Is Jesus mentioned outside the Bible?

Josephus, the Jewish historian

Flavius Josephus, a priest from Jerusalem who became a historian in Rome, finished his Antiquities of the Jews around AD 93, and Jesus appears in it twice. The clearer mention comes in passing. Telling how the high priest Ananus had a man stoned in AD 62, Josephus identifies the victim as James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ (Antiquities 20.200). Nearly all scholars accept that line as his; the man himself is the subject of Who was James, the brother of Jesus?

The other passage, the Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities 18.63–64), is the famous problem. As it survives, it calls Jesus a wise man, wonders whether he should be called a man at all, states that he was the Messiah, and reports that he appeared to his followers alive on the third day. A Jew who never became a Christian is unlikely to have written that, and in the third century Origen complained that Josephus did not accept Jesus as the Christ. So most scholars take a middle view: Josephus wrote a shorter, neutral note about a teacher whom Pilate condemned to the cross, and Christian copyists enlarged it. A tenth-century Arabic paraphrase, published by Shlomo Pines in 1971, reads more cautiously, though scholars debate whether it reflects the original.

Tacitus and Pliny, Roman officials

Around AD 116 the senator Tacitus, describing the fire of Rome under Nero, explains that Christians took their name from Christus, who had been executed in the reign of Tiberius by the governor Pontius Pilate, and that the movement, checked for a moment, broke out again in Judea and reached Rome itself (Annals 15.44). He calls it a deadly superstition; he had no wish to flatter it. Tacitus pairs the same emperor and governor that Luke uses to date the story’s start:

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee

Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia on the Black Sea around AD 112, wrote to the emperor Trajan for advice. People were being denounced as Christians. He had executed those who would not give up the name and tortured two slave women the believers called deaconesses. What he found was ordinary: dawn meetings, a hymn to Christ as to a god, an oath against theft and adultery, a plain shared meal (Letters 10.96). Trajan replied that they should not be hunted down (Letters 10.97). Pliny describes worship of Christ, not the life of Jesus.

Suetonius and a man called Chrestus

Suetonius, writing around AD 121, says Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because they kept rioting at the prompting of one Chrestus (Life of Claudius 25.4). Chrestus, “useful,” was a common slave name that sounded much like Christus, so many scholars think Suetonius garbled a quarrel in Rome’s synagogues over Christ; others think Chrestus was a local agitator. Acts mentions the same expulsion:

He found a certain Jew named Aquila, a man of Pontus by race, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome.

The Talmud

The Babylonian Talmud, compiled from older traditions by about AD 500, tells of Yeshu, in some manuscripts Yeshu the Nazarene, hanged on the eve of Passover for sorcery and for leading Israel astray, after a herald had called for forty days for anyone to speak in his defense (Sanhedrin 43a). Censors cut it from many printed editions. Scholars such as Peter Schäfer read it as a late answer to Christian claims rather than independent memory.

What they add up to

None of these writers knew Jesus, and only Josephus came from his land. Together they confirm the outline: a Jewish teacher executed under Pilate, and a movement in his name that reached Rome within a generation. On that basis nearly all historians, believers or not, conclude that Jesus existed. What his followers said happened next is another question: Is there historical evidence for the resurrection?