What did the ancient world write about Jesus?

In the second century, Tacitus described how Nero blamed the fire of 64 on a group the crowd called Christians. Explaining the name, he wrote that "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus".

Tacitus is not reporting the life of Jesus. He is explaining, with evident distaste, where a Roman problem came from. The study cited here argues the distaste is deliberate, down to the choice of the less prestigious title for Pilate, and that the sentence is Tacitus’s own rather than a Christian insertion. A hostile witness with no reason to invent an execution he mentions in passing is worth more than a friendly one. The passage is still questioned, chiefly by those who doubt that Jesus existed, though not only by them.

The letters of Paul are the earliest Christian writings that survive, the first of them written about two decades after the crucifixion, by someone who says he persecuted the movement before joining it and who describes meeting people who had known Jesus personally.

They are not biography. Paul says very little about what Jesus did or taught. What he provides is a fixed point: within a generation, a former opponent is writing to congregations from Galatia to Rome about a crucified man they worship.

Josephus, writing in Rome in the 90s, refers to Jesus in two places in his Antiquities of the Jews. The second is a brief aside identifying James as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ", in an account of a judicial execution in Jerusalem. It is incidental, says nothing for or against Jesus, and was already known to Origen.

The other passage, in book 18, praises Jesus in terms no non-Christian Jewish writer of the period would plausibly have used, calling him more than a man and affirming the resurrection. Almost no historian accepts it as Josephus wrote it.

What divides scholars is whether the whole passage was inserted by a later Christian copyist, or whether a shorter and more neutral notice was expanded. Both positions are held by serious people, though most take the second, and the manuscript tradition does not settle it: every surviving copy comes through Christian hands.

None of the four names its author in the text. The names come from the titles the manuscripts carry and from second-century writers such as Irenaeus, and how early the titles are is argued. Most Gospels scholarship treats the books as anonymous. One case against that holds that the “gospel according to” titles may be later in their present form, that the absence of a name inside a work is not evidence either way, and that the attributions are most likely original.

The disagreements are about what stands behind them: how much reached the writers as oral tradition, how much through written collections that have not survived, and how much reflects the concerns of the communities they were written for.

The sayings attributed to Jesus reach us in Greek, from writers working decades later, from a teacher who taught in Aramaic. Some material is judged early on grounds such as awkwardness for the later church. But no method recovers a transcript, and the confident reconstructions of the "real" teaching have tended to resemble whoever was doing the reconstructing.

The New Testament does not present Jesus as a figure to be assessed. It presents him as the one through whom God acted, crucified and raised, and it asks for a response rather than a verdict.

That is a different kind of statement from the ones above, and it is worth being exact about the difference. That a text makes a claim is a fact about the text. Whether the claim is true is not something dating a manuscript can decide.

Nicene Christianity holds that Jesus is not only a figure attested in ancient sources but God made human. On that view the evidence discussed here is the ordinary residue of an event Christians understand as the hinge of history.