Anyone who has ever spent a period of time on the internet will have noted what a reasonable and balanced environment it is. Arguments are presented rationally and thoughtfully; people are allowed time and space to develop ideas and various opinions are given respect and equal airtime.
You will also have noted that visitors to the esteemed and hallowed grounds of such schools of reason as X and Facebook like to engage in formal debate about all sorts of topics from ‘lol Pepe the frog’ to whether men have decided that women should give birth or not, to how the wokes have ruined whatever it someone on TV told you they had ruined this week, to whether atheists are right or theists are right.
The main problem with the latter always appears to be that, like everything else on the internet, the people having that argument are not having their own argument, they are having someone else’s argument that they either agree or disagree with.
People on each side of this argument simply repeat talking points they have heard someone else come up with, which they then wave around, sometimes feverishly, as some kind of knockout punch for their own version of whatever their agenda is.
Atheists often claim to have become atheists by reading the Bible. It’s commonly claimed, without even the slightest bit of evidence ever being presented to back it up, that most atheists know more about the Bible than most theists. The trouble is that should you ask them a few simple questions about the Bible they are supposedly now experts on, they clam up remarkably quickly or start repeating arguments that they clearly have lifted from somewhere and someone else.
And look, I’m not really trying to be too down on either side here. I’m an atheist, too. The temptation to repeat what you think is a really good point is irresistible in most debates. The problem arises when what may be otherwise contextual debating points are thrown around without that context, or when things that are just plain nonsense are used like hammers to smash the other side with.
Everyone always wants the ultimate ‘gotcha’.
But things in history are never really that simple, nor are they, paradoxically, quite so complicated.
The problem with most atheist v theist debates is that when they try to use archaeological and historical arguments, including using the Bible as a source, that they very quickly forget (or don’t care) about the academic pursuit of historical narrative and just go straight for the theological jugular.
The single greatest sticking point tends to be around one question - Did Jesus actually exist?
The desire to see this question definitively answered is obvious. If the atheist side can demonstrate once and for all that Jesus never existed, then all of the theist arguments become instantly irrelevant. Without Jesus, there is no Christianity. Proving that Jesus didn’t exist would hole the theist argument below the waterline.
On the other side, if you can demonstrate with absolute certainty that Jesus did exist, then the likelihood of the rest of a theological argument holding water increases considerably.
But you might have noticed the issue here. These are not really historical arguments. They are philosophical or theological arguments trying to use history and archaeology to prove their points.
History doesn’t really care if Jesus was the Son of God or not. History is no more concerned with whether Jesus healed the blind by touching them, than if the Emperor Vespasian healed the blind by touching them, an event for which we have perfectly sensible historical records. History is less concerned with whether Vespasian actually was a god, but with what the claims surrounding his divine nature, and his grumpiness because becoming a god was happening to him, can tell us about the time and the society in which these events happened.
I’m sure it’s happening somewhere on the internet, but not many people are arguing about whether Vespasian even existed to try and disprove that he could cure blindness with a miracle. Of course he couldn’t cure blindness with a miracle. Nobody really thinks he could. Nobody was even really supposed to think that he could, it was just a part of his duties as pontifex maximus, the chief priest of Rome, and he did it because he had to. He didn’t want to, but it was his job. The people he ‘cured’ were clearly just there to be miraculously cured and everyone had to see this happen.
The history is not about miracles or gods, it’s about Roman society and the people who made these things happen.
So, let’s try and dismantle this most basic of arguments using history and history alone. What does the history actually say? How reliable is it? How strong are some of the main talking points used in this continual online bunfight?
We’ll try and take them one by one.
1. What is a ‘history book’?
This argument mostly comes up when people say that the Bible is or isn’t a ‘history book’ and it’s mostly used to outright dismiss anything the Bible contains as a source. But that raises the question of what a history book even is, or, more basically, what the study of history even is.
If you ask most people what a ‘history book’ is, they’ll probably have in mind some sort of academic compendium of dates on which everyone agrees. A list of kings or queens in chronological order. A long list of battles dated one after another, perhaps with a little map of where they happened, what happened and to who.
What people have in mind is either some sort of almanac or an encyclopedia and whilst those things do exist, saying that this is what a history book is and nothing else kind of misses the point a lot and also throws the vast majority of sources, particularly for ancient history, straight in the trash.
Whilst there isn’t any hard definition of what a history book is, history itself can be broadly described as an approach that tried to understand the motivations, attitudes, and beliefs of the people who produced the sources rather than viewing their work as reliable indicators of the events they portrayed.
In giving some examples of what I mean, I’ll be referring back to the works of the Roman senator and historian Tacitus. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of ancient history would probably agree that Tacitus is a great source for Roman history. He is known as one of the greatest historians of his day. Even says that he is a historian and that his works serve as accurate and reliable accounts of events he portrays. What’s more, even promises us that, unlike those who have come before him, he won’t be giving versions of events that have been spun for political or personal reasons.
Problem is that he then ignores his own advice and spins everything he writes like a top. He leaves things out, he adds stuff that didn’t happen, he makes more of certain events and little of others and writes it all with a polemic that at times borders on manic propaganda.
But that doesn’t mean that what he writes has to be dismissed. he’s still an amazing, and vital, source for the events he portrays. Sometimes he’s the only source for such events. There are some historical events that have passed into the lexicon of ‘fact’, that are there only because Tacitus wrote about them. If not for him, we wouldn’t know what happened, or why, or even that it had happened at all.
Tacitus is the source for the story about Vespasian performing miracles I talked about earlier, and the only primary source for them. Tacitus was there in Rome at the time. These are pretty much first-hand accounts. But nobody actually believes that these miracles happened. We don’t also throw everything Tacitus wrote in the trash because we don’t believe the miracles occurred.
In the same way, the Bible is a source and a very handy one for finding out about life for the lower ranks of society in the Roman Empire. Remember that the events of the New Testament are all taking place in the Empire of the 1st Century AD.
Whilst it is often said that history is written by the victor, it’s more accurate to say that history is written by the rich. People like Tacitus are in the upper echelons of Roman society and correspondingly they tend to write about events in their world, the world of senators and emperors. Nobody tends to write about the people at the bottom of the Roman social triangle, the plebs, the prostitutes, the shepherds and the carpenters.
But you can find tales about those lives in the Bible and whilst, like with Tacitus, we don’t necessarily have to believe the stories about miracles and gods, we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater either.
There are stories in there by the Apostle Paul, for example, that are amazing sources for how a lowly Jewish citizen of the empire could expect to be treated. In Acts 22, Paul is dragged in by the Romans for ‘questioning’, particularly the sort of questioning that involves whips, and he is quick to point out to the guard that he is a Roman citizen and hence exempt from such treatment.
Paul is from Tarsus and that city was granted free status under Augustus; hence he was born a citizen with all the rights that entails. He is absolutely right that they cannot question him and realizing this, the Romans let him go immediately. We know from secular history that this was a law all citizens benefitted from and right there in the Bible is a wonderful example of that history being used.
As a source then, such accounts are invaluable. But you’ll often see another claim, which is that no ‘real’ historian would ever use the Bible as a source. You’ll see this claim used very often by atheists in debates, both formal ones and the scruffier versions on Facebook. I’ve seen some of the greatest names in atheist advocacy use this claim and whilst I have nothing but respect for their philosophical and theological prowess in debating, saying that no Roman historian would use the Bible as a source is palpably untrue.
It’s actually quite difficult to teach 1st century Roman history without using the Bible as a source. It can be done, of course, but why would anyone not want to use it as a source? It would be like trying to teach early English literature without using Beowulf as a source. You can, but why would you?
The easiest thing to do to dispel the idea that no historian would use the Bible as a source, outside of just taking my word for it, is to give you some examples:
The Roman World, 44BC - AD180, Martin Goodman, Routledge, 1997
The Roman Empire, Colin Wells, Fontana, 1984
That’s just two examples, but these are standard texts used in the teaching of Roman history in universities, written by established and esteemed academics who are experts in their field. Both of them are secular books which present no theological arguments and both of them quote directly from the Bible as a source.
We can very easily then dismiss the myth that Roman historians do not use the Bible as a source and with it, perhaps, settle the argument over whether the Bible is a ‘history book’.
It might not be an almanac or compendium of events and some of the events it portrays are obviously not true. But some of them are and, in other respects, it serves a source for the details of life in the Roman Empire that cannot be found elsewhere.
In this respect, we can compare it to some of the events we know about from Tacitus. One of the most famous events in The Annals of Imperial Rome, written sometime after 96AD and more likely around 110AD, is Tacitus’ account of the rebellion of the British warrior queen Boudica.
Everything we know about her comes from roughly three or four paragraphs in this book. The archaeology shows that the events he described happened, but not why, or who did them, nor anything of the events that led up to them.
Every single thing about her - her fierce and brave nature, the defiling of her and her daughters, the outrages perpetrated by the evil of Rome on her people - comes from the pen of Tacitus, who, of course, wasn’t there. But his father-in-law was there
Although there are coins attributed to her husband, Prasutagus, nothing else exists to place her in history apart from Tacitus’ account (and subsequent accounts written using Tacitus as a source). The full story then is his.
Furthermore, the depiction of her as a hero and of Rome as the bad guy is also his story. The accounts of her speeches are not her words, but his. All of it is the spin that Tacitus promises us he is going to avoid. We are reading Tacitus’ angry view of the decline of Roman morality through the lens of a people being crushed by its evils. And, of course, ultimately rescued by the ‘good guys’ of the Roman Cavalry, literally almost, in the form of people like his own father-in-law, the future governor of Britain Julius Agricola.
The Bible is the same sort of source. We might have to take the veracity of its accounts of events with a certain pinch of salt, but it is also telling us something of the motivations of the people who wrote it, and, in that respect, it is an invaluable source.
So yes, if this is how we are going to define a ‘history book’, the Bible is a history book. If you want to define ‘history book’ as a compendium of verified events, it isn’t.
There’s a famous work called the Historia Augusta that is of unknown authorship and contains all manner of legitimate history, sprinkled with, at times, complete fabrication. At some points it becomes so wildly inaccurate that it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that someone was making all this up on purpose, either as an elaborate joke or simply because they’d gone a little daft in the head.
That narrative - who wrote this gibberish and why - becomes the interesting thing about the work, rather than it’s, at times, dubious historical value.
For example, in the biography of the Emperor Geta, it claims he was born in Mediolanum in the ‘consulship of Severus and Vitellius’. Geta was born in Rome in 189AD and there was never a year in which two consuls called Severus and Vitellius served at the same time.
At the end of the day, almost any ancient writing is going to be able to tell us something about the times in which it was written and about the motives of the people who wrote it.
But please remember that when we study history, we don’t really have definitions for things like ‘history book’ and we don’t go around saying that this is a history book and that isn’t. Instead, what we refer to are sources. Some sources are more valuable than others and some are more reliable than others and we certainly never treat the sources as sacrosanct, but we do treat them as sources, nonetheless.
2. The Romans Kept a Lot of Records. Where is Jesus in the Records?
The basic premise of this argument is reasonably solid. Like all authoritarian regimes, the Roman Empire loved its paperwork, even if the paperwork didn’t actually contain any paper. But how did the Romans make records?
The most physically obvious way was to make inscriptions, be it on stone, pottery, tiles, marble, metal or some other material into which the record is inscribed. Everyone has seen buildings such as the Pantheon in Rome, with its grand inscription across the front ‘M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT.’ - Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, Consul for the third time, Made This (Marcus Agrippa didn’t make this, Hadrian made this, but that’s for another day). But there are also inscriptions of the names of potters on the bottom of vessels, the stamps of Legions on tiles, funerary inscriptions and even good old graffiti.
There are inscriptions giving tax tariffs, on the gates of cities giving special orders to citizens, laws are carved into the side of buildings, monumental reliefs are erected with graphic depictions of battles, statues, work orders, missives, dedications and lots more, all the way up the Augustus’ immense ‘what I did’, the Res Gestae, a monumental biography of the emperor’s achievements, paragraph after paragraph of it.
These epigraphic works are meant to be as permanent as possible and where they are not recording such things as custom stamps, or makers marks, or the scratchings of angry bar patrons, they are expensive dedications aimed at increasing the social status of the people who had them erected.
In the Roman world the way you demonstrated your wealth was via public benefaction and building a new temple, for example, was a great way of not only showing people you were rich, but it could prove to your peers that you had money enough to fund such projects and that this qualified you for some sort of higher office. Imagine a world in which politicians had to demonstrate their suitability for office by first spending 100 million of their own cash on a new hospital. That’s the idea.
Of course, once you had spent all that cash, you wanted everyone to know about it and so you stuck your name in big, bronze letters across the front of it and where those letters once sat, the ghost of those carvings still remain.
In the epigraphy, then, is not the place you would expect to find the name of an itinerant Jewish carpenter, even one who claimed to be the Messiah. The only place you would perhaps have expected to find the name of Jesus in the epigraphy (and we’re talking about contemporary examples, naturally), would be on something he had made as a carpenter. But, as you can probably imagine, lowly Judean carpenters are not the sort of people to sign their chairs or tables, even though, as the Bible suggests, Jesus was trained in the ways of the Temple and hence would have been literate.
Even if he had signed a table or two, the problem is then very obvious. Wooden tables don’t really last 2,000 years and examples of worked timber from that period only survive in extremely precise and rare conditions. They do survive, of course, and furniture from the tomb of Tutankhamun can attest to that, but that is one of those extremely rare examples.
And therein lies the problem with the next way Romans recorded things.
Papyrus scrolls were another medium used to make records on and there is a quite sizeable database of known examples, particularly from Egypt where the conditions that ensure their preservation are more favorable. Again, most of the contents are incredibly fascinating but rather mundane; contracts, tax demands, sales agreements, deeds, wills, the normal background noise of a bureaucracy that demanded everything be written down and sent to someone who’s job was to look at it and then send it to someone else. Who would look at it…. and so on.
But again, outside a set of incredibly precise physical and biological conditions, these scrolls don’t survive. In the dry sands of Egypt, conditions are better and the vast majority of the extant examples of papyrus scrolls come from this part of the world, or from similar climates. And they are a long way from Judea, particularly if you’re walking.
In the soggy old Western part of the Empire, the survival of papyrus is unbelievably rare. Roman gold is far more common than Roman paper. There are some notable exceptions, particularly in the staggering number of records preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed not only Pompeii but the neighboring town of Herculaneum.
The latter’s ‘Villa of the Papyri’ is, as the name suggests, an enormous, largely unexcavated complex that contains ancient Europe’s only surviving library. People are normally aware of the incredible library of Alexandria that was burned in 48BC (but kept going until the 3rd Century AD), but they are unaware of its Western equivalent at Herculaneum.
Only a fraction of the scrolls it contains, burned by the pyroclastic flow that engulfed the town, yet preserved by their destruction, have been excavated and deciphered. Doing so is a painstaking task without destroying them and work is rightfully very slow and very methodical. Until technology can catch up with techniques, that will remain the case. It’s better that they are preserved for future generations who will have techniques more adept at their excavation than have us simply blunder in there, desperate for knowledge and destroying what remains.
Most of the scrolls in the villa appear to be the works of some of the great poets of the ancient world and how many scrolls are in there is anyone’s guess. There could be hundreds of thousands of them. There are certainly tens of thousands.
It might well be that one of those scrolls contains a contemporary mention of Jesus. It would seem unlikely, given what we know of the nature of the work within and given, again, that writing down something about a desert wandering carpenter and his fisherman buddies is not the sort of thing one would write down and then place in an academic library of the great poets, but it is possible.
What each of those scrolls contain will probably remain unknown in all our lifetimes. There are generations of work there to unravel them. But the lure of their contents is spellbinding.
Outside of the scrolls, Romans also used wax tablets, in a small wooden frame, on which they would scratch with a stylus. A bit like a modern-day notebook computer. These would be used to make temporary lists, tally up totals or to just pass a quick note to someone. All one had to do when they were finished with is use the other end of the stylus to rub out the marks and then the tablet could be used again.
The temporary nature of these is obvious and built-in, and the wax surfaces do not survive anywhere at all. They are known from secondary sources or fragmentary archeological remains and none of the writing they contained has ever survived, nor was it meant to.
Similarly, they would write in ink on thin wooden veneers, about the size of a postcard. Two of these would then be bound together, with the name of the recipient on the outside, like a modern envelope, and sent via the Roman mail service.
Again, this material is very ephemeral, and its survival is remarkably rare. The greatest examples are from the fort of Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s Wall, where the incredibly precise, damp and anerobic conditions of the rubbish dumps they were tossed into 2,000 years ago, has preserved a staggering number of them.
They contain everything from work orders for socks, wine and beef, to complaints about how terrible the road are these days (that never changes) to an unbelievably touching birthday invitation from the wife of one camp commander to another, her ‘sister’, which is written by a scribe but contains a note at the end written in another hand, presumably that if the woman herself, begging her to come to her party.
The Vindolanda Tablets give an amazing insight into how the Roman world operated and serves to remind us, all these centuries later, that despite their remoteness in time, these were people just like you and me, with the same gripes and grumbles, the same joy and happiness and the same sorrow and grief.
They are, almost certainly, the greatest archaeological treasures of the Roman world. More valuable for their rarity than any gold or jewels.
And that’s precisely the point. They are sensationally rare items. They simply do not exist in other contexts. So precise and specific must the conditions be for them to have survived in the ground that you can dig them up and read them, that their very survival is little short of miraculous.
Whilst we have an impressive sample of the written word from ancient Rome, we have it only because the Romans produced it in vast quantities. What has actually survived is a miniscule fraction of what there once was.
Whilst it’s impossible to put a number on the percentage of what remains because we cannot put a number on what was produced in the first place, if you told me that what survived is 1% of 1% of what the Romans ever produced, I would suggest that number to wildly overestimated. I cannot express more strongly enough just how fragmented and rare the extant written record of the Roman world actually is.
To discover new material, even in this advanced technological age, in any substrate from stone to wood, is a remarkable moment in archaeology. There simply aren’t chests full of Roman records out there that survive.
So, to say that the records of Jesus don’t exist is perfectly true. They don’t. But that doesn’t then mean quite what that argument is meant to mean.
The records don’t exist and that’s absolutely to be expected. Nobody would ever expect to find a record that mentions Jesus, no matter how much book-keeping the Romans did.
If they ever did make a record of his name, the chances of us finding it would be unbelievably slim. First you would have to find that record among millions of other records and then an incredibly serendipitous set of circumstances would have to have preserved that exact record and then, to top it all, we’d have to find it.
That records of Jesus don’t exist prove absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps they never even made a record of him at all? Jesus was a nobody in the grand scheme of the empire, particularly at the time of his death, so outside of his ‘trial’ at the hands of Pilate (who finds him not guilty, of course), he barely even came into contact with authorities. He might have been on a tax farmer’s record somewhere, but as we have discussed, the chances of those records surviving are almost zero.
To put it in context, we can go back to the works of Tacitus. He’s one of the most famous of all the Roman historians and the reason for that is because we have a sizeable chunk of his works to go on. But even then, those works are incomplete.
His most famous work, Annals of Imperial Rome, is incomplete. A number of books are missing from it, including the whole of the life of Caligula. It even ends mid-sentence:
”Then, as his lingering death was very painful, he turned to Demetrius and…..”
And we’ll never know. Because, like all the rest of the records, it simply doesn’t survive. If the most famous works of the Roman age do not survive, how can gossip about a Jewish shaman be expected to have survived?
And there’s more, to drive this point home even further, because not only do the works themselves not survive, but not one single extant copy of any of the works of Tacitus, Dio, Livy, either of the Plinys or any other of the great Roman writers survive. Anywhere. In the whole of Roman archaeology.
The only reason we have these works today is because people copied them. No original copies have ever been found.
That’s how rare these things are and that is why no copy of anything about Jesus exists. Not because it was never made, although that can’t be ruled out, and not because he didn’t exist, which is equally possible, but because finding an example would be like looking for a needle made of straw in a haystack the size of Europe and the haystack blew away 2,000 years ago.
You know who else there is no surviving record of, anywhere in the archaeological or epigraphic record?
Tacitus.
And you wouldn’t claim that this absence is proof that he never existed, would you?
This is part one of, provisionally, two. Writing it has taken rather more words than I had expected, in my naivety. Whole books are dedicated to these arguments normally.
Also, this article would normally appear under the paid section of the subscription, but I know a lot of people want to read it and I want them to be able to use these clarifying points in arguments they then encounter. Please feel free to share it wherever and whenever you like, but please leave a link back to my Substack if you do.
I’ll keep this paywall free for a short while as a result.
Stay tuned for part two (and possibly part three!) coming soon!