If Jesus existed as a human being and did so many amazing things, surely somebody at the time would have written about him? Well, actually, no. The first time Jesus is mentioned outside the Bible is sixty years after he supposedly died. By then, Paul had already spread the myth of a Jesus that he himself had never met, and the first gospels may have already been written.
After these sixty years of silence, there are five ‘early’ independent reports that Christians most often quote:
- A discredited fourth-century attempt to insert Christian propaganda into a first-century history book.
- A passing second-century reference to the death of Christ, which gets Pontius Pilate’s job title wrong.
- Two uncontroversial second-century records of the existence of Christians in Rome and Asia Minor.
- A claim, made in the ninth century, that somebody else wrote, in the third century, about somebody else writing about a solar eclipse in a lost first-century document.
There is no independent record, in all of recorded history, of any of the following: his alleged bloodline from Abraham and David, his alleged virgin birth, his parent’s alleged flight from Herod, his alleged baptism by John the Dipper, his alleged preaching to large multitudes, his alleged miracles (walking on water, reviving corpses etc), the nature of his alleged trial or death, or his alleged return from being dead to being alive again.
Here are the details of the earliest independent records of the possible existence of Jesus:
This is the third article in a series about why I assume that reality is basically as it seems to be. In the first article, I explained 
This is the second article in a series about why I assume that reality is basically as it seems to be. In the first article, I explained 
This is the first article in a series about why I assume two things about reality: (1) that nothing can be objectively known, and (2) that reality is basically as it seems to be. This article is about the first of those assumptions – that nothing can be objectively known. Here’s a summary:
This is a reply from Joshua Moran to 
The Vatican is by far the smallest State in the world, being just over a hundred acres in size. It plays at being a real State by issuing its own stamps, but it has no proper citizens (just transient employees of the Catholic Church), few public services (Italy provides it with police and water) and no real economy (though it does have a novelty ATM machine that issues instructions in Latin).
Four out of every five Filipinos are happy, and this level of happiness has remained relatively high over the past fifteen years. And poor Filipinos are only marginally less happy than average. However, seven million Filipino families consider themselves to be poor in terms of food. And hunger causes more unhappiness than general poverty does.
The more money you earn, the less impact that your extra money has on your happiness. If you earn $15,000 a year, an extra $7,000 would make you one percent happier. But if you earn $250,000 a year, it would take an extra $625,000 to make you that same one percent happier. That’s one finding of a report that summarises seven years of research into what makes Australians happy.
An atheist running for President of the United States today faces roughly the same level of prejudice from voters as a female candidate would have faced in the 1940s while women workers were being sacked to make way for returning soldiers.
