What are five historical facts about Jesus?

Answer 1

Yes, facts historically proven can be demonstrated to be true.

The five Gospels themselves are enough and historically reliable. The existence of Christ is more provable than most other historical figures of ancient times. The difficulty comes if one rejects the possibility of the divine and miraculous.

Answer 2

A:Historical facts are facts that have been independently verified as to their veracity and accuracy. Surprisingly, we have no independently verified information about Jesus. We can not even be sure that he actually lived as a real, historical person, although historians generally accept this on the grounds that if a person is mentioned in ancient writings then he did live unless there are good reasons to believe otherwise.

Our only generally accepted source of information on the life and mission of Jesus is in the four New Testament gospels. There are other gospels written in the second century and later, but these are not accepted as being of historical significance. Having four gospels, each providing information on Jesus from an eyewitness or contemporary of Jesus ought to be sufficient evidence for the historicity of the accounts. However, they were not actually written by eyewitnesses, were not contemporary with Jesus and are not even independent of each other. The gospels were originally anonymous and only attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. The earliest gospel, known as Mark's Gospel, was not written until approximately 70 CE and it has been demonstrated that the other gospel authors relied, directly or indirectly, on Mark for everything they knew about the life and mission of Jesus. Thus, we only have one original account of the life and mission of Jesus. This can not be accepted as genuinely historical until it can be verified against some other, as yet unknown, sources.

Paul should have been a contemporary of Jesus and can be expected to mention aspects of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, he never mentions having visited or wishing to visit Nazareth or the birthplace of Jesus, nor the place of the crucifixion or any other place associated with Jesus. He never mentions Jesus as an actual person and never seems to have realised that he was a person who lived and died in Palestine shortly before Paul began his own mission. This certainly does not prove the non-existence of Jesus as a living human, rather than a merely spiritual person in heaven, but it does suggest caution in accepting gospel information about Jesus.

Subject to the above caution, we could say that Jesus:

1. Was born in Bethlehem in Judea
2. Spent at least part of his childhood in Nazareth in Galilee
3. Preached high moral standards
4. Sought to reform Judaism
5. Was crucified in Jerusalem

Discrepancies in the different resurrection accounts make the resurrection of Jesus difficult to accept as historical.

Answer 3

While it is a truism that historically proven facts can be demonstrated to be true, the real problem is that no one has been able to provide the five historically proven facts. The gospel accounts contain many supposed facts about Jesus, but these have not been proven, which would require contemporarly, reliable and independent sources.