Is God Dead? Series: What we Have

By Ty B. Kerley The last few weeks have been spent presenting non-biblical sources that speak to one or more of the three minimal bedrock facts concerning what happened to Jesus after His crucifixion. We spent a lot of time looking at the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Both historians wrote in the mid-first century, and both wrote about Jesus. But there are more to mention. Lucian of Samosata is another non-Christian source that provides independent testimony to the fact that Jesus was a real person and that He died by crucifixion. Lucian was a second-century Greek writer. In his writing, The Death of Peregrine, Lucian wrote: “The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day–the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites and was crucified on that account. . . . then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.”