
You never find the details of the Jesus story in a history book, like you would for Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Why is that? Why is the Bible not cataloged in the library in the History section?
Christians correctly point out that the historical grounding for the gospel story has some compelling points. For example, there are not one but four gospel accounts. The time gap from original manuscripts to our oldest complete copies of New Testament books is relatively small compared to other books of the time. And the number of Bible manuscripts is far greater than that for any other ancient book.
The enormous difficulty, however, is historians reject miracles—not just in the Bible but consistently in any book that claims to be history. The problem becomes clear if we imagine that libraries did catalog the Bible in the history section. Should other religious books get in as well? They couldn’t all be history because they conflict.
Remember the story of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon River? The historian Suetonius reported that Julius saw a divine messenger who urged him to cross. It’s a fact of history that Suetonius wrote about the messenger, but historians don’t think this miraculous appearance actually happened.
Remember Caesar Augustus, the Roman emperor who ordered the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem? Augustus reportedly was himself divinely conceived, and he ascended into heaven when he died. These reports about Augustus are part of history, but the supernatural conception and ascension are not.
Legends about Alexander the Great grew up in his own time. Did you hear the one about how the sea bowed in submission during his conquest of the Persian Empire? Or about how ravens miraculously guided his army across the desert? Alexander is treated the same way—miraculous reports don’t make it into history.
The Alexander biography is a plausible natural story with excellent supporting evidence (coins with his likeness, cities with his name, stone pillars with his laws, the spread of Hellenism and the creation of the successor empires, records of his conquests from outsiders, and so on) and a few miracles. The natural part is the noteworthy part; the miracles add little and are not part of the historical record.
Compare this to the Jesus story, an implausible story of a god documented by religious texts and without any supporting evidence. Jesus didn’t leave any writings himself, there is nothing from contemporary historians, and later historians record only the existence of the religion. In this case, only the miraculous part is noteworthy.
Strip away the miracle claims from Julius Caesar or Caesar Augustus or Alexander the Great and you’re left with precisely the remarkable accounts of those leaders in history. But strip away the miracle claims from the Jesus story, and you have just the story of an ordinary man—a charismatic teacher, perhaps, but hardly divine.
Christians sometimes argue that we should treat the gospel story like any other biography, and they’re right—but they may not like where that takes them.
Image credit: Danika Perkinson via Unsplash
Notes
Caesar Augustus, the Roman emperor who ordered the census: Luke 2:1.