DAY 148
CHALLENGE
“The historical sources that mention Jesus are all dependent on what they’ve heard from Christians. Why should we believe what they say?”
DEFENSE
The extent to which they are dependent on Christians for their information is questionable, and even if they derived all of it from Christian sources that would not make them unreliable.
The sources we cited probably have different degrees of dependence on Christian sources for their information about Jesus:
- Suetonius is not known to have interviewed any Christians. He did have access to the official Roman archives when writing The Lives of the Caesars. He also had contact with various learned Romans. The fact that he seems to mistake the word Christus as Chrestus is a sign that he was getting his information from non-Christian sources.
- Tacitus also is not known to have interviewed any Christians. He did, however, use official Roman records in writing the Annals, and it is likely he took his information about Jesus from them.
- Pliny the Younger interviewed Christians about their practices, and it may be that, in writing his Letters, he was largely dependent on these interviews and what was commonly said about Christians in Roman society.
- Josephus probably encountered Christians, but he also had access to Jewish records that he used in Antiquities of the Jews. He also was born in Palestine in A.D. 37, and there were many non-Christian Jews living there who had independent knowledge of Jesus.
The assertion that these authors derived their knowledge of Jesus exclusively from Christian sources is implausible. While they may have gained information from Christian sources (especially Pliny the Younger), they also had independent information.
Even if they did not, it would not deprive their writings of value. Information is not to be dismissed if it can be traced to a Christian source. Historians do not systematically reject what is said by Chris- tians and treat such sources as “guilty until proven innocent.” To do so would simply be anti-Christian bias.
Even if everything these authors wrote was derived from Christian sources—which is very unlikely—it still reveals what was being said in their day about Christ and Christianity, and this itself provides a powerful argument for the existence of Jesus (see Day 8).