Actually, they are evidence - Pliny says his christians worshiped their christ as a god - no historical Jesus there.
Tacitus (if he wrote the passage) repeats what 2nd century christians then believed. But we already know there were these gospel tales in the 2nd century.
Suetonius cays his Chrestus was alive in Rome during the reign of Caligula. So not very much like the Jesus in Palestine who died years before that.
Josephus - by now everyone knows this is pretty useless. Even Bart Ehrman admits it.
The epistles don't offer much for an historian to say about any Jesus but the cosmic christ.
So that leaves the gospel tales.
It certainly doesn't help that Chrestus was a very common name and even title going back as far as the 5 century BCE (Mitchell, James Barr (1880) Chrestos: a religious epithet; its import and influence; Pleket, H.W.; Stroud, R.S.. "Egypt. Funerary epithets in Egypt.(26-1702)." Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Current editors: A. T. R.S. R.A. Chaniotis Corsten Stroud Tybout. Brill Online, 2013.) and there may have been a pagan group that called Chrestians running about.
One inscription dated to the 1st century BCE is to "Iucundus Chrestianus" and there is a supposed Erythrean Sybil prophesy from the time of Homer that states IESOUS CHREISTOS THEOU HUIOS SOTER STAUROS.
In fact, Homer himself uses CHRISTI "Yet the word Christes means rather a white-washer, while the word Chrestes means priest and prophet, a term far more applicable to Jesus, than that of the "Anointed," since, as Nork shows on the authority of the Gospels, he never was anointed, either as king or priest."
This (and several other facts) leads to the following theory:
"All this is evidence that the terms Christ and Christians, spelt originally Chrest and Chrestians [chrestianoi] (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius, Clemens Alexandrinus, and others spelt it in this way) were directly borrowed from the Temple terminology of the Pagans, and meant the same thing."
But and this is where the sting in the tail come in--both Chrest and Chrestian predate the time of Jesus by nearly 400 years and even Panarion 29 Epiphanius in the 4th century expressly states "this group did not name themselves after Christ or with Jesus’ own name, but Natzraya." a term that was applied to all followers of Jesus. He then relates that they were even called Jessaeans for a time. Then the group at Antioch started calling themselves Chrestians.
Also there an inscription of Chrestians for Christians showing that while the terms may have once meant the same thing that by the time of Paul they we being applied to two very different groups something Tertullian in the 3rd century basically hits everybody over the head with. Lactantius goes over how the ignorant transform Christ "by the change of a letter are accustomed to call Him Chrestus"...which would not explain why you have Christ and Chrestians in the same freaking document (our oldest copy of Acts).
The more you dig the more it appears that Jesus if he did exist had the nickname Chrestus (the good) rather then Christ (messiah) which would go a long way to explain why his followers still called themselves Chrestians in their holy writings clear into the middle of the 5th century CE. And if that is true then we are looking for a Chrestus cult for the idea of a 100 BCE Jesus have any validity.
Last edited:
