That's not a valid example. Tacitus and Josephus never met Jesus and did not live at the time that Jesus lived either. They were just saying what they heard about Jesus. Those references were debunked ages ago. Josephus' passage is considered a forgery. It interrupts the narrative and context, and a Jewish historian would never call Jesus "the king of the Jews", that's blasphemy. Plus that passage in Josephus wasn't mentioned by Christian theologians until hundreds of years later. If it was real, then it would have been mentioned much sooner.retiredfrank wrote:Both Tacitus and Josephus mention Jesus.The_Adventurer wrote:There is not one single historical document, outside of religious text, that speaks of Jesus. In fact, the biggest problem mainstream history has with the issue is that the most prominent historians, who actually lived in the same place, at the same time as these events, make no mention of him whatsoever.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/f ... ounts.html
There are no historians who lived in Judea at the time of Jesus whose works have survived, much less prominent historians. But no reason to think Tacitus, in particular, would falsify events. Josephus is also very trustworthy.
The point is, none of the 40 Roman historians living at the time of Jesus mentions Jesus. Also, if Jesus rose from the dead, that would have gotten a lot of attention and made it into the history books. Especially if hundreds of people saw it, as Paul wrote in the Epistles.
Also, Jesus was only crucified for only a few hours. It usually takes a day or two to kill someone by crucifixion. So it sounds like he should have survived if he was taken down from the cross after a few hours. Some say he survived and went back to India, to Cashmere maybe.