When I was younger, I came of age around movies like Zeitgeist, which, these days, I would consider to be atheist propaganda. The trouble was that I hadn’t bothered to fact check them before internalizing the information they presented and settling into a decidedly atheist worldview myself…a mistake I am much more wary of today!
There are so many pieces of that movie specifically that are worth debunking, but we’ll start with the biggest one right out of the gate.
Today, we’re busting the myth that Jesus supposedly never existed.
The New Testament
While we have an entire post dedicated to the reliability of the Bible, the main points to remember are that for all of the accusations of the text getting “corrupted”, it’s actually the best-preserved piece of ancient literature from a textual criticism standpoint.
We have more copies, and copies closer to the times of the described events, than any other work of ancient history.
And so, if the amount of “corruption” is enough to cast doubt on the validity of the New Testament of the Bible, than that standard applied to all other ancient works necessarily means that absolutely nothing in ancient history can be trusted…at all!
Furthermore, the New Testament isn’t just one literary work. It’s a compilation of letters, histories, and accounts that were circulating widely among members of the early church. Christians were copying and circulating these pieces for centuries before Emperor Constantine, famous for asking for a “standard” Bible to be produced, was even born.
Secular Sources
But even for those who wish to distrust the documents of the New Testament, there are plenty of secular sources who not only mention Jesus but state several facts about His life.
In fact, hardly a scholar today would even entertain the notion that Jesus never existed, because there’s so much evidence to support that, in fact, He did, and nothing credible at all to suggest that He didn’t.
Just a few examples include:
- Flavius Josephus – Mentions James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ
- Publius Cornelius Tacitus – Wrote that Jesus was put to death by Pontius Pilate in Judea during the reign of Tiberias
- Celsus – An enemy of Christianity who would have never admitted these things if not true, but confirms that Jesus claimed to have a virgin birth, did miracles, and even claimed to be God.
Then, There’s Archaeology.
Remember what we said about the New Testament containing histories and letters? One very useful advantage to this is the ability we now have to fact-check the plethora of very specific names and places mentioned in there.
We have an entire post on this as well that we welcome you to check out.
