Summary of the Evidence for Jesus Outside of the Gospels

This post is the last part of a chapter on historical sources for Jesus outside of the gospels. Much of this chapter is an upgraded version of what I had done in my earlier series. If you're interested, check here. Basically, I do an overview of the Roman, Jewish, and non-gospel New Testament evidence for Jesus. Here are my conclusions:

Comparing the gospels to what we know of first-century history and geography suggests that they are historically accurate. They do not place Jesus in some make believe world filled with make believe people. Rather, the gospels locate Jesus sensibly in the midst of the Palestine in the first century A.D. This shows that they generally reliable, though it doesn't prove that their portraits of Jesus were accurate, of course.

If we didn't have the biblical gospels, we wouldn't know much about the historical Jesus. From the later, non-canonical gospels we'd be able to glean a few facts, but not nearly as much as we get from the New Testament gospels. They remain our chief sources of information about Jesus, for good reason.

However, if we had to piece together the data about Jesus from sources outside of the gospels, from Roman writers, from Josephus, and from Paul and the other New Testament writers, we'd come up with a little. We'd have Jesus, a Jew from Judea, who for some reason got in trouble with Pontius Pilate, and was crucified. We'd also know that something amazing happened after his death because his followers actually multiplied dramatically. For some reason, they believed that Jesus was the Christ, the Jewish Messiah, even though he had done a most "unmessianic" thing in getting himself crucified. This picture of Jesus is sketchy, to be sure, but it focuses on the most important aspects of the Christian gospel: the death of Jesus and the "amazing thing" that happened afterwards.