'Jesus Christ didn't exist' according to author who found no mention of him in historical texts

'Jesus Christ didn't exist' according to an author who found no mention of him in historical texts

This is not news, but the truth is much more complicated than the author purports:

1. The Talmud and other works make reference to people who might be the man known to Christians as Jesus of Nazareth. The author of this study has chosen to ignore these possible references, choosing to acknowledge only those mentions which are certainly identifiable as the Jesus of the New Testament.

2. There is a factual error in the article (which may be an accurate representation of an error found in the book, but that's a fact I am unable to ascertain, not having read the book). In direct contradiction to the article's claims, the Roman historian Tacitus does mention Jesus and his condemnation by Pilate. In 116 AD, Tacitus wrote in his Annals about Nero's famous fire in 64 AD, including the following passage:

"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind."

Most scholars consider that passage to be valid. This, however was written nearly a century after the supposed life of Jesus of Nazareth, and Tacitus may just have been repeating what Christians believed rather than what could be proved. Tacitus does not cite sources or explain why he believes his account of the Christ/Pilate encounter, which had happened some 80 years earlier. The standards of historical presentation in 116 AD were somewhat more lax than those of our era.

Still, it can be fairly stated that no Roman or Jewish historian who actually lived in the time of Jesus of Nazareth mentioned him. It doesn't mean, however, that he never existed. That conclusion is an irrational leap of logic. No historian who wrote about the 1930s and 1940s mentions my father, but we cannot conclude from that fact that my father never existed. We can conclude that if my father existed, he was not considered noteworthy in his lifetime. The same can be said of Jesus of Nazareth. While he may possibly be the most influential person in all of human history, as measured by his impact on future generations, it seems that he was a minor figure who attracted no wide notice in his lifetime.