Artful Dodger:

> read this book then make your points. As it is, you speak out of ignorance. http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Testament-Documents-Reliable/dp/0802822193

I am not asking for a book written by a Christian scholar.

'Frederick Fyvie Bruce (12 October 1910 – 11 September 1990) was a Biblical scholar and one of the founders of the modern evangelical understanding of the Bible. His first book, New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (1943), was voted by the American evangelical periodical Christianity Today in 2006 as one of the top 50 books "which had shaped evangelicals".'

I am asking for a direct literary source contemporary to Jesus that states unequivocally that he existed. There is no such source. The earliest mention outside the New testament is in a brief paragraph in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and that as written in 93-94 AD. Many scholars disagree on the interpretation of a brief paragraph written by a rather obscure Jewish scholar in the Roman empire.

The Gospels themselves are based on one, possibly two documents written at around 75 AD. That leaves us with no contemporary sources.

Was Jesus a historical figure? Most scholars think that Jesus did exist and see sources as Josephus and Tacitus as either brief mentions of the historical Jesus, or reflections of events that those historians heard among early Christians. However, the mythology around Jesus (the virgin birth, the miracles, etc.) are considered to be non-historical (in other words, they have no concrete historical proof of their having occurred.)

Do we really believe that a man would do all those miracles and go unnoticed by all the Roman and Greek historians of the era? If somebody did all those miracles, that person would not have gone unnoticed, specially when those miracles gave rise to the dominant religion in the Roman empire. Matthew clearly states that Jesus was followed by "multitudes", and yet nobody in the Roman world noticed him enough to write anything of him? Romans noted inconsequential people, but ignored Jesus in spite of his miracles?