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 Originally Posted by couriermike
There is more textual evidence for the life of Jesus, written down closer in time to his life, than for any other person from the ancient world. Even non-Christian sources like Josephus and Pliny mention him. While the gospels and epistles may have been redacted some at a later date, there is no reason to doubt the main story because the authors eventually chose martyrdom over denying Christ.
Dying for their beliefs does not validate their beliefs as true, it just validates that they really believed it.
Also while these sources appear to be contemporaries of Jesus, or at least close, I was reading that the people who wrote of him around his time could have very well been writing about a man they believed to have lived centuries before the first century A.D. After their writings were a few hundred years old, religious scholars could have placed the J-man's life in their times as a way to lend credibility to their writings. What I'm saying is, we know when the writers of the source material lived, but not when Jesus himself lived. Therefore we cannot really say for certain that there are writings about Jesus that were written in his day.
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