Quote:
Originally Posted by Janszoon
Also, both Tacitus and Josephus were writing about it decades after the fact. It's not as if they were witnesses or even contemporaries of Jesus.
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They might not have been contemporaries but usually most written histories come after the fact of an event anyway. Furthermore, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger also wrote of Christ. I don't see why pagan writers would have a reason to conspire and make up Jesus for future generations. They were simply chronicling the issue of Christians stirring up trouble by refusing to conform to the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods that all conquered cultures were expected to buy into.
The historical proof of Jesus as a man is about as solid as anything else in ancient history. Obviously historiography plays a huge role in what is given to us in that the victor always gets to tell the story but that's all we have to go off of.