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Although it might sound strange, some critics have made the bold claim that Jesus never even existed. They claim that because the New Testament documents are biased and therefore cannot be trusted, and that since there are also no non-Christian sources which mention him, that we cannot reliably conclude that Jesus actually existed. However, aside from whether or not the New Testament documents are trustworthy, did you know that there are actually several non-Christian sources which mention Jesus around the same time period as the New Testament?
Facts
As mentioned above, there are actually several non-Christian (some could even be considered anti-Christian) sources that mention Jesus. From ancient historians (Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Thallus), to government officials (Pliny the Younger, Emperor Trajan, Hadrian), to Jewish sources (Talmud, Toledoth Jesu), gentile Sources (Lucian and Mara Bar-Serapion), gnostic sources (The Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of John, The Gospel of Thomas, The Treatise on Resurrection), and even some lost sources (The Acts of Pontius Pilate and Phlegon), the evidence for Jesus outside of the New Testament is far from nonextant.
Continue reading Quick Fact: “Non-Christian Sources For Jesus”
“The gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel which a person who is secularized will not… [as such] part of the broader task of Christian scholarship is to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.”
Quiz: What is the documentary hypothesis, where did it come from, and why is it no longer held by most critical scholars?
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