The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.
The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.
In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.
One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Misinformation.
There’s Tacitus’s *Annals" (year 117), Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (93-94), Mara bar Serapion’s letter to his son.
Seutonius (Lives of the Twepves Cæsars) and Pliny wrote about the conflict between the Romans and the followers of Christ (or Chrestus) around that era.
uienia@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You are the one who is doing the misinforming. All of the sources you mention, except Josephus, were written up to more than a century after his supposed existence. With Josephus being written around half a century after his existence.
Joshi@aussie.zone 4 months ago
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here but both Suetonius and Pliny are talking about Christians in the 2nd century, Tacitus speaks about Christ only in the context of Nero blaming Christians for the great fire. These are literary evidence for the existence of Christians in the second century and are not direct literary evidence of the existence of Christ which was the question I was addressing.
I’d be delighted to be shown to be wrong but I believe my original post stands.