Christians have told me there are numerous accounts of Jesus written by contemporaries of Jesus. I found Jesus mentioned a couple of times in the writings of Josephus but some contend that those accounts are forgeries. Other than in the bible and in the writings of Josephus are there historians of the first century that wrote about Jesus?
Chekmate – There are only a few that I know of:
[ul][li]a reference in Josephus that most serious scholars consider a spurious intrusion,[/li][li]a few references in Tacitus and Pliny to Christians as “followers of one Chrestus, who was put to death in Judea by Pontius Pilate”[/li][li]one account of the arrest of two grandsons of Jesus’s brother Jude for teaching Christianity about AD 100,[/li][li]a letter supposedly written by Jesus to Abgar King of Edessa (on what’s now the Turkey-Syria border) which is almost certainly a fraud[/ul][/li]
[sub]fixed coding - DrMatrix[/sub]
You might want to check this thread , where the issue is currently debatted…
Cecil sez nothing until 40 years later.
There are several early (50s and later) references to the followers of “Chreestos”, but not to the man himself.
However, absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. We have very little data (outside the bible) about the existence of anyone from ancient times. Most documents simply rotted away; over the centuries, scribes copies the documents that they thought were important, so Tacitus and Suetonius among others have survived. Presumably these scribes sometimes added their own comments, as to Josephus.
As discussed in the Staff Report about Augustus’ census, the New Testament mentions that Quirinius was governor of a large region, so fairly important. We have only a few documents that prove HIS existence, and those has some ambiguity about when, exactly, he was governor. Records weren’t kept on “insignificant” people, and what records were kept were destroyed if they weren’t deemed worthy of being recopies.
Bottom line: If we don’t have much information about the existence of exalted, powerful, ruling-class type of folks, we can’t expect to have information about the existence of a simple carpenter’s son in a backwater province. So the absence of evidence of Jesus’ existence in non-Biblical texts is neither conclusive nor even indicative.