Historicity of Jesus
Definition
The historicity of Jesus concerns whether Jesus Christ was a real historical figure who lived, taught, died, and rose again at a particular time and place — as opposed to a legendary or mythical figure with no underlying historical person. This is distinct from the quest for the “historical Jesus”, which asks not whether Jesus existed but which parts of the Gospel record can be established by historical-critical method; it is also distinct from the historicity of the New Testament generally, though the two are closely related.
Biblical Basis
The Gospel writers themselves present Christ’s life as anchored in verifiable public history, not timeless myth. Luke dates John the Baptist’s ministry, and so the beginning of Jesus’s, against named Roman and Jewish rulers: “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee… in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas” (Luke 3:1-2). Paul grounds the resurrection in the same way, appealing to still-living witnesses rather than private vision: Christ “appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:6). John makes the same claim for the incarnation itself: “that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1).
Objections and Responses
Does it matter whether Jesus was a real historical person, so long as the idea of Christ — as a moral example, or a symbol of humanity’s union with God — continues to shape people’s lives? Bavinck traces this move across a line of modern thinkers who each, in different ways, made Christ’s actual history unnecessary to Christianity’s real content: for Kant, Jesus could only be “a moral model, a teacher of virtue,” so that “the historical Jesus and his ministry, death, and resurrection are unimportant; it is the ideal Christ that counts.” For Fichte, “the historical Jesus is unimportant; what counts is the eternal, metaphysical truth of our oneness with God.” Bavinck names what results from this whole trajectory plainly: “the historical Jesus disappears behind the veil of an idea… The person of Christ himself, however, is actually not a part of basic Christianity” on this view.1 Reformed theology rejects this move: since the incarnation is the claim that the eternal Son actually became flesh at a real point in history, a “Christ” detached from Jesus’s real historical existence is a different doctrine altogether, not a deeper version of the same one.
Related Doctrines
References
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Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩