Blaise Pascal is right to have jotted in one of his baroque notebooks that Jesus lived “in such obscurity… that historians writing of important matters of state hardly noticed him”. And Erich Auerbach is right to have stressed in a book he wrote in Istanbul, exiled from Hitler’s Reich, that Jesus’s death was “a provincial incident”. This is what makes it so remarkable that the life and death of an impoverished Galilean rabbi are described in a number of non-Christian texts from the first centuries of our era.
Jesus’s first non-Christian mention may be found in a Syrian philosopher’s letter, The Letter of Mara bar Sarapion, which was rediscovered in the 19th century but is vexingly hard to date. One eminent historian, Fergus Millar, concluded that this Letter was likely written as early as 73AD. This would make it roughly contemporary with the first gospels to be written.
Though Millar’s dating is contested, Mara’s Letter is certainly a pagan text of the first or second century AD. In it, both Socrates and Jesus are seen as belonging to an august history of philosopher-martyrs. Mara thinks that it is human error which led to their deaths, and to the devastation of the cities in which they died:
“What can we say, when wise men are forcibly dragged by the hands of tyrants, and their wisdom is taken captive by slander? … For what benefit did the Athenians derive from the slaying of Socrates? They received the retribution for it in the form of famine … Or the Judaeans [from the slaying] of their wise king? From that very time their sovereignty was taken away …. [Yet] Socrates did not die, because of Plato … nor did the wise king [die], because of the new laws that he gave.”
There is nothing necessarily untoward about Mara’s notion of divine nemesis. A Cynic philosopher, Dio of Prusa, similarly holds that Socrates’s death was the cause of the Athenians’ later misfortunes. And a Judaean historian, Josephus (on whom more in a moment), reports that many Judaeans viewed Herod Antipas’s humiliating defeat in 36AD, by a Nabatean king, as divine retribution for his murder of John the Baptist. For a first or second-century philosopher such as Mara, “killing the philosophers” was a recurring drama which led to the gods’ destruction of Mediterranean cities. And for early Christians (and many Judaeans), “killing the prophets” was a recurring drama which included John the Baptist and Jesus, and which brought down judgement on the cities of Galilee and Judaea.
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Originally Posted by Tahuyaman
