Articles and books about Jesus always seem to find an audience. This is not just a modern phenomenon, however. Once Christianity became dominant in the Roman empire, a considerable amount of interest was generated by the few references to Jesus in non-Christian literature. There were only a handful of these, and the many discoveries of new original sources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not add to the store of Jesus testimonies, unfortunately. The result is that there is a long list of secondary studies on these passages, going back several centuries.

In a short article such as this, it is not possible to give an extensive survey of past studies. Instead, my purpose is to examine the original sources that refer (or might refer) to Jesus and consider what they tell us about the presumed founder of Christianity, taking account of some of the recent secondary literature.

Roman Writers

Since Jesus allegedly lived under Roman rule, it is not surprising that our main ‘pagan’ sources are Roman. No Greek writers (i.e. non-Jewish and non-Christian) appear to refer to him.

Tacitus

Probably the most important Roman writer is Tacitus (56–c. 120). He was a historian of note and still regarded as the pinnacle of the Roman historians. He writes the following about an episode during the reign of the emperor Nero: