Who was Jesus? What historians know and what Christians believe

Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish preacher and healer from Galilee who was baptized by John the Baptist, taught about the coming kingdom of God, and was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate around 30 to 33 CE. That much almost all historians accept. Christians believe more: that he was the Son of God, the Messiah, who rose from the dead. Those are two different kinds of claim, and this note keeps them apart.

In short

• Almost all historians, religious or not, accept that Jesus existed, that he was a Jew from Galilee, and that he was executed by crucifixion on the orders of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.
• The main sources are Christian, the letters of Paul and the four Gospels, with brief mentions by the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus.
• Christians believe Jesus is God made human and rose from the dead; Muslims honor him as a prophet and the Messiah but not as divine; Judaism does not regard him as the Messiah.

What do historians know about Jesus?

History cannot test miracles or a resurrection; what it can do is weigh the sources for an ordinary human life. On that basis, scholars across the spectrum, Christian, Jewish and secular, broadly accept a short list of facts (Wikipedia):

• He was born around 6 to 4 BCE, before the death of King Herod, and grew up in Nazareth, a village in Galilee. He spoke Aramaic.
• He was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, a preacher who called Jews to repent before a coming judgment.
• He became a traveling teacher in Galilee, gathered disciples, and was known as a healer and exorcist. His central theme was the kingdom of God, often taught in short stories, the parables.
• He went to Jerusalem at Passover, caused a disturbance at the Temple, and was arrested.
• He was crucified, a Roman punishment for rebels and slaves, on the orders of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE. The most likely years are 30 and 33 CE.
• Soon afterward, his followers proclaimed that he had risen from the dead, and a movement grew in his name.

Jesus was a Jew, and his teaching makes sense inside the Judaism of his time: he read the Hebrew scriptures, debated Jewish law, and taught in synagogues. The religion that grew from his followers, Christianity, became distinct from Judaism only over the following decades.

What are the sources, and when were they written?

Nothing survives that Jesus wrote, and no source was written during his lifetime. Historians are used to that: few people in the ancient world left any record at all. For Jesus, the earliest sources were written within 20 to 70 years of his death.

Source	Written	What it says
Letters of Paul	c. 50–60 CE	The earliest Christian writings; mention Jesus's Jewish birth, his brother James, the Last Supper, the crucifixion and the claim that he rose
Gospel of Mark	c. 70 CE	The first Gospel, written around the time of the Jewish war with Rome
Gospels of Matthew and Luke	c. 80–90 CE	Use much of Mark, plus sayings they share and material of their own, including birth stories
Gospel of John	c. 90–110 CE	Different in style and order from the other three; the most developed view of Jesus as divine
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities	c. 93–94 CE	A Jewish historian mentions "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James", and has a longer passage on Jesus that most scholars think a later Christian copyist enlarged
Tacitus, Annals	c. 116 CE	A Roman historian, hostile to Christians, says their founder "Christus" was executed in the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate

The Gospels are not biographies in the modern sense. As the New Testament scholar Mark Goodacre puts it, they are "books with a message", written to bring readers to faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God (BBC Religions). Historians read them the way they read other ancient texts with a purpose: closely, and with tests.

How do historians decide what is likely?

Historians use a few rules of thumb to judge which parts of the Gospels go back to Jesus himself. Here is how they work on one well-known fact, his baptism by John.

1. Multiple attestation. Is it reported by more than one independent source? The baptism appears in Mark and is reflected in John, which many scholars think did not copy Mark. It passes.
2. Embarrassment. Would the early church have invented it? Baptism by John implies that John was the greater figure and that Jesus had something to repent. Later Gospels show unease: Matthew has John protest that Jesus should baptize him. A story that awkward is unlikely to be made up. It passes.
3. Context. Does it fit 1st-century Galilee and Judea? Wandering prophets calling for repentance are well known from Josephus. It passes.

The crucifixion passes the same tests even more strongly: it is in every source, Christian and not, and a crucified Messiah was, in Paul's words, "a stumbling block" to those he preached to. A sign of how reliable the setting is came in 1961, when archaeologists at Caesarea found a stone inscribed with Pilate's name and title, prefect of Judea.

Did Jesus really exist?

Almost all historians, whatever their beliefs, say yes. The claim that Jesus never existed, sometimes called the Christ myth theory, has a small following online but very little among specialists. The reasons are those above: Paul knew Jesus's brother James and his closest disciple Peter personally and wrote within about 25 years of the crucifixion; independent sources agree on the core; and two non-Christian historians, one Jewish and one Roman, mention him. The agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman wrote a whole book, Did Jesus Exist? (2012), to set out that evidence and explain why specialists reject the Christ myth theory.

What historians do argue about is everything beyond the core: which sayings are authentic, whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah, and how he saw the kingdom he preached, as a coming end of the world or a present way of life.

What do Christians believe about Jesus?

Christians hold that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Hebrew scriptures, and the Son of God: fully God and fully human, the second person of the Trinity. They believe he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, performed miracles, died on the cross for the sins of the world, rose bodily on the third day, ascended to heaven, and will return to judge the living and the dead. These are beliefs held in faith, set out in the creeds; history can neither confirm nor refute them. For Christians, the resurrection is the event on which the faith stands or falls.

How do Christianity, Judaism and Islam see Jesus?

The three religions that trace themselves to Abraham all have a view of Jesus, and they differ sharply.

	Christianity	Judaism	Islam
Who he was	The Son of God, God made human	A Jewish teacher of the 1st century	Isa, one of the greatest prophets, born of the Virgin Mary
The Messiah?	Yes	No: the Messiah is still to come and will bring an age of peace that has not arrived	Yes, he is called al-Masih, the Messiah, though in a different sense from the Christian one
Divine?	Yes	No	No: the Quran firmly denies that God has a son
Crucified?	Yes, and rose from the dead	Yes, by the Romans	No: the Quran says it "was made to appear so", and most Muslims believe God raised him alive to heaven
Return?	Yes, at the end of time	No	Yes, most Muslims believe, before the Day of Judgment

The Islamic view comes from the Quran (4:157 on the crucifixion) and later tradition, in which, as the historian Tarif Khalidi writes, Jesus stands out as "a prophet of very special significance" (BBC Religions). More on how Muslims understand prophets is in what Islam teaches, and on why scholars group these faiths as they do in what religion is.

Check yourself

• Which facts about Jesus do almost all historians accept, and why can't history settle whether he rose from the dead?
• How does the criterion of embarrassment work, using his baptism by John as the example?
• On which two points do Christianity and Islam differ most about Jesus?

Sources

• Jesus — BBC Religions, Mark Goodacre, 2009
• Jesus through Muslim eyes — BBC Religions, Tarif Khalidi, 2009
• Historicity of Jesus — Wikipedia
• Tacitus on Jesus — Wikipedia
• Surah An-Nisa, 157 — Quran.com
• Pilate stone — Wikipedia