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."
