Jesus SkepticНамуна

Jesus’s Existence: Myth or Fact?

Wherever there is a powerful story, there are powerful people who want to suppress the truth. 

When it comes to Christianity, my investigation convinced me that my generation of millennials—born in the 1980s and 1990s—is largely denied the truth about Christianity’s influence and record on social justice. We are told the negative moments in Christian history, and we are told the positive moments from other world belief systems. But we are not exposed to a more comprehensive truth of the Christian record so that we can decide for ourselves whether Jesus’s teachings and movement would be helpful to our personal lives and to the positive society we want to build.

Whether we like it or not, Jesus’s movement has become the largest movement in human history. According to the Pew Research Center, of about 7 billion people in the world, 2.3 billion believe the spiritual and historical claims of Jesus to be true. These people sincerely believe that Jesus lived and then rose from the dead. They believe that Jesus is God and will return to set up a kingdom of peace and prosperity. Today more people adhere to Christianity than to any other single belief system. As a result, any educated person should be informed about Jesus, His claims, and the measurable impact His followers have on society.

The Jesus story is either among the greatest scams ever perpetrated or among the greatest news ever told. Because I am a skeptic by nature, I sincerely questioned if Christians were duped into believing someone existed that had not.

I wanted to see Primary Evidence with my own eyes so I could know for certain whether Jesus actually lived as a historical figure. Was there strong evidence—outside the Bible—for Jesus’s life?

A careful examination revealed far more evidence than I expected. In fact, the evidence for Jesus’s literal and physical existence astonished me. Within the evidence, I learned that the specific cities, rulers, and people Jesus interacted with were real. They are documented in history, and you can still visit many of the cities and locations today (such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the Jordan River). Additionally, outside the Bible, more than a dozen non-Christian writers from Jesus’s era described Jesus and His movement in ancient documents. Among respected historians, we have far more evidence for Jesus’s existence than for most other figures of history from two thousand years ago.

Is historical evidence important to your belief that Jesus existed?  Why or why not?