By: Faith Amour

29 January 2016

The Historicity of Jesus

Jesus: was he real or fiction?

The concept of who Jesus is has evolved throughout history. Starting with the early Christians who witnessed and got first-hand testimony of His life and ministry; because of their encounter and personal experience they believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that He was real. Contrastingly, we have people today – 2,000 plus years later – who struggles to fathom the concept of a sinless man leaving His glories to come to a sinful, selfish world to live selflessly, and then die in the stead of the same people who would kill Him. If I was not a Christian I might have questioned this logic because humanly thinking it is absurd!

However, when we go beyond faith and start to reason the concept of Jesus; the prophesy proclaiming His birth, life and death is undeniably accurate. Furthermore, the evidences for His existence is convincing, especially if we consider the evidences for other historic figures like Alexander the Great; whose history was written about 300 year after his supposed rule and conquest of the world. That is enough time to dress his story in pink and put a bonnet on it; in other words, how can we be sure that the account of his life is accurate? Yet everyone seems to take his existence at face value.

In respect to the life of Jesus, there are several streams of evidences to validate His existence: archaeological findings, the accounts of early non-Christians, the early Christian accounts, early New Testament manuscripts and the historical impact of His life. Even without all these evidence, I believe he exists. In fact, I have seen Him work miracles in my life, I have had answered prayers and more importantly, I have a peace that passes all understanding.

Nonetheless, for the atheist and antagonist of Christianity these evidences serve as proof