MusketThere appears to be recorded proof of a political agitator who the local chiefs wanted keeping quiet and the Romans obliged, and this would appear to be the bloke the Jesus myth was built on.

There's actually virtually no recorded proof that the biblical Jesus ever existed. Josephus was at best recounting stories about Jesus that were then circulating (and nobody denies that by AD 90, when Josephus was writing, such stories were circulating) and at worst is a later insertion. Other than that there's a mention in Tacitus, but he is only mentioning something that he has heard...ie, that the current sect called Christians believe that such a person existed and was condemend to death by Pilate. No evidence as such for a historical person.

There are *no* contemporary sources at all which mention Jesus' existence during his supposed lifetime...which is pretty incredible when you consider that the gospels mention him being followed by "innumerable" hordes of people, that his fame was known far and wide, and that he was a thorn in the side of both the Jewish and Roman establishments. Someone like Philo-Judaeus, who was in Jerusalem at the time when Jesus was supposed to be having such an impact on everyone, is totally silent about him, though his writings mention other people of the period who had far less impact than the gospels attribute to Jesus.

Timings and contradictions in the Gospels themselves are rife.Matthew says Jesus was born when Herod was King of Judea. Luke says he was born when Quirinius was Governor of Syria. He could not have been born during a joint period of administration of these two rulers because Herod died in the year 4 B.C and Quirinius didn't become Governor of Syria until ten years later. Any census conducted under Quirinius' rule would have to have occurred at least 10 years after Herod could have arranged for the killing of boy children!

As for Censuses: Roman censuses did NOT require people to return to the towns of their birth, but were enumerated in the towns where they lived and worked. So if Joseph and Mary were living in Nazareth, that's where they would have been assessed for the census, with no need at all to travel to Bethlehem. We also know from surviving Roman documents that the census conducted in 6 AD (10 years after Herod died) was for Judea only, and did not include Galilee.

Neither is there any other extant record that Herod (who died before this census that *didn't* require people to travel away from home) had a large number of boy children slaughtered...something that other writers of the period would surely have remarked on, it being a fairly major thing to occur.

We can go all the way through the gospels like this, finding large amounts of information that is there for effect/ propaganda purposes, but that does not stack up with what we know to be historically or legally accurate (eg Jesus' supposed quotation about the status of a wife divorcing her husband...made at a time when wives *had* no right to initiate a divorce). Or the whole ludicrous legality of the trial, betrayal and execution which mixes up Jewish and Roman legal processes in a way which is almost inconceivable could have really occurred.

The simple truth is that the four Gospels are historically worthless. They abound in contradictions. There is very little in them that can be depended upon as true, while there is much in them that we certainly know to be false, and that other than the Gospels, there is virtually no evidence for the historical existence of this person.

The Talmud has 2 mentions of a "Jeshua": There are to a Jeshua bar Pandira, stoned to death and then hung on a tree at some unspecified date, and to a Jeshua ben Stada, stoned to death and hung on a tree at Lydda sometime between 100AD and 130AD. Niether of these could be the "Jesus" of the gospels.

The only real contemporary evidence for the existence of a historical prophet or "holy" person of the period is the mention in various of the Qumran (Dead Sea) scrolls of someone called "The Teacher".