Why isn’t there more evidence for Jesus outside the Bible?

Theologian and Bible commentary author R. T France begins his book, The Evidence for Jesus, in a seemingly odd way by saying: “The first thing to be said about non-Christian historical evidence for Jesus is that there is not much of it, at least from a period close enough to the events to be of any value as an independent witness to Jesus as seen through non-Christian eyes.”

France follows up his initial statement by adding, “It is often suggested that this fact is very damaging for the New Testament portrait of Jesus: it lacks external corroboration and is therefore suspect.”

What France is referring to is a line of anti-Jesus argumentation that is very long in the tooth that says if you have a man with such universal significance like Jesus who did the kinds of things we read about in the Gospels, well then, He would have been known by everyone during that time and written about by every historian worth their salt. And since that’s not what we have, then either Jesus never really existed, or the biblical authors have greatly exaggerated His life.

OK, so let’s ask the question: Is the non-biblical evidence for Jesus so thin as to make a thinking person question if He lived or matches up to how the Bible presents Him? Let’s start at the top and work our way down to the bottom and see where we end up.

The myth that Jesus is a myth

At the far end of the Jesus-denying train are figures like the controversial figure Bruno Bauer (1809 – 1882) who put forward a series of widely-disputed works nearly 200 years ago arguing that Jesus never existed. That position is beyond extreme fringe today, with Princeton professor Bruce Metzger writing decades ago, “Today no competent scholar denies the historicity of Jesus.”

Very true, says Christian skeptic Bart Ehrman, who wrote a book a few years back refuting the “mythicists” entitled Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. He sums up his work by saying: “He [Jesus] certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”

Round 1: Christianity, 1; Skeptics, 0.   

Moving past the radical Jesus-never-lived crowd we find those who say the gospel accounts have the character of a fairy tale or, at the very most, were heavily redacted long after they were originally written by mythologizers who turned Christ into a legend that He wasn’t.

Putting those allegations to rest is Dr. Richard Burridge and his landmark work What are the Gospels – A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography. Burridge originally set out to disprove the thesis that the Gospels fit within the genre of ancient biography, but during his research, the evidence he uncovered caused him to reverse his opinion. A fairy tale is something the Gospels are not, argues Burridge, with Graham Stanton of Cambridge saying in the forward to Burridge’s book: “I do not think it is now possible to deny that the Gospels are a subset of the broad ancient literary genre of ‘lives,’ that is, biographies.”

What about the charge of mythologizing redaction? That would be the real magic trick as no New Testament historian dates the Gospels outside of the first century (of which we have ancient copies) during which His eyewitnesses lived, and the same group will tell you it typically takes two generations to pass before legend can be successfully inserted into a historical account.

But that said, we do know of three attempted additions to the New Testament — the longer ending in Mark; the account of the adulterous woman in John; and the “Johannine Comma” that contains a Trinitarian formula insertion. But it should be kept in mind that, through the science of biblical criticism, we know of these attempts, and all are marked as such in the vast majority of Bibles. The conclusion is that no other redactions or additions are known to exist.

Round 2: Christianity, 2; Skeptics, 0.   

OK, fine, maybe the Gospels are ancient biographies of Jesus, and what they originally wrote back then is what we have today. But let’s get back to the question of why there aren’t more outside-the-Bible accounts of Jesus.

First, this particular area of historical research is fairly young. As Robert Van Voorst points out in his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament, “Until about one hundred years ago, scholars did little or no search for Jesus outside the New Testament.”

Those who have pursued the topic are faced with the fact that the availability of “news” back in the first century was scarce, especially on a multi-nation level. Even though Rome was the focus of activity in the first century, Jesus’ deeds were confined to Judea and Galilee, two tiny administrative areas under the massive umbrella of Rome. The sayings, actions (no matter how profound), and death of a seemingly failed Jewish insurrectionist likely caught little long-term attention.

That last point should not be overlooked. Keep in mind that, even with all that Jesus did and taught, the overwhelming majority of people rejected, abandoned, and put Him out of their minds once He was put to death. As for His miracles, Jewish writers explained them away by saying He “practiced sorcery” (JewishSanhedrin – The Talmud, 43a), which was intentionally crafted to make Him laughable and forgettable in most people’s eyes.     

Next, it’s widely understood that much of the historical writing from that period has not survived. R. T. France notes that “even the great histories of Tacitus … have survived in only two manuscripts, which together contain scarcely more than half what he is believed to have written; the rest are lost.”

The New Testament itself speaks to that fact. Luke tells us other accounts of Jesus were written that we, to date, don’t have: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word …” (Luke 1:1-2, my emphasis).

Even if much of the non-biblical evidence for Jesus may have been lost, what we do dovetails pretty well with what Scripture says about Him. Take, for example, this blurb from Tacitus: “Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men loathed for their vices whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor. But the deadly cult, though checked for a time, was now breaking out not only in Judea…”

Short and sweet but useful as Tacitus gives us His name (“Christus”), His sentence under Pilate, His date (the reign of Tiberius, AD 14-37), and His home origin (“Judea”).

Not bad.

I won’t go into all the other non-biblical authors’ mentions of Christ, which include Jewish writings like Josephus (yes, his Testimonium Flavianum of Jesus does have historical merit) and the Talmud, as well as other non-Jewish historians like Celsus, Pliny the Younger, Lucian, and Mara bar Serapion.

All in all, there’s a healthy set of non-biblical references to Jesus that add historical weight to the Gospel accounts, strengthening a belief that He’s real. Historian and theologian Gary Habermas, in his book The Historical Jesus, sums up this conclusion by saying: “We have examined a total of 45 ancient sources for the life of Jesus, which include 19 early creedal, four archaeological, 17 non-Christian [my emphasis], and five non-New Testament Christian sources. From this data we enumerated 129 reported facts concerning the life, person, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, plus the disciples’ earliest message … There can be little doubt that this is a substantial amount of pre- and non-New Testament material for Jesus’ existence.”

Strike three for the skeptic's side.

Lastly, let’s not forget that having mountains of more non-biblical materials won’t provide any additional Heavenly benefit for us other than what’s contained in the Gospel accounts. John tells us at the end of his gospel that we have enough information to make the most important decision we’ll ever make and that should be sufficient: “Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30-31).