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The Birth of Jesus - a Smoking Gun From History?

Some say that Jesus of Nazareth is just a myth and a legend. Others, a historical figure who was born in Bethlehem, probably around 5 BC. 

Wouldn't it be great if we could find his birth certificate and settle the matter once and for all?!

Oddly enough, it's not such a daft idea. The Roman Empire was assidious about keeping records, and the birth of Jesus would certainly have been noted in its archives. Unfortunately, between the sackings of Rome and Constantinople almost all of them were lost.

That wasn't always the case, though.

Several times in the first three centuries AD the Empire made concerted efforts to erase the story of Jesus from history. For all this time the records were available - as the Christian apologist, Justin Martyr, was at pains to point out in an open ketter to the Emperor: "Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius, your first procurator in Judæa." ('First Apology', c.156 AD).

At the time, this would have been an easy statement to refute. Yet there's no suggestion the Roman authorities ever disputed the birth story of Jesus. That surely suggests the evidence supported it.

The basic account of Jesus' death also finds historical endorsement. The respected Roman historian, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, wrote about Nero's brutal persecution of Christians (Annals, 115 AD). According to him, "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus".

Whatever we make of his life in between, the basic facts of Jesus' birth and death rest on solid historic ground.

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