Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, he descended to the dead (Acts 2:22-39)

This week I go to speak on a few lines from the Apostles Creed as our church progresses through a series on it. Below is more or less my tal...

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A list of Jesus references outside the NT

Below is a summary of references of Jesus outside the New Testament from no more than about 150 years after His death. This series was inspi...

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Jesus in the Talmud wrap up

Is that what is says? It needs to be noted that there is some questions about the accuracy of this Talmud quote . Could this text dealing wi...

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Jesus problems in the Talmud

This post is part of a series that looked at some of the references to Jesus outside the New Testament that were made in the first and seco...

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Jesus in the Talmud

This reference to Jesus is from a Jewish text called the Talmud . The Talmud is broken into two parts, the earlier part – the Mishnah was w...

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Another thing Josephus said

Later on in Josephus Antiquities of the Jews there is another reference to Jesus. This time there is not much debate about it as it is onl...

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What Josephus probably said

When we remove what most historians think was doctored from the first Jesus quote of Josephus we get the following: Now there was about thi...

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What Josephus didn't say

One of the most well know and debated references of Jesus outside the bible is from Josephus (37-100 AD). Josephus was a Jewish historian w...

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Lucian of Samosata - What was said

This post continues on from this one . From the quote by Lucian we can see that the Christian community was know to be quite a kind and gen...

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Lucian of Samosata - A part of his play

Our next reference to Jesus outside the bible comes, not from a historical account but from a satirical play. This goes to show that the kno...

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Suetonius

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (70-130 AD) was a historian who wrote a large work called The Twelve Caesars which surprisingly enough is abou...

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Pliny the Younger - Those Christians

Now this next source might say more about Christians than Jesus, but I have again included this reference as it is implicit (or I have assum...

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Tacitus - What can we say?

This post continues on from this one . Tacitus said "Christ" not "Jesus" Another objection to the Jesus reference from T...

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Tacitus - What did he say?

The third non-biblical source about Jesus I want to look at is from a guy named Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 AD). Tacitus was a Roman historia...

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Mara Bar-Serapion - Is it Jesus?

In the last post we saw a few possibilities of who this "wise king" in the letter from Mar Bar-Serapion could be. The ones that w...

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Mara Bar-Serapion - The wise king options

This post continues on from this one . Since the "wise king" in the Mar bar Serapion is not named some historians have tried to wo...

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Mara Bar-Serapion - The text

The second bit of non-Christian evidence outside of Jesus is a little extract from a letter from a stoic father in prison to his son. This e...

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Thallus - What can we say?

This post continues on from this one . A shade of a shade This Thallus reference shows us just how hard it is sometimes for historians to p...

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Thallus - What did he say?

This post continues on from this one . What did Thallus say? There is kind of a problem with trying to work out what Thallus said because ev...

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Thallus - Who was he?

Historians have a problem in that not everything in the past survives. They have to do some detective work. In some cases they can not find ...

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