Tag: Extra-Biblical Source

When examining the earliest non-Christian accounts of Jesus, a notable pattern emerges: when hostile sources address his miracles, they do not dismiss them outright but reinterpret them as sorcery or magic. Jewish and pagan critics alike attribute his works to illicit power rather than deny that remarkable acts were being reported. This mirrors the Gospel…

Celsus was a Greek philosopher and one of the earliest outspoken critics of Christianity. Although his work The True Doctrine survives only through the rebuttal of the 3rd-century Christian scholar Origen in Contra Celsum, scholars generally regard the preserved quotations as substantially faithful to Celsus’s original arguments, given their length, detail, and consistently unflattering portrayal…

Lucian of Samosata was a Syrian-Greek satirist and writer during the second century AD. Famous for his sharp wit and eloquent satire, Lucian’s works often targeted and mocked philosophers and emerging religions, including Christianity. In The Passing of Peregrinus (165 AD), Lucian ridicules the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus, who, at one point, converted to Christianity.…

Mara bar Serapion was a Stoic philosopher from Syria who wrote a letter to his son while in prison somewhere between ~73-150 AD. His work is preserved in a single Syriac manuscript in the British Library (Add. 14658). Unlike Roman historians such as Tacitus or Suetonius, Mara was not writing about politics or emperors but…

Suetonius (c. 69–122 AD) was a Roman writer and official best known for The Lives of the Caesars, a series of imperial biographies. His work is not “history” in the modern sense. Instead of a strict chronological account, Suetonius arranged material thematically, collecting anecdotes, gossip, and moral judgments to illustrate the character of each emperor.…