An obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth was hardly a “superstar” by today’s standards.

His fame was, for the most part, a local phenomenon. The world and its cultures took little notice of His coming and going. And so it remained for nearly a century.

Jesus’ claims to authority — and even divinity — surely would have seemed absurd to the average Roman citizen. A carpenter had come to save the world. He was God, yet He was publicly executed in a most humiliating way. And after a century, the world seemed no more saved then before.

To the most cultured, and to the movers and shakers of the Roman Empire, Jesus didn’t matter. He hardly merited a joke or a second glance. But that was just as it should be.

Back in 1994 Pope John Paul II pondered the pagan historians of antiquity as he prepared the Church for the millennium we now call home.

“This ‘becoming one of us’ on the part of the Son of God took place in the greatest humility,” he wrote in Tertio Millennio Adveniente (“As the Third Millennium draws near”). “So it is no wonder that secular historians, caught up by more stirring events and by famous personages, first made only passing, albeit significant, references to Him.”

Just what “passing” did they take, and why is it “significant”? Pope John Paul dedicated a paragraph to those rare testimonies in his long meditation on the incarnation of Christ.

The first he takes up is by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the Roman Court, who wrote his “Antiquities of the Jews” about 60-65 years after Christ’s death. Josephus’ only undisputed reference to Jesus appears as he describes the severity of the Sadducees in judging offenders against the law.
The example he offers is that of the apostle James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” Yet Josephus is concerned here not with Jesus but with James, who was “delivered to be stoned.”

In a footnote, the Pope mentions another passage that appears in some manuscripts of “Antiquities of the Jews,” but is missing from others.
scholars who believe the passage is authentic claim that it had bee purged by copyists during times when Christians were persecuted. Those who believe it is false claim it was plugged in by pious copyists of later centuries. The Pope, in his footnote, acknowledges the dispute.

The passage comes as Josephus is relating the reign of Pontius Pilate as procurator of Judea. After a description of how Pilate rather violently put down rebellions, the text reads: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works – a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jew and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal man amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

The problem some scholars raise (and even some Church Fathers raised) is that if Josephus could make a statement of faith such as “He was the Christ,” such a faith should pervade the rest of his history – especially his reading of the prophets and patriarchs, and at the very least his reading of the death of St. James. But it doesn’t.

In recent centuries, some unbelieving scholars have used the paucity of references to Jesus in Josephus’ writings to argue against the Nazarene’s very existence. Yet they perhaps forget that Josephus elsewhere proclaims his own master, the Emperor Vespasian, to be the Messiah, and so the historian would probably be reluctant to give notice to the most promising “competition.”

In any event, a handful of Romans recorded their brief notice of Jesus and His followers as the years wore on.

Pope John Paul also mentioned the historian Tacitus, writing between A.D. 115 and 120 on the burning of Rome, which the emperor Nero had blamed on the Christians. Tacitus recorded that the founder of this sect (“hated for their abominations”) was one “Christus,” who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

Christ also appears, by name only, in the “Lives of the Caesars,” by the historian Suetonius, writing around A.D. 121.

Another brief but more telling remark comes in the testimony of Pliny the Younger, writing in A.D. 111-113 when he was Roman governor of Bithynia, on the Black Sea. Reporting his routine interrogations and torture to the emperor Trajan, Pliny spoke of the Christian sect as something harmless. They gather once a week, he wrote, “on a designated day, before dawn, to sing in alternating choirs a hymn to Christ as to a God.”

The pagan Pliny’s report, then, is among the earliest records of orthodox Christology – relating the early Church’s belief of the divinity in Christ. (Dan Brown, call your office.)

Perhaps the Pope could have mentioned more in Tertio Millennio Adveniente. For instance, Celsus, an anti-Christian polemicist of around A.D. 180, never for a moment doubted that Jesus had lived. Rather, he directed his attacks at the divinity of Christ and the veracity of His miracles.

The mother of all early pagan records, perhaps, was by the neoplatonist Porphyry, who wrote 15 volumes against Christ – again, never denying that He had lived, but taking aim rather at the Church’s idea of Who and what Jesus was.

Porphyry’s nastiness was so offensive to Christians, however, that they fairly thoroughly wiped it out, once they were running the empire. Today, Porphyry is known only from what the Church Fathers said in response to him.

It is one of the ironies of history that all those contemporaries who made such passing reference to Christ should themselves become passing references in today’s record of that pivotal moment in human history.

In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Pope John Paul, after giving a paragraph to Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny, swept on to 54 paragraphs about Jesus of Nazareth whose birth the world marked in the year 2000.

Indeed, today the world marks all its years from the birthday of that obscure carpenter of so many years ago.

If Christians can draw a lesson for themselves, maybe it is that they should expect little from today’s media and opinion-makers – who may be tomorrow’s footnotes.

But the truth about history endures in the Lord of History. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.