[squirt]

shouldn't we have expected to find more about Jesus in ancient writings outside the bible? when people begin religious movements, it's not often until many generations later that people record things about them, but the fact is that we have better historical documentation for Jesus than for the founder of any other ancient religion, for example, although the Gathas of Zoroaster, about 1000 BC, are believed to be authentic, most of the Zoroastrian scriptures were not put into writing until after the 3rd century AD, the most popular Parsi biography of Zoroaster was written in AD 1278, the scriptures of Buddha, who lived in the 6th century BC, were not put into writing until after the Christian era, and the first biography of Buddha was written in the 1st century AD, although we have the sayings of Muhammed, who lived from AD 570-632, in the Koran, his biography was not written until 767 - more than a full century after his death, so the situation with Jesus is unique - and quite impressive in terms of how much we can learn about him aside from the New Testament, let's pretend we didn't have any of the New Testament or other Christian writings, even without them, what would we be able to conclude about Jesus from ancient non-Christian sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, Pliny the Younger and others? we would still have a considerable amount of important historical evidence; in fact, it would provide a kind of outline for the life of Jesus, we would know first, Jesus was a Jewish teacher; second, many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms; third, some people believed he was the Messiah; fourth, he was rejected by the Jewish leaders; fifth, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; sixth, despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by AD 64; and seventh, all kinds of people from the cities and countryside - men and women, slave and free - worshiped him as God, and not only can the contours of Jesus' life be reconstructed apart from the bible, but there's even more that can be gleaned about him from material so old that it actually predates the gospels themselves