What Does Tom Holland Really Think About Jesus? By Unbelievable host, Dr. John Nelson

Host Justin Brierley was joined by Dr Peter Williams, principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge. Yet perhaps like most people in the packed room, I was there not so much for Williams but rather his interlocutor: the popular agnostic historian, Tom Holland.

The Rest is History podcast host has often found himself getting invited to Church since he wrote Dominion, a book arguing that Christianity is deeply embedded in the fabric of the West’s moral imagination. Yet in that book, as he confessed last night, he was nervous to broach the subject of the historical Jesus. I was eager, then, to finally hear what Holland made of Jesus, and where he might differ from Williams’ approach. In this piece, I offer some reflections on the event.

The Sources for Jesus

The discussion opened with an exploration of Roman sources for Jesus. Holland explained that when he was an atheist teenager, he believed that the evidence for Jesus’ life was much weaker than, say, the evidence for the Prophet Mohammad. Yet in researching his book on Islam, he realised he had got it the wrong way round: the key sources for Mohammad’s life were written hundreds of years after his life. By contrast, Jesus appears in a relatively “astonishing” number of sources relatively early on.

The sources in question are diverse: Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking the Emperor what to do with these pesky Christians who ‘worship Christ as a god’; Tacitus’ reference in his Annals to Christians who were blamed by Nero for the fire in Rome; Suetonius’ possible reference to a certain “Chrestus”; as well as the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ descriptions of Jesus in his Antiquities.

All of these sources are fascinating as a window into early Christianity and an indirect witness to Jesus. Yet I slightly lament the fact that discussions of Jesus’ life are often framed by them, giving the impression that the Roman sources somehow provide a more stable foundation for Jesus’ life than the ‘Christian’ ones. If we did not have these sources, our understanding of Jesus would remain largely unaffected.

It is perhaps telling that the sources did not come up again in the discussion, attesting to their rather threadbare historical interest. The more pressing concern is whether Paul and the gospels get Jesus right – and that is where the conversation turned next.

What the Gospels get right – and wrong…

Peter Williams opened his case for the gospels by pointing to what they get right. They mostly understand the local ‘colour’ of the region – the names we find in them are common Jewish names, and the terminology they use is often appropriate. Unlike later apocryphal gospels, which show little concern for Palestinian realia, the canonical gospels bear a close familiarity with the people and places they describe.

I agree with Williams and would add that it is not only the content but the form of the (Synoptic) gospel tradition which points to its origins in a Palestinian setting. Philip Alexander puts it this way, comparing the gospels to anecdotes in rabbinic literature:

“In terms of form, function, setting and motif, the Rabbinic anecdotes are very close to the Gospel pericopae, and there can be little doubt that both belong to the same broad Palestinian Jewish tradition of storytelling.” (2015, 42)

On the gospels’ historicity, Tom was happy to concur that the gospels may get the “macro” right, but they are not always so great on the details. He offered three examples where the gospels fall short of documentary truth: the unlikelihood that Pontius Pilate would offer Barabbas as a substitute for Jesus (a ‘custom’ nowhere attested in history); Herod’s massacre of the Bethlehem innocents, which does not appear in Josephus; and Luke’s presentation of an empire-wide census under the reign of Quirinius, governor of Syria. As far as we can tell, there was no such census.

Williams admitted that Luke’s census may be the most intractable problem for the gospels’ historicity. He conceded that, at least on the surface, there does seem to be a mismatch between Luke’s dating of Jesus during the reign of Herod, who died in 4 BC, and the census of Quirinius, who governed Syria from 6 AD. Yet he proposed that the Greek of the verse is somewhat tricky, and perhaps Luke might be given the benefit of the doubt. This is because Luke set out to write a historical work (1:1-4) and he would have needed to make it sound at least plausible to his readers.

I think at this point, however, Holland had the upper hand. The concern Holland expressed is that Christian scholars are sometimes committed, on doctrinal grounds, to seeing the biblical text as perfectly accurate. Yet ancient historians generally do not treat their materials in this way. When they come across an apparent snafu, they are happy to admit that it is such. This does not mean that we must throw out their texts as a whole, or pronounce them generally unreliable. Yet it does mean that we should not always try to harmonise the biblical accounts.

More Tom Holland:

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 Why the Bible makes sense of modern life

On the nativity, Holland raised two further snags. The first is that in Matthew, Mary and Joseph seem to already live in Bethlehem, while Luke brings them down from Nazareth via the census. Williams seemed happy to harmonise the accounts, agreeing with Justin’s suggestion that Matthew left out their journey from Nazareth. Yet this harmonising strategy does not seem to produce a natural reading of Matthew’s text. In Matthew’s gospel, when the Holy Family return from Egypt, it is back to Judea they intend to go. It is only when they realise Archelaeus is ruling that they take up their residence in Nazareth, implying they were forced there by circumstance.

The second is that the gospels want to make a point that Jesus is the Messiah. They therefore said that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because it fitted their reading of the Jewish Scriptures, particularly Micah 5:2, which describes a future ruler from Bethlehem. For Holland, then, the gospels are a kind of ‘prophecy historicized.’ In their telling of Jesus’ life, the writers looked to the Scriptures for the details.

Here, I believe that Williams missed an opportunity to push back. It is certainly true that Jewish writers sometimes used Scripture to craft details in their own narratives. Yet one equally finds moments when gospel writers use scripture to interpret traditional material that they have received. In this case, the gospel writers would not be inventing a detail to fit scripture, but drawing on scripture to interpret a detail.

In the case of Jesus’ Bethlehem birth, it is possible that Matthew invented Jesus’ birthplace to fulfil the prophecy of Micah 5:2 – Holland’s scenario. Yet one might equally suppose that Matthew interpreted Micah messianically precisely because Jesus was born there. As Jonathan Rowlands has pointed out, there are no Second Temple sources that construe Micah 5:2 messianically, and Jesus certainly did not need to be born in Bethlehem to be counted as a Davidide (2022). Both of these points may suggest that Matthew did not simply fabricate Jesus’ Bethlehem birth from scripture.

From this brief discussion, the picture I derived was a mixed one. Williams was right to say that the gospels show evidence of local colour. Yet I think Holland was also right in saying that “documentary accuracy” was not the evangelists’ principal concern. Much more important in the nativity stories was to place Jesus on the stage of imperial history. Holland was spot on in suggesting that Luke crafts Jesus as a rival to Augustus. This is an important theological truth, even if it is not a historical one.

The Teaching of Jesus

The strongest area of agreement in the discussion related to the teaching of Jesus. Holland described Jesus as the “greatest short story teller” in history – a claim that resonates well with Williams’ assessment in his book, The Surprising Genius of Jesus.

One of the claims that Williams made is that we see a series of subtle patterns across the parables of Jesus, which are best explained by the fact that they go back to a distinctive Jewish mind. This reminded me of an approach taken by the great New Testament scholar, C.H. Dodd, who puts it this way in The Founder of Christianity:

“… the first three gospels offer a body of sayings on the whole so consistent, so coherent, and withal so distinctive in manner, style [and] content, that no reasonable critic should doubt, whatever reservations he may have about individual sayings, that we find here the thought of a single, unique teacher.” (p.21-22)

Holland agreed with Williams on the teachings of Jesus. While we could ascribe each of the different strands of the Jesus tradition to a group of individual followers, it is a simpler and more compelling hypothesis to view their origin in Jesus himself.

I find this argument from coherence mostly persuasive, yet I want to sound a note of caution. The first relates to the Gospel of John, in which Jesus sounds remarkably different to the earlier Synoptic gospels. Strikingly, the gospel of John did not come up as a topic of conversation.¹ Yet I think this is a significant oversight, given the way in which many gospel scholars would question its historical veracity.

The second relates to the fluidity of ancient biography. In ancient ‘lives’, as in history, it was not uncommon for writers to invent the sorts of things a subject would have said, in moments where the biographer lacked a primary source. This would explain how we have detailed speeches in the gospels where no such source was apparent.

The third relates to the diversity of the Jesus tradition. Even in the Synoptic gospels, the teachings of Jesus do not always appear in the same form or with the same meaning. While I accept that many of the gospels’ teachings originated with Jesus, I would love to have heard more from each scholar on how we can be confident in any particular teaching. Is it enough, for example, that we are struck by the novelty of Jesus’ teaching to ‘love our enemies’? Or can we develop a more precise method by which to distinguish Jesus’ original teachings from their later developments?

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Is Faith-Based in Historical Evidence?

A final thread in the discussion was the relationship between faith and history. Justin asked Tom whether the divinity of Jesus could ever be established from the historical evidence, to which Tom gave a more theological answer than I was expecting. Rather than dismissing the supernatural from the outset, he said that it would be contrary to the gospels’ intention to think of the Resurrection as leaving no room for faith. In the gospels, the resurrection is not something obvious: it is wrestled with to be believed.

Williams was here in a surprising amount of agreement with Holland. He noted that the evidence is not “coercive,” for how we interpret depends to a large extent on our personal philosophies. For Williams, what we can confirm with history is that the disciples experienced him after his death – and this experience led them early on to incorporate Jesus into Jewish monotheism. But how we interpret that experience today will depend, to some extent, not on the history but on our own worldviews.

Here I was in broad agreement with Holland and Williams. If the resurrection experiences were ambiguous in the first century, we should not expect them to be solved as a matter of historical debate in our own. At the same time, I wondered what it would mean to remove an anti-supernaturalist bias from the gospels. Would this simply mean that we accept the miracles of Jesus at face value? Or would it leave us in pretty much the same place – that accepting the miracles remains a leap of faith?

Here, the discussion touched on the limits of history for grounding belief. This may seem like a difficult realisation for those who would wish to prove Christianity. Yet I would argue that it is truer to the epistemology of the gospels. When Peter proclaims Jesus as the Christ, he does not to come to that truth through a series of logical or historical deductions. Jesus claims that God himself has revealed it to him.

Left Wanting More…

In a discussion of this kind which covered so much ground in a short space of time, it is perhaps natural that certain stones were left unturned. Yet I was slightly disappointed that some quite basic questions on the gospels were left unexplored.

I have already raised the subject of John. Yet another important cluster of questions relates to the gospels’ provenance: who wrote them, when and where were they written? When the question of dates came up, Williams did not offer a clear answer, because “the gospels come with names but not with dates.” Yet this left me scratching my head. Most gospel scholars today do not see the gospel titles as original. One does also wonders – is it not the very task of historians to date their texts?

Putting these desirables aside, the conversation was immensely stimulating. It was a real pleasure to see so many people turn out for the historical Jesus. And I think it succeeded in doing what these discussions always do best: not in answering all our questions, but in piquing our interest so we can investigate the topic for ourselves.

Dr John Nelson is a writer, biblical scholar and host of Premier Unbelievable? He completed his graduate studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Edinburgh, and is the author of Jesus’ Physical Appearance: Biography, Christology, Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2025). He writes weekly posts on his substack, Behind the Gospels, and is the producer and researcher for the history podcast Biblical Time Machine in association with SBL’s Bible Odyssey. 

¹ An indirect allusion to John was Williams’ claim that Jesus died on the “eve of Passover,” which he said was corroborated by a Jewish source (sources?). Yet this stands in clear tension to the earlier Synoptic accounts, which have Jesus die after the Passover lamb has been eaten. The Jewish source to which Williams alluded is the Babylonian Talmud, whose understanding of Jesus is muddled and much later.