How Famous was Jesus?

The Fame of the World's Most Famous Figure

In a 1966 interview, John Lennon boasted that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus.’ For this controversial claim, the singer earned four bullets in his back.¹

But how popular really was Jesus? By the modern era, he had certainly become the most famous figure in world history. But was Jesus ‘famous’ within his own lifetime?

From what I can tell, historians have given surprisingly little thought to this question. While the Gospels have a lot to say on Jesus’ fame, the fame of Jesus has seemed rather less interesting to scholars today.

Admittedly, I myself had not given much thought to the topic until one of my readers asked me to write on it. To work out what I thought, I wrote this sketch. Was the historical Jesus famous, and if so, what were his claims to fame?

1. Sources for Jesus’ Life

One means of gauging Jesus’ popularity may be to look at the recognition he received beyond the fledgling Jesus-movement. Here we run into a number of Roman sources: the writings of Flavius Josephus, as well as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius.

The difficulty is that few of these sources give us independent information about Jesus – or how famous he was. For example, Tacitus tells us that a ‘most mischevious superstition’ broke out in Judea after Pontius Pilate put ‘Christus’ to death. Yet Tacitus’ interest in this passage is not Jesus himself, but rather the Christian group blamed by Nero for the burning of Rome (Annals 15.44).

Pliny the Younger and Suetonius also refer to Christ. Yet each source has more to do with the unrest caused by his followers than about Jesus. For Pliny, Christians had bankrupted the local economy in their refusal to eat meat offered to idols. His letter to the Emperor was asking what punishment these pesky Christians deserved.

Suetonius, on the other hand, records that the Emperor had expulsed the Jews from Rome in 40 CE due to ‘disturbances’ concerning a certain ‘Chrestus.’ Contrary to much scholarship, it is doubtful that this ‘Chrestus’ refers to Jesus of Nazareth. Yet even if did, it would not tell us anything about Jesus’ popularity.

Perhaps the most relevant of our Roman sources is Flavius Josephus. Nestled within his twenty-volume history or Antiquities of the Jews (93 CE), Josephus describes Jesus as a wise man who ‘won over many Jews and many of the Greeks’ (Ant. 18.3.3).

The difficulty here is that the passage – the so-called Testimonium Flavianum – has undergone tampering by a Christian scribe. This is suggested by the fact that Josephus – a non-Christian Jew – goes on to describe Jesus as the risen Christ. At least some of this passage – if not perhaps the whole thing – is therefore unoriginal.

Yet if we think that the statement about Jesus’ popularity is genuine, one reason to do so is because it matches so poorly what we know about Jesus’ ministry in the Gospels, namely, that was focused largely on Jews. If Josephus did think that Jesus ‘won over many Greeks’, it may reflect the demographic of early Christian communities, rather than the ministry of the historical Jesus as remembered in the Gospels.

Regardless of whom Jesus was winning over, Josephus seems to remember Jesus as a teacher who won over crowds. If we accept at least this much of his testimony, we have a first-century historian picking up on Jesus and remembering him as popular. Yet just how popular in his own time remains ambiguous from Josephus’ hoi polloi.

2. Jesus in the Gospels

As we turn from extra-biblical texts to the Gospels, the ‘report’ (ἀκοή) or ‘fame’ (φήμη) of Jesus becomes something of a leimotif. According to Mark, Jesus’ message immediately like wildlife once he began preaching: ‘And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee’ (1:28).

Later on in Mark, we are offered some impression of the size of his crowds and where they came from: ‘a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon’ (3:7-9; Mt. 4:24-25).

In a line which is easily overlooked, Luke even says that when the crowds were in their thousands, they trampled on one another to hear Jesus (12:1). Like a modern-day celebrity, we find Jesus often withdrawing to get away from the crowds.

What are we to make of the idea that Jesus was this famous? It is perhaps wise to be cautious about any specific numbers, as we find in the stories of the feeding of the five thousand and four thousand. Not only are such narratives historically contested, numbers in ancient histories were sometimes employed somewhat liberally.

With those caveats in mind, there are three reasons why the Gospels’ impression of Jesus’ fame during his ministry seems plausible. The first is contextual. Josephus tells us that there were other messianic figures in Jesus’ time who drew great crowds. This strongly suggests that there was a public appetite for a figure like Jesus.

If Jesus was extremely popular, this would explain his need to withdraw from the crowds, since rebel movements were often crushed by the Romans. According to Matthew, news of Jesus’ ministry had reached Herod Antipas (14:1). If Jesus was popular, this might explain why he stuck to rural Galilee rather than the cities.

The second is that Jesus was known as a healer and exorcist. This is important, because as Joan Taylor describes, first-century Galilee was undergoing a “chronic health crisis.”² At a time when good medical treatment was difficult to attain, it makes sense that Jesus’ ministry should make him extremely popular. This would be especially so if one of his methods of healing – affective touch – was uncommon.

Third, any account of Jesus’ popularity also has to take into account a crucial fact about him: he was crucified by the Romans. While the Gospels present the Jewish authorities as the initial catalyst for Jesus’ death, crucifixion was a Roman means of punishment. The Romans must have had reason to deem Jesus a threat to the peace. And he was likely deemed a threat to the peace, in part, because of the size of his following.

3. John the Baptiser

So far, we have seen that there are some good reasons to take seriously the Gospels’ claim to Jesus’ fame. Yet just how popular was Jesus? A final means of gauging Jesus’ popularity might be to compare him to a similar figure of his time: John the Baptiser.

Regarding the fame of John, Mark’s opening words are extremely suggestive: ‘All of Judea, including all the people of Jerusalem, went out to see and hear John’ (1:5). This may seem like a typical case of Markan exaggeration, given that Mark elsewhere describes how ‘all the Jews’ washed their hands ceremonially before eating (7:3).

Yet it is not only the Gospels who tell us about John. Josephus has a lengthy passage describing the activities of the Baptiser, in which he is said to have drawn great crowds. According to Josephus, this was one of the reasons Herod Antipas put John to death. He feared the influence that John could have over the people (18.5.2).

There are still further clues that John was more famous than Jesus. Tellingly, when Jesus is challenged in Jerusalem about his authority, he defers to the Baptist. This posed a difficulty for those who challenged him, for everyone believed John to be a true prophet (Mk. 11:32).

Finally, the disproportionate amount of space the Gospels devote for John is itself a give-away. When we look closely, three of our four Gospels open their lives of Jesus with something about John. Mark begins by sketching his activities; Luke opens with an account of his birth; and John features him heavily in the prologue to his Gospel.

What is even more curious are the kinds of things the Gospels say about John, and have John say: that one coming after him was stronger than himself (1:7), that he was not the Messiah (Jn. 1:20), that he was not himself the Light and came only as a witness to the Light (Jn. 1:8), etc. etc.

Many scholars see this as a case of the Gospels protesting too much. John’s own movement believed that he was the Messiah, and continued well until after Gospels. The fact that the Gospels protest this only betrays John’s immense popularity.

The Fame of Jesus

So, how famous was Jesus? While it is difficult to put numbers to it, I have suggested that there is a reality behind the Gospels’ motif of Jesus’ fame.

Not only was Jesus a healer and exorcist at a time when such messianic feats would attract a crowd, he was famous enough to be deemed a threat to the peace of Judaea. His popularity - or at the least, his name - even seem to have reached the ears of the first-century historian, Flavius Josephus.

At the same time, Jesus perhaps did not rise to the level of stardom of John. This is suggested not only by the extended treatment John receives in Josephus, but by the Gospels’ own description of him. In their own time, it was perhaps John, not Jesus, who could be considered the superstar.

1. See Jack Jones, Let Me Take You Down: Inside The Mind of Mark David Champan, the Man Who Killed John Lennon (New York: Villard, 1992), 117-118.

2. See Joan E. Taylor, “Jesus as News: Crises of Health and Overpopulation in Galilee,” JSNT 44 n.1 (2021): 8-30.