Non-Biblical References to Jesus

TACITUS, ANNALS 15.44 (c. AD 116)

Explaining who Nero used as scapegoats after the fire of AD 64, Tacitus stops to identify the sect: "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus" (Church and Brodribb translation, 1876).

He calls the movement "a most mischievous superstition" and Judaea "the first source of the evil." A hostile senator with access to state records supplies the emperor, the official, the province, and the manner of death.

The passage survives in the Second Medicean codex — Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 68.2 — copied in the eleventh century at Monte Cassino. Ultraviolet photography shows the manuscript originally read chrestianos, corrected by a later hand to christianos: a scribal fingerprint that argues against wholesale Christian fabrication of the passage.

JOSEPHUS, ANTIQUITIES 20.200 (c. AD 93)

Josephus reports that in AD 62, in the gap between the death of the procurator Festus and the arrival of Albinus, the high priest Ananus convened the Sanhedrin and delivered up "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James" to be stoned.

The phrasing is un-Christian. No believing scribe identifies James by a merely so-called Christ. This passage is accepted as authentic by all but a handful of scholars.

JOSEPHUS, ANTIQUITIES 18.63-64 — THE TESTIMONIUM

The longer notice describes Jesus as a wise man, a doer of startling deeds, a teacher who drew both Jews and Greeks, condemned to the cross by Pilate on the accusation of the leading men, with a following that had not died out.

Three phrases in the received Greek are confessions no synagogue-loyal Jew would write: "if indeed one ought to call him a man," "He was the Christ," and the third-day resurrection "as the divine prophets had foretold." Remove those and a plain, faintly cool Jewish notice remains — which is where most of the field lands.

Louis Feldman's survey of the 1937-1980 literature found the large majority holding the passage substantially Josephan with Christian retouching. In 1971 Shlomo Pines published a tenth-century Arabic version preserved in the chronicle of Agapius of Hierapolis that lacks the most confessional lines.

PLINY THE YOUNGER, EPISTLES 10.96 (c. AD 112)

Pliny, governor of Bithynia-Pontus, writes to Trajan for instructions on trying Christians and reports what he extracted under interrogation, including from two slave women he calls ministrae — deaconesses — whom he tortured.

They met before dawn on a fixed day, he says, "to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ, as though he were a god," and bound themselves by oath against theft, robbery, adultery, breach of faith, and refusing to return a deposit when called upon.

Pliny adds that the temples had stood nearly deserted and were filling again. That is a hostile governor's measure of how far the movement had already spread through a Roman province.

SUETONIUS, CLAUDIUS 25.4 (c. AD 121)

"Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome." Acts 18:2 records the same expulsion from the other side: Paul meets Aquila and Priscilla at Corinth because Claudius "had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome."