Actually this isn’t true at all. If you check the link I provided above, for instance, you will find several contemporary (i.e. within “living memory”) historians who documented the region and period in great detail, but contradict the Bible fairly comprehensively.
Er, no, the writers cited do not contradict the Bible, merely fail to corroborate crucial statements in it. This is a not-so-subtle difference.
In any case, there is at least one contemporary of Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Josephus and Justus who does mention Paul - Clement of Rome in his ‘first’ letter to the Corinthians, which is usually dated to the last decade of the first century.
(Yes, some historians dispute the attribution to Clement and this particular dating, but even most of those historians who are sceptical of the traditional datings for other early Christian works still accept this letter as a genuine document of the late first century.)
I hate, hate, hate when the hamsters eat a big post that I forgot to save. Sigh.
The shorter version:
I was jumping the gun by using the term contradiction – it requires a few more steps of logic that I did not illustrate.
Yes, most scholars accept that the ‘first letter’ was written between 61 and 90 CE. However, the uncertainty as to the order of the early Bishops of Rome and the vagueness of the date leave authorship to considerable speculation. (The ‘first letter’ was from the congregation of Rome to that of Corinth, and is without attribution.) It wasn’t until the middle of the second century CE that anyone documents Clement as the author. Regardless, Clemens Romanus was a Christian Bishop, not a historian.
OK, debate about Jesus, I can understand, but Paul? Someone had to write the seven “authentic” Pauline letters, and I’ve never heard anyone claim it wasn’t Paul. Why would someone trying to assert authority over the nascent Christian community pretend to have been a Christ-hating persecuter of the Church until a couple of years ago unless a) he really was, or b) such a person really existed and did have authority in the church and the author is claiming to be that person (the likely case in the disputed or pseudo-Pauline letters). I mean, the conversion story in Paul’s (unlike Acts) writings isn’t all that dramatic; it’s not likely to have been made up for effect. We know Paul existed because he wrote stuff down, and there is no reason whatsoever to consider most of it anything but genuine. It’s not the kind of thing people would make up. Nor does it have anything to do with the truth of Christianity–people have had dramatic conversion experiences that led them to all kinds of cults, and if Paul were proved not to have existed, it wouldn’t prove Jesus wasn’t ressurected, so what’s the big deal?
The debate isn’t so much about whether Paul did in fact exist, but rather whether or not there is any record of him outside of the Bible. Despite some obvious later editing, Galatians, I & II Thessalonians, I & II Corinthians, Romans, Colossians and Philippians are all widely accepted to be written by the person identified as Paul in the Bible.
As APB points out above, the lack of corroboration in historical record is not evidence that such a person did not exist per se. I’m not quite as familiar with historical research into Paul’s life as I am with some other Biblical figures, but I would hazard a guess that noone has been able to find an event from Paul’s life that should have been documented somewhere (other than the Bible) that wasn’t.