Most historians today, including those who are no friends of the Christian faith, agree on two fundamental points: Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure, and the early Christian movement grew rapidly in the decades after his death. That does not mean that every question has been answered. It does not prove His miracles or that He really did rise from the dead. But it does dispel a common idea that Jesus perhaps never existed at all. That’s not at all where the evidence leads.
So what kind of evidence do we actually have, and how should we think about it?
What do we mean by “historical”?
When we say “historical,” we mean that the person existed in a real time and place. Sources close to the events mention him, sources that can be critically examined and cross-checked, and the movement he began can be tracked in the wider world.
By that standard, even though He came from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, Jesus is a well-attested figure from antiquity. We are therefore dealing with a real person in a real setting, with real sources that can be examined and weighed.
The Gospels are not modern biographies, but they are biographies
In a YouTube video interview, Cambridge scholar Dr. Peter J. Williams makes a simple but vital point: the Gospels are not “fever-dream fiction.” They fit the writings of the ancient world. At one level, they are “Gospels.” At another level, they resemble ancient biographies, written to convey who a person was and why they mattered, not to satisfy modern expectations and all that entails.
A key feature is content. A large portion of each Gospel focuses on the events regarding Jesus’ final week leading to His death, and the claim of His resurrection. That is not accidental on the writers’ part. The Gospels recount history with theological implications. They are saying loud and clear, “These events happened, and there are ramifications for everyone in our world.”
That combination often bothers modern readers. But it should not surprise us. Ancient historians regularly wrote with a viewpoint. The question is not, “Do the authors have convictions?” They clearly do. The question is, “Are they close enough to the events described so that they know what really happened, and can their claims be tested?”
Dr. Williams also makes a helpful observation: the Gospels do not include printed dates on the title page, but they do include names. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really are the authors, that creates a basic historical constraint and timeline. People can only live so long. A tax collector who left his booth to follow Jesus cannot be writing centuries later. We are driven back into the Middle Eastern world of the first century, within the living memory of the events.
This matters for dating. Even if scholars debate the precise decade, authorship by first-century figures limits how late the Gospels can be.
One more point strengthens credibility, especially for skeptical readers. The Gospels include details that early Christians would not naturally invent to make their message “sell” better: the Messiah’s shameful execution by crucifixion, the record of the disciples’ repeated failures, and the initial fear and confusion surrounding the resurrection story. Historians sometimes discuss this under the heading of the “criterion of embarrassment.” The idea here is not that embarrassing details automatically prove everything, but that awkward, costly, or reputation-damaging details are less likely to be deliberate propaganda. This definitely carries weight as evidence of authenticity when the historical setting is understood.
Non-Christian sources confirm key basics
We do not have to begin with Christian sources to establish that Jesus existed and was executed. Two well-known non-Christian witnesses accommodate us here.
Tacitus, a Roman historian writing about Nero’s response to rumors after the great fire of Rome, mentions Christians and explains the origin of their name. He links the movement to “Christus,” and places His execution in the reign of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate. Whatever someone concludes about the resurrection, Tacitus is not trying to help Christianity. He is a hostile witness. Yet he still treats the basic claim as public knowledge: there was a man called Christus, executed under Pontius Pilate, and His followers increased in number.
Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor in Bithynia-Pontus, writes to Emperor Trajan about how to handle the Christians of his day. He reports that they met before dawn and sang “a hymn to Christ, as to a god,” and bound themselves by oath not to engage in crime. Again, this is not from a friendly source. Pliny is describing what he sees as a troubling movement. Yet he confirms key facts for us: Christians existed early, they worshiped Christ, and their convictions shaped their behavior.
A third witness is Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. Josephus provides another important witness, though his testimony requires careful handling. His brief reference to “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” is widely regarded as authentic in substance, even among many who dispute the more debated passage often called the Testimonium Flavianum.
These witnesses wrote within roughly 20 to 85 years of Jesus’ death, which is remarkably early by ancient historical standards. Tacitus and Pliny are commonly dated to the early second century (c. AD 110–120), and Josephus to the late first century (c. AD 93–94 for Antiquities).
So even outside the New Testament, the trail of evidence quickly leads us to Jesus and to a movement that was convinced He mattered supremely.
“The telephone game” objection: why this is not a good analogy
A common skeptical line goes like this: “The Jesus story was passed around for decades. That is basically the telephone game. Details get distorted.” That analogy sounds persuasive until you slow down and compare the situations.
The telephone game is designed to corrupt the message. The whole point is that one person whispers once, the next repeats once, and so on. The process is intentionally thin and uncontrolled. But Jesus’ public teaching did not happen in private whispers. He taught repeatedly, in public settings, to groups, with disciples tasked to learn. In the interview, Williams notes that disciples were students, and Jesus could have used structured repetition and memorization methods. That is historically plausible in a Jewish context where memorization was common, and where teachers repeated core material.
The early community also had “multiple lines” of access. The telephone game depends on a single chain. Early Christianity did not. You have many witnesses, many communities, and early written sources circulating among them. Even when accounts differ in details, the differences can actually function like cross-checks rather than proof of invention.
This is also where the “Jesus myth theory” should be named explicitly. Online, it is common to hear that Jesus never existed and that Christianity began as a purely mythical story. Whatever one thinks about miracles, that claim is widely rejected in mainstream scholarship, including by many skeptical scholars who do not accept Christian faith claims. Even Bart Ehrman, a skeptical New Testament scholar, explicitly argues that the proposal that Jesus was a legend/myth does not hold up to scrutiny. Jesus’ historical existence is not seriously disputed among historians who specialize in the period.
Here is where manuscript evidence matters. The New Testament is preserved in an enormous manuscript tradition. Building on the general point Williams makes about “loads of copies,” many commonly cited estimates describe over 5,800 catalogued Greek New Testament manuscripts, and when early translations in other languages (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and others) are included, the total number of witnesses exceeds 20,000.
The telephone game makes recovery impossible. Textual criticism does the opposite. It thrives on abundant copies. When you have many manuscripts across regions and centuries, you can identify patterns, compare readings, and detect where copying differs. Paradoxically, the abundance that produces variants is also what makes the original text more recoverable.
A simple illustration helps. For many ancient works, the manuscript base is comparatively thin, and sometimes concentrated in a small number of copying streams. For the New Testament, the manuscript base is gigantic by comparison and geographically widespread, which makes large-scale, coordinated “editing” across the entire tradition extraordinarily difficult to sustain without leaving clear traces.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” yes and no
That slogan gets repeated constantly. It can be helpful, but only if you define your terms.
In the interview, Williams pushes back by noting that “extraordinary” depends on your underlying worldview. If God exists, miracles are not “impossible intrusions.” They are purposeful acts consistent with God’s power and plan.
There is also a second issue: people apply the slogan selectively. Many modern claims about origins are extraordinary too: life emerging from non-life, consciousness arising from purely material processes, the universe springing from nothing. Yet people often grant these a pass because they fit a naturalistic framework. The point is not that Christianity wins by pointing to hard questions in science. The point is that everyone has “background beliefs” that shape what they consider plausible.
A more honest approach is this: worldviews shape what we consider plausible, so we should test the sources carefully rather than dismiss them out of hand.
What can we responsibly conclude?
At minimum, the evidence supports these historically grounded statements: Jesus existed as a first-century Jewish teacher. He was executed under Roman authority in Judea. His followers rapidly spread across the empire. They worshiped Christ early, even when it carried social and legal risk.
Christian faith goes further, of course. It says the best explanation for the rise of Christianity is not merely that Jesus lived and died, but that He rose and reigns.
But even before you get to that claim, you have solid historical footing: Jesus is not a mythical figure invented centuries later. He is a real figure who left real footprints in the ancient world.