Welcome to the Cold Case Christianity broadcast.
The only Christian case making program hosted by a cold case homicide detective.
J.
Warner Wallace has been investigating cold case murders in Los Angeles County for
over a decade.
His work has been featured on Fox News, Court TV and Dateline.
For more information about Jim's work and the case for Christianity, please visit
coldcasechristianity.com.
Now, here's your host, J.
Warner Wallace.
Well, thanks for joining us at Cold Case Christianity.
I'm J.
Warner Wallace.
Today, we're going to do what I predict will be the most watched episode of our
small show in the history of our short show.
And I know that because we're going to talk about material that is actually the
most popular material at coldcasechristianity.com.
Now, if you visited our website, you know we put lots of information there
about making the case for God's existence from science and philosophy, about making
the case for the reliability of Scripture based on a cold case detective approach
toward the actual Gospels.
And this particular article that I posted years ago, well, maybe about a year and a
half ago, really has been the most visited article at our website by a long measure.
As a matter of fact, if I check my statistics and the activity at the website
at any given time, there's always somebody, two, three, four people reading
this article.
And we're going to be talking about it because I think it's of interest to both
skeptics and believers who wonder, is there any evidence for Christianity
outside of the Bible?
Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus outside the Bible?
So I've got everything staged here.
You should see my desk, it's filled with computer monitor screens, all of which
have contained information.
We're going to try today to go through the evidence for Jesus outside of the Bible
from ancient sources as a way to kind of make a case for the historicity of Jesus.
But before I do that, and we're going to do it in two different groups,
both unfriendly pagan, either Greek or Roman or Syrian sources.
And then we'll also do it from unfriendly Jewish sources, which are kind of in a
separate category.
So we'll do that today.
But before I start, I want to talk about a couple of issues that I think are raised
by even asking this question.
When someone asks you, is there any evidence for Jesus outside of scripture?
If you really stop and think about it, that question wouldn't even be asked if
they took the gospels as serious historical accounts.
Clearly when someone says, you know, that's great.
I see what it says in the gospels and in the New Testament about Jesus.
But do you have anything outside of scripture?
Well, what they're really saying is, I don't trust that your scripture is
accurate.
And I don't trust that it can even be called history in any way.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
I think that realistically, that's why I wrote Cold Case Christianity, was in an
effort to say, well, why would we think that this is not reliable eyewitness
testimony?
Why would we think that accounts don't include the accurate observations of
people who actually knew Jesus?
And I think if you're saying, well, I can only accept versions of the Jesus
story written by those people who were not friends of Jesus, that's a silly approach
to take.
I've talked about it in the past here on this show.
I've talked about it in my public speaking engagements.
But the reality of it is, is that the people who knew Jesus best, who can give
us the kind of intimate details that are available to us in the New Testament
Gospels, they became part of the inner circle of Jesus.
And in the end, they became Christians, Christ followers, based on what they saw
Jesus do for all those years.
And then they wrote an account.
So for example, you might say, well, you know, I don't trust that the
Gospel of John's reliable because, you know, John was a disciple of John the
Baptist, and he was kind of a friend of the movement.
And at least in the sense of kind of expecting the coming Messiah that John the
Baptist foretold.
Okay, fine.
Let's kick him out then.
And I don't trust, you know, that, that, you know, Peter giving the account
to Mark, which is now in Mark's Gospel.
He was kind of like John, you know, a disciple of John.
Okay, fine.
But what do you do with Matthew?
Matthew's a guy who was named Levi, who was a tax collector, who was no friend
of the Christian movement, really no friend of anybody.
As a matter of fact, most people who knew him did not like him, given his occupation
as a tax collector.
And Jesus finds him, not as part of the discipleship of John the Baptist,
or not a part of any friend group, and he brings him into the fold.
And after three years of watching what Jesus did, Matthew became a believer and
then wrote an account.
But he doesn't start off trying, you know, in other words, to say that this
is, in many ways, you could argue this is an unfriendly account.
At least, initially, this is not somebody who was a friend of Jesus.
He became a believer of Jesus based on what he saw.
And it's very different to argue that somebody's writing something based on some
pre-existing bias, or simply just based on what they saw, that then turned them into
a believer.
So, the problem we have with the ancient accounts is all of those folks,
whether they were initially friends of Christianity or not, initially were
expecting the coming Messiah based on what John the Baptist had told them.
Or otherwise, anyone who knew Jesus well enough to write an account ended up
becoming...
now, you might say, well, boy, I wish that the Gospel of Judas was
actually...
you know, there is a Gospel of Judas.
It's just a very late...
you know, it's not a true gospel.
It's written very late by people who didn't even know much about the truth of
Jesus, other than what they had read in the reliable gospels.
And so, but he would be the one person, I guess you could say, Judas, if he had
actually written an account before hanging himself.
He would be the one person you could say, well, this is no friend of Jesus,
but he did write a story about Jesus.
Well, it turns out his story is included in the Gospel of Matthew.
And the reality is that Matthew was just a stranger to Jesus, who became a follower,
wrote an account because of what he saw.
So, the first thing I want to clarify is that most of the time, when I'm asked for
evidence for Jesus outside of the Gospels, what they're really saying is,
I don't trust the Gospels.
And I would say, okay, fine.
Then let's put the Gospels to the test.
That four-part template that I often use with eyewitnesses, that's what I did to
decide if I could trust what the Gospels said.
But even if you didn't have the Gospels, even if you didn't have a single Christian
document of the Church Fathers or anybody else, and all you had were the earliest
statements of non-believers, you would know an awful lot about Jesus.
And this is why even ardent skeptics like Bart Ehrman, who rejects Christianity,
he still would argue, though, for the historicity of Jesus, that he was a real
person who lived based on the kind of evidence we're going to talk about today.
One last thing, we're going to use accounts that are as close to the life of
Jesus as possible.
But you might notice that some of these are, all of these are obviously after the
resurrection, after the crucifixion, after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
So you might say, well, I can't... I'm looking for something that's so ancient,
it co-dates, it co-existed with the Gospels, or it was part of the earliest
stories of Jesus.
A couple of things about that.
First of all, the Gospels themselves were not written immediately.
They were written as the disciples realized they were going to be dying and
not being able to transfer the story orally.
And now these Gospels began to get written.
So we have a gap of time before we have the accounts that are in the scripture.
But in addition to that, if you were to ask me today, if I was to do a show
talking about the history of Abraham Lincoln, and I was to tell you all the
stories about Abraham, and then a thousand years from now, you discovered this little
video, and you had no other information about Abraham Lincoln.
You didn't have the sources that I am referencing, the sources that I am
thinking about as I'm telling you about Abraham Lincoln.
You might be inclined to say, well, then I can't believe in Abraham Lincoln,
because I only have the word of Jim Wallace 150 years after the man was dead.
But clearly I'm close enough to the action to be able to source back the information
to Abraham Lincoln and determine that the story of Abraham Lincoln is historically
reliable.
Now I will tell you about it being only 150 years separated from it, not even that
far separated from people who actually wrote about Abraham Lincoln who died later
on.
Some of them died in the early 20th century.
So these sources describing Abraham Lincoln are still apparently available to
me.
Now when I discover an ancient account, say it's Greek or it's Roman, and it's
following the life of Jesus by 30, 40, 50, let's say even 100 years,
we need to give it the same kind of consideration you would give my statement
about Abraham Lincoln given that I apparently have access to resources that I
am referring to.
And I'm speaking to you today in 2015 as somebody who is committed to the story of
Abraham Lincoln as though it's historically reliable, because I happen to
still have access to the sources that demonstrate for me that it's historically
reliable.
And even if you don't have what I had in order to determine the reliability of
Abraham Lincoln, you ought to listen to my story and give it some weight.
Now we're going to do the same thing with early stories in the first century,
second century, about Jesus.
And although they may follow the story of Jesus for some period of time,
the people who were not Christians who wrote about Jesus apparently were
determined and were committed to the fact that Jesus really lived, because they
wrote about him as though he did really live.
And like me, with my connection to Abraham Lincoln, they had some connection to
sources about Jesus.
And that's where we will begin our study.
And we'll start right after the break.
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Okay, we're going to start with what I would call unfriendly pagan or
non-Christian sources.
Now my wife, for example, when she saw I was doing this and has read some of my
more recent writing in the next book, for example, she's my editor, she said,
why do you call these folks unfriendly?
Well, because I think it's important for us to recognize that the complaint that's
typically leveled is that you are trusting your friendly sources, Gospels.
Let's take a look at what unfriendly sources, in other words, non-believers,
would say about Jesus.
And that's what we're going to do.
And we're going to start with an ancient Greek historian of the name of Thallus.
Thallus was somebody who wrote, and I'm going to be referring to my notes
here as I go along.
By the way, this article in its entirety is called Is There Any Evidence for Jesus
Outside the Bible?
And you can find it by simply looking and use the search engine, the search bar at
coldcasechristianity.com.
Okay, that being said, we're looking at Thallus here.
He is a non-Christian source.
His source is pretty ancient.
And we don't have a lot of Thallus, we don't have anything really from Thallus
originally.
What we have are pieces, fragments of the work of Thallus that are delivered to us
by other ancient sources.
I don't think there's any reason though to just to not believe that these are
authentic quotes from Thallus because most of those sources that are quoting Thallus
are not friendly to Thallus.
And they're quoting Thallus in order to argue about what he said.
If you were going to try to pull the wool over my eyes, you would simply lie about
what Thallus said and make him agree with you.
But if you're going to embarrassingly write about his disagreement with you,
I think there's probably a good reason to believe that he actually did disagree with
you.
And so we have an ancient source from Julius Africanus in which he's going to
quote something that Thallus writes about very early in history.
You can see dating here right around the 50s, 60s of the first century.
And here is what he writes.
Again, he is writing about Jesus.
He's also writing about a specific passage, a specific event related to
Jesus, the crucifixion and the darkness and the earthquake that occurred at the
crucifixion.
Let's take a look at what he has to say.
I've got it here on the screen for you.
On the whole world there pressed a most fierce fearful darkness as at the point of
the crucifixion and the rocks were rent by an earthquake and many places in Judea and
other districts were thrown down.
This darkness, Thallus, this is Julius Africanus now describing to Thallus in the
third book of his history calls, as it appears to me without reason,
an eclipse of the sun.
So Julius Africanus is arguing that Thallus when writing about this darkness
that occurred at the crucifixion is attributing it to an eclipse of the sun.
An eclipse of the sun.
Now that's interesting because what you have to do in order... you might say,
well look, this doesn't tell us much.
It doesn't.
But it tells us that in the earliest source here from Thallus that Thallus
believes that Jesus was in fact a historical character who was crucified and
at the point of his crucifixion there was a great darkness and earthquake but the
darkness was caused by an eclipse of the sun.
He may explain it a different way but he has to reluctantly back into several
details including the life of Jesus, the crucifixion, and the darkness at the
crucifixion in order to make any claim against Jesus.
You get some data from this early non-Christian source.
Let's go to another one.
This is Cornelius Tacitus.
Tacitus is... I've written a lot about Tacitus on the website on this page.
He basically wrote the annals for Emperor Vespasian and Vespasian wanted to know a
little bit detail about what happened under Nero's reign.
So what you have here is a statement written by Tacitus who is explaining in
the annals he wrote what Nero... who Nero blamed for the destruction of Rome.
Let's take a look at what he writes here.
This is Tacitus writing, consequently to get rid of the report Nero fastened the
guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for called what?
Called Christians by the populace.
Crustus from whom the name had its origin suffered the extreme penalty during the
reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procreators Pontius Pilatus and a most
mischievous superstition thus checked for the moment again broke out not only in
Judea the first source of the evil but even in Rome where all things hideous and
shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.
Sounds like Rome was a really hopping place at the time.
But here's what this does tell us.
It tells us that there is a group who followed a man named Christ, Christus,
who called themselves Christians.
Okay, makes sense.
And that this man suffered the extreme penalty was crucified under the reign of
of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procreators who guess who Pontius Pilatus
and that this mischievous superstition what could that be?
It seems to me that what might be reasonable here is that there's a
superstition related to the resurrection.
Now he's not going to say that here but it does appear this is an early account that
at least tangentially infers something about the resurrection and we're pretty
early in time.
We're late first century early second century.
And this is the source of the evil was obviously here in Judea.
Lots of details about location, about leadership, about government,
about the way he was executed, about the names of his followers.
Lots even of hinting at the resurrection here just from this brief non-christian,
hostile, unfriendly ancient source.
So we know some things about Jesus now.
If we lost everything else we'd know some details now, wouldn't we, about who Jesus
is.
Let's go to another source.
We're going to go to a Syrian philosopher named Marabar Serapion.
And what Serapion does is he's writing to his son, describing to his son the fate of
a number of philosophers.
He's writing, you know, in the late first century, early second century.
And he's writing about what happened to several leaders of several movements.
Let's read what he has to say.
So here we have Jesus described, without a name, as the wise king.
He was, in fact, that's what was the label that was put over his cross.
The wise king of the Jews who was killed and then the kingdom was, the temple was
destroyed in 70 AD.
And then on top of it all, there is some sense here that the teaching of this wise
king continued on with his followers.
Some more data we have related to Jesus coming from non-Christian pagan sources,
hostile sources.
That's what the most important part is.
Let's go to Phlegon.
Let me scroll down here on my article on the website.
This is somebody who is very similar to Phallus in the sense that we don't have
the original work of Phlegon.
We have to trust another ancient source to get what Phlegon said.
And typically, the ancient source that's quoting Phlegon is kind of debating it
with Phlegon.
So that's why I think there's some credibility to what the ancient source is
saying.
If you're writing to a group that doesn't know who the sources are, you might as
well have this guy agree with you.
But instead, he simply says it as it is.
Phlegon offers a position that is somehow different than the other ancient source.
So he's going to mention this ancient historian.
He's going to mention something about Jesus.
We'll talk about it here on the screen.
I've got a couple of quotes.
Now, there's a lot more that I could add to this.
And on the website, there's just a ton of really more information we're just not
going to be able to cover here in 28 minutes.
So please visit that article if you want to learn more.
But let's just talk about a couple of quotes from Phlegon being quoted by
Origen.
Now, Phlegon, in the 13th or 14th book, I think, of his chronicles, not only
ascribed to Jesus a knowledge of future events, but also testified that the result
corresponded to his predictions.
So here you have somebody in the ancient world, a relatively early, late first
century, early second century, who is saying that, hey, this guy,
Jesus, he also was a predictor of future events.
And these things actually turn out the way he predicted them.
Interesting.
Now, also you have this quote, Jesus, while alive, was of no assistance
to himself, but that he arose after death and exhibited the marks of his punishment
and showed how his hands had been pierced by nails.
Now, remember, this is not an eyewitness who saw this.
I'm not making that claim.
That any of these ancient sources that we're talking about today are,
in fact, eyewitnesses.
That's what's in the Gospels.
And if you're wondering, well, I can't trust the Gospels, you're not
being fair to the Gospels because you haven't even tested them by tossing them
out the way you have.
You need to be able to test them.
That's what cold case Christianity does.
But the point here is that these are ancient sources who, if nothing else,
affirm for us the information about Jesus that's already circulating.
It's already circulating in the culture.
It's what's being said about Jesus, much the same way I might report today
about what has been said about Abraham Lincoln.
So, this is what you're hearing in the earliest sources.
So, here you have more data, his accurate ability to predict the future,
the fact that he rose after the dead and exhibited the marks of his hands.
Not all that unusual if you put this together with the Tacitus remark about
this mischievous superstition.
You start to see some parallels here.
Let's do another one.
Pliny the Younger.
His real name is much more complicated.
I actually wanted to pull it up for you here.
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus.
And he was a lawyer, an author, a magistrate.
He was somebody who was very well known by leadership in the Roman Empire.
As a matter of fact, he writes a letter to Trajan, Emperor Trajan, in which he
describes certain aspects of Christian followers.
Now, this is later in history.
We're now looking at a little bit later in history than the other sources in the
sense that this, well at least this, his information is more about followers of
Jesus and their religious community than anything else.
But when you see what he says about the followers in their religious community,
you get a chance to mine out some data about Jesus.
Check it out.
Pliny says, they, the Christians, were in the habit of meeting on a certain
fixed day before it was light.
And when they sang in alternate verses, a hymn to Christ as to a God and bound
themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any
fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word or deny a trust when
they should be called upon to deliver it up.
After which it was their custom to separate and then reassemble to partake of
food, but food not of an ordinary kind and an innocent kind.
Because there were other groups out there that were not partaking of food of an
innocent or ordinary kind.
Pliny is basically saying, hey, the Christians were this supper they would
have together.
Now, what you see here are certain early beliefs that Christians held, if nothing
else.
Is Jesus God?
Did the earliest Christians think Jesus was God?
It seems like he thinks they do.
Pliny seems to report that.
Also, you've got questions about how they represented certain teachings of their
master.
If you're wondering about the historical reliability, for example, the Sermon on
the Mount or any of the moral ethical teaching of Jesus, you see some of it
reflected here in the work of Pliny describing what the Christians believed.
So you've got some more data about Jesus.
Now, we'll take a break.
When we come back, we're going to look at another source of information,
which is not from pagan sources in the empire, Greek, Roman, or Syrian,
but is instead from believers.
Believers of Yahweh, but not Christian believers of Yahweh.
We'll talk about the Jewish claims related to Jesus right after this.
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Okay, we're almost out of time, but I want to go through an ancient Jewish
source related to the history of Jesus and the information related to Jesus.
And that is somebody you may recognize, the Jewish, the ancient Jewish historian
named Josephus, a very early historian commissioned to do a history of the Jews.
And a lot more detail about that online and in my book, Cold Case Christianity.
I'm going to show you a stripped version, which I think is a reliable version of the
most ancient non-Christian record in Judaism about Jesus written by Josephus in
his history.
And here's around this time lived Jesus, a wise man, for he's a worker of amazing
deeds and was a teacher of people who gladly accept the truth.
He went over both many Jews and many Greeks.
Pilate, when he heard him accused by leading men among us, condemned him to the
cross.
But those who had first loved him did not cease doing so.
To this day, the tribe of Christians named after him has not disappeared.
Now there are many kind of corrupted versions of the Josephus account.
This account has been stripped of the corruption.
And here you see that certain attributes of Jesus are once again affirmed.
His miraculous deeds, the fact he was crucified under Pilate, the fact that the
Jews led him to that crucifixion, the fact that his believers continued even
though he was crucified.
If you were to go back and reconstruct the story of Jesus, not using scripture or not
using church fathers, not using anyone who's a Christian, just using the most
ancient records we have.
Now I want to include some details here from a couple of accounts I couldn't get
to in 28 minutes that are on the website.
This is what you would know about Jesus from the absolute bare minimum,
from just the non-Christian accounts.
You're going to get a lot of information about Jesus from non-Christians early.
Here's what it says.
Jesus, we would know from just the non-Christians in early history,
was a real man who lived in history.
He was reportedly born of a virgin.
He had an earthly father who was a carpenter.
He lived in Judea in the region known as Palestine.
He was wise.
He was righteous.
His teaching was so influential that he developed a large following of Jewish and
Gentile followers.
He taught his disciples to live with the same virtue that he exhibited and his
moral code was exceedingly high.
But he was more than just a moral teacher.
He possessed magical powers and had the ability to accurately predict the future.
His supernatural acts and teachings persuaded many Jews to walk away from
their Jewish beliefs.
Jesus claimed to be God and his disciples readily accepted that claim.
The Jewish leadership ultimately brought charges against Jesus based on his actions
and his teaching and Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
crucified and prosecuted him.
There was an earthquake and darkness at the point of the execution and his
followers, Jesus' followers, reported seeing him resurrected after the
crucifixion, three days afterwards.
However, even Jesus showed them his wounds.
Not only that, his believers believed that the resurrection was a proof that Jesus
was, in fact, the Messiah.
They adopted his moral teaching.
They lived their lives accordingly.
They held their belief in his deity.
They held firm to that, even though it meant they were going to suffer under the
Roman rule.
As a matter of fact, they were persecuted for their faith in All of that
information, all of that history of Jesus and his followers, you would know if you
never opened your Bible.
You can get that from non-Christian sources in the first and early second
century.
That's pretty powerful.
A lot more to be said about this.
I'm afraid we're running out of time, but you can find out more at the website,
coldcasechristianity.com.
Scroll down, there are articles.
Use the search engine there for evidence for Jesus outside the scriptures.
I've also written quite a bit about this in the book, Cold Case Christianity.
Wow, we covered a lot of information today and I hope it was helpful to you.
See you here next week at Cold Case Christianity.
Thanks for joining us at the Cold Case Christianity broadcast.
If you're interested in more information about this week's topic, please visit
coldcasechristianity.com.
For a thorough investigation of the reliability of the New Testament Gospels
in the case for Christianity, be sure to purchase Cold Case Christianity,
a homicide detective investigates the claims of the Gospels.
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