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While billions of people believe Jesus of Nazareth was one of the most important figures in world history, many others reject the idea that he even existed at all. A 2015 survey conducted by the Church of England, for instance, found that 22 percent of adults in England did not believe Jesus was a real person.Among scholars of the New Testament of the Christian Bible, though, there is little disagreement that he actually lived. Lawrence Mykytiuk, an associate professor of library science at Purdue University and author of a 2015 Biblical Archaeology Review article on the extra-biblical evidence of Jesus, notes that there was no debate about the issue in ancient times either. “Jewish rabbis who did not like Jesus or his followers accused him of being a magician and leading people astray,” he says, “but they never said he didn’t exist.”WATCH: Jesus: His Life in HISTORY VaultArchaeological evidence of Jesus does not exist.There is no definitive physical or archaeological evidence of the existence of Jesus. “There’s nothing conclusive, nor would I expect there to be,” Mykytiuk says. “Peasants don’t normally leave an archaeological trail.”“The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place,” says University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman, author of Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. “The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99% of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record.Questions of authenticity continue to surround direct relics associated with Jesus, such as the crown of thorns he reputedly wore during his crucifixion (one possible example is housed inside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris), and the Shroud of Turin, a linen burial cloth purportedly emblazoned with the image of his face.

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Archaeologists, though, have been able to corroborate elements of the New Testament story of Jesus. While some disputed the existence of ancient Nazareth, his biblical childhood home town, archaeologists have unearthed a rock-hewn courtyard house along with tombs and a cistern. They have also found physical evidence of Roman crucifixions such as that of Jesus described in the New Testament.READ MORE: Died Like Jesus? Rare Remains Suggest Man Was Crucified 2,000 Years AgoDocumentary evidence outside of the New Testament is limited.The most detailed record of the life and death of Jesus comes from the four Gospels and other New Testament writings. “These are all Christian and are obviously and understandably biased in what they report, and have to be evaluated very critically indeed to establish any historically reliable information,” Ehrman says. “But their central claims about Jesus as a historical figure—a Jew, with followers, executed on orders of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius—are borne out by later sources with a completely different set of biases.”Within a few decades of his lifetime, Jesus was mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians in passages that corroborate portions of the New Testament that describe the life and death of Jesus.READ MORE: What Did Jesus Look Like?