This is a continuation of a response to The Quest for the Mythical Jesus by Duke Mertz. In this post, I respond to the problems with the lack of non-biblical witnesses for Jesus.
Among all the Greek and Roman documents from the first century, there are no verifiable records of early Christians outside the Bible. Papyrus and parchment scrolls have a limited shelf life, and for over a thousand years, the only copies were produced by Church scribes. Surely texts that mentioned early Christianity would have been preserved in some reliquary and reproduced. But this never happened.
If there really were such a person as Jesus, then there should be plenty of literary evidence outside the Bible. Since such literary evidence does not exist, then we should question the existence of Jesus. Sounds logical.
The problem with this is that we need consider what kind of evidence it is reasonable for us to expect. There are two types (since we are talking aside from Christian witnesses which were included in the New Testament). One is Roman and one is Jewish.
We start seeing Roman accounts of Christians in the second century. But shouldn’t we have court documents from Pilate’s trial of Jesus? There are two things to take into account. We don’t have a lot of Roman texts from the first century. secondly, they were not really that concerned about religious controversies on the margins of the Empire. A lack of Roman witnesses is not an issue.
What about the Jewish evidence? Again, there is very little in terms of Jewish texts from the first century. The main writers we have are Philo and Josephus. Philo does not mention Jesus and we would not expect him to, as I explain here.
But what about Josephus? Josephus does mention Jesus twice, as Mertz acknowledges. But he suggests that these are later Christian additions and not original to Josephus. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that there are few scholars (outside of the Mythicist camp) that question the reference to James, brother of Jesus. Also, most scholars acknowledge that Josephus said something about Jesus and that the original reference was later added to.
I would like to comment on something else. He asserts that Luke’s Acts of the Apostles was written after the death of Josephus, that is in the second century. While there have been some scholars who claims this, by far the majority date Acts in the 80-90s and some even earlier than that. There are no good reasons to believe that Acts is a second century texts.
Mertz argument is basically that the mysterious lack of the mention of Jesus in the many Roman and Jewish texts we have from the first century make the existence of Jesus questionable. Except for that we have very few first century Roman and Jewish texts that deal with the events of Galilee and Judea.
The kind of evidence we would expect for a Jewish messiah in Galilee and Judea in the first century is exactly the evidence we have.
