A new survey has found that less than half of all Australians believe Jesus was a real historical person. This is bad news for Christianity, especially at Christmas, but it is also bad news for historical literacy.
Each year as Christmas approaches, the faithful are used to reading stories in the “secular media” providing a take-down of our beloved story. The star of Bethlehem never happened. The three wise men are inventions. And the virgin birth is a typical trope of ancient myth. But such scandalous claims are usually interpreted in church circles as clickbait scepticism, and not representative of mainstream Australia.
A survey just released by the church-friendly NCLS Research suggests that Australians are as unbelieving as the media. 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.”
This is, obviously, terrible news for Christianity in Australia. 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. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. It seems many Australians really don’t agree.
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But, frankly, this new survey is also bad news for historical literacy. 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. If Jesus is a “mythical or fictional character”, that news has not yet reached the standard compendiums of secular historical scholarship.
Take the famous single-volume Oxford Classical Dictionary. Every classicist has it on their bookshelf. It summarises scholarship on all things Greek and Roman in just over 1,700 pages. 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. Readers will discover that no doubts at all are raised about the basic facts of Jesus’s life and death.
Or take the much larger Cambridge Ancient History in 14 volumes. Volume 10 covers the “Augustan Period”, right about the time that Tiberius, Livia, Pliny the Elder, and — yes — Jesus all lived. It has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. The entry begins with a couple of pages outlining what is known of Jesus’ life and death, including his preaching of the kingdom of God, his fraternising with sinners, and so on. No doubts are raised about the authenticity of these core elements.
Not wanting to labour the point, but we could also turn to the compendium of Jewish history, the Cambridge History of Judaism in four volumes. Volume 3 covers the “Early Roman Period”. Several different chapters refer to Jesus in passing as an interesting figure of Jewish history. One chapter — 60 pages in length — focuses entirely on Jesus and is written by two leading scholars, neither of whom has qualms dismissing bits of the New Testament when they think the evidence is against it. The chapter offers a first-rate account of what experts currently think about the historical Jesus. His teaching, fame as a healer, openness to sinners, selection of “the twelve” (apostles), prophetic actions (like cleansing the temple), clashes with elites, and, of course, and his death on a cross are all treated as beyond reasonable doubt. The authors do not tackle the resurrection (unsurprisingly), but they do acknowledge, as a matter of historical fact, that the first disciples of Jesus “were absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised and was Lord and that numerous of them were certain that he had appeared to them.”
There is a reason for this consensus. When you apply the normal rules of history to Jesus of Nazareth, this figure is plainly a historical one not a mythical one. The early and diverse sources we have put his existence (and much more) beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps only 49 per cent of Australians reckon “Jesus was a real person”, but I wager that 99 per cent of professional ancient historians — atheist, Christian, Jewish, or whatever — would agree with this minority view.
In 2014, in a rush of blood to the head, I offered a cheeky bet, first on Twitter and then in an article for the ABC: I will eat a page out of my Bible if someone can find a full Professor of Ancient History, Classics, or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived. My Bible has been safe these last seven years. Professors of philosophy, sure. Professors of English literature or German language, yes. But no Professor in the relevant fields has yet been named.
Maybe such a scholar exists somewhere. There are thousands to choose from. So I have the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (which recounts Jesus’s birth) primed. I’m willing to rip it out, cut it up, and eat it with my Christmas pudding. But in the meantime, I will be lamenting not just the growing scepticism in Australia toward Christianity but also our declining historical literacy.
John Dickson is an author and historian, and the presenter of the podcast Undeceptions. He holds a PhD in Ancient History from Macquarie University and is a Visiting Academic (2016-2022) in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford.