea, as can be seen in the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection in chapter 1 and in the speeches that
occur abundantly throughout the narrative. Chapter 1 portrays the disciples meeting with Jesus
after the resurrection. They receive their final instructions from him in Jerusalem, where he has just
been killed. Among the interesting traditions found in this chapter is a statement by the apostle
Peter about the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, who is said to have purchased a field with the money he
received for turning Jesus in to the authorities. Judas is said to have fallen headlong on the field and
spilled his innards out. It is for that reason, Peter indicates, that the field came to be known as
“Akeldama,” an Aramaic word meaning “Field of Blood” (1:16–19).
One of the reasons this passage is interesting is that in his earlier Gospel account Luke says
nothing about the death of Judas. Neither does Mark or John. The most famous account of Judas’s
death is in the Gospel of Matthew, where we are told that after he performed the foul deed, he
repented of what he had done and tried to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests. They
refused to take the money, and so he flung it down in the Temple and went out and hanged himself.
The priests were unable to put the money into the Temple treasury since it was “blood money” (used
to betray innocent blood), and so they used it to buy a field to serve as a cemetery. For that reason
the field came to be known as the “Field of Blood” (Matthew 27:3–10).
These two accounts of Judas’s death cannot be reconciled. In one Judas buys the field, in the
other the priests do; in one it is called the Field of Blood because Judas bled all over it, in the other
because it was purchased with blood money; in one Judas dies by hanging himself, in the other he
falls headfirst and bursts open in the midst. These differences show that Luke had an independent
tradition of the death of Judas, which was at least as early as the one in Matthew. There are reasons
for thinking that at the heart of both stories is a historical tradition: independently they confirm that
a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way both with the money Judas was paid to betray Jesus
and with Judas’s death. Moreover, it was known as the Field of Blood. Matthew calls it a “potter’s
field.” Is it possible that it was actually a field of red clay used by potters, and so—because of its
color—called the Field of Blood, which in one way or another was connected with the death of
Jesus’s betrayer?
However one resolves this issue, two points are of particular importance. One is that Matthew
and Acts give disparate accounts of the event so that Acts here is an independent tradition. The
other is that the Acts account gives clear evidence of being very early and Palestinian in origin: as
happens occasionally in the Gospels, here too a key word is left in Aramaic (Akeldama means “Field
of Blood”), the original language of the story. This is a tradition that goes back to the earliest
Christian community in Palestine. Luke is not simply recording traditions from his own day, in the
80s CE; he is recording traditions that—some of them, at least—stemmed from as much as half a
century earlier. Moreover, that Luke has access to sayings of the historical Jesus not recorded otherwise, even
in his Gospel, is clear from a passage such as Acts 20:35, where the apostle Paul is recorded as
saying, “I have shown you that it is necessary by hard work to help the weak, and to remember the
words of the Lord Jesus, that he said ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive.’” It is not necessary
to think that the historical Paul—the man himself—really said this. What we have here is a narrative
by a later author claiming that Paul said it. Whether Paul himself really knew this saying of Jesus
can be argued. But what is clear is that Luke thinks he knew it and, more important for our
considerations, that it is a tradition of a saying of Jesus that has no parallel in any of our Gospels.
And so the book of Acts provides further evidence from outside the Gospels that Christians from
earliest times believed that Jesus actually lived, as a Jew, that he was a moral teacher, and that he
was killed in Jerusalem after being betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas.
The Speeches in Acts
Even more significant for our purposes are the speeches recorded in the book of Acts, placed on the
lips of the apostles at key moments of the narrative. About a fourth of Acts is made up of speeches
delivered by Peter in the first third of the book and Paul in the final two-thirds. Scholars have long
been intrigued by these speeches. We know from ancient historians such as Thucydides that it was
customary for historical writers to invent the speeches of their main characters. There really was no
other way to present a speech in an ancient biography or ancient history: the authors were almost
never there to hear what was actually said on the occasion, and almost never (if ever) did anyone
take notes. And so, as Thucydides indicates, historians came up with speeches that seemed
appropriate for the occasion.
But the speeches in Acts are particularly notable because they are, in many instances, based
not on Luke’s fertile imagination but on oral traditions. The reason for thinking so is that portions of
these speeches represent theological views that do not mesh well with the views of Luke himself, as
these can be ascertained through a careful reading of his two-volume work. In other words, some of
the speeches in Acts contain what scholars call preliterary traditions: oral traditions that had been
in circulation from much earlier times that are found, now, only in their written forms in Acts. This is
important information because, here again, it shows that Acts is not simply a document from the 80s
CE. It incorporates much older traditions. And these traditions are quite emphatic that Jesus was a
Jewish man who lived, did spectacular deeds, taught, and was executed, as a human, in Jerusalem.
One of the most striking features of several of the speeches in Acts is that they present a view
of Jesus that scholars have long thought was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Christian
understanding of what it meant to call Jesus the Son of God. Eventually, of course, Christians came
to think that Jesus had always been the Son of God, from eternity past, and that he came into the
world only to conduct his miraculous ministry and deliver his supernatural teachings for a short
while before returning to heaven whence he came. This is the view that can be found in the last of
our Gospels, the Gospel of John. But this was not the earliest view of Jesus. Before anyone thought
Jesus preexisted as the divine being who created the world (see John 1:1–18, for example), there
were Christians who thought Jesus came into existence when he was born of a virgin and that it was
because she was a virgin—and the “father” was God himself—that he was the Son of God.
This view seems to be embodied in the Gospel of Luke itself. Not a single word in Luke
mentions Jesus preexisting his life on earth. Instead, his mother conceives of the Holy Spirit, and
that is how he comes into being. As the angel Gabriel tells Mary at the Annunciation, informing her
of how she will bear a child: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High
will overshadow you. For that reason the one who is born of you will be called holy, the Son of God”
(Luke 1:35). Here Jesus is the Son of God because God made his mother pregnant.
At an even earlier stage of the tradition, before Christians had begun to talk about either
Jesus’s preexistence or his virginal conception, they (or some of them) believed that he had become
the Son of God by being “adopted” by God to be his son. In this view Jesus was not metaphysically or
physically the son of God. He was the son of God in a metaphorical sense, through adoption. At one
point Christians thought this happened right before he entered into his public ministry. And so they
told stories about what happened at the very outset, when he was baptized by John: the heavens
opened up, the Spirit of God descended upon him (meaning he didn’t have the Spirit before this),
and the voice from heaven declared, “You are my son. Today I have begotten you.” One should not
underplay the significance of the word today in this quotation from Psalm 2. It was on the day of his
baptism that Jesus became God’s son.9
There were yet earlier traditions about Jesus that did not speak of him as the Son of God from
eternity past or from his miraculous birth or from the time he began his ministry. In these, probably
the oldest, Christian traditions, Jesus became the Son of God when God raised him from the dead. It
was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, exalting him to heaven, and calling him
his son, the messiah, the Lord. Even though this view is not precisely that of Paul, it is found in an
ancient creed (that is, a preliterary tradition) that Paul quotes at the beginning of his letter to the
Romans, where he speaks of Christ as God’s “son, who was descended from David according to the
flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection from
the dead” (1:3–4). One reason for thinking that this is an ancient creed—not the formulation of Paul
himself—is that Paul holds other ideas about Jesus as the Son of God and expresses them in his own
words elsewhere. But he quotes this creed here, probably because he is writing this letter to get on
the good side of a group of Christians, the church in Rome, who do not know Paul or what he stands
for, and the creed provides a standard formulation found throughout the churches of his day. It is, in
other words, a very ancient tradition that predates Paul’s writings. More striking still, a similar tradition can be found in some of the speeches of Acts, showing
that these speeches incorporate materials from the traditions about Jesus that existed long before
Luke put pen to papyrus. So, for example, in a speech attributed to Paul in Acts 13 (but not really by
Paul; Luke wrote the speech, incorporating earlier materials), Paul is reputed to have said to a
group of Jews he was evangelizing, “We proclaim to you that the good news that came to the
fathers, this he has brought to fulfillment for us their children by raising Jesus, as is written in the
second Psalm, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33).
Note once again the word today. It was on the day of the resurrection, according to this
primitive tradition that long predated Luke, that Jesus was made the Son of God. A comparable view
is found in an earlier speech delivered by the apostle Peter: “Let the entire house of Israel know
with certainty, that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this one whom you crucified” (Acts
2:36).
In both of these speeches we have, then, remnants of much older pre-Lukan traditions, older
not just than the book of Acts but than any of the Gospels and older in fact than any surviving
Christian writing. They embody a certain adoptionist Christology where Jesus is exalted by God and
made his son at the resurrection. In both of them Jesus is understood to be purely human and to
have been crucified at the instigation of the Jews in Jerusalem. Only then did God adopt him into
sonship.
That the speeches of Acts contain very ancient material, much earlier than the Gospels, is
significant as well because these speeches are completely unambiguous that Jesus was a mortal who
lived on earth and was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Jewish insistence. Consider the following
extracts from three of the significant speeches:
Men of Israel, hear these Words. Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God through
miracles and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, just as you know, this
one was handed over through the hand of the lawless by the appointed will and foreknowledge
of God, and you nailed him up and killed him; but God raised him by loosing the birth pangs of
death. (2:22–24)
God…glorified his child Jesus, whom you handed over and denied before Pilate, who had
decided to release him. But you denied the holy and righteous one and demanded a murderer to
be given over to you. But you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead, as we
are witnesses. (3:13–15)
For those who live in Jerusalem and their leaders…when they found no charge worthy of
death, they asked Pilate to execute him; and when they had fulfilled all the things that were
written about him, they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb. But God raised
him from the dead. (13:27–29)
These primitive traditions from the speeches in Acts are unambiguous about their views of
Jesus. They are at least as old as our earliest surviving Gospel stories about Jesus, and equally
important, they are independent of them. As was the case in the preceding chapter, here we see that
the historical witnesses to Jesus’s life simply multiply the deeper we look into our surviving
materials.
The Non-Pauline Epistles
The epistles of the New Testament are chock-full of references to a human Jesus, who really lived
and died by crucifixion. There is no need to provide a detailed analysis here; I can simply cite some
of the outstanding passages in books that were written by a range of authors, none of whom knew
each other’s works or the writings of the Gospels.
Among the writings that circulated under the name of Paul are a number that Paul did not
actually write.10 One of them is the letter of 1 Timothy, which records the tradition known from so
many of our other sources: “I command you before the God who makes all things alive and Christ
Jesus, the one who, bearing his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession…” (6:13). We do not know who this author was; we only know that he was not Paul and that he shows no
evidence of knowing our Gospels. But he confirms one of the central claims of these other works.
Paul was not the only author imitated by later writers. Peter too probably did not write either
book that bears his name in the New Testament.11 It is quite clear that both of these other authors
maintained that Jesus was a real, living human being. I begin with several passages from the book
known as 1 Peter, which again shows no familiarity with our Gospels:
For you were called to this end, because Christ suffered for you, leaving an example for you that
you might follow in his steps, who did not commit sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth, who
when reviled did not revile in return, while suffering uttered no threat, but trusted the one who
judges righteously, who bore our sins in his body on the tree, in order that dying to sin we might
live to righteousness, for by his wounds we were healed. (2:21–24)
For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might
bring you to God, having put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit. (3:18)
Since Christ suffered in the flesh, you also be armed with the same thought. (4:1)
And so I admonish the elders among you, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the
sufferings of Christ…. (5:1)
The fact that these lines were not really written by Peter are immaterial for my purposes here.
Once again we have independent testimony to the life (in the flesh) of Jesus and his very tangible
death. More emphatic is 2 Peter, another writing forged in Peter’s name, which does not show clear
evidence of any familiarity with the Gospels but clearly knows the tradition recorded in them of the
experience of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration:
For not by following sophistic myths have we made known to you the power and presence of our
Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of the majesty of that one. For when we received
honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was brought to him by the magnificent glory,
“this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” we heard this voice that was brought from
heaven to him, for we were on the holy mountain. (1:16–18)
Somewhat earlier than 2 Peter, probably sometime near the end of the first century, comes the
treatise of 1 John, wrongly attributed in the tradition to Jesus’s disciple John the son of Zebedee. The
anonymous author of this treatise did not write the Gospel of John, but there are good reasons for
thinking that he knew of it and that he lived in the same community that produced the Gospel. In
any event, this author too is quite emphatic that when Jesus appeared on earth he was a real human
who could be felt, handled, heard, and seen:
What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we
beheld and our hands handled, concerning the world of life. And the life was made manifest, and
we saw and we bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal live which was with the Father and
has been manifest to us. What we saw and heard we proclaim also to you, that you also may
have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.
(1:1–4)
Even the book of Revelation, with all its bizarre imagery and fantastic apocalyptic views,
understands that Jesus was a real historical figure. For this author he was one who “lived” and who
“died” (1:18). Like the Gospel of John, but not dependent on it, this book, written by a different
author, portrays Jesus as the “lamb who was slain” for salvation (5:6). Quite apart from the
theological spin he puts on Jesus’s death, the fact that matters for us in this context is that he too
provides independent witness to the Christian tradition of a real Jesus.
As my final example I can turn to the letter of the Hebrews, a book that was written
anonymously but was eventually accepted into the canon of the New Testament by church fathers
who thought, incorrectly, that it had been produced by Paul. The book is not dependent on the
letters of Paul and shows no evidence of any familiarity with the Gospels. And yet it contains
numerous references to the life of the historical Jesus. The following are simply some of the key
passages to consider:
Jesus appeared in “these last days” (1:2).
God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2).
He “made a purification for sins” (that is, he died a bloody death; 1:3).
He was told by God, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” and was called “son of God”
by the Father (1:5).
He was the first to proclaim salvation (2:3).
God bore witness to him and/or his followers through signs, wonders, various miracles, and
gifts of the spirit (2:4).
He tasted death “apart from God” (that is, apart from any divine solace; 2:9).
He was made perfect by suffering (2:10).
He partook of flesh and blood (2:14).
He was like his brothers (the Jews? all people?) in all respects (2:17).
He was tempted (2:18) in every way but without sin (4:15).
He was faithful to God (3:2).
He offered up prayers and loud cries and tears to be saved from death (presumably before his
crucifixion; 5:7).
He learned obedience by suffering (5:8).
He was crucified (6:5; 12:2).
He was descended from the tribe of Judah (7:14).
He taught, about God: “You have not desired or taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and
burnt offerings and sin offerings” (10:8).
He said, “I have come to do your will” (10:9).
He suffered “outside the gate” (that is, outside Jerusalem; 13:12).
He endured abuse (13:13).
In sum, according to this unknown author, based on oral traditions that he had heard, Jesus
was a real man who lived in the past, a flesh-and-blood human being, a Jew from the line of Judah
who was tempted like all other people, suffered in obedience to God, and was crucified, dying
without any solace that God could have provided. Here again is an independent witness to the life
and death of Jesus. Thus we have not only the seven independent Gospel witnesses for knowing that
Jesus existed; we have also the speeches of Acts, some of which are rooted in early Palestinian
traditions, the narrative of Acts, the epistles of the New Testament, and three church fathers—all of
them evidently independent of one another.12
The Witness of Paul
THE APOSTLE PAUL IS our earliest surviving Christian author of any kind. Many readers of the
Bible assume that the Gospels were the first books of the New Testament to be written since they
appear first in the New Testament and discuss the life of Jesus, who obviously started it all. But Paul
was writing some years before the Gospels. His first letter (1 Thessalonians) is usually dated to 49
CE; his last (Romans?) to some twelve or thirteen years after that. It is commonly said among
mythicists that Paul does not speak about the historical man Jesus and has no understanding of the
historical man Jesus. This simply is not true, as an examination of his writings shows full well.
Apparently one reason mythicists want to make this claim is precisely that Paul is our earliest
available witness, writing within twenty years of the traditional date of Jesus’s death. If Paul knew
nothing about the historical Jesus, then maybe he did not exist. A second reason for the claim is
related: mythicists want to argue that Paul, rather than thinking of Jesus as a human who lived a few
years earlier, believed in a kind of mythical Christ, who had no real historical existence but was a
divine being pure and simple, like the dying and rising gods allegedly worshipped by pagans. I will
be dealing with that view in chapter 7. For now I want to look at the evidence that Paul understood
Jesus to be a historical figure, a Jew who lived, taught, and was crucified at the instigation of Jewish
opposition.
One way that some mythicists have gotten around the problem that this, our earliest Christian
source, refers to the historical Jesus in several places is by claiming that these references to Jesus
were not originally in Paul’s writings but were inserted by later Christian scribes who wanted Paul’s
readers to think that he referred to the historical Jesus. This approach to Paul can be thought of as
historical reconstruction based on the principle of convenience. If historical evidence proves
inconvenient to one’s views, then simply claim that the evidence does not exist, and suddenly you’re
right.
The Life of Jesus in Paul
The reality is that, convenient or not, Paul speaks about Jesus, assumes that he really lived, that he
was a Jewish teacher, and that he died by crucifixion. The following are the major things that Paul
says about the life of Jesus.
First, Paul indicates unequivocally that Jesus really was born, as a human, and that in his
human existence he was a Jew. This he states in Galatians 4:4: “But when the fullness of time came,
God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were
under the law….” This statement also indicates that Jesus’s mission was to Jews, a point borne out in
another letter of Paul’s, in Romans 15:8: “For I say that Christ became a servant to the circumcised
to show the truthfulness of God, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.” This
claim that Jesus’s ministry was to and for Jews, to fulfill what was promised in the scriptures, hints
at one of the most important points Paul makes about Jesus, that he was in fact the Jewish messiah.
So firmly rooted in Paul is this belief in Jesus as the messiah that the phrase Jesus Christ, which
means “Jesus the messiah” (since the Greek word Christ is a literal translation of the Hebrew word
messiah), is exceedingly common in Paul, as is the reversed sequence Christ Jesus, and the simple
term Christ is used as an appellative. In other words, Paul was so convinced that Jesus was the
Jewish messiah that he used the term Christ (messiah) as one of Jesus’s actual names.
That in part is why Paul insisted that Jesus was a physical descendant of David. It was widely
thought that the “son of David” would be the future ruler of the Jews; for Paul, that was Jesus. We
have already seen the key passage in Romans 1:3–4, where Paul refers to “the gospel concerning his
Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh.” Jesus, then, was a fleshly being, even if
he was God’s son, and he was one of David’s physical descendants. When Jesus was born, he naturally came into a family. We have seen that Paul obliquely
mentions Jesus’s mother when he indicates that he was “born of a woman.” In another place he
mentions the brothers of Jesus, who after Jesus’s death became missionaries along with their wives.
This Paul states in 1 Corinthians 9:5, where he is pointing out that he too should have the right to
take along a spouse on his missionary journeys but chooses not to do so (because, as he indicated
two chapters earlier, he was not married): “Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife
as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” It should not be thought here
that Paul is referring to “brothers of the Lord” in some kind of spiritual sense, in that in Christ all
men are brothers. If that were what he meant, then the rest of the statement would make no sense
because it would mean that the apostles themselves and even Cephas (Peter) were not the “spiritual
brothers” of the Lord since they are differentiated from those who are brothers. And so interpreters
are virtually unified in thinking that Paul means Jesus’s actual brothers. We know the names of some of Jesus’s brothers from our early Gospel traditions. The Gospel of
Mark names them as James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3). It also indicates that Jesus had sisters,
though these are not named. As it turns out, in one place Paul also names one of the brothers of
Jesus, and it is none other than James, also mentioned by Mark. This is in one of the most disputed
passages discussed by mythicists, and I will reserve a full treatment for the next chapter. The
comment comes in Galatians 1:18–19, one of those rare autobiographical statements of Paul in
which he reflects back on his life and indicates what he did after his conversion: “Then after three
years I went up to Jerusalem to consult with Cephas. And I remained with him for fifteen days. I did
not see any of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord. What I am writing to you, I
tell you before God, I am not lying!” When Paul swears he is not lying, I generally believe him. During those fifteen days he saw
Cephas and James and no one else. Here again James cannot simply be a “brother” of Jesus the way
any other Christian was since his being a brother is what differentiates him from Cephas, as I will
explain yet more fully in the next chapter. At this point it is enough to know that Paul knew that
Jesus had brothers and that one of them was James, a personal acquaintance of his.
Paul also appears to know that Jesus had twelve disciples, or perhaps it is better to say that
Paul knows of a close-knit group of disciples of Jesus who were called “the twelve.” I phrase it this
way because some scholars think that what mattered was not the actual number of this group but
the symbolic number attached to them. That Paul knew of them is shown by his statement
concerning the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, where he indicates that after Jesus was
raised on the third day, “he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5). It is
not necessary to conclude that Cephas was not one of the twelve himself; Paul may simply be saying
that first there was an appearance to Peter and then to the entire group. It is interesting that he
calls them “the twelve” in this context since according to both Matthew and the book of Acts the
disciple Judas Iscariot, one of this inner circle, had already defected and in fact died (by hanging in
Matthew, by falling headlong and bursting in Acts). The fact that Paul speaks of “the twelve” as
having seen Jesus at the resurrection means either that he does not know the stories about Judas (as
was possibly true of Mark and John as well) or, as I have suggested, that the name “the twelve” was
attached to this group as a group, even when one of them was no longer with them.
Paul knows that Jesus was a teacher because he quotes several of his sayings. I will deal with
these in a moment. For now it is worth noting that two of the sayings of Jesus that Paul quotes were
delivered, he tells us, at the Last Supper on the very night that Jesus was handed over to the
authorities to face his fate.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in
which he was handed over took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it and said, “This is my
body that is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper,
saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink, in remembrance
of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:22–24)
When Paul says that he “received” this tradition “from the Lord,” he appears to mean that
somehow—in a revelation?—the truthfulness of the account was confirmed to him by God, or Jesus,
himself. But the terminology of “received” and “delivered,” as often noted by scholars, is the kind of
language commonly used in Jewish circles to refer to traditions that are handed on from one teacher
to the next. In this case, we have a tradition about Jesus’s Last Supper, which Paul obviously knows
about. The scene that he describes is very close to the description of the event in the Gospel of Luke
(with some key differences); it is less similar to Matthew and Mark.
One point I will stress in a later chapter is that Paul emphasizes that this event happened “on
the night in which he was handed over.” Traditionally this phrase is translated as “on the night in
which he was betrayed” and is taken to indicate that he is referring to the betrayal of Judas Iscariot.
The problem with this translation is that the word Paul uses here does not mean “betray” but “hand
over,” and he uses it in other passages to refer to what God did when he “handed over” his son to his
fate, as in Romans 8:31–32: “If God is for us, who is against us? The one who did not spare his own
son, but handed him over for all of us, how will he not with him freely give us all things?” This is the
same Greek word: handed over.
So Paul probably is not referring to the betrayal of Judas in the passage about the Last Supper
in 1 Corinthians 11:22–24. But he is clearly referring to a historical event. It is important to note
that he indicates this scene happened at night. This is not some vague mythological reference but a
concrete historical one. Paul knows that Jesus had a Last Supper with his disciples in which he
predicted his approaching death, the very night he was handed over to the authorities. Moreover, Paul thinks that Jesus was killed at the instigation of “the Jews.” This is indicated in
a passage that is much disputed—in this instance, not just among mythicists. In 1 Thessalonians
Paul narrates a number of wrongful doings of his Jewish opponents who live in Judea:
Be imitators, brothers, of the churches of God that are in Judea in Christ Jesus, because you
yourselves suffer the same things by your own fellow citizens as they do by the Jews (or the
Judeans), who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and persecuted us, and are not
pleasing to God and to all people, who forbade us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might
be saved, in order to fill up the full measure of their sins always. But wrath has come upon them
at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16)
It is this last sentence that has caused interpreters problems. What could Paul mean that the
wrath of God has finally come upon the Jews (or Judeans)? That would seem to make sense if Paul
were writing in the years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans,
that is, after 70 CE. But it seems to make less sense when this letter was actually written, around 49
CE. For that reason a number of scholars have argued that this entire passage has been inserted
into 1 Thessalonians and that Paul therefore did not write it. In this view some Christian scribe,
copying the letter after the destruction of Jerusalem, added it.
I myself do not agree with this interpretation, for a number of reasons. To begin with, if the
only part of the passage that seems truly odd on the pen of Paul is the last sentence, then it would
make better sense simply to say that it is this sentence that was added by the hypothetical Christian
scribe. There is no reason to doubt the entire passage, just the last few words.
But I do not doubt even these. For one thing, what is the hard evidence that the words were not
in the letter of 1 Thessalonians as Paul wrote it? There is none. We do not of course have the original
of 1 Thessalonians; we have only later copies made by scribes. But in not a single one of these
manuscripts is the line (let alone the paragraph) missing. Every surviving manuscript includes it. If
the passage was added sometime after the fall of Jerusalem, say, near the end of the first Christian
century or even in the second, when Christians started blaming the fall of Jerusalem on the fact that
the Jews had killed Jesus, why is it that none of the manuscripts of 1 Thessalonians that were copied
before the insertion was made left any trace on the manuscript record? Why were the older copies
not copied at all? I think there needs to be better evidence of a scribal insertion before we are
certain that it happened. And recall, we are not talking about the entire paragraph but only the last
line.
The other point to stress is that Paul did think the wrath of God was already manifesting itself
in this world. A key passage is Romans 1:18–32, where Paul states unequivocally, “For the wrath of
God is being revealed from heaven on all human ungodliness and unrighteousness, among those
who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” When Paul says that God’s wrath is “being
revealed,” he does not simply mean that it is there to be seen in some ethereal way. He means it is
being manifested, powerfully made present. God’s wrath is even now being directed against all
godless and unrighteous behavior. In this passage in Romans Paul is talking about God’s wrath now
being directed against pagans who refuse to acknowledge him here at the end of time before Jesus
returns from heaven. It would not be at all strange to think that he also thought that God’s wrath
was being manifest against those Jewish people who also acted in such ungodly and unrighteous
ways. And he has a full list of offenses against which God has responded.
In short, I think that Paul originally wrote 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16. He certainly wrote
everything up to verse 16. What this means, then, is that Paul believes that it was the Jews (or the
Judeans) who were ultimately responsible for killing Jesus, a view shared by the writers of the
Gospels as well, even though it does not sit well with those of us today who are outraged by the
wicked use to which such views were put in the history of anti-Semitism.
Finally, Paul is quite emphatic throughout his writings that Jesus was crucified. He never
mentions Pontius Pilate or the Romans, but he may have had no need to do so. His readers knew full
well what he was talking about. Crucifixion was the form of punishment used by Romans and could
be used on criminals sentenced by Roman authorities. Jesus’s crucifixion is one of Paul’s constant
themes throughout his letters. One brief summary statement of his view can be found in 1
Corinthians 2:2: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Or
consider 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, a passage that stresses that this teaching about Christ’s death was
the very core of Paul’s message: “For I delivered over to you as of first importance what I also
received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried.” I
will later stress this latter point. Jesus was not only crucified, he was buried. In other words, he died
a human death, by execution, at the hands of the Romans, and he really was dead, as evidenced by
his burial.
The Teachings of Jesus in Paul
In addition to these data about Jesus’s life and death, Paul mentions on several occasions the
teachings he delivered. We have seen two of the sayings of Jesus already from Paul’s first letter to
the Corinthians (11:22–24). Paul indicates that these words were spoken during Jesus’s Last Supper.
These sayings are closely paralleled to the words of Jesus recorded years later in Luke’s account of
the supper (Luke 22:19–20).
Two other sayings of Jesus in the book of 1 Corinthians also find parallels in the Gospel
tradition. The first occurs in Paul’s instructions about the legitimacy of divorce, where he
paraphrases a saying of Jesus in urging believers to remain married; that this is a saying tradition
going back to Jesus is shown by the fact that at this point Paul stresses that it is not he who is giving
this instruction but that it was already given by the Lord himself: “But to those who are married I
give this charge—not I, but the Lord—a woman is not to be separated from her husband (but if she
is separated, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and a man should not
divorce his wife.”
The statement in the parentheses is widely seen as Paul’s own addition to this commandment
from Jesus. Editors and translators normally set it off as a separate part of the sentence with
parentheses or brackets. The rest is the command that Paul learned from the Lord himself. And as it
turns out, there is a close parallel to the command on the lips of Jesus, for example, in the Gospel of
Mark: “And [Jesus] said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery
against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’” (Mark
10:11–12).
It has sometimes been argued that Jesus could not have said such a thing since in Palestine in
his days a woman was not permitted to divorce her husband, and therefore Paul cannot really be
quoting a saying of Jesus (since he never said it). For example, G. A. Wells argues that what we have
here in Paul is not a quotation of the historical Jesus but a prophecy from heaven that came to a
Christian prophet, which Paul understood, then, as having come “from the Lord.”
13 I will deal with
that larger claim momentarily. But at this stage I want to emphasize a couple of points about this
particular saying. The most important is that there is an enormous difference between saying that
some authorities in Roman Palestine did not allow women to divorce and saying that women did not
divorce. Recent studies have shown that Jewish women in fact did divorce their husbands in
Palestine, whatever the authorities may have thought about it, so Jesus’s saying does indeed make
perfect sense in its context.14 He thought the practice was not good, and he too did not want to
permit it.
At the same time, whether or not Jesus really gave this teaching is not directly relevant to the
question we are asking here, so Wells’s objection is immaterial. Mark thought Jesus said some such
thing, so Paul stays close to what Jesus is alleged to have said. Moreover, Paul indicates that his
source for this teaching is not his own wisdom and insight into familial concord but the Lord himself.
It looks exceedingly likely that Paul is basing his exhortation on a tradition about divorce that he
knows—or thinks he knows—going back to the historical Jesus.
Something similar can be said of yet another instance in 1 Corinthians where Paul appears to
refer to a teaching of Jesus. In chapter 9 he addresses the question of whether apostles have the
right to be financially supported by others during their missionary efforts. He thinks they have that
right even though he himself does not regularly take advantage of it, and he supports his view by
appealing to a teaching of Jesus: “For thus the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the Gospel
should get their living from the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14). It has long been recognized that this
command from the Lord is still found in our Gospel traditions, in slightly different forms in Matthew
and Luke (that is, it comes from Q). Luke’s version is the most apt. Here Jesus is instructing his
disciples what to do as they go about spreading the gospel: “Stay in the same house [that you first
come to] and eat and drink whatever they provide. For the worker is worthy of his wages” (Luke
10:7).
In both these instances—as with the sayings Paul quotes from the Last Supper tradition—we
have close parallels between what Paul says Jesus said (in a quotation or a paraphrase) and what
Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having actually said. This makes it clear to most interpreters of Paul
that he really does intend here to quote the teachings of Jesus.
There are no other obvious places where Paul quotes Jesus, although scholars have often found
traces of Jesus’s teachings in Paul.15 The big question is why Paul does not quote Jesus more often.
This is a thorny issue that will require more sustained reflection at the end of this chapter. For now I
need simply to stress the most important point: Paul obviously thought Jesus existed, and he
occasionally quoted his teachings.
In several other instances Paul indicates that he is echoing a “word” or “commandment of the
Lord.” This happens in his earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, where he is discussing the future return
of Jesus from heaven, when all the dead will be raised and all living believers will join them in a
heavenly reunion with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18). In this context Paul states, “For this we
say to you by a word of the Lord, that we who are living who are left until the coming of the Lord
will certainly not precede those who are asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with
the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ will rise first….” For
Paul, those who had already died would meet the Lord first, to be immediately followed by those
who had not yet died. And he learned this from a “word of the Lord.”
As indicated earlier, the mythicist G. A. Wells argues that the sayings of Jesus in Paul’s writings
were given to him not from the traditions about the teachings of the historical Jesus but from
prophecies delivered in Paul’s churches, direct revelations from the Lord of heaven. In some
instances that may indeed have been the case, and this passage in 1 Thessalonians may be one
example of it. The reason for thinking so is that we do not have any record of the historical Jesus
saying any such thing about what would happen at his return (though see Matthew 24:3–44). So
there are two choices here: either Paul knew of a tradition in which the historical Jesus allegedly did
discuss this matter or he learned this teaching through a prophecy in one of his churches.
At the end of the day I think it is impossible to decide between these two options. Jesus no
doubt said lots of things—hundreds of things, thousands of things—that are not recorded in the
early Gospels. Later many, many other things were attributed to Jesus that he probably did not say
(for example, many of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and later Gospels). Paul may well have
heard of sayings of Jesus, such as the one in 1 Thessalonians, that no longer survive otherwise
(whether they are sayings Jesus actually said or not). Or he may have learned this information about
the second coming from a prophecy. But here we are in a different category from the other sayings
of Jesus in Paul’s letters that we considered earlier. When Paul claims that the Lord said something,
and we have a record of Jesus saying almost exactly that, it is surely most reasonable to conclude
that Paul is referring to something that he believed Jesus actually said.16
Provisional Summary: Paul and Jesus
In sum, Paul does indeed show that he knew Jesus existed, and he reveals that he had at least some
information about his life. Mythicists as a rule do not accept any of this information as being
relevant to the question of whether Paul actually knew or believed there was a historical Jesus. I will
give several of their most common arguments in a moment. Before doing so I want to stress several
points by way of summary of what we have seen so far about Paul’s view of the historical Jesus.
Paul obviously did not write a Gospel about Jesus, and he did not include enormous numbers of
traditions about Jesus in his writings. This strikes many readers of the New Testament as odd. Why
doesn’t Paul tell us more about Jesus? You would think it would matter to him. I will address this
question at greater length later, as it is one of the points insisted on by many mythicists, who think
that if Paul had known there was a historical Jesus, he would have told us a lot more about him. At
this stage I want to emphasize two things. The first is that we have to remember that the writings
we have from Paul were letters that he directed to his churches (and to the church of Rome, which
he did not found). He is writing these letters to deal with problems that had arisen in them. His
letters are not meant to spell out everything that he knew or thought about God, Christ, the Spirit,
the church, the human condition, and so forth. He addressed problems that his churches were
facing. I myself have written hundreds of letters dealing with religious issues over the past thirtyfive years. It would be, oh, so easy to collect seven of these letters and not find a single saying of
Jesus quoted or a single reference to anything he is thought to have done or experienced. Does that
mean I don’t know that Jesus existed?
My second point is that what Paul does tell us makes it very clear that he knew or at least
believed that Jesus had lived as a historical person some years earlier. Paul mentions that Jesus was
born; that he was a Jew, a direct descendant of King David; that he had brothers, one of them named
James; that he had a ministry to Jews; that he had twelve disciples; that he was a teacher; that he
anticipated his own death; that he had the Last Supper on the night he was handed over; that he
was killed at the instigation of Jews in Judea; and that he died by crucifixion. He also refers on
several occasions to Jesus’s teachings. Paul certainly knew that Jesus existed, and he knew some
things about him.
I should stress in addition that Paul indicates on several occasions that the traditions about
Jesus are ones that he himself inherited from those who came before him. This is clearly implied
when he says that he “handed over” what he had earlier “received,” technical language in antiquity
for passing on traditions and teachings among Jewish rabbis. Even where Paul does not state that he
is handing on received tradition, there are places where it is clear he is doing so. I have mentioned,
for example, Romans 1:3–4, an ancient adoptionistic creed about Jesus that indicates he “became”
the son of God only when he was raised from the dead. This creed was not written by Paul: it uses
words and phrases not otherwise found in Paul (for example, spirit of holiness) and contains
concepts otherwise alien to Paul (that Jesus was made the Son of God at the resurrection). He is
using, then, an earlier creed that was in circulation before his writing. Where did Paul get all this received tradition, from whom, and most important, when? Paul
himself gives us some hints. He indicates in Galatians 1 that originally, before his conversion, he had
been a fierce persecutor of the church of Christ, but then on the basis of some kind of mysterious
revelation he came to see that Jesus really was the Son of God, and he converted. After three years,
he tells us, he made a trip to Jerusalem, and there he spent fifteen days with Cephas and James.
Cephas was one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, and James was his brother. I will stress the importance
of this fact in the next chapter. For now I simply want to point out that this visit is one of the most
likely places where Paul learned all the received traditions that he refers to and even the received
traditions that we otherwise suspect are in his writings that he does not name as such. And when
would this have been?
Since Paul sometimes provides a time frame (“three years later” or “after fifteen years”), it is
possible to put together a rough chronology of Paul’s life. To give us a rock-solid start, we can say
that Paul must have been converted sometime after the death of Jesus around 30 CE and sometime
before 40 CE. The latter date is based on the fact that in 2 Corinthians 11:32 Paul indicates that
King Aretas of the Nabateans was determined to prosecute Paul for being a Christian. Aretas died
around the year 40. So Paul converted sometime in the 30s CE. When scholars crunch all the
numbers that Paul mentions, it appears that he must have converted early in the 30s, say, the year
32 or 33, just two or three years after the death of Jesus.
This means that if Paul went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and James three years after his
conversion, he would have seen them, and received the traditions that he later gives in his letters,
around the middle of the decade, say the year 35 or 36. The traditions he inherited, of course, were
older than that and so must date to just a couple of years or so after Jesus’s death.
All this makes it as clear as day that Jesus was known to have lived and died almost
immediately after the traditional date of his death. We do not have to wait for the Gospel of Mark
around 70 CE to hear about the historical Jesus, as mythicists are fond of claiming. This evidence
from Paul dovetails perfectly with what we found from the Gospel traditions, whose oral sources
almost certainly also go all the way back into the 30s to Roman Palestine. Paul too shows that just a
few years after Jesus’s life his followers were talking about the things he said, did, and experienced
as a Jewish teacher in Palestine who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jewish
authorities. This is a powerful confluence of evidence: the sources of the Gospels and the accounts
of our earliest Christian author. It is hard to explain this confluence apart from the view that Jesus
certainly existed.
Mythicist Counterarguments
Some scholars, as I mentioned, have devoted their lives to studying the life and letters of Paul. I
personally know scores of scholars who have spent twenty, thirty, forty, or more years of their lives
working to understand Paul. Some of these are fundamentalists, some are theologically moderate
Christians, some are extremely liberal Christians, and some are agnostics or atheists. Not one of
them, to my knowledge, thinks that Paul did not believe there was a historical Jesus. The evidence is
simply too obvious and straightforward. Many mythicists, however, claim that this scholarly
consensus is wrong, and they have some interesting arguments to show it. Even though I don’t buy
them, I think these arguments need to be addressed seriously.
Interpolation Theories
One relatively easy way to get around the testimony of Paul to the historical Jesus is the one I
mentioned already. It is to claim that everything Paul says about the man Jesus was not originally in
Paul’s writings but was inserted instead by later Christian scribes who wanted Paul to say more
about the earthly life of their Lord. As I suggested, this seems to be a “scholarship of convenience,”
where evidence inconvenient to one’s views is discounted as not really existing (even though it does
in fact exist). I should stress that the Pauline scholars who have devoted many years of their lives to
studying Romans and Galatians and 1 Corinthians are not the ones who argue that Paul never
mentioned the details of Jesus’s life—that he was born of a woman, as a Jew, and a descendant of
David; that he ministered to Jews, had a last meal at night, and delivered several important
teachings. It is only the mythicists, who have a vested interest in claiming that Paul did not know of
a historical Jesus, who insist that these passages were not originally in Paul’s writings. One always
needs to consider the source.
Apart from the mythicist desire not to find such passages in Paul, there is no textual evidence
that these passages were not originally in Paul (they appear in every single manuscript of Paul that
we have) and no solid literary grounds for thinking they were not in Paul. Paul almost certainly
wrote them. Moreover, if scribes were so concerned to insert aspects of Jesus’s life into Paul’s
writings, it is passing strange that they were not more thorough in doing so, for example, by
inserting comments about Jesus’s virgin birth in Bethlehem, his parables, his miracles, his trial
before Pilate, and so forth. In the end, it is almost certain that whatever else one thinks about Paul’s
view of Jesus—and however one explains why Paul himself does not say more—it is safe to say that
he knew that Jesus existed and that he knew some fundamentally important things about Jesus’s life
and death.
The Argument of G. A. Wells
In my judgment a much more interesting argument about Paul’s knowledge of the historical Jesus is
one that is hammered time and again by G. A. Wells. If Paul knew about the historical Jesus, asks
Wells, why was he silent about almost everything that we hear about Jesus in the surviving Gospels?
We hear almost nothing about Jesus’s teachings (just three references to them in Paul). Were Jesus’s
other teachings irrelevant to Paul? If they were relevant, why didn‘t he mention them? Furthermore,
we hear almost nothing about the events of Jesus’s life: no descriptions of miracles or exorcisms or
raisings of the dead. Were these things unimportant to Paul? We hear almost nothing about the
details of Jesus’s death: the trip to Jerusalem, the betrayal, the trial before Pontius Pilate, and so on.
Did none of this matter to Paul? In Wells’s view all of these traditions about Jesus should have been
massively important to Paul, and he would have written about them had he known about them. That
suggests that Paul in fact did not know about them.
For Wells it is particularly significant that Paul does not quote the sayings of Jesus extensively
or refer to his miracles. Surely Jesus’s teachings should have mattered, especially when Paul talks
about the same issues. For example, Wells points out, Paul indicates that “we do not even know how
to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26).17 But Jesus actually taught his disciples how to pray when he
taught them the Lord’s Prayer. If Paul knew anything about Jesus, wouldn’t he at least know this?
Paul also taught that followers of Jesus ought to be celibate (1 Corinthians 7). Surely if he knew
about Jesus, he would know that Jesus too praised those who renounced marriage for the kingdom
of heaven (Matthew 19:12). Paul taught that Christ’s followers should “bless those who persecute
you” (Romans 12:14). Why would he not quote Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to bolster his
argument, to show that the injunction is not based simply on his own personal view? With respect to
miracles—since, in Wells’s words, “The Jews certainly expected that miracles would characterize the
Messianic age”—it is almost impossible to understand why Paul would not appeal to a single miracle
of Jesus or even mention that he did any if he wanted to authorize his gospel message. With respect to all the silences of Paul, Wells makes one particularly significant methodological
point. It is not simply that Paul does not mention some things about Jesus’s life. It is that he does not
mention things that would have bolstered precisely the points he was trying to make to his readers.
In Wells’s words: “Of course silence does not always prove ignorance, and any writer knows a great
many things he fails to mention. A writer’s silence is significant only if it extends to matters
obviously relevant to what he has chosen to discuss.”
18 In the end, Wells finds it puzzling that if Paul
really thought Jesus lived just a few years earlier, “there is no mention of a Galilean ministry; no
mention of Bethlehem, Nazareth, or Galilee; no suggestion that Jesus spoke parables or performed
miracles; and no indication that he died in Jerusalem.” With respect to the crucifixion, “he might be
expected at least to allude to when and where this important event occurred, if that was known to
him.”
19 The conclusion that Wells draws is that Paul did not know about a Jesus who had lived just a
few years before, a Galilean Jewish teacher who was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate.
The Counter to the Counterargument
Wells does seem to make a strong argument, when it is stated baldly. But when examined closely, it
falls apart for some compelling reasons. For one thing, when Wells says that Paul would have cited
the Lord’s Prayer or the command to bless one’s persecutors had he known them, he might be right
or he might be wrong (as we’ll explore more fully below). But even if Paul knew about the historical
Jesus, and even if he knew a lot about him, there is no reason to think that he therefore must have
known these particular sayings of Jesus. Many authors, even those living after Paul, who knew full
well that Jesus existed, say nothing about the Lord’s Prayer or the injunction to bless those who
persecute you. It is striking, for example, that neither of these passages is found in the Gospel of
Mark. Did Mark think Jesus existed? Of course he did. Why then did he not include these two
important sayings? Either they did not serve his purposes or he had not heard of them, even though
he too is interested in both prayer and persecution. (The sayings came to Matthew and Luke from
Q.)
Some of the materials that Wells expects Paul to refer to were completely irrelevant to what
Paul was writing about and to whom. Take, for example, the claim that Paul would have referred to
Jesus’s miracles to demonstrate that Jesus was the messiah. It may well be that if Paul were arguing
with a group of Jews over whether Jesus was the messiah, he would have mentioned Jesus’s
miracles. But the seven of Paul’s letters that we have were not written to Jews to persuade them to
believe in Jesus. Quite the contrary. They were written to congregations of Christians who already
believed in Jesus and needed no convincing (and, by the way, the congregations were principally
made up of Gentiles, not Jews). Why would Paul have needed to appeal to Jesus’s miracles to
convince people who already were committed to the cause?
One of the real weaknesses of Wells’s argument is that he assumes that we know what Paul
would have done. Second-guessing someone is always a dangerous historical enterprise, especially
second-guessing someone from two thousand years ago whom we don’t really know and have limited
access to. What real evidence do we have to suggest what Paul would have done?
It bears noting in this connection that Paul’s silences are not restricted to the life and teachings
of Jesus. He is silent as well about many, many things that we desperately wish he would have talked
about since we would like to know a good deal more about all sorts of matters. Think of all the
silences of Paul with respect to Paul himself. Where was he from? Who were his parents? What was
his education? Who were his teachers? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? Why doesn’t
he name any of them? What were his religious activities before converting? What was the
“revelation” that made him convert? What did he do during his three years in Arabia or Damascus
before meeting with Cephas in Jerusalem? Or in the following fourteen years? Where did he travel?
What was his occupation? Or his daily routine? How did he convert people? Where did he meet
them? What did he tell them? What happened once they accepted the gospel? And on and on and on.
There are thousands of things about Paul we would like to know. Why doesn’t he tell us any of
them? Mainly because he had no occasion to do so. He was writing letters to his churches to deal
with their problems, and for the most part he spent his time in these letters addressing the
situations at hand. It is important to bear in mind that his audiences were made up entirely of
Christian believers. We don’t know how much these people already knew—about Paul or, more
important, about Jesus. If they were already fully informed about Jesus, then there was no need for
Paul to remind them that Jesus walked on water, raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, and was
executed in Jerusalem.
Is it then unreasonable that Paul tells us relatively little about Jesus? Why not double-check
with other authors? For we have writings produced years after Paul by Christians who certainly
believed Jesus existed, and we can see whether in those writings we find references to the words
and deeds of Jesus missing from Paul.
An obvious place to turn is to the other books of the New Testament. How many times do 1
Timothy, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and Revelation—all written by authors, as we have seen, who clearly
indicate that Jesus existed—talk about Jesus’s parables, his miracles, his exorcisms, and so on?
Never. Does that mean they don’t know about Jesus? No, it probably means that these traditions
about Jesus’s life were not important to their purposes.
Or consider two even clearer cases, authors who certainly knew of actual Gospels of Jesus that
we still have today. As I earlier mentioned, the author of 1, 2, and 3 John was living in the same
community out of which the Gospel of John was produced, and he shows clear evidence of actually
knowing John’s Gospel. And how many times does he quote it in his three letters? None at all. How
often does he talk about Jesus’s parables, his miracles, his exorcisms, his trip to Jerusalem, his trial
before Pilate? Never. Does that mean he doesn’t think Jesus lived?
So too with the book of Acts. In this case we are dealing with an author who actually wrote a
Gospel, the first volume of his work, the Gospel of Luke. As I earlier indicated, about one-fourth of
the book of Acts is dedicated to speeches allegedly delivered by the apostles. And in how many of
those speeches do the apostles quote the words of the historical Jesus or at least the words of Jesus
found in the Gospel of Luke? Almost never. The clearest quotation of Jesus is the one we considered
before, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” a saying that in fact is not even found in the
Gospel of Luke. I should stress that these speeches deal with matters that Jesus himself often talked
about—persecution, for example, and false teachers—but Jesus’s words on the subject are not
quoted.
Or take later authors from outside the New Testament. The authors of both 1 Clement (from
around 95 CE) and the Epistle of Barnabas (around 135 CE) show clear and compelling evidence
that they know about Jesus and understand that he was a real historical figure. They say a number
of things about him. But their silences are nearly as large as those of Paul. Just to consider some of
the matters mentioned by Wells as “surprisingly” absent from Paul’s writings, neither 1 Clement nor
Barnabas indicates that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to a virgin, that he came from Nazareth, that
he experienced his temptations in the wilderness, that he ever told a parable, that he healed the
sick, that he cast out demons, that he underwent a transfiguration, that he got into controversies
with Pharisees, that he made a final journey to Jerusalem during the Passover, that he entered into
the city riding a donkey, that he cleansed the Temple, that he had the Last Supper, that he went to
Gethsemane, that he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, that he was put on trial first before the high
priest Caiaphas and then by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, that the Jewish crowds convinced
Pilate to release Barabbas instead of Jesus, and so on. What do these silences show? They do not show that these authors did not know about the
historical Jesus, because they clearly did. If anything, the silences simply show that these traditions
about Jesus were not relevant to their purposes. Why then does Paul not say more about the historical Jesus, if he knew more? One point I want
to reemphasize. From what Paul does tell us, it is clear that he did indeed know about the historical
Jesus. He gives us important information about Jesus’s life and quotes his teachings on several
occasions. Why then doesn’t he quote him more often, and why doesn’t he give us more information?
This is indeed a perennial question asked by scholars of the New Testament, and several
possibilities can be considered.
One, obviously, is that Paul didn’t say more about the historical Jesus because he didn’t know
much more. This strikes many readers of Paul as implausible: if he worshipped Jesus as his Lord,
surely he wanted to know more about him. Wouldn’t he want to know absolutely everything about
him? It may seem so. But it is important to remember that when Christians today think about their
faith, they often think about the ultimate source of their faith in the New Testament, which begins
with Gospels that describe the things Jesus said and did. And so for Christians today, it only makes
sense that a Christian is informed about Jesus’s life. But when Paul was writing there were no
Gospels. They were written later. It is not clear how important the details of Jesus’s life were to Paul.
In this connection it is important to remember what Paul told the Corinthians about what he
taught them when he was with them: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ,
and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). It was the death of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection
that really mattered to Paul. That is why when Paul summarized the matters of “primary
importance” in his preaching (1 Corinthians 15:3–5), it consisted of a very short list: Christ died in
accordance with the scriptures; he was buried; he was raised from the dead in accordance with the
scriptures; and he appeared to his followers (then to Paul). Those are the things—not the Sermon on
the Mount—that mattered most to Paul.
The deeper question of why Paul would want to focus more on the death and resurrection of
Jesus than on his life is intriguing—it has gripped scholars for many years—but it is not germane to
the point I am trying to make here. Paul may have known about the teachings of Jesus found in the
Sermon on the Mount, or he may not have. We can’t know. What we can know is that on occasion he
found the teachings of Jesus that he did know about useful to his purposes, and so he cited them. Why he didn’t cite them more frequently is a matter of guesswork. Maybe he didn’t know many of
them. Maybe he didn’t think they were all that important. Maybe he assumed his readers knew them
already. Maybe in his other letters (the many that have been lost) he quoted them all over the map. We will never know. What we can know is that Paul certainly thought that Jesus existed. He had clear knowledge of
important aspects of Jesus’s life—a completely human life, in which he was born as a Jew to a Jewish
woman and became a minister to the Jews before they rejected him, leading to his death. He knew
some of Jesus’s teachings. And he knew how Jesus died, by crucifixion. For whatever reason, that
was the most important aspect of Jesus’s life: his death. And Paul could scarcely have thought that
Jesus died if he hadn’t lived.
Conclusion
AS A RESULT OF our investigations so far, it should be clear that historians do not need to rely on
only one source (say, the Gospel of Mark) for knowing whether or not the historical Jesus existed. He
is attested clearly by Paul, independently of the Gospels, and in many other sources as well: in the
speeches in Acts, which contain material that predate Paul’s letters, and later in Hebrews, 1 and 2
Peter, Jude, Revelation, Papias, Ignatius, and 1 Clement. These are ten witnesses that can be added
to our seven independent Gospels (either entirely or partially independent), giving us a great variety
of sources that broadly corroborate many of the reports about Jesus without evidence of
collaboration. And this is not counting all of the oral traditions that were in circulation even before
these surviving written accounts. Moreover, the information about Jesus known to Paul appears to
go back to the early 30s of the Common Era, as arguably does some of the material in the book of
Acts. The information about Jesus in these sources corroborates as well aspects of the Gospel
traditions, some of which can also be dated back to the 30s, to Aramaic-speaking Palestine. Together
all of these sources combine to make a powerful argument that Jesus was not simply invented but
that he existed as a historical person in Palestine. But there is yet more evidence, which we will
examine in the following chapter.
