The Conspiracy of Silence

Imagine that you were a history student assigned the task of writing a paper on the life of George Washington, America's first president and one of the country's most influential founding fathers.

On its face, this seems like a simple assignment. Encyclopedias and textbooks full of biographical information about Washington, written by notable scholars on his life, abound. Any one of them would provide enough material for a reasonably detailed report. However, this is not good enough for a diligent student such as yourself. To get the most detailed and accurate picture requires skipping the modern references, which were written centuries after the fact, and going straight to the original sources. You decide to base your report on first-hand evidence: letters written by Washington himself, accounts of his life written by people who knew him personally, and stories of his sayings and deeds recorded while he was still alive.

But, as you comb the records, you find something strange: you cannot seem to locate any first-hand sources. Though Washington is claimed to have done many wonderful things – leading the Continental Army, freeing the American colonies from British rule, presiding over the convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution, becoming the first President of the United States – somehow, there are no records of these deeds written by people who actually saw them happen, or even by people who were alive at the time. The historians who were alive during Washington's lifetime, as well as the ones that lived soon afterward, do not mention him at all. The first mentions of him come in disputed and scattered records written decades after his death; over time, these mentions grow more numerous until, by about a hundred years after his death, a chorus of historians who had never seen or met Washington themselves all testify to his existence and his deeds. It is their writings, not any first-hand evidence, that have filtered down to modern times to create the abundance of records we have today.

Would you begin to conclude that there was something very wrong here?

According to the New Testament gospels, Jesus' fame spread far and wide throughout his lifetime. He was known throughout Israel and beyond (Matthew 4:25), renowned not only as a teacher and wise man, but also as a prophet and miraculous healer (Matthew 14:5, Luke 5:15, John 6:2). Great multitudes of people followed him everywhere he went (Luke 12:1). He converted many Jews, enough to draw the anger of the Jerusalem temple elders (John 12:11). He attracted the attention of some of the most prominent leaders of his day, both Roman and Jewish (Matthew 14:1, Luke 19:47). And when he was crucified, portentous and dramatic miracles occurred on a massive scale: a great earthquake (Matthew 27:51), a worldwide three-hour darkness (Luke 23:44), and the bodies of the saints arising from their tombs and walking the streets of Jerusalem, showing themselves to many people (Matthew 27:52-53).

If these things were true, it is beyond belief that the historians of the day could have failed to notice.

And yet, when we examine the evidence, that is precisely what we do find. Not a single contemporary historian mentions Jesus. The historical record is devoid of references to him for decades after his supposed death. The very first extra-biblical documents that do mention him are two brief passages in the works of the historian Josephus, written around 90 CE, but the longer of the two is widely considered to be a forgery and the shorter is likely to be one as well (see part 2). The first unambiguous extra-biblical references to a historical, human Jesus do not appear until well into the second century.

Few if any Christian apologists will mention these extraordinary facts, but as in the George Washington hypothetical, we can rightfully conclude that there is something wrong here. The rosy picture painted by the gospels of a preaching sage and famous miracle worker followed by crowds of thousands stands in stark contrast to the reality of the extra-biblical historical record, and that reality is that mentions of the man Jesus do not exist until almost the end of the first century.

Why is this? It is not as if there were no capable historians at the time. There was, for example, Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who lived from about 20 BCE to 50 CE. His own beliefs were influenced by Platonic elements that were in some ways similar to Christianity, and his writings show interest in other offshoot sects such as the Essenes and the Therapeutae; he wrote about Pontius Pilate and he was, by some accounts, living in or near Jerusalem at the time of Jesus' death and, presumably, the attendant miracles. Yet none of his works contain any mention of Jesus or Christianity.

Other writers of the time show the same pattern. Justus of Tiberius, a native of Galilee who wrote a history around 80