What is the Physical Evidence for the Existence of Jesus?

The Easter season is upon us, and members of the world’s most populace religion – Christianity – will be celebrating the traditional event that serves as the foundation of their beliefs: the supposed death & resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Now, I’m not really interested in getting into all the philosophical & metaphysical questions regarding the beliefs of Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ here.  Rather, I am more interested in asking a much more direct question: did Jesus actually exist as a historical figure?

To address this question, and the related issues which are presented in a (pardon the pun) newly risen branch of theological discourse called the Jesus/Christ myth theory, we must take into account the physical evidence (or lack thereof) for the existence of Jesus.

To address these questions, I would like to reference this excellent article from LiveScience.com:

Jesus Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold Up?

Jesus Christ may be the most famous man who ever lived. But how do we know he did?

Most theological historians, Christian and non-Christian alike, believe that Jesus really did walk the Earth. They draw that conclusion from textual evidence in the Bible, however, rather than from the odd assortment of relics parading as physical evidence in churches all over Europe.

That’s because, from fragments of text written on bits of parchment to overly abundant chips of wood allegedly salvaged from his crucifix, none of the physical evidence of Jesus’ life and death hold up to scientific scrutiny.  [Who Was Jesus, the Man?]…

This is a particularly interesting point that I think some Christians need to address.  Many insist that the world around us provides evidence for their beliefs: that God is real, and Jesus died for our sins to save us, etc.  However, when we really analyze the world around us to address questions such as “Did Jesus really exist?” the evidence seems lacking; and then those same believers dismiss this lack of evidence and then proceed to point to the Bible as “evidence”.  People who argue in such a manner are not being consistent in their argument nor are they being intellectually honest, because they want to stack the deck of evidence, so to speak.

[**Addendum (4-22-11): Even for those who wish to try gathering all of their “evidence” for the historical reality of Jesus from the Bible, there are very troublesome inconsistencies.  To see why, try taking this Easter Quiz on the Biblical account of Jesus’s death & resurrection over at Skeptic Money]

So let’s talk about the supposed physical evidence for the existence of Jesus, and see just why it is that it doesn’t pass muster.  For example, a recent “documentary” claimed that the original nails used to crucify Jesus on the cross could have been found, but according to the LiveScience.com article…

… In their coverage of the new film, Reuters reported that most experts and scholars they contacted dismissed the filmmaker’s case as far-fetched and called it a publicity stunt.

It turns out publicity stunts abound when it comes to holy hardware. In 1911, English liturgical scholar Herbert Thurston counted all the nails that were at that time believed to have been used to crucify Jesus. Though only three or four nails (the exact number is up for debate) were supposed to have pinned Christ to the cross circa A.D. 30, in 1911, 30 holy nails were being venerated in treasuries across Europe.

In an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Thurston, a Jesuit himself, offered this explanation for the surplus in hardware: “Probably the majority began by professing to be facsimiles which had touched or contained filings from some other nail whose claim was more ancient. Without conscious fraud on the part of anyone, it is very easy for imitations in this way to come in a very brief space of time to be reputed originals.”

Along similar lines, enough wood chips from the “True Cross” – the cross on which Jesus was crucified – are scattered across Europe to fill a ship, according to this famous remark by the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin: “There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places, there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big shipload. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.” …

Wow.  So apparently, if everyone who makes such claims is to be believed, Jesus wasn’t crucified upon a single cross but an entire fleet of ships!

Okay, but what about the funeral blanket that covered Jesus’s body after he died – also known more famously as the Shroud of Turin?  Well, it ends up that the claims of the Shroud’s authenticity deserve some critical analysis (as I’ve outlined in a previous blog post)…

… Perhaps the most famous religious relic in the world, the Shroud of Turin, is believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The 14-by-4-foot linen blanket, which bears the ghostly image of a man’s body, has been worshipped by millions of pilgrims in a cathedral in Turin, Italy. But scientifically speaking, the Shroud of Turin is a fake.

Radiocarbon dating of the shroud has revealed that it does not date to the time of Christ but instead to the 14th century; coincidentally, that’s when it first appeared in the historical record. In a document written in 1390, Bishop Pierre d’Arcis of France claimed the image of Jesus on the cloth was “cunningly painted,” a fact “attested by the artist who painted it.”

Today, the Catholic Church does not officially endorse the Shroud of Turin as authentic, though many of the faithful, including Pope Benedict, have indicated that they personally believe in its holiness. …

So while the Catholic Church doesn’t “officially” state the Shroud is authentic, they also have their highest officials state publicly they believe it to be the real thing and don’t encourage any sort of critical thought one way or the other on the matter.  Man, talk about trying to have it both ways… but I suppose when you’re concerned about putting asses into church pews (and therefore money into the collection plate) you’ll use whatever sloppy thinking you can get.

What about those recently-discovered lead books which are supposedly windows into the early history of Christianity?  Well, surprise, it seems the media hype (and accompanying religious fervor) may not be living up to scrutiny…

… Seventy metal books allegedly discovered in a cave in Jordan were hailed in recent weeks as the earliest Christian documents. Dating them to mere decades after Jesus’ death, scholars called the “lead codices” (they’re written in code and cast in lead) the most important discovery in archaeological history. Even BBC News stated: “Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history.”

Christians took the books to be proof of the real-life existence of Jesus, because one page displayed an image of him. Nearby, a fragment of text reading “I shall walk uprightly” was interpreted by many as a reference to Jesus’ resurrection — strong evidence that it actually happened, coming so soon after the fact.

But as Life’s Little Mysteries reported, the lead codices are fakes — a jumble of anachronistic dialects and borrowed images probably forged within the past 50 years. “The image they are saying is Christ is the sun god Helios from a coin that came from the island of Rhodes,” Oxford archaeologist Peter Thonemann told the press. “There are also some nonsense inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek.” The main scholar who had been backing their authenticity was later revealed to be a fringe thinker with no real credentials. …

Oops, that’s embarrassing.

So a great deal of the physical evidence which supposedly testifies to the historical reality of Jesus Christ is either misrepresented, fraudulent, or of stunningly poor scholarship.  Not only that, but then there’s the evidence which is reasonably authentic but which cannot lead the experts in the field to agreeable conclusions…

… One of the most important archaeological finds that actually dates to the time of Jesus may or may not provide evidence of his existence, depending on who you ask. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a vast trove of parchment and papyrus documents found in a cave in Israel in the 1940s, were written sometime between 150 B.C. and A.D. 70. In one place, the scrolls refer to a “teacher of righteousness.” Some say that teacher is Jesus. Others argue that he could be anyone. …

… Before Jesus was crucified, the Gospels say, Roman soldiers placed a crown of thorns on his head in a painful mockery of his sovereignty. Many Christians believe the thorny instrument of torture still exists today, albeit in pieces scattered across Europe. One near-complete crown is housed in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The documented history of Notre Dame’s Crown of Thorns goes back at least 16 centuries — an impressive provenance — but it doesn’t quite trace back to A.D. 30. Furthermore, as Nickell points out, Notre Dame’s crown is a circlet of brush, and is completely devoid of thorns. …

Okay, so – outside of the Bible – the best physical evidence presented so far that Jesus actually existed as a historical figure is inconclusive when examined by experts in the field?  Wow, that’s not really a very strong argument, is it?