Early Historical Documents on Jesus Christ

The historical documents referring to Christ's life and
work may be divided into three classes: pagan sources,
Jewish sources, and Christian sources. We shall study
the three in succession.

I. PAGAN SOURCES

The non-Christian sources for the historical truth of
the Gospels are both few and polluted by hatred and
prejudice. A number of reasons have been advanced for
this condition of the pagan sources:

* The field of the Gospel history was remote Galilee;

* the Jews were noted as a superstitious race, if we
believe Horace (Credat Judoeus Apella, I, Sat., v,
100);

* the God of the Jews was unknown and unintelligible to
most pagans of that period;

* the Jews in whose midst Christianity had taken its
origin were dispersed among, and hated by, all the
pagan nations;

* the Christian religion itself was often confounded
with one of the many sects that had sprung up in
Judaism, and which could not excite the interest of the
pagan spectator.

It is at least certain that neither Jews nor Gentiles
suspected in the least the paramount importance of the
religion, the rise of which they witnessed among them.
These considerations will account for the rarity and
the asperity with which Christian events are mentioned
by pagan authors. But though Gentile writers do not
give us any information about Christ and the early
stages of Christianity which we do not possess in the
Gospels, and though their statements are made with
unconcealed hatred and contempt, still they unwittingly
prove the historical value of the facts related by the
Evangelists.

We need not delay over a writing entitled the "Acts of
Pilate", which must have existed in the second century
(Justin,"Apol"., I, 35), and must have been used in the
pagan schools to warn boys against the belief of
Christians (Euseb.,"Hist. Eccl.", I, ix; IX, v); nor
need we inquire into the question whether there existed
any authentic census tables of Quirinus.

A. Tacitus

We possess at least the testimony of Tacitus (A.D. 54-
119) for the statements that the Founder of the
Christian religion, a deadly superstition in the eyes
of the Romans, had been put to death by the procurator
Pontius Pilate under the reign of Tiberius; that His
religion, though suppressed for a time, broke forth
again not only throughout Judea where it had
originated, but even in Rome, the conflux of all the
streams of wickness and shamelessness; furthermore,
that Nero had diverted from himself the suspicion of
the burning of Rome by charging the Christians with the
crime; that these latter were not guilty of arson,
though they deserved their fate on account of their
universal misanthropy. Tacitus, moreover, describes
some of the horrible torments to which Nero subjected
the Christians (Ann., XV, xliv). The Roman writer
confounds the Christians with the Jews, considering
them as a especially abject Jewish sect; how little he
investigated the historical truth of even the Jewish
records may be inferred from the credulity with which
he accepted the absurd legends and calumnies about the
origin of he Hebrew people (Hist., V, iii, iv).

B. Seutonius

Another Roman writer who shows his acquaintance with
Christ and the Christians is Suetonius (A.D. 75-160).
It has been noted that Suetonius considered Christ
(Chrestus) as a Roman insurgent who stirred up
seditions under the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41 54):
"Judaeos, impulsore Chresto, assidue tumultuantes
(Claudius) Roma expulit" (Clau., xxv). In his life of
Nero he regards that emperor as a public benefactor on
account of his severe treatment of the Christians:
"Multa sub eo et animadversa severe, et coercita, nec
minus instituta....afflicti Christiani, genus hominum
superstitious novae et maleficae" (Nero, xvi). The
Roman writer does not understand that the Jewish
troubles arose from the Jewish antagonism to the
Messianic character of Jesus Christ and to the rights
of the Christian Church.

C. Pliny the Younger

Of greater importance is the letter of Pliny the
Younger to the Emperor Trajan (about A.D. 61-115), in
which the Governor of Bithynia consults his imperial
majesty as to how to deal with the Christians living
within his jurisdiction. On the one hand, their lives
were confessedly innocent; no crime could be proved
against them excepting their Christian belief, which
appeared to the Roman as an extravagant and perverse
superstition. On the other hand, the Christians could
not be shaken in their allegiance to Christ, Whom they
celebrated as their God in their early morning meetings
(Ep., X, 97, 98). Christianity here appears no longer
as a religion of criminals, as it does in the texts of
Tacitus and Suetonius; Pliny acknowledges the high
moral principles of the Christians, admires their
constancy in the Faith (pervicacia et inflexibilis
obstinatio), which he appears to trace back to their
worship of Christ (carmenque Christo, quasi Deo,
dicere).

D. Other pagan writers

The remaining pagan witnesses are of less importance:
In the second century Lucian sneered at Christ and the
Christians, as he scoffed at the pagan gods. He alludes
to Christ's death on the Cross, to His miracles, to the
mutual love prevailing among the Christians
("Philopseudes", nn. 13, 16; "De Morte Pereg"). There
are also alleged allusions to Christ in Numenius
(Origen, "Contra Cels", IV, 51), to His parables in
Galerius, to the earthquake at the Crucifixion in
Phlegon ( Origen, "Contra Cels.", II, 14). Before the
end of the second century, the logos alethes of Celsus,
as quoted by Origen (Contra Cels., passim), testifies
that at that time the facts related in the Gospels were
generally accepted as historically true. However scanty
the pagan sources of the life of Christ may be, they
bear at least testimony to His existence, to His
miracles, His parables, His claim to Divine worship,
His death on the Cross, and to the more striking
characteristics of His religion.

II. JEWISH SOURCES

A. Philo

Philo, who dies after A.D. 40, is mainly important for
the light he throws on certain modes of thought and
phraseology found again in some of the Apostles.
Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., II, iv) indeed preserves a
legend that Philo had met St. Peter in Rome during his
mission to the Emperor Caius; moreover, that in his
work on the contemplative life he describes the life of
the Christian Church in Alexandria founded by St. Mark,
rather than that of the Essenes and Therapeutae. But it
is hardly probable that Philo had heard enough of
Christ and His followers to give an historical
foundation to the foregoing legends.

B. Josephus

The earlist non-Christian writer who refers Christ is
the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus; born A.D. 37, he
was a contemporary of the Apostles, and died in Rome
A.D. 94. Two passages in his "Antiquities" which
confirm two facts of the inspired Christian records are
not disputed. In the one he reports the murder of "John
called Baptist" by Herod (Ant., XVIII, v, 2),
describing also John's character and work; in the other
(Ant., XX, ix, 1) he disappoves of the sentence
pronounced by the high priest Ananus against "James,
brother of Jesus Who was called Christ." It is
antecedently probable that a writer so well informed as
Josephus, must have been well acquainted too with the
doctrine and the history of Jesus Christ. Seeing, also,
that he records events of minor importance in the
history of the Jews, it would be surprising if he were
to keep silence about Jesus Christ. Consideration for
the priests and Pharisees did not prevent him from
mentioning the judicial murders of John the Baptist and
the Apostle James; his endeavour to find the fulfilment
of the Messianic prophecies in Vespasian did not induce
him to pass in silence over several Jewish sects,
though their tenets appear to be inconsistent with the
Vespasian claims. One naturally expects, therefore, a
notice about Jesus Christ in Josephus. Ant., XVIII,
iii, 3, seems to satisfy this expectation:

About this time appeared Jesus, a wise man (if indeed
it is right to call Him man; for He was a worker of
astonishing deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the
truth with joy), and He drew to Himself many Jews (many
also of Greeks. This was the Christ). And when Pilate,
at the denunciation of those that are foremost among
us, had condemned Him to the cross, those who had first
loved Him did not abandon Him (for He appeared to them
alive again on the third day, the holy prophets having
foretold this and countless other marvels about Him.)
The tribe of Christians named after Him did not cease
to this day.

A testimony so important as the foregoing could not
escape the work of the critics. Their conclusions may
be reduced to three headings: those who consider the
passage wholly spurious; those who consider it to be
wholly authentic; and those who consider it to be a
little of each.

Those who regard the passage as spurious

First, there are those who consider the whole passage
as spurious. The principal reasons for this view appear
to be the following:

* Josephus could not represent Jesus Christ as a simple
moralist, and on the other hand he could not emphasize
the Messianic prophecies and expectations without
offending the Roman susceptibilities;

* the above cited passage from Josephus is said to be
unknown to Origen and the earlier patristic writers;

* its very place in the Josephan text is uncertain,
since Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., II, vi) must have found it
before the notices concerning Pilate, while it now
stands after them.

But the spuriousness of the disputed Josephan passage
does not imply the historian's ignorance of the facts
connected with Jesus Christ. Josephus's report of his
own juvenile precocity before the Jewish teachers
(Vit., 2) reminds one of the story of Christ's stay in
the Temple at the age of twelve; the description of his
shipwreck on his journey to Rome (Vit., 3) recalls St.
Paul's shipwreck as told in the Acts; finally his
arbitrary introduction of a deceit practised by the
priests of Isis on a Roman lady, after the chapter
containing his supposed allusion to Jesus, shows a
disposition to explain away the virgin birth of Jesus
and to prepare the falsehoods embodied in the later
Jewish writings.

Those who regard the passage as authentic, with some
spurious additions

A second class of critics do not regard the whole of
Josephus's testimony concerning Christ as spurious but
they maintain the interpolation of parts included above
in parenthesis. The reasons assigned for this opinion
may be reduced to the following two:

* Josephus must have mentioned Jesus, but he cannot
have recognized Him as the Christ; hence part of our
present Josephan text must be genuine, part must be
interpolated.

* Again, the same conclusion follows from the fact that
Origen knew a Josephan text about Jesus, but was not
acquainted with our present reading; for, according to
the great Alexandrian doctor, Josephus did not believe
that Jesus was the Messias ("In Matth.", xiii, 55;
"Contra Cels.", I, 47).

Whatever force these two arguments have is lost by the
fact that Josephus did not write for the Jews but for
the Romans; consequently, when he says, "This was the
Christ", he does not necessarily imply that Jesus was
the Christ considered by the Romans as the founder of
the Christian religion.

Those who consider it to be completely genuine

The third class of scholars believe that the whole
passage concerning Jesus, as it is found today in
Josephus, is genuine. The main arguments for the
genuineness of the Josephan passage are the following:

* First, all codices or manuscripts of Josephus's work
contain the text in question; to maintain the
spuriousness of the text, we must suppose that all the
copies of Josephus were in the hands of Christians, and
were changed in the same way.

* Second, it is true that neither Tertullian nor St.
Justin makes use of Josephus's passage concerning
Jesus; but this silence is probably due to the contempt
with which the contemporary Jews regarded Josephus, and
to the relatively little authority he had among the
Roman readers. Writers of the age of Tertullian and
Justin could appeal to living witnesses of the
Apostolic tradition.

* Third, Eusebius ("Hist. Eccl"., I, xi; cf. "Dem.
Ev.", III, v) Sozomen (Hist. Eccl., I, i), Niceph.
(Hist. Eccl., I, 39), Isidore of Pelusium (Ep. IV,
225), St. Jerome (catal.script. eccles. xiii), Ambrose,
Cassiodorus, etc., appeal to the testimony of Josephus;
there must have been no doubt as to its authenticity at
the time of these illustrious writers.

* Fourth, the complete silence of Josephus as to Jesus
would have been a more eloquent testimony than we
possess in his present text; this latter contains no
statement incompatible with its Josephan authorship:
the Roman reader needed the information that Jesus was
the Christ, or the founder of the Christian religion;
the wonderful works of Jesus and His Resurrection from
the dead were so incessantly urged by the Christians
that without these attributes the Josephan Jesus would
hardly have been acknowledged as the founder of
Christianity.

All this does not necessarily imply that Josephus
regarded Jesus as the Jewish Messias; but, even if he
had been convinced of His Messiahshp, it does not
follow that he would have become a Christian. A number
of posssible subterfuges might have supplied the Jewish
historian with apparently sufficient reasons for not
embracing Christianity.

C. Other Jewish Sources

The historical character of Jesus Christ is also
attested by the hostile Jewish literature of the
subsequent centuries. His birth is ascribed to an
illicit ("Acta Pilati" in Thilo, "Codex apocryph. N.T.,
I, 526; cf. Justin, "Apol.", I, 35), or even an
adulterous, union of His parents (Origen, "Contra
Cels.," I, 28, 32). The father's name is Panthera, a
common soldier (Gemara "Sanhedrin", viii; "Schabbath"',
xii, cf. Eisenmenger, "Entdecktes Judenthum", I, 109;
Schottgen, "Horae Hebraicae", II, 696; Buxtorf, "Lex.
Chald.", Basle, 1639, 1459, Huldreich, "Sepher
toledhoth yeshua hannaceri", Leyden, 1705). The last
work in its final edition did not appear before the
thirteenth century, so that it could give the Panthera
myth in its most advanced form. Rosch is of opinion
that the myth did not begin before the end of the first
century. The later Jewish writings show traces of
acquaintance with the murder of the Holy Innocents
(Wagenseil, "Confut. Libr.Toldoth", 15; Eisenmenger op.
cit., I, 116; Schottgen, op. cit., II, 667), with the
flight into Egypt (cf. Josephus, "Ant." XIII, xiii),
with the stay of Jesus in the Temple at the age of
twelve (Schottgen, op. cit., II, 696), with the call of
the disciples ("Sanhedrin", 43a; Wagenseil, op. cit.,
17; Schottgen, loc.cit., 713), with His miracles
(Origen, "Contra Cels", II, 48; Wagenseil, op. cit.,
150; Gemara "Sanhedrin" fol. 17); "Schabbath", fol.
104b; Wagenseil, op.cit., 6, 7, 17), with His claim to
be God (Origen, "Contra Cels.", I, 28; cf. Eisenmenger,
op. cit., I, 152; Schottgen, loc. cit., 699) with His
betrayal by Judas and His death (Origen, "Contra
cels.", II, 9, 45, 68, 70; Buxtorf, op. cit., 1458;
Lightfoot, "Hor. Heb.", 458, 490, 498; Eisenmenger,
loc. cit., 185; Schottgen, loc. cit.,699 700;
cf."Sanhedrin", vi, vii). Celsus (Origen, "Contra
Cels.", II, 55) tries to throw doubt on the
Resurrection, while Toldoth (cf. Wagenseil, 19) repeats
the Jewish fiction that the body of Jesus had been
stolen from the sepulchre.

III. CHRISTIAN SOURCES

Among the Christian sources of the life of Jesus we
need hardly mention the so called Agrapha and Apocrypha
(see AGRAPHA and APOCRYPHA). For whether the Agrapha
contain Logia of Jesus, or refer to incidents in His
life, they are either highly uncertain or present only
variations of the Gospel story. The chief value of the
Apocrypha consists in their showing the infinite
superiority of the Inspired Writings by contrasting the
coarse and erroneous productions of the human mind with
the simple and sublime truths written under the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

Among the Sacrd Books of the New Testament, it is
especially the four Gospels and the four great Epistles
of St.Paul that are of the highest importance for the
construction of the life of Jesus. The four great
Pauline Epistles (Rom., Gal., I and II Cor.) can hardly
be overestimated by the student of Christ's life; they
have at times been called the "fifth gospel"; their
authenticity has never been assailed by serious
critics; their testimony is also earlier than that of
the Gospels, at least most of the Gospels; it is the
more valuable because it is incidental and undesigned;
it is the testimony of a highly intellectual and
cultured writer, who had been the greatest enemy of
Jesus, who writes within twenty five years of the
events which he relates. At the same time, these four
great Epistles bear witness to all the most important
facts in the life of Christ: His Davidic dscent, His
poverty, His Messiahship, His moral teaching, His
preaching of the kingdom of God, His calling of the
apostles, His miraculous power, His claims to be God,
His betrayal, His institution of the Holy Eucharist,
His passion, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, His
repeated appearances (Rom., i, 3, 4; v, 11; viii, 2, 3,
32; ix, 5; xv, 8; Gal., ii, 17; iii, 13; iv, 4; v, 21;
I Cor., vi, 9; vii, 10; xi, 25; xv, passim; II Cor.,
iii, 17; iv, 4; xii, 12; xiii, 4; etc.). However
important the four great Epistles may be, the gospels
are still more so. Not that any one of them offers a
complete biography of Jesus, but they account for the
origin of Christianity by the life of its Founder.
Questions like the authenticity of the Gospels, the
relation between the Synoptic Gospels, and the Fourth,
the Synoptic problem, must be studied in the articles
referring to these respective subjects.

A. J. MAAS Transcribed by Joseph P. Thomas In Memory of
Archbishop Mathew Kavukatt

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From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
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