Top 5 non-Christian sources attesting to the historical Jesus
It helps if we can verify the stories from other sources because if only one source talks about the event, it may not be accurate if that source is biased.
Apart from the New Testament, there are other sources that can substantiate the accuracy and reliability of the New Testament records concerning the resurrection of Jesus.
Tacitus, the Roman historian, who was born between AD 52 & 54 wrote about the reign of Nero. “Nero…..punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate….”
Lucan, of the 2nd Century, spoke scornfully of Christ and the Christians. He described Christ as “the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world.”
We also have a testimony from the rabbinical tradition from the time of Christ. The Tannaitic period of the rabbinic traditions contains one or two references to Jesus Christ. The most important is a “barathia’ preserved in the Talmudic tracate Sanhedrin (43a): Jesus was hanged on Passover eve….because he has practised sorcery and led Israel astray and enticed them into apostasy.
There is a large body of literature written by early Church Fathers which provides further evidence to help us establish the accuracy of the New Testament text. These Church Fathers lived near the end of the first century and shortly afterwards. The most important of these are Justin Martyr, Tatian, Iranaeus and Clement of Alexandra, all of the second century; Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian of the third century and many others. Volume after volume of their writings have been preserved, many of which are literally filled with quotations from the New Testament scriptures. We are now able to document in early church writings, 89,000 quotations from the New Testament. Without any bibles or manuscripts they could all be thrown away one could reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material written 150 to 200 years of the time of Jesus Christ.