This is the second in a series of five essays titled:
A Historical and Methodical Approach to Finding Faith in Jesus
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Lots of people say lots of things about Jesus, but what about him can be determined historically? That’s what interests me, and I assume that’s what would interest any open-minded person.
The most reliable sources of historical information about Jesus of Nazareth can be found in the Bible – specifically, in the New Testament. When I say this, however, it’s important that you understand I am meaning the New Testament in its human sense, not its divine sense. I do believe that both the Old Testament and the New Testament are the word of God, but I believe this as a result of my faith in Jesus – not as a cause of it. In other words, it’s my faith in Jesus and the things he said that lead me to have faith that the Bible is the word of God, not the other way around.
Therefore – and, again, this is very important – for purposes of this chapter, and for purposes of laying a sure foundation for faith in Jesus Christ, I want you to initially regard the New Testament as the writings of men – just as you would regard the writings of Thucydides, Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, David McCullough, or any other human being. Coming to a conviction that the Bible is the word of God is for another time – after faith in Christ has first been secured. Before putting faith in Jesus, we have to learn enough about him to warrant placing faith in him. Only a fool trusts someone he knows little about.
Learning from History
Jesus is a historical figure. Learning about him is not a matter of philosophy. Neither is it a matter of science. It’s not even a matter of theology. It’s a matter of history. We can know the truth about Jesus of Nazareth the same way we can know the truth about any other historical figure – which is that people in a position to know a person or event documented the facts. We learn what they knew by reading what they wrote.
Someone may object to this approach by saying that any claims about Jesus are a matter of religion, as if that distinction can remove Jesus from the realm of history. History is about what happened. We don’t get to exclude from it people and events that might have religious implications we don’t like. Nero, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Herod the Great are all 1st-century historical figures; in that sense, Jesus of Nazareth is just one more.
The 27 Texts We Call the New Testament
Someone may object that since the texts that comprise the New Testament were written by followers of Jesus, these texts cannot be considered historical. That, however, would be as foolish as saying that America’s founding documents can’t be historical because they were written and preserved by Americans, or that we can’t accept any Jewish testimony about the Holocaust because it comes from Jews. That witnesses have a connection with the historical person being studied is a factor that helps you know how to analyze their testimony, but by no means excludes that testimony. Otherwise, the discipline of history would be greatly limited in its fact-finding ability.
Jesus wrote nothing himself, but he did commission representatives – called apostles – to bear witness to the key events in his life as they spread his teaching throughout the world. For the most part, these men fulfilled their mission with face-to-face preaching and teaching. Over the decades of the 1st century in which they did their work, they did occasionally find the need to write to and for the congregations – called churches – they had formed by their preaching and teaching. The churches received the original texts from the authors, and then preserved them, copied and shared them with other churches, handing them down from one generation to the next. This was the process that took place between the 1st century when they were written and the 4th century when they began to be published as a single collection combined with the Old Testament – what we today call the Bible.
The ancient churches involved in this chain of custody were spread from one end of the Roman Empire to the other…and beyond. Each congregation was independent from the other; there was no headquarters or centralizing authority structure. A church in one city would copy what had been written for a church in another city, and vice versa. Between the 1st and 4th centuries, forgeries of apostolic writings proliferated. Though some fakes took longer to expose than others, all were excluded by the time the New Testament took its final form late in the 4th century.
Christianity began as an obscure Jewish sect in the 1st century, and grew to be the state religion of the Roman Empire by the 4th. This is what enabled churches to finally come out of the shadows and finalize the only 27 authentic texts that could be confirmed as coming from the 1st-century followers of Jesus.
Primary Sources Versus Secondary Sources
When historians research a subject, they distinguish between primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are those produced closest in time and place to the subject of study; secondary sources draw on those primary sources. The 27 New Testament texts fall into the category of primary sources on Jesus…all by themselves. Every other book, article, or other form of writing about Jesus is a secondary source because no other texts can be proven to have come from the first generation of his original followers.
Therefore, the most reliable sources of historical information about Jesus of Nazareth are 27 1st-century texts which are collectively called the New Testament. This chapter has not been about placing faith in Jesus – it’s only been about the historical sources that are best able to give us enough information to make that decision. Since that information is easily accessible by practically all American adults today, it’s only by our own choosing that we are ever deprived of it.
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The next essay in this series: What Is the Nature of the Primary Historical Evidence for Jesus? (6 min)
11/14/25
The Duty of a Man 