Did Jesus Even Live?

Before we can ask whether Jesus rose from the dead, whether he is the Son of God, or what his teaching demands of us, we have to face a more basic question — one that occasionally surfaces in a documentary, a viral post, or a late-night conversation: did Jesus of Nazareth ever actually live at all? It is the right place to begin a six-week study of the historical evidence, because everything that follows rests on it. If there was no Jesus, there is nothing to investigate.

This series engages the work of historian and philosopher Gary Habermas, whose The Historical Jesus patiently examines what can be known about Jesus from the earliest sources — including evidence outside the New Testament. In this first lesson we take up the hardest version of the challenge head-on, trace two centuries of scholarly searching, and ask honestly where the evidence actually points.

It would be easy to skip past this question as too obvious to bother with. Most people, believers and skeptics alike, simply assume Jesus existed. But assumptions are a poor foundation for faith, and a thoughtful seeker deserves better than "everybody knows." So we begin where a fair-minded critic would begin — with the possibility that the whole story was invented.

Here is what is striking: even scholars with no interest in defending Christianity regard the claim that Jesus never lived as a misuse of the evidence. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the twentieth century's most skeptical New Testament critics — a man who spent his career arguing that we can know very little about Jesus — still wrote plainly that the question of Jesus' bare existence was settled.

When even the demythologizers grant that much, we are not standing on contested ground. But conviction is not the same as understanding. Let us see why the question is settled — and first, how scholarship arrived here at all.

For at least two hundred years, the life of Jesus has been studied, doubted, reconstructed, and studied again. The trail is winding, but a brief tour helps us see that today's confidence in Jesus' existence was hard-won, not naive.

From the late 1700s through the 1800s came what Albert Schweitzer called the "fictitious lives of Jesus" — imaginative reconstructions that filled the Gospels' silences with invented plots. A favorite device was a secret society, often the Essenes, who supposedly stage-managed Jesus' miracles and even nursed him back to health after the cross. Schweitzer dismissed these as "rather a sorry makeshift"; they were built on supposition and added little to serious history.

In 1835, David Strauss shifted the ground. His Life of Jesus abandoned the earlier attempts to explain miracles away as misunderstood natural events and treated the Gospels instead as myth — narratives clothing transcendent ideas in seemingly historical dress. The mythical approach denied the basic historicity of the Gospels and set the terms for much that followed.

In the early twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann pressed further with his program of "demythologizing": the supernatural language of the Gospels, he argued, could not be taken literally today but should be reinterpreted for its existential meaning. The historical Jesus receded into the background.

Then came the turn back. In a landmark 1953 lecture, Ernst Käsemann argued that Christian faith actually requires some genuine historical content about Jesus — that belief cannot float free of history altogether. His "New Quest" reopened the door. More recently still, the "Third Quest" has emphasized anchoring Jesus firmly in his own time, especially the Jewish world of first-century Palestine. The dominant trend now is to take the historical Jesus seriously, across liberal and conservative lines alike.

Still, the idea that Jesus never existed persists, especially in popular treatments. Its most serious modern advocate has been G.A. Wells, who argued that Jesus may have been at most an obscure figure — and possibly never existed at all, his story patterned after the ancient pagan mystery religions.

Wells's argument hinges on the order of the New Testament books. He claimed that Paul's letters — the earliest writings — say comparatively little about the details of Jesus' earthly life, and concluded that Paul knew almost nothing about a recent historical Jesus. On Wells's reconstruction, Paul conceived of Christ as "a supernatural being who spent a brief and obscure period on earth," perhaps even centuries earlier. Only in the later Gospels, he argued, was Jesus given a specific time and place. The historical details, in this view, were a late addition — and the figure being worshiped was "little different from the mystery gods of other ancient peoples."

It is an ingenious theory. It is also, as we will see, one that almost no working historian accepts. Even Michael Martin, the one philosopher who followed Wells, ultimately declined to use the thesis in the main body of his own book because it "is controversial and not widely accepted." When the theory's own sympathizers set it aside, that tells us something.

The myth theory fails on several fronts, but two are decisive. The first concerns historical method. The second concerns the mystery religions themselves.

On method: the historian Michael Grant — no apologist, but a respected classicist who wrote a serious life of Jesus — pointed out that the case against Jesus' existence depends on treating the New Testament by a special, harsher standard than we use for any other ancient document. Apply the ordinary rules of ancient history, and the conclusion is unavoidable.

On the mystery religions: the supposed pagan parallels do not hold up under scrutiny. There is no clear, early evidence of a dying-and-rising mystery deity before the late second century AD — well after the Christian message was already being proclaimed. Whether those later cults borrowed from Christianity or not, it makes no sense to claim the earliest Christians were inspired by teachings that postdate them. Further, the mystery gods were not historical persons at all, which stands in sharp contrast to the early Christian insistence that their claims rested on real events and real witnesses. And the mystery religions had little influence in first-century Palestine, where Christianity was born.

On this last point Grant is again blunt, naming it a major problem with Wells's thesis:

• No clear, early evidence exists of a dying-and-rising mystery deity before the late second century AD — later than the Christian message itself.
• The mystery gods were not historical persons; Christianity insisted from the start that its claims rested on solid, factual underpinnings.
• The mystery religions had little influence in first-century Palestine, the Jewish setting in which Christianity actually arose.
• The earliest source, Paul, names Jesus' contemporaries — Peter, John, and James "the Lord's brother" — and points to hundreds of eyewitnesses still living when he wrote.

There is a deeper irony in the myth theory. The earliest Christians were not floating in mythical timelessness — they were anchoring their claims in checkable history. We see this nowhere more clearly than in the opening words of Luke's Gospel, where the author pauses to explain exactly what kind of book he is writing: an orderly account, drawn from eyewitnesses, set down so the reader may know the truth with confidence.

Two details deserve attention. First, Luke writes in the manner of an ancient historian — naming his method (careful investigation, orderly arrangement) and his sources (those who "from the beginning were eyewitnesses"). Second, his stated purpose is the opposite of myth-making: not to inspire vague devotion but to ground the reader in certainty. A community inventing a timeless savior-god has no need of eyewitnesses, no need to "follow all things closely," no need for the firm footing of fact. Luke writes precisely because the events were real and could be verified.

So we can lay the first question to rest. By the ordinary standards of history, Jesus of Nazareth lived. The myth theory survives in popular imagination but not in the judgment of historians — including those with no faith to defend. The data point one direction, and they point clearly.

But notice what settling the first question opens up. "Did he live?" was never really the interesting question. The interesting questions are the ones a real historical person forces on us: Who was he? What did he claim? What did he do? How did he die — and did he rise? Those are the questions that have echoed for two thousand years, and they are the questions we will spend the next five weeks pursuing through the evidence.

Over this series we will examine the earliest sources — including a creed older than the New Testament books that contain it — what non-Christian writers like Tacitus and Josephus recorded, what archaeology has uncovered, and finally the event on which the whole Christian claim stands or falls. We begin, as a fair historian would, by clearing away the easy dismissal. The harder, richer, more wonderful question is still in front of us.