“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene ... the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness” (Luke 3:1-2).
I want to set expectations low from the outset. There are no non-Christian documents that prove Jesus rose from the dead. For one thing, if any document says Jesus rose from the dead, it’s immediately classified as a Christian document. But there is extra-biblical support for the broad outline of the story, and there is archaeological evidence that the NT writers were, at the very least, not writing high fantasy — that they were writing about the world around them.
So the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus comes from several years after his ministry. The primary evidence comes from the Jewish historian Josephus (37-100) and the Roman historian Tacitus (56-120). Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallus, and rabbinic tradition offer a little more material. The relevant passages are interesting, but for our purposes I will only quote historian Edwin Yamauchi’s summary of the picture these various ancient documents paint of Jesus. If we lost the New Testament, what would we know about Jesus?
“We would know that first, Jesus was a Jewish teacher; second, many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms; third, some people believed he was the Messiah; fourth, he was rejected by the Jewish leaders; fifth, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; sixth, despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by A.D. 64; and seventh, all kinds of people from the cities and countryside—men and women, slave and free—worshiped him as God.”Is this enough to make people fall down and worship Jesus? Of course not. But it’s ample evidence that the stories told in the gospels have at least some historical basis.
The second type of evidence is the archaeological data. The question is whether archaeology supports the historicity of the New Testament accounts. In recent history, people have tended to assume the worst. If the NT speaks of a person or place that we have no other information about, it is assumed to be a fabrication. Until the evidence emerges.
One example is Luke’s reference to Lysanias as tetrarch quoted above. As archaeologist John McRay tells it, “For years scholars pointed to this as evidence that Luke didn’t know what he was talking about, since everybody knew that Lysanias was not a tetrarch but rather the ruler of Chalcis half a century earlier.” That is until “an inscription was found from the time of Tiberius ... which names Lysanius as tetrarch.” Time and again critics have accused Luke of being loose with the details or even making things up. Time and again he has been shown to be a very careful historian.
The same thing has happened with some other writers. For example, John 5 tells about Jesus healing a man at the Pool of Bethesda. For years this was cited as proof the John didn’t know Jerusalem because no such place existed. You can now visit the ruins.
Again and again archaeology has vindicated both the New Testament and the Old. This is not proof that the stories they tell are true, but it does provide strength to the argument that the authors were indeed present and trying to recount history rather than just writing wild fantasies.
The stories recounted in the Bible are fantastic. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t really happen. If they did, if a man who died on a Roman cross really rose from the dead, then everything he said is worth paying attention to.
For more information, see The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
Image credit: The Pool of Bethesda by Robert Bateman, 1877
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