Early questions about Jesus.

Did Jesus exist?

The need for this essay goes back to the ancient heresy of Docetism, hinted at in 1 John 4.1-3 and 2 John 7, and developed by 2nd-century Gnostics to the point where Christ's earthly appearance was an illusion, likewise his death, since he was replaced on the cross by Judas or Simon of Cyrene.

After long abeyance, the ideological pot unsurprisingly heated up in the 18th century, the supposed 'Age of Reason'; several exchanges in Boswell's Life of Johnson bear good witness.

The debate was sharpened in 1835 by D.F. Strauss' The Life of Jesus, and at that century's end by the Marxist Karl Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity. Then came the German sceptical school, reflected in Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the World (1926) and his pupil Gunther Bornkamm's Jesus of Nazareth (1956) dogmatising, "Nobody is any further in a position to write a Life of Jesus." A major denier in contemporary

academic circles is G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1983). Amusingly, in 1994, using exactly the same materials, E.P. Sanders reached diametrically opposite conclusions: "We know a lot about Jesus. We have a good idea of the main lines of his ministry. We know who he was, what he did, what he taught, and why he died."

Wells was even willing to praise the preposterous House of The Messiah (1992) by Ahmed Osman, which argues that Christ lived c. 1300 BC: "Osman is quite right that there is no evidence that Jesus lived between the time of Herod and Pontius Pilate."

More moderately, Northrop Frye, in The Great Code." The Bible as Literature (1981) claimed, "There is practically no real evidence for the life of Jesus outside the New Testament." Two other academically respectable deniers are Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1994) and A.N. Wilson's Jesus (1997); the latter also a well-known novelist, turned from Christianity after years of very public promotion of it.

The issue is hot and continuous among members of the 75-person USA-based Jesus Seminar, with the sceptics most noisily represented by Luke Johnson's The Real Jesus." the Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus, and the traditionalists by John Crossman, The Historical Jesus; both are former priests. These battles can be followed through periodic press coverage; e.g., David Van Biema's level-headed article in the Globe and Mail, 13 April 1991.

What did pagan authors say?

Can the earthly existence of Christ be proved? Yes! There is no reason whatsoever to disbelieve it for the very good and simple fact that it was never questioned by the hostile pagan writers who mention the matter in the first 200 years after his life and death. True, there are not many such references, thanks to pagan lack of interest and (perhaps) later church censorship of offending passages. But none of them question the historicity of Jesus.

The first one, admittedly, is something of a puzzle. In his Life of Claudius, the biographer Suetonius says that the emperor expelled the Jews from Rome during his reign (AD 41-54) because they were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus. There are those who think this does not allude to Christ, but to some rabble-rouser--Chrestus is a common enough name for a slave or ex-slave. But in that case, we would have expected Suetonius to say who the fellow was, at the very least to introduce him by the words "a certain".

Thanks to the later Church father Tertullian, we happen to know that 'Chrestus' was a common error for 'Christus', thanks to similar pronunication of the relevant Greek vowels. On this reckoning, Suetonius (who elsewhere praises Nero for persecuting the Christians, though interestingly does not connect them with the burning of Rome in AD 64) both accepted the existence of Christ and assumed his readers needed no further information or argument on the matter.

Writing at the same time as Suetonius (early second century), the historian Tacitus does make the connection between the tire and the persecution. Looking for plausible scapegoats to allay the suspicion that he was the arsonist, Nero plumped for the Christians over the Jews. Incidentally, in Latin, the suffix -ianus here implies devotion to a particular individual.

Now, you could hardly have a less sympathetic witness than Tacitus, who explicitly says (Annals 15.44) that Christianity was one of the new and degraded superstitions at Rome and that its adherents deserved the punishments inflicted upon them - these included being thrown to wild beasts, crucifixion and burning alive. But he has no doubts about Christ, stating in a crisp matter-of-fact way that he was executed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37).

A friend of Tacitus and Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, had trouble with Christians in the Eastern province of Bithynia while he was governor there. We still possess his letter on the matter to the emperor Trajan, along with the latter's reply. Pliny looked into the affair carefully, concluding (like Tacitus) that Christianity was nothing but a degenerate novelty, including among other things female officials he says were called deaconesses. His key discovery was that Christians would meet on a fixed day, before dawn, to chant songs in honour of Christ as if to a god. I have kept Pliny's actual words here. It never occurs to him that these sectarians might be deluded fools who followed a hero who had never existed.

Somebody who did call them deluded fools was the mid-second century Greek satirist from the East, Lucian. But not for believing in an historical Christ. Lucian made fun of all religions and philosophies. Bishop Arethas and other Byzantines regarded him as the Anti-Christ; he was included in the first edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1557); on September 3, 1766, he was the protagonist villain in a musical drama called 'Lucian of Samosata the Hapless Atheist' presented by the Jesuit School at Regenshurg; Lord Macaulay dubbed him 'The Voltaire of Antiquity'. Lucian has quite a lot to say about Christians in a pamphlet he wrote against what we might oxymoronically call a genuine charlatan named Peregrinus, a character who would hot be out of place among certain Sunday morning televangelists.

This Peregrinus had sponged greedily on the Christians, whose kindness and generosity he exploited before moving on to fresh victims. The point is, Lucian calls the Christians stupid because of their belief in personal immortality. But he accepts Christ as an historical figure without any question, dubbing him the sect's first law-giver, that crucified sophist whom they worshipped (Lucian's own words).

It was around this time that a certain Celsus penned his True Doctrine, apparently the first pagan literary effort to combat Christianity on intellectual grounds. He may be the same Celsus to whom Lucian addressed another pamphlet against another fake prophet. The work survives only in the paraphrases and quotations in the Christian refutation of it by the third-century churchman Origen. But it is clear enough that Celsus worked on the assumption that Christ did exist, since he dismissed the Gospel miracles as magic tricks that Jesus had learned in Egypt.

A Byzantine satire, The Patriot, once falsely ascribed to Lucian, has a passing satirical mention of the Trinity, implying belief in the Son. The emperor Alexander Severus (AD 222-235) is said by his Roman pagan biographer to have placed a bust of Christ in his private chapel--he would hardly have so honoured someone in whose existence he did not believe.

The scathing treatise Against the Galilaeans by the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian (AD 361-363), accepts the earthly Christ without qualms, with frequent allusions to episodes in his life and ministry. This, by the way, would later give Ibsen the inspiration for one of his most rarely produced plays, Emperor and Galilaean.

I have scrupulously left out of the reckoning the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, since the reference to Jesus as 'The Christ' in his Jewish Antiquities and the detailed account of the ministry and crucifixion in 'The Jewish Wars' in the Slavonic (not the Greek) text are branded by some--not all--commentators as Christian interpolations. Pending more evidence, a Scottish verdict of Not Proven is the fairest verdict.

The overall point is, had any of these hostile sources thought there was the slightest chance of denying the fact of Christ's earthly existence, it is inconceivable that they would hot have taken it. It is true that we do not know the tack taken in such notorious pamphlets as the now lost Against the Christians by Porphyry (3rd century), but the statement of Augustine that enemies of the Church preferred to attack Christianity rather than Christ suggests that he knew of no such attempt.

Barry Baldwin is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Calgary.