We don’t need faith to begin exploring the reality of Jesus Christ—we just need history. The records you see below chronicle the most significant historical non-biblical accounts of Jesus during his life on Earth. By rooting our understanding of Jesus in the established, verifiable claims found in these accounts, we can move beyond simple belief and toward grounded evidence. Please review the detailed records below, and then join us after it, as we delve further into the historical evidence supporting the existence and claims of Jesus Christ.

Each of these accounts are clickable.

The story of Jesus is primarily found in the Bible, but the existence and early spread of Christianity are also discussed by non-Christian authors from the same period. These historical accounts provide a crucial, outside perspective on Jesus and His followers. Analyzing them helps us see what was known about Him from secular sources alone.

Their accounts provide external corroboration for key events mentioned in the New Testament. They confirm that the story of Jesus wasn’t a later invention but was a subject of discussion and documentation within a few decades of His life, even among those who weren’t His followers.

By examining the earliest historical accounts, we can establish several key facts about Jesus and the early Christian movement without using the Bible.

• Jesus existed: All of the authors reference Jesus as a real person. Tacitus calls him “Christus,” and Josephus refers to him as “a wise man.”

• He had a title and was called the “Christ”: Both Tacitus and Josephus refer to Him by this title, showing that it was a known name for Him even outside of Christian circles. Josephus specifically mentions Jesus as the “brother of James, who was called Christ.”

• He was executed under Pontius Pilate: Tacitus, a Roman historian, explicitly states that “Christus… had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate.” This is a powerful, unbiased confirmation of a central event in the Gospel accounts.

• His followers believed He was resurrected: Josephus mentions that “those who had first loved him did not cease,” and that “the tribe of Christians… has not disappeared to this day.” This suggests a strong, enduring belief in His teachings after His death, which the historian attributes to their claim that He “appeared to them alive again.”

• His followers were widespread and worshiped Him: Pliny the Younger’s letter to Emperor Trajan in the early 2nd century confirms that Christianity had already spread widely in the Roman Empire, so much so that he was unsure how to handle it. He also describes their worship practices, noting that they sang hymns “to Christ as to a god,” which shows they viewed Him as more than just a man.

A Jewish Perspective: The Babylonian Talmud

The importance of this account is not in its hostile claims but in the facts it confirms from a non-Christian, and even adversarial, point of view. It provides an independent confirmation of Jesus’s existence, His execution, the timing of his death (the eve of Passover), and the fact that He had a following that was significant enough to be seen as a threat to Jewish religious authorities.

Writers like the Roman historian Suetonius and the philosopher Celsus show that the Christian movement continued to gain traction and was often met with suspicion and opposition. Celsus, in particular, wrote a lengthy attack on Christianity, which ironically preserved many of the early Christian beliefs he was trying to disprove, including Jesus’s birth, miracles, and resurrection. The very act of refuting these claims shows how seriously the movement was taken in the Roman world.