Steph Curry’s Jesus

Steph Curry and I have a few things in common. Apart from gender, we both love basketball, family and Jesus. In receiving the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award last year, Curry unapologetically said, “First and foremost I have to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for blessing me with the talents to play this game, with the family to support me, day in, day out. I’m his humble servant right now and I can’t say enough how important my faith is to who I am and how I play the game.”

In responding to Curry’s faith, some bloggers expressed the view that the Jesus in whom he trusts, is more hype than history. In other words, Curry’s faith is based on a mythical figure, and not a real person. One blogger went as far as to suggest that other than the antique New Testament, no other ancient literature acknowledged the existence of Jesus.

Really? Let us first examine the kind of evidence we will need to verify the existence of Jesus apart from what is cited in the New Testament. Unlike some items in science, historical data cannot be repeated. Historians must appeal to different kinds of evidence to be able to validate historical data. Agreed, we do not have anything Jesus wrote, neither do we have any photographs others took.

In other words, physical evidence appears to be very rare. Actually, for almost 2,000 years we’ve gone without archaeological evidence of Jesus. Then we came across the first-century ossuary (bone box) of Jesus’ brother, James, the head of the Jerusalem church. The fragile limestone burial box bears the inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

According to the publishers of The Brother of Jesus by Shanks and Witherington, “the ossuary and its inscription are now regarded as authentic by top scholars in the field; they represent the first visual, tangible, scientific evidence of Jesus’ existence.” Another useful resource on the physical evidence of Jesus is in New York Times Bestseller, Bart Ehrman’s volume, Did Jesus Exist?

Like in the case of most ancient persons, historians look for information about the person and not from the person. Historians look for written sources, preferably sources that are relatively near the date of the person or event that they are describing.

It is important that the various sources corroborate with what each of the other sources has to say. In addition, it is important to know that the various sources are independent of one another and do not rely on each other for all of their information.

Unlike today, record keeping was rare when Jesus was around. Scholars believe the vast majority of people in the ancient world could not write. This explains why the Bible so often states, “he who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Writing was done by hand and writing materials were very expensive.  

However, it is important to understand that the absence of much written stuff and physical evidence, do not necessarily mean the non-existence of personalities like Jesus. Agreed, the situation becomes a bit more complicated when our modern-day understanding of a journalist was not imbedded among the disciples of Jesus.

However, Luke makes it clear in his opening verses that “many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from first were eyewitnesses...” (Luke 1:1-2). We do not know if those earlier writings to which Luke referred, were ever included in the New Testament canon.

What we do know, is that a number of non-Christian writers wrote about persons who knew and were greatly influenced by the life of Jesus. The first surviving reference to Jesus by a non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger (62-113 CE/AD).

Tacitus (55-117), another Roman historian is even more explicit in his Annals. A third Roman writer who referred briefly to Jesus and Christians is Seutonius (70-160). According to the late Professor Bruce Metzer, “the early non-Christian testimonies concerning Jesus, though scanty, are altogether sufficient to prove that Jesus was a historical figure who lived in Palestine during the early years of the first century. Today no competent scholar denies the historicity of Jesus.”

The earliest non-Christian witness to the historicity of Jesus was the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. He was personally involved with some of the most important events that he narrated, especially in his eight-volume work, The Jewish Wars.

Interestingly, none of the non-Christian sources cited here is as reliable as the New Testament. There is more than enough evidence to believe that the Jesus in whom Steph Curry has placed his faith, actually lived on earth in the first century. Should one choose not to believe this, does not nullify Jesus’ existence, and our need to acknowledge Him as Lord of our lives.