Does anyone know of any secular references to Jesus from the first century AD? I'm specificially looking for something that isn't an obvious forgery.

quote:Originally posted by jsaxton14:

Does anyone know of any secular references to Jesus from the first century AD? I'm specificially looking for something that isn't an obvious forgery.



lol...you and every scholar there has ever been!

I was looking for someone specifically from the first century AD

quote:Originally posted by jsaxton14:

I was looking for someone specifically from the first century AD



well the nearest you're gonna get is ol' josephus but how much of what he wrote is genuine is anyone's guess.

There are some, but the big question is how reliable they are.

A common cite is Tacitus, who made a mention of Jesus. The problem is that he called Jesus Christos, something only Christians would call him, suggesting his source was a christian and thus not secular.

If Jesus existed it would seem the Romans didn't see anything very special about him and treated him as just another prophet.

Here. (http://tinyurl.com/b2k89)

To be honest, I don't know how accurate that is. If anyone wants to fill me in on whether it's right or wrong I'd be grateful.

[This message has been edited by Paradise Lost (edited 08-14-2005).]

quote:Originally posted by Beta69:

There are some, but the big question is how reliable they are.

A common cite is Tacitus, who made a mention of Jesus. The problem is that he called Jesus Christos, something only Christians would call him, suggesting his source was a christian and thus not secular.

If Jesus existed it would seem the Romans didn't see anything very special about him and treated him as just another prophet.



he asked for 1st century...tacitus is commonly held to have written around 115.

quote:Originally posted by Paradise Lost:

Here. (http://tinyurl.com/b2k89)

To be honest, I don't know how accurate that is. If anyone wants to fill me in on whether it's right or wrong I'd be grateful.





fairly accurate in the facts he quotes (i've only glanced through it so i may be wrong). his conclusions however are not my own.

To be technical, he lived through the second half of the first century but his writings were mainly in the second century. However, I was just giving an example of problems that you can run into when trying to determine if a source is really secular.

quote:Originally posted by Beta69:

To be technical, he lived through the second half of the first century but his writings were mainly in the second century. However, I was just giving an example of problems that you can run into when trying to determine if a source is really secular.



yes, my bad , i was being overly pedantic. although standard practice is to go from date of authorship (approx).

The problem with finding sources of that type from that time period is that most of the people who actually cared about Jesus would have been either early christians or jews.

I believe there are some Roman documents(we all know how much the Romans loved documents) which mention Jesus.

Basically though, Jesus and christianity wouldn't have been nearly big enough to get major coverage by the historians, except for those who happen to be christian.

Another thing is that during the middle ages, the monestaries were in control of most of the books in Europe. This means that they had motive and plenty of opportunity to change things around, making any references of Jesus suspect.