Foundations of Religion - Christianity SECTION B ChAPTER 3 hOW WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS Looking at the Evidence
Konstantin Tischendorf (1815–1874) was a German scholar who lived at a time when some writers were claiming that Jesus had never existed. Even some of those who accepted his existence said that we didn’t have any reliable information about his life.
Tischendorf wanted to know if there was any truth in these claims. So, he did what any historian would do when trying to find out about some person or event long ago: he went looking for evidence.
REMEMBER! Evidence is any kind of information that lets you know what happened in the past.
To find the evidence, we need to look at different sources.
As Jesus did not write books about his life and teaching, Tischendorf had to study what other people had written about him. He found that they had left us two kinds of sources:
REMEMBER! A source is anything from the past that provides us with evidence. For example: a building, a document, a painting and so on.
(a) DOCUMENTS OF HISTORY
t These were written by non-Christians
(b) DOCUMENTS OF FAITh
t These were written by Christians All of these documents about Jesus were written between the years 50 CE and 115 CE.
When taken together, these sources provide us with a lot of information about who Jesus was, what he said and how he lived.
