What Historians Actually Think About Jesus

I want to be clear about what this piece is and isn't upfront. It's not an argument for or against Christianity. It's an attempt to describe what historians, working with the tools of historical criticism, not faith, think they can establish about Jesus of Nazareth. The answer is more interesting, and more contested, than most people realize.

The mainstream historical consensus, held by the large majority of scholars who work on this period, is that Jesus existed. This might seem obvious, but the 'mythicist' position, that Jesus was a purely legendary figure with no historical basis, has gained some popular traction in recent years. Most historians find it unpersuasive. The evidence for a historical Jesus, while not overwhelming, is sufficient by the standards applied to other ancient figures.

What evidence is there? The letters of Paul, written within twenty years of the crucifixion, mention meeting James, 'the brother of the Lord.' The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s CE, refers to 'James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.' The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 CE, mentions Christians who 'derived their name and origin from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate.' These are independent sources, and they converge on a historical figure.

What do historians think they can say about this figure? The 'criteria of authenticity', methods for identifying material in the Gospels that likely goes back to the historical Jesus, have produced a rough consensus on a few points. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. He gathered disciples. He had a reputation as a healer and exorcist. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. These are the things most historians, including skeptical ones, are willing to say.

Beyond that, things get more contested. The apocalyptic Jesus, a Jewish prophet who believed the end of the age was imminent and proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God, is the dominant scholarly reconstruction, associated with Albert Schweitzer and more recently with Bart Ehrman. The Cynic-sage Jesus, a wisdom teacher in the tradition of Greek philosophy, was popular in the 1980s and 90s but has lost ground. The political revolutionary Jesus has its advocates. Each reconstruction tends to produce a Jesus who looks remarkably like the concerns of the scholars doing the reconstructing.

The Gospels themselves are complicated sources. They were written decades after the events they describe, by authors with theological commitments, drawing on oral traditions that had been circulating for years. This doesn't make them worthless, historians use biased sources all the time, but it means they have to be handled carefully. The criterion of embarrassment (material that would have been embarrassing to early Christians is more likely to be authentic) and the criterion of multiple attestation (material that appears in independent sources is more likely to be historical) are the main tools.

What I find most interesting about the historical Jesus question is what it reveals about the limits of historical method. We can establish that someone named Jesus existed, was baptized, gathered followers, and was executed. We cannot establish, by historical methods alone, whether he rose from the dead, that's a theological claim that falls outside what history can adjudicate. The gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is real, and it's worth being honest about.