It is not always found to be whether Jesus mattered or not; it is whether he can be dealt with by the ordinary instruments of history, two thousand years on.
To historians, the issue is not whether ancient texts are “religious” or “secular”, but whether they are weighable, comparable and datable. Archaeology can teach an understanding of the scenery and the traditions, but rarely identifies personalities; according to Bart D. Ehrman, we have no archaeological evidence of literally anyone who lived and worked in the time and place of Jesus. It is that restriction which influences almost all assertions concerning first-century Galilee and Judea, even the localities, most closely connected with Jesus, of Bethlehem and Nazareth. The excavations have brought into light the remains of Nazareth in the first century, of a rock-cut courtyard house, tombs, and a cistern, although nothing which can be directly attributed to an individual family.
Since the physical evidence is exhausted, the best historical ground is the writings which were created close enough to the historical period to be debated over. In this case, researchers tend to differentiate between the testable biography and theology. Despite this, the standard scholastic opinion typically refers to two events as the strongest ones, Jesus being baptized and crucified on the cross. The second reason is important as it places Jesus in the system of the Roman provincial government, in which crucifixion was an execution, a deterrent to everyone and a form of death to one.
The account is partial, and not barren, outside Christian literature. The 90s A.D. reference made by the Jewish historian Josephus, who writes that James is the brother of Jesus who was named Christ, is taken by many scholars to be his safest reference. Another passage concerning Jesus in Josephus, the Testimonium Flavianum, is controversial due to the presence of phrases in it that seem overly confessionary to be written by a non-Christian writer. However, a wider academic consensus is that there was a central reference, which was subsequently edited, and historians are left to the task of determining what Josephus must have meant to say about a teacher whose disciples still existed.
Tacitus, a senator of Rome who wrote at the beginning of the second century provides a different, hostile opinion. In Annals he relates the name “Christus” with a death at the hands of Pilate by saying that Christus… met his death… at the hands of… Pontius Pilatus. The meaning of this is not information about the life of Jesus, but the intersection: here a Roman writer, who is not sympathetic to Christians, makes the founder of the movement into an ex-executed individual who existed in an familiar imperial context.
Proximity is also added by Christian sources, but brings different issues. The genuine letters of Paul are usually dated around 20-30 years after the death of Jesus and depict Jesus as a living Jew, a brother to James, and died by crucifixion plus having the belief of resurrection. The later Gospels, as an ancient biography and proclamation, hold traditions which, though they cannot be verified, are still the major witnesses of how Jesus was remembered, debated over, and applied to the interpretation of the scriptures of Israel.
Ultimately, the “historical Jesus” is not the unitary file of resolved facts but a limited portrait created by the use of fragmented sources and their biases revealed instead of being disregarded. The record that has survived will not be able to provide photos or relics. It may, however, be able to explain why the majority of scholars are dealing with Jesus as a first-century figure, whose life was destroyed on a Roman cross, and why the greater controversies are reduced to interpretation what he taught, why he was condemned, why a small movement would come to talk about him as though history and heaven had met.
