There is no doubt that Jesus is one of the most popular religious figures in the world today. We were told, especially by John, that He was God himself in the likeness of man. He was the only begotten son, the lamb that was slain for the remission of sins. But, did Jesus really exist or perhaps he was just one of the legends of oral history?
Can We Really Trust the Synoptic Gospels?
Much of what is known about the life of Jesus is contained in the first three books of the New Testament. Unfortunately, however, the earliest of these books (usually believed to be Mark) was written some fifty years after the death of Jesus by men who did not have any personal relationship with him. These men wrote with pseudonyms which suggest they were one of Jesus' disciples. Of course, the authors had to do this to make their accounts more believable.
Furthermore, the other gospels were written some thirty to fifty years after the first (Mark) by early Christians who probably lived in different cities, speaking different tongues. This makes it scholarly impractical to validate the existence of Jesus relying solely on the accounts of the Synoptic gospels.
What Does History From Non-Christian Sources Say About Jesus?
A more reliable way of ascertaining whether Jesus really existed or not is to consider what pagan historians say about him. And, sincerely, not much was really reported about Jesus from these sources. There are neither official records of Jesus' birth, his death, nor his trials. Nevertheless, scholars found two pagan references about Jesus.
The first time Jesus was mentioned in a pagan source was in the year 112 CE. In a letter written by Pliny the Younger, who was then the governor of a Roman province, he asked his emperor, Trajan, how to handle some groups of Christians who were meeting illegally. These people, he tells the emperor, worship Christ as God.
A second reference to Jesus came in the year 115 when, in writing the history of Rome, Tacitus, a renowned Roman historian, blamed Christians for a fire outbreak which occurred in the year 67. He explained that the Christians got their names from Christus....who was executed in the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.(Annals 15.44).
Although Tacitus' testimony, surely, confirms the story we already know about Jesus' trial before Pilate, it did not provide further details about the life of Jesus.
Conclusion
There is no denial that Jesus, indeed, existed following the references from non-Christian sources. However, the scanty details provided about the life of Jesus raises further questions as to whether he was actually as popular as the synoptic gospels wanted us to believe. While the latter question may be probed on another day, Jesus is not a fiction. He did exist.
Image sourced from Google
SUPPORT CORNER
Kindly follow the peerless vocabulary lessons delivered by 
Are you a minnow and you're already thinking of giving up on Steemit? Please don't quit. Kindly follow @Steemitcentral and use the steemitcentral tag in your posts to get some upvotes.
I am 
, the young man who goes about carrying his magical pen, not his gun, in his pockets.
Gif courtesy of
