The evidence for Jesus

Thanks for coming to "Just Looking"! This page is just an extra resource which we've put up here to help you explore more of the facts about Jesus Christ, the figure who is the key to understanding Christian faith and why people get so excited about it. We hope it's useful to you. See you next Sunday!

What can you know - for sure - about Jesus Christ? If you believe everything you hear, you might think the answer is "Not very much".

Most people assume that there are so many myths and legends surrounding Jesus Christ, it's impossible to know the truth.

A few years ago, most scholars would have agreed with them. Not now though. We've found out a lot of things this century which have shown that you can actually know quite a bit about Jesus. For instance:

• HE REALLY LIVED

There's no real possibility that he was just a myth. Jesus is mentioned by many non-Christian writers of the time:

• Suetonius
• Josephus
• Tacitus
• Pliny
• Lucian
• Thallus

Also, we now know that the Gospelks were written too soon after Jesus' death for them to be fiction. People still remembered Jesus very clearly, and wouldn't have swallowed a lot of exaggerated claims without protesting! One scholar, Professor Joachim Jeremias, has shown that the Gospels bear the traces of Jesus' own speaking style - it's as if we're listening to the voice of Jesus himself.

• HE WAS A BRILLIANT THINKER

You can't find any teacher equal to Jesus in any of the great minds of his day. It had been hundreds of years since the Jews had produced anybody so original, creative, or compelling. The statements of Jesus Christ have been quoted more often than any other words in history. Just check out any Dictionary of Quotations! He was unique. He was a genius.

• HE MAY WELL HAVE BEEN A MIRACLE WORKER

"Oh, come on," you might complain. "Water into wine? Feeding five thousand people? You can't believe anything like that. Obviously those are just legends that were made up afterwards."

Well, it's interesting that Jesus' opponents didn't deny that he had done some miraculous things. They claimed he'd done it all by magic and sorcery - but they did admit he'd done it! A hundred years later, one Christian writer told the Roman emperor Antonius Pius that if he didn't believe the miracle stories, he only had to look at the official records of Pontius Pilare - it was all written down in there!

Now we don't have these records any longer; they crumbled into dust many years ago. So we can't check. But why would the Christian writer have made that claim, to the most important person in the Empire, if it wasn't all officially noted down?

• HE CLAIMED TO BE PERFECT, AND MAYBE HE WAS

Even more incredible, you say? Well... hang on. This was a claim that Jesus' followers were making right from the very start, not a legend that grew with time. You find it all over their writings.

So all his enemies had to do was to drag up one piece of dirt about him... and his credibility would have been exploded. They never did. And remember that Jesus' followers were a pretty shrewd bunch of fishermen, peasants and tax inspectors - people who knew how to see through fancy claims - and they spent three years travelling around with him. They lived closely together, sharing food, sleeping rough, often low on money. If Jesus had once done something morally bad, they'd have spotted it - then left him.

HE CHANGED PEOPLE'S LIVES

The Bible says that six weeks after Jesus' death, 3000 people joined his movement in one day. Some explosion like that must have happened, because we know that the Church spread rapidly - just as Jesus had predicted it would - all over the ancient world.

Christianity began as a small sect with a handful of followers, "a religion of slaves and women" as the Romans scornfully put it. They tried to stamp it out over three centuries of persecution, but by AD 329 so many lives had been changed by Christianity that the Roman emperor gave in and made it his state religion!

Why was there such a tremendous impact on so many people? Because Christians believed Jesus had risen from the grave, was alive again, and could give people a new life. Nobody else could explain what had happened to the body of Jesus; it was a genuine mystery. And when thieves, prostitutes, philosophers, housewives, Roman governors and Jewish priests all started to claim that this dead man had changed them into better people - the whole world had top sit up and take notice.

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, 59,200 people every day are having the life-changing experience of meeting Jesus.

Could he change your life?