Tom Holland on the Historical Jesus

An Evening Discussion in London

Last night, I went to All Souls Langham Place for a discussion on Jesus. Host Justin Briefly was joined by Dr Peter Williams, principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge. Yet perhaps like most people in the packed room, I was there not so much for Williams but rather his interlocutor: the popular agnostic historian, Tom Holland.

The Rest is History podcast host has often found himself getting invited to Church since he wrote Dominion, a book arguing that Christianity is deeply embedded in the fabric of the West’s moral imagination. Yet in that book, he confessed last night, he was nervous to broach the subject of the historical Jesus. I was eager, then, to finally hear what Holland made of Jesus, and where he might aver from Williams’ approach. In this piece, I offer some reflections on what Tom Holland made of the gospels.

The Sources for Jesus

The discussion opened with an exploration of Roman sources for Jesus. Holland explained that when he was an atheist teenager, he believed that the evidence for Jesus’ life was much weaker than, say, the evidence for the prophet Mohammad. Yet in researching his book on Islam, he realised he had got it the wrong way round: the key sources for Mohammad’s life were written hundreds of years after his life. By contrast, Jesus appears in a relatively “astonishing” number of sources relatively early on.

The sources in question are diverse: Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking the Emperor what to do with these pesky Christians who ‘worship Christ as a god’; Tacitus’ reference in his Annals to Christians who were blamed by Nero for the fire in Rome; Suetonius’ reference to a certain “Chrestus”; as well as the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ descriptions of Jesus in his Antiquities.

All of these sources are fascinating as a window into the reception of early Christianity. Yet I slightly lament the fact that discussions of Jesus’ life are often framed by them, giving the impression that the Roman sources somehow provide a more stable foundation for the life of Jesus than the ‘Christian’ ones. The sources did not come up much again in the ensuing discussion, attesting to their rather threadbare concern to historians. The more pressing concern is whether Paul and the gospels get Jesus right – and that is where the conversation turned next.

What the Gospels get right – and wrong…

Peter Williams opened his case for the gospels by pointing to what they get right. They mostly understand the local ‘colour’ of the region – the names we find in them are common Jewish names, and the terminology they use is often appropriate. Unlike later apocryphal gospels, which show little concern for Palestinian realia, the canonical gospels bear a close familiarity with the people and places they describe.

On the gospels’ historicity, Tom was happy to concur that the gospels may get the “macro” right, but they are not always so great on the details. He offered three examples where the gospels fall short of documentary truth: the unlikelihood that Pontius Pilate would offer Barabbas as a substitute for Jesus (a ‘custom’ nowhere attested in history); Herod’s massacre of the Bethlehem innocents, which does not appear in Josephus; and Luke’s presentation of an empire-wide census under the reign of Quirinius, governor of Syria. As far as we can tell, there was no such census.