In the objections regarding the historicity of Jesus, even if Christ really existed as a person, the argument is often used of the existence of personalities for which we are supposed to have much less historical evidence than those concerning the leading figure of Christianity, despite these their historical existence is generally accepted.
But is that the case?
Case 1: Socrates
"We have to admit that for few personalities of antiquity we have so much indisputable historical information, and we have so many authentic references" as for Jesus, while "the situation is much less positive, for example, in the case of Socrates"
Seriously; Let's see how true this is.
Socrates was a famous wise man, he was the spark that finally ignited philosophy as a science as we know it today. It was executed in Athens in 399 BC. because he challenged the status quo. He emerged as the wisest man of the ancient world. But that makes sense. For we know the names of numerous eyewitnesses who wrote books about him, including at least sixteen of his disciples.
There is no book that has been written about whether Christ existed. In some cases we even know the titles of the books about Socrates, and many paraphrases or excerpts from them survive in other sources. Actually, we have two of them.
Which were written within a few years after his death, and not half a century later or even more (as the Gospels were written about Jesus), and not even in a foreign country and language. Already these are far more than we have for Jesus. As for those two eyewitnesses? They were the students of Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, who together wrote several books about him.
So not only do we have multiple eyewitnesses talking about Socrates within a few years of his death, but we also have the testimony of a person relatively hostile to him, outside and beyond the circle of his fanatical disciples. It is about the Athenian satirical poet Aristophanes who presented a comedy in which he politely pokes fun at Socrates, his school and his students. The work, entitled Nepheles, survives to this day.
Aristophanes not only knew Socrates personally and based his comedy on his first-hand knowledge of him and his school, but as later historians (based on contemporary eyewitness sources) have recorded, Socrates was in the stands among the spectators of the first project presentation. If only we had such an invaluable source for whether Christ really existed! But unfortunately we don't have. There are absolutely no neutral or independent records of whether Christ existed. We have only later material written by fanatical and doxastic believers, who make up the most biased source possible. As we just saw in the last Chapter, any minor references made by non-Christian historians were simply repetitions of what these later fanatical Christian sources had reported – or were entirely fabricated by fanatical Christians!
So even on this point alone, again we have much better evidence for Socrates than for Jesus. But they are not the only ones we have. We also have many of his contemporaries testifying to the historical existence of Socrates. For Jesus we have none—except a heavenly being. And several historians of Socrates, dating from about a century later, collected material from his contemporaries and eyewitnesses, material from which they compiled histories and biographies of this man. Among them Idomeneus, who wrote On the Socratics, excerpts of which have survived. Altogether, the surviving testimonies and quotations of Socrates' speeches by his eyewitnesses and contemporaries fill the four volumes of the work Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae of Gabriele Giannantoni published in 1990. All this is so much more than we have for Jesus that it really boggles the mind to think how anyone can say that we have more evidence for Jesus than for Socrates!
If Socrates had been instantly worshiped as the resurrected Son of God, Savior of the Universe, whose biography and sermons should urgently be spread throughout the world for the good of mankind, and if his followers had gained control of all the social mechanisms within three centuries, then we might have even more evidence than we already have. The dozens of eyewitness accounts and contemporary reports that we know of but only have references or excerpts from (and more that we don't) would certainly have been saved by this "Church of Socrates" which controlled all book keeping and production for a millennium after third AD century. We would have all that. Plus everything we already have.
But why was there no similar production and preservation of testimonies and contemporary reports about Jesus?
All we can assume is simply because nothing was written. Or that no one could preserve such records even just to commemorate them. Or someone destroyed them. One, two, three answers. Choose from them at your discretion. Socrates is very similar to Jesus in that he was a rather famous, distinguished and respected teacher who never wrote anything himself, but who had disciples who took it upon themselves to spread his teachings, thus perpetuating his reputation. The followers of Socrates and their descendants similarly split into competing sects, leading to the emergence of different philosophical schools, from Platonism and Aristotelianism to Cynicism and Stoicism, and a few other less widespread ones.
The influence of his thought on Western society has been enormous, touching at the core of every aspect of our ideas today, from science to democracy. But Socrates is nothing like Jesus in that he was never worshiped as a savior god who appeared in visions from outer space. There were also legends invented about him.
But he was never mythologized like Jesus. Not even close. The opposite happened.
Socrates belongs to the category of those who establish schools of thought in a surrounding culture that is very conducive to the establishment of schools of thought. Jesus belongs to the category of world-savior gods and archangels from above – embedded within a culture that greatly favors the discovery of world-savior gods and archangels from above. It's not the same thing. And the evidence validates this difference.
Case 2: Julius Caesar
"Whether Christ really existed is as self-evident to any impartial historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar"
Truth; Let's see if this is true.
Julius Caesar, of course, was not "the eponymous salad guy" as Bill and Ted want him to be in the serial Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure2. In fact he was "the first of the Empire and the last of the Republicans of Rome" as stated by his avatar in the lyrics of the rap group Epic Rap Battles. And in his case, we have one of the best proofs that can be found for someone's existence: we have the texts he wrote himself. Caesar wrote about many of his wars, as well as his role in the Roman Civil War. Copies of those books of his survive today. Christ, on the other hand, did not write anything in a book.
We have accounts of Caesar's contemporaries who knew him personally and write about him in many surviving letters, such as Cicero and Pompey. Similar sources for whether Christ existed do not exist. Many of Caesar's contemporaries who knew him personally wrote about him in books that survive to this day and can be read by us, such as the poets Virgil, Ovid, and Catullus; as well as those whose works survive, such as the historian Titus Livius; and many others whose books we know to have existed.
We also have writings from others who were simply his contemporaries, such as the geographer Strabo and the biographer Nicholas of Damascene, and, of course, many historians in the years immediately after his death, from Vellius Paterculos onwards, who he consulted the first texts as well as the following ones. There are no such sources for Jesus.
Moreover, we have accounts of Caesar not only from eyewitnesses and his contemporaries or immediately subsequent historians, but also from his close friend and follower, Sallustius – not only in Sallustius' surviving work The War with Catalina, but also in excerpts from Sallust's Histories, a work which constitutes his own assessment of Roman History, including Caesar's affairs. As to whether Christ existed, there are no such sources or any corresponding book
We actually have inscriptions written and posted by Julius Caesar himself. And of course countless coins which were minted at his command, confirming his existence, his personal characteristics, his achievements, his positions and his hegemony. We even have statues of him that he posed for! There is not one of these incontrovertible proofs to be sure that Christ existed, as we observe so far in the book.
The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, they do not name eyewitness sources, and they do not give us verifiable eyewitness sources. There is no eyewitness testimony that Christ actually existed. For Caesar there are at least nine that have survived.
So how can Jesus be vindicated as well as Caesar?
Which is confirmed by evidence which, apart from all inscriptions and statues in marble or on buildings and coins, made by order of Caesar himself or those who knew him personally, is again much more than we have for Jesus. Mere claims make no sense. Yet we have Christian scholars like Darrell Bock who still insist that "the story of Christ is as well attested as that of Caesar."
Case 3: Pontius Pilate
"For the most powerful and great personality of his time, Pontius Pilate ... not even" there is "a mention in any of his contemporary, Roman sources"
Philo Alexandreus was a contemporary of Pontius Pilate. And he was a Roman in every sense. Although a Greek-speaking Jew living in the Roman province of Egypt—which adjoined the Roman province of Judaea, which Philo admittedly visited on pilgrimage at least once—Philo was definitely a Roman citizen. And not only was he a famous and wealthy Alexandrian, with the office of ambassador to the emperor, but he was also the uncle of Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Roman government official. Not only did Philo live during the period of Pontius Pilate's rule of Judea, but he also wrote an entire book about Pilate. We know this because he himself states it in his surviving texts.
But there is also a Christian historian of the fourth century, the Eusebius, who tells us that he read this book (in Church History 2.5).
Philo also describes an incident in which Pontius Pilate is sketched, in another surviving book of his, written in the 40s AD, not long after Pilate's suicide during the reign of Caligula, a fact that Philo had included in his lost book on Pilate (as you can see in Embassy to Gaion 299-305 and in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History 2.7). This in regards to the fact that Pilate was not mentioned in any Roman source of his time.
However, we also have a lot of information about Pilate and not about persons like Christ in Joseph's book On the Jewish War, written in the 70s AD. and Jewish Archeology written in AD 93. at a time distance from the time when Pilate lived equal to the distance of the Gospels from the time of Jesus.
Josephus was reported to Pilate in detail because his rule of Judea from 26 to 36 AD. was one of the most decisive periods that led to the final destruction of the Jewish state. Although Josephus, who wrote about these events a lifetime later, was still a Greek-speaking Jew—who once served as governor of Galilee—he was also a Roman citizen and spent much of his life in Rome itself. And we know that he used earlier sources for his descriptions (he often names or mentions them).
Josephus was born only a few years after Pilate's death, so he is not exactly a contemporary. But even so, we have no equivalent of whether Christ really existed, a detailed account by a third rationalist historian, using earlier modern sources. (As we have already pointed out, the real Josephus probably never wrote any book in which Christ is mentioned). Nor do we have any similar, like Philo's, detailed record by third parties, which is chronologically almost contemporary with Jesus.
It is very strange, however, that the Christians of the medieval period did not take care to preserve Philo's book about Pilate.
They rescued dozens of his other volumes – but let this particular one go to waste. Why; The most likely reason is estimated to be the fact that nowhere in it did it mention whether or not Christ existed. And a book that deals with the entire period during which Pontius Pilate ruled and does not perceive the presence of Jesus, was either considered uninteresting or considered disturbing to its later Christian readers.
But for an eminent historian like Bart Ehrman to forget that Philo spoke of Pontius Pilate, both in his surviving and lost books, and instead to mislead the public by writing in one of the major journals that none of Pilate's contemporaries commemorated him is something very strange indeed. Why could he do this?
Do historians insist from book to book on repeating ridiculous things like this, just to convince the public that Is the evidence for Christ as strong as for all the other famous ones? Because this is not an isolated case. Similar behaviors are noted all the time. We have seen one case after another. And these behaviors are copied and repeated endlessly. So there is a specific purpose to all of this.
Whatever this purpose, the effect is that it calls into question the judgment and reliability of the scholarly consensus in favor of the historicity of Jesus. Because this consensus is supported by scholars, who should understand the evidence better than settle for ludicrous claims like the ones above. A fact that makes their consent suspect.
Finally, in his book on whether Christ really existed, entitled “Did Jesus Exist?” Ehrman admits that Philo mentions Pilate - in fact, there he also admits something else, which he forgets to tell his Huffington Post readers, that we actually have an inscription commissioned by Pontius Pilate himself, which certifies its existence! It is a stone slab that was incorporated into a building project undertaken by Pilate in Judea, where his name is commemorated on it.
This book is not just some eyewitness evidence that Christ existed; it is Pilate himself speaking to us. And neither is it just Pilate himself speaking to us; it is his authentic signature. This inscription is not some copy made centuries later, but the actual carved stone that Pilate himself oversaw and signed. And most importantly, you can't get more Roman than a Roman government official who tells us it exists, writing it in Latin, on an official state monument!
He was not some worshiped savior god or celestial visitor from space visible only in visions. He was just an ordinary government official who played some role in the day-to-day political history of the ancient world. He's just the type of person we always believe existed unless we have reason to doubt it...unlike what happens with cultic soteriological deities from outer space.
On whether Jesus Christ was - or not - an actual person, his book Richard Carrier from Daedaleos Publications is the perfect read for you!