Dispensing with the History-Denying “Jesus Mythicists”

Everything I believe about God is rooted in historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth – what he taught and the way he lived. Therefore, if you can undermine the historical authenticity of Jesus, you can destroy my faith. I am not willing to believe in a person who did not exist or for whom there is no evidence. You shouldn’t be either. God has chosen to root our faith in history – not philosophy, science, or even religion.

Since Jesus lived as a man long ago, this means finding out what history has to say about him. We can even afford to be skeptical about Jesus’ relationship to God in the beginning of our historical search; I sure was. As a result, I subsequently found out that you don’t need faith to arrive at faith. All you need is a determined preference for facts over falsehoods, for truth over lies. No one in his right mind enjoys being lied to. With a common-sense attitude, we simply look to history for information about Jesus, just as we would for information about George Washington, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or anyone else who lived and died before we came along.

The purpose of this essay is to address a small but loud group who insist that history cannot tell us about Jesus. That is, there has come to be in the age of the internet certain people who are called “Jesus Mythicists.” They believe that Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed. These people are just like those people who maintain that the earth is flat or those who claim that the moon landing was faked in that no amount of historical evidence is ever going to convince such people. By contrast, real historians – regardless of religion or lack thereof – acknowledge Jesus’ historicity.

John Dominic Crossan, for example, is a former Catholic priest and widely-recognized historian of early Christianity who denies that Jesus was raised from the dead. In this regard, he’s typical of many modern biblical scholars. In the quote below, he invokes both Jewish and Roman historians to emphatically make the point that the Bible is historically accurate when it says that Jesus was crucified.

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus … agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.”
John Dominic Crossan in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (p. 145). HarperCollins, 1994, 234 pages.

Could there be a more emphatic statement than the crucifixion of Jesus is “as sure as anything historical can ever be”?

To give another example of historical confirmation by a skeptic of the resurrection, Bart Ehrman is a former evangelical and an even more widely-read biblical scholar than Crossan. His textbooks are commonplace in college curriculums and his books for mass audiences are best sellers. Like Crossan and other skeptical scholars, Ehrman is fully convinced of certain historical facts about Jesus even though he thinks Jesus is just as dead as anyone else who ever died. While Crossan’s quote was taken from a context focused on the way Jesus died, Ehrman’s quote was taken from a context focused on the broader question of Jesus’ historicity, and what specifics beyond just crucifixion are considered universally accepted by historians. When he says “virtually all scholars of antiquity” and “nearly every trained scholar on the planet” in the quote below, Ehrman indeed means “virtually all” and “nearly every.” He wants to emphasize that he is not just talking about Christian scholars.

“Despite [an] enormous range of opinion [on Jesus], there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. […T]his is the view of nearly every trained scholar on the planet…”
Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (p. 12). HarperCollins, 2012, 373 pages.

Obviously, “Jesus Mythicists” aren’t just fighting Christianity – they’re fighting historians and history itself.

There was a Roman Empire. There was an Israel under its dominion. There was a Tiberius Caesar in Rome, and there was a Pontius Pilate representing him in Jerusalem. There was a Jewish rabbi named Jesus. There were witnesses. There is documentation. It’s all history. Sure, there’s lots of dispute about what Jesus said and did – but not that he said and did things! In fact, unless there was agreement that he once lived, there’d be no argument to have about what he said and did.

Jewish, Roman, and other non-Christian sources from ancient time – and ever since – testify to the historicity of Jesus. Granted, the non-Christian sources usually do so in fleeting, dismissive, and even hostile ways – but no reasonable person, much less trained historian, attempts to deny Jesus’ human existence. Not every secular historian is as honest as H. G. Wells, but Jesus’ life has made too much impact on the world for it to have been a figment of human imagination.

“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English writer and social critic, author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and many other books.

When people ignore the historicity of Jesus, they’re ignoring the elephant in the room of history. After all, the reason we call the 1st century “the 1st century” is because of this man named Jesus.

All human history, in fact, is now dated according to Jesus’ life – all time being divided into B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord”). This system of dating was first proposed in the 6th century and was widely used by the 9th. In other words, it took a while for people to realize just how much impact this “royalty reject” had had on the human race. Do you think the world chose to re-orient and universalize all its calendars around a man who never lived?

Even today, the world is still paying homage – however thoughtlessly or unwillingly – to the centrality of Jesus in human history. Every time we write a date showing the year, even on a check, it is a reference to his life. Since there is a date on the majority of documents humans produce, there are more than abundant references to the historicity of Jesus. Why do we not think about this more? One reason is that our increasingly secular age seeks out ways to suppress references to Jesus. For example, you may have noticed that many folks seek to replace B.C. with B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and A.D. with C.E. (the Common Era). However, they’re only obscuring a fact; they can’t change the reality that a man named Jesus is the reason each year is the number that it is – regardless of whether you place a CE or AD after it.

History deniers – such as “Jesus Mythicists” – are very few in number. What’s far more common are people who simply ignore history. I was one of them. What changed me was someone willing to call my attention to the elephant in the room.

10/1/25