MadHatter

This may have been asked previously, but a cursory search didn't reveal anything obvious.

Is there any documentation of the crucifixion outside of the bible? Either through ancient government records, eyewitness accounts, etc.?

It seems if one ruler believed he had just executed a competing ruler, he would have documented it, no?

Thanks.

SLD

Well, maybe. But it is also highly unlikely that such records would survive virtually 2000 years.

But to answer your question, no. Outside the gospels there are no other accounts of the Crucifixion. IIRC, the earliest references to Jesus being crucified (other than the various bibles, including the apocrypha) was Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan around 110 CE, or possibly Tacitus's comments regariding the cause of the fire of Rome in AD 66. Both of these sources are in the 2nd Century AD.

SLD

Family Man

I doubt if anyone involved in Jesus's execution would have considered him of any great importance, much less a ruler of anything. Jesus only became significant many years after his death, at least in a historical sense.

Crazy Liz

Josephus mentions that Jesus was condemned by Pilate to be crucified.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topi.../josephus.html

Toto

This passage in Josephus is a clear forgery, and it is disingenuous to mention it without at least mentioning the many problems with it. The only question is whether there was some mention of Jesus in the original document, but reconstructing the original document is highly speculative. Peter Kirby discusses the question extensively here.

Crazy Liz

Kirby's discussion is interesting, and I appreciate your posting it, although I have not studied it extensively enough to discuss it in detail (and won't have time to do so today). The page I linked also discusses one aspect of the same controversy. It seems, from my reading, that this passage is not a "clear forgery." It is also not clearly genuine. It seems the majority of the scholars think it is partly genuine, but with glosses added.

Toto

We have discussed this so often that you will not find many people here who want to get into it again.

The passage is clearly forged at least in part, we agree. The majority of scholars like to think that they can recover the original text from that forged section by removing the clearly Christian words. But they are unable to answer a basic question: once you admit that there has been some forgery, how do you know that the entire section has not been added?

You might want to read some of the links on Kirby's Josephus section, especially Ken Olson's article on Eusebius.

Vorkosigan

It is a clear forgery, unless viewed through the lens of an a priori commitment to a historical Jesus. I wish Atwill and Hudson would show up here to discuss their observations about it. They made some very interesting observations that are coming out in their new book on Christianity.

Vorkosigan

Family Man

I also suspect that MadHatter was talking about contemporaneous sources, of which there are none. Josephus was written decades after Jesus's death, and even in the passage wasn't a forgery (and it isn't at all clear that it isn't) he could have been repeating what he heard from Christian communities -- meaning it wouldn't be independent. The passage is also curiously short, with no real details, each also suggests unimportance.

Ceverante

Actually, there are tons of crucification records in the Roman tribunal records of trials. Pontius Pilate was quite a trigger-happy-jew-crucifying prelate... by all records. He was crucifying jews left and right during his time in Jesrusalem, I guess he probably enjoyed it

But the problem is, none of the records mentioned Christ, although Yeshua was quite a common jewish name. There were also dozens of 'Saviors' proclaming themselves to the the prophesied Messiah. But they propably 'crossed' Pilate but later they did get the 'point'.

Pliny did not live in the same time as the Human Jesus, so he could never have met him. His records cannot be considered as eye-witness account, the same with Flavius Josephus. So even if the passage in the Flavium Testimonium is not interpolation, it's a moot issue. Josephus could have heard it from someone, but he definitely never saw the Human Jesus with his own eyes.

Even the NT themselves were not written by eye-witness. Like it or not, there currently exists no contemporary account of the Human Jesus, inside or outside the gospels.