It is amazing to see the number of ideas and interpretations that you can find on the Internet.   All kinds of undefendable opinions and views can be found there, especially about spiritual matters.  It is not hard to find those that claim that Jesus Christ really never existed.   Think about what that mean.   The impact that Jesus has had on our lives is tremendous.  Think of the hospitals and schools founded by his followers.  A few years ago, my wife and I were able to walk through the Louvre in Paris, the world’s largest art museum.  I was struck by the vast number of images of Jesus throughout it. The impact of Christians following Jesus has been huge, but is that all because of a fable, where the founder of the religion was created by zealous believers?   Wikipedia reports on the Historicity of Jesus: “The historicity of Jesus relates to whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. Virtually all scholars who have investigated the history of the Christian movement find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain, and standard historical criteria have aided in reconstructing his life.”  What kinds of evidence exist?

1. A very short time between the proposed life of Christ and the date when reports written that document the life.

     The books of the New Testament are really 27 separate documents from the 1^st Century that all attest to Jesus existence.  We don’t know exactly when the first were written, but no serious scholar would date the earliest of Paul’s books to beyond 55 AD, 25 years after Christ’s death.  Could such a religious leader have been manufactured in the imaginations of the early Christians in that little time.  Consider that the earliest documents reporting on most important characters from ancient times are almost always far longer than those for Jesus.

2. Ancient non-Christian historian accounts

     See the timelines below.  I find timelines invaluable and have created many in the course of my studies on apologetics and the Bible in general.

3. Skeptics and non-believers accounts

     Keep in mind that there is no evidence that the historians were Christians.  Even the Apostle Paul started out as a non-believer in the divinity of Jesus.  In the second century, many different views of Jesus began to appear, in addition to many writings from Christian church fathers.   These again assume a historical Jesus.   The Jewish Babylonian Talmud compiled between AD70-500AD reports, “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald … cried, “He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy.”  This is evidence from a clearly hostile source. 

 Are there alternative explanations? 

     Many skeptics that I read complain that Jesus is not referred to in 1st century records Roman records from Judea.  As far as I know, virtually no such records exist.  Remember Jerusalem was essentially destroyed several times.  It is likely that the Romans indeed did record the crucifixion of Jesus, but such records are long gone now.

      Would it be possible to put together a cohesive explanation for history that makes Jesus a creation of zealous, misguided or malevolent religious people in the 1^st century?   If such an explanation is possible, it would be far more convolved than the much simpler case that Jesus really did exist.  An alternative must account for the willingness of so many of the early witnesses to Jesus life to die for him, knowing that he never existed.

     Does this prove that Jesus was God?  Hardly.  But it does begin the case that He lived as the Bible claims.