Although the character who uttered this pronouncement is fictitious, the charge is a frequent one and, as in this case, sometimes used in an attempt to discredit Christianity. We will simply make two responses to this view here, especially since it is not necessarily a critical attempt to reject the pursuit of the historical Jesus.
1.A false notion
First, it is simply false to hold that there are no ancient sources outside of the New Testament that speak of Jesus. It is true that none of these extrabiblical sources give a detailedaccount concerning Jesus, but there are nevertheless well over a dozen non-Christian sources from ancient history that mention him. There are also a number of early Christian sources that provide more information concerning him. We will have to wait until Part Two to specifically substantiate this claim, but it is enough to note here that it is incorrect to assert that the ancient non-Christian world knew nothing of Jesus. It may even be the case that he is one of the most-mentioned figures of the ancient world!
2.Communications in the ancient world
Second, Daniel-Rops notes a few considerations that help explain why even more was not written about Jesus in ancient times. For instance, the first century was certainly not characterized by advanced communications, at least by any modern standards. Any number of events, persons, or situations could be newsworthy in a regional setting and get hardly any attention on the international scene. Furthermore, there were very few ancient writers, comparatively speaking. Consequently, they would have plenty to write about and often confined themselves to situations that were “official” or of international interest.
At the beginning, we cannot be sure that Jesus or the earliest Christians made any such international commotion. Lastly, Jesus’ background as a peasant from a humble family would mitigate against him receiving any great amount of attention. Even the Christian teaching of his messiahship might look to an outsider to be a Jewish sectarian dogma, making Jesus just another “pretender” to be the king of the Jews.^54
Again, we must not be misled by these considerations into the mistaken conclusion that extra-New Testament sources ignore Jesus. There are a surprising
53 Charles Templeton, Act of God(New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 152. 54 Daniel-Rops, “The Silence of Jesus’ Contemporaries,” pp. 13–14, 17–18.
number of non-Christian sources that do tell us a number of things about him. There are also several reasons why even more is not reported.
Summary and Conclusion
In this chapter we have investigated some misconceptions concerning the historicity of Jesus, reaching the conclusion that none of them presents compelling reasons to disregard all or part of our source material about him.
A popular view in the mid-twentieth century taught that Jesus did exist but that very little can be known about him. This approach was disproven by the data, and has lost most of its appeal. The disregard for details concerning the historical Jesus and their relation to faith, an a prioridismissal of the possibility of miraculous events such as Jesus’ resurrection, historical objections to radical form and redaction criticism, and the demonstrated reliability of the New Testament text are some of the reasons we rejected this option. Other problems are also apparent.
