[GraceChristianChat] EVIDENCE APART FROM THE BIBLE

[Charles Sawyer]

>From "A Case For Christ"  By Lee Stobel

>From Chapter 4 

THE CORROBORATING EVIDENCE 

Is There Credible Evidence for Jesus outside His Biographies? 



pages 86-87


EVIDENCE APART FROM THE BIBLE 

Although we were finding quite a few references to Jesus outside the gospels, I was wondering why there were not even more of them. While I knew that few historical documents from the first century have survived, I asked, "Overall, shouldn’t we have expected to find more about Jesus in ancient writings outside the Bible?" 

"When people begin religious movements, it’s often not until many generations later that people record things about them," Yamauchi said. "But the fact is that we have better historical documentation for Jesus than for the founder of any other ancient religion." 

That caught me off guard. "Really?" I said. "Can you elaborate on that?" 

"For example, although the Gathas of Zoroaster, about 1000 B.C., are believed to be authentic, most of the Zoroastrian scriptures were 

not put into writing until after the third century A.D. The most popular Parsi biography of Zoroaster was written in A.D. 1278. 

"The scriptures of Buddha, who lived in the sixth century B.C., were not put into writing until after the Christian era, and the first biography of Buddha was written in the first century A.D. Although we have the sayings of Muhammad, who lived from A.D. 570 to 632, in the Koran, his biography was not written until 767—more than a full century after his death. 

"So the situation with Jesus is unique—and quite impressive in terms of how much we can learn about him aside from the New Testament." 

I wanted to pick up on that theme and summarize what we had gleaned about Jesus so far from nonbiblical sources. "Let’s pretend we didn’t have any of the New Testament or other Christian writings," I said. "Even without them, what would we be able to conclude about Jesus from ancient non-Christian sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others?" 

Yamauchi smiled. "We would still have a considerable amount of important historical evidence; in fact, it would provide a kind of outline for the life of Jesus," he said. 

Then he went on, raising a finger to emphasize each point. "We would know that first, Jesus was a Jewish teacher; second, many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms; third, some people believed he was the Messiah; fourth, he was rejected by the Jewish leaders; fifth, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; sixth, despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by A.D. 64; and seventh, all kinds of people from the cities and countryside—men and women, slave and free—worshiped him as God." 

This was indeed an impressive amount of independent corroboration. And not only can the contours of Jesus’ life be reconstructed apart from the Bible, but there’s even more that can be gleaned about him from material so old that it actually predates the gospels themselves. 




















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