Volume 10 covers the “Augustan Period”, right about the time that Tiberius, Livia, Pliny the Elder, and - yes - Jesus all lived. Or take the much larger Cambridge Ancient History in 14 volumes.
Readers will discover that no doubts at all are raised about the basic facts of Jesus’s life and death. There is a multiple page entry on the origins of Christianity that begins with an assessment of what may be reliably known about Jesus of Nazareth. It summarises scholarship on all things Greek and Roman in just over 1,700 pages. Every classicist has it on their bookshelf. Take the famous single-volume Oxford Classical Dictionary. If Jesus is a “mythical or fictional character”, that news has not yet reached the standard compendiums of secular historical scholarship. This reported majority view is not shared by the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century. Your information is being handled in accordance with the ABC Privacy Collection Statement.īut, frankly, this new survey is also bad news for historical literacy. It seems many Australians really don’t agree. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith - in the minds of believers - is that it centres on real events that occurred in time and space. This is, obviously, terrible news for Christianity in Australia. The 2021 Australian Community Survey asked a representative sample of Australians, “Which of the following statements best reflects your understanding of Jesus Christ?” 22 per cent agreed that “Jesus is a mythical or fictional character” 29 per cent said they “Don't know” if Jesus lived and just 49 per cent affirmed that “Jesus was a real person who actually lived.” But such scandalous claims are usually interpreted in church circles as clickbait scepticism, and not representative of mainstream Australia.Ī survey just released by the church-friendly NCLS Research suggests that Australians are as unbelieving as the media. And the virgin birth is a typical trope of ancient myth. This is bad news for Christianity, especially at Christmas, but it is also bad news for historical literacy.Įach year as Christmas approaches, the faithful are used to reading stories in the “secular media” providing a take-down of our beloved story. Original article on new survey has found that less than half of all Australians believe Jesus was a real historical person. 660, also has frescoes on its walls depicting Jesus, Mary and the Apostles.įollow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Their archaeological dig has yielded some surprises, including more than 1,000 human skeletons. Köroğlu's team has been working at the Balatlar Church site since 2009. The business-card-size papyrus is highly contested, with many saying it is a forgery. And then there's the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife, claimed to be from the fourth century and to be the first ancient evidence of Jesus speaking of a wife. Later analyses by classical and biblical scholars, however, revealed that many of the supposed Christian symbols were just random marks or decorative carvings that were misinterpreted.Īnother ossuary, said to hold the bones of Jesus' brother and put on display at a Toronto museum in 2002, is also controversial, with its authenticity hotly debated. The ossuary, sometimes referred to as the " Jonah Ossuary" because one carving seems to show a fish swallowing a man (like Jonah, the biblical figure who was swallowed by a whale), was initially heralded as the earliest known Christian artifact. Other purported Christian relics, including a 2,000-year-old ossuary embellished with obscure carvings that was first discovered in 1981, are also of disputed origins. Protestant theologian John Calvin, a famed 16th-century skeptic of religious relics like the so-called "true cross," once remarked that "if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load."