WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS

 

There has been in up to this present day an attempt to deny the holocaust ever having taken place during World War II though existing reliable witnesses and documentary evidence to refute those claims. In like manner the same has taken place concerning Jesus Christ though there exist written documentation from established and recognized secular and Christian historians of the First, Second and Third centuries who have annotated the existence of the individual called “Christus” and the sect of men that were “given to a new superstition”[i] along with accounts of the founding and intensification of the Christian faith.  The question of the existence of Jesus as a historical figure is very distinct from the study of the historical Jesus which goes beyond analyzing the historicity of the man attempting to reconstruct the portraits of his life and teachings based on critical view of the gospels and the history of first century Judea.  Modern scholars of antiquity, for the most part the majority, are in agreement that Jesus existed and view the theories of his non-existence as having been effectively refuted.   Those who opposed Christianity never denied the existence Jesus. His [Jesus] crucifixion by Pontius Pilate seems to be part of the bedrock of historical tradition, based on the availability of non-Christian evidence.  A number of ancient non-Christian documents, such as Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, have been used in historical analyses of the existence of Jesus.

Ancient Secular Historians

C. Thallus(c. 50-75AD)

Thallus was a Samaritan-born historian who lived and worked in Rome around ca.52 AD. His works have been lost to us but he was quoted many times by Christian chronographers.  He has been cited for the details on Syrian and Assyrian history and has been identified in the Chronicles of Eusebius of Caesarea as the author of a history of the Mediterranean from the fall of Troy to the Olympiad of 109 B.C.  He was first mentioned by Theophilus Bishop of Antioch in A.D. 180 in his Ad Autolycun.  In A.D. 221 Julius Africanus cites from Thallus’ History of the Mediterranean World from the Trojan War up to his own time, which was c. A.D. 52, in response to Thallus’ comment on the darkness that enveloped the afternoon sky during the crucifixion of Jesus.  In the third of his three books, Thallus explains away the darkness that enveloped the sky on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion as an eclipse of the sun.[ii]  Thallus is the first historian to mention the man Jesus and gives us insight that the account of the crucifixion of Jesus and the darkness that occurred was a known fact, even then, requiring an explanation.  It is ironic that Thallus' efforts to “explain away” the darkness during the crucifixion have been turned into the main historical proof for Jesus and for the reliability of Mark's account of the darkness at his death."

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[i] Josh McDowell, New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, (Nashville, Nelson Publishers 1999) p 121

[ii] Ibid. p 122