Are there any records of Jesus while he was alive?

Question

I have heard in the past that there are no records of Jesus existing while he was alive. Is this true? I know that there are said to be witnesses, but I am actually looking for written accounts of him while he was alive.

Thanks.

Answer 1

No, there are no such records.
The Bible was written decades after Jesus is said to have died, not during Jesus' lifetime. Who the authors of the Gospels were is disputed, whether any of them actually met Jesus is unknown.

As for Josephus, the writings about Jesus are a hoax. Early Church fathers knew Josephus well yet never mentioned this reference to Jesus. This reference was not mentioned until several centuries later, and then by someone (Eusobius) who admitted that lying for the cause was justified and who was known to refer to forgeries to advance his argument. The passage would never have been written by a Jew, Jews didn't consider Jesus divine. If they did they would have been Christians.
The other references often cited are historians of later times, or writers of Talmudic passages, who were discussing what Christians believed, not citing independent sources or authority that Jesus had lived.

Answer 2

There are some records the indians from india had kept that says Jesus Christ traveled around communicating with the hindu's.
There was a man from a european country that had traveled to india and got hurt somehow. When the indians from india doctored, and took care of him. They shared these writings with him. While reading these writings he realized the person that was recorded in the indians records, was Jesus Christ. He realized it from the name that was recorded.
The writings had stated this man came from the place where Jesus was from, and that this man had stayed for a period of time. While this man was there he was looked at being a wise man. It just so happens this man somehow disrupted the peace of the hindu's beliefs and soon left.
Scholars have calculated the time frame of these writings and have found that if these recordings are about Jesus Christ it would have been in the teenage years to young adulthood. The years that are missing out of the bible.
Please do forgive me, I have no idea what the name of the book was or any other details about the recordings.

Oh yes. This just came to me LOUD & CLEAR! That I remembered. The name that was recorded in the hindu texts was Issa.

You are Welcome:

Answer 3

From my understanding there were no records written about him while he was alive. There is a refference to him in the writings of Josephus but even Christian schollars say that they were added *way* after the fact.

Also the "Gospels" (Matt, Mark, Luke, John) were written between 50-200 years AFTER Jesus died and were not neccessarily written by their namesakes.

A really great resource you might want to look into are Q&A's that Rabbi Singer has published on his website www.outreachjudaism.org. He has a lot of mp3's you can listen to about this too. It's really interesting to get a Jew's perspective on Jesus, and hear what the Old Testament was really talking about when it was written, not just what Christians inturpret it as. Who should know better than a Jew since they wrote it and it's their history. Great question!

Answer 4

Here is the truth:

There are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus's life. The Apostle Paul supposedly saw Jesus in a vision well after Jesus died.

The first Gospel recorded in writing was Mark. This was written about 70 c.e., or approx. 40 years after the date presumed for Jesus's death in Rome, not Jerusalem. Matthew was written after Mark and derived from it. The other two were written after that.

Not one of the Gospels is an eye witness account. You will not find one written account of Jesus recorded during his lifetime.

Answer 5

I'm afraid your thanks came too soon, because nobody has found any records of any kind about Jesus when he was alive.

Worse, there are no eyewitness accounts verified independently of the new testament gospels (which read like fairy tales).

The worst part of it is that this is one of the most documented periods of history. There were scholars, politicians, doctors, and businessmen writing in four major and six minor languages in the region where Jesus (supposedly) lived, and copious records kept by and about several figures mentioned in the gospels.

For example, there were real people named Herod who served as king, but none of them called a census requiring anyone to travel, and there's no census at all around the timeframe mentioned by the gospels.

Of course, no astronomers saw or recorded any new stars or other celestial activity, there was no murder of small boys while Joseph and Mary supposedly fled to Egypt.

Not one shred of the birth stories can be validated by any outside source, and the rest speaks for itself.

Answer 6

No. There was no "Jerusalem Daily Express" in those days.

The nearest we can get is a Roman record that a Joseph and his two sons, Jesus and James, were chartered to build something in Caesarea I believe it was.... You see a carpenter in those days was not merely a table or chair maker, they were basically architects. But there were a lot of Josephs, Jesus', and James back then, it is frankly impossible to know if it was the Jesus of Nazareth that was being referred to.

I'm just surprised there is a record of Jesus as old as 90AD. Some of the works of Tacitus and Josephus only exist in 1400AD copies.

Answer 7

No, there are no contemporary records. The earliest writings are THOUGHT to have been written about 30-60 years after Jesus supposedly lived...The earliest documents we actually have are the Pauline epistles, I believe. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written until 60-120 years later.

See this site for more information: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

Answer 8

Other than the Bible and the books removed from the Bible by the early Christian church, Jesus is only mentioned by Josephus.

Josephus mentions him in 2 places. One is just in passing when Josephus is talking about his brother. There, Josephus says Jesus is the "so-called Messiah," which indicates that Josephus doesn't believe he was really the Messiah.

In the other place, Josephus refers specifically to Jesus, goes on at length, and describes him as the Messiah. This part is now considered by scholars to be a later addition by Christian scribes because it contradicts the previous one and everything Josephus says elsewhere about "Messiahs" is negative. Messianic figures were common-place in Judea at the time and Josephus viewed them as nothing more than charismatic speakers leading bands of gullible fools. It is highly unlikely that this second mention of Jesus was part of his original writing.

Other than that, Jesus isn't mentioned until long after he was supposedly killed and resurrected.

Answer 9

No. No written records exist from that time. Mainly because few people could write and the vast amount of time elapsed.

Answer 10

Tacitus, born about 55 C.E. and considered one of the world’s greatest historians, mentioned the Christians in his Annals. In the account about Nero’s blaming the great fire of Rome in 64 C.E. on them, he wrote: “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” The details of this account match the information regarding the Jesus of the Bible.

Another writer who commented on Jesus’ followers was Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia. In about the year 111 C.E., Pliny wrote to Emperor Trajan, asking how to handle Christians. People who were falsely accused of being Christians, wrote Pliny, would repeat an invocation to the gods and worship the statue of Trajan, just to prove that they were not Christians. Pliny continued: “There is no forcing, it is said, those who are really Christians, into any of these compliances.” That testifies to the reality of the existence of the Christ, whose followers were prepared to give their lives for their belief in him.

After summarizing the references to Jesus Christ and his followers by the historians of the first two centuries, The Encyclopædia Britannica (2002 edition) concludes: “These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.”