Historicity of Jesus Relative to Other Ancient Figures

How do our sources about the life of Jesus compare to our sources about other ancient figures? This is a question historians of antiquity have to grapple with constantly, since virtually no figure from the ancient world is attested by the kind of rich documentary record we're used to for modern history. The comparison matters because critics sometimes dismiss the Gospels as too late, too few, or too biased to be historically useful — but that standard, if applied consistently, would eliminate most of what we think we know about the ancient world.

Michael Licona (Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from the University of Pretoria) takes up exactly this comparison. Licona is a historian who specializes in applying the same methods historians use for other ancient figures to the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and one of his go-to examples is Caesar Augustus — arguably the most powerful and consequential ruler in Roman history, and a figure reigning at the very moment of Jesus's birth. If our sources for Jesus turn out to be comparable to, or better than, our sources for Augustus, that's a meaningful data point: it would mean the Gospels are not unusually weak by the standards of ancient biography, but are in fact unusually strong.

Caesar Augustus is regarded as Rome’s greatest emperor and was ruling the empire when Jesus was born. Historians rely on six chief sources to learn about Augustus’s adulthood: a funerary inscription that is nearly 4,000 words in length, Plutarch who wrote around 90 years after Augustus’s death, and four others writing 100-200 years after his death. When we consider that this is what we have for the greatest Roman emperor, four biographies of Jesus written within 35-65 years of His death is pretty good!

The comparison Licona draws out is worth sitting with. Augustus is not some obscure footnote of ancient history — he founded the Roman Empire, ruled for over four decades, and is arguably the single most documented ruler of the ancient world precisely because of his importance. Yet even in his case, historians are working from a mix of an inscription and later biographical accounts written decades to nearly two centuries after his death — and no one, on that basis, concludes that we can't know anything meaningful about Augustus's life and reign.

By contrast, the four Gospels are dated by most scholars (including many skeptical ones) to within a single lifetime of Jesus's death — closer, in fact, than nearly all of what we have for Augustus. If a 90-to-200-year gap doesn't disqualify our sources for the most significant political figure of the age, it's difficult to see why a 35-to-65-year gap should disqualify our sources for Jesus. The reasonable conclusion isn't that either figure is undocumented — it's that ancient history in general has to be reconstructed from a smaller and later body of evidence than modern historians are used to, and by that standard, the Gospels are unusually well-attested rather than unusually weak. Note: Plutarch is known to have written a dedicated biography of Augustus, but that specific work has not survived to today — only fragments and references to it remain. Plutarch's surviving works (such as his Lives of Antony and Cicero) do discuss the young Augustus at length, which may be closer to what's referred to in Licona's statement.

Learn More

Short Blog: Bias in “Historical Jesus” Research and Lack of Consensus

Reference

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics (Nashville, Tenn: B & H Academic, 2012), 143.