@Ionus,
Jesus existence is proven historically.
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Below is the kind of PROOF offer that a cult leader by the name of Jesus exist in any form at that time period.
To me it fall far far short of any proof at all and this is even more true given the known history of the church in faking documents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Greco-Roman sources
There are passages relevant to Christianity in the works of four major non-Christian writers of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries " Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger. However, these are generally references to early Christians rather than a historical Jesus. Of the four, Josephus' writings, which document John the Baptist, James the Just, and possibly also Jesus, are of the most interest to scholars dealing with the historicity of Jesus (see below). Tacitus, in his Annals written c. 115, mentions popular opinion about Christus, without historical details (see also: Tacitus on Jesus). There is an obscure reference to a Jewish leader called "Chrestus" in Suetonius. (According to Suetonius, chapter 25, there occurred in Rome, during the reign of emperor Claudius (circa AD 50), "persistent disturbances ... at the instigation of Chrestus".[88] [4] Mention in Acts of "After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome." (Acts of the Apostles 18:1-2) has been conjectured[89][90] to refer to the expulsion at the times of these "persistent disturbances".[citation needed]
[edit] Josephus
Main article: Josephus on Jesus
Flavius Josephus (c. 37"c. 100), a Jew and Roman citizen who worked under the patronage of the Flavians, wrote the Antiquities of the Jews in 93 AD. In these works, Jesus is mentioned twice. The one directly concerning Jesus has come to be known as the Testimonium Flavianum.
In the first passage, called the Testimonium Flavianum, it is written:
About this time came Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is appropriate to call him a man. For he was a performer of paradoxical feats, a teacher of people who accept the unusual with pleasure, and he won over many of the Jews and also many Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon the accusation of the first men amongst us, condemned him to be crucified, those who had formerly loved him did not cease to follow him, for he appeared to them on the third day, living again, as the divine prophets foretold, along with a myriad of other marvellous things concerning him. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day.[91]
Concerns have been raised about the authenticity of the passage, and it is widely held by scholars that at least part of the passage has been altered by a later scribe. The Testimonium's authenticity has attracted much scholarly discussion and controversy of interpolation. Louis H. Feldman counts 87 articles published during the period of 1937-1980, "the overwhelming majority of which question its authenticity in whole or in part."[92] Judging from Alice Whealey's 2003 survey of the historiography, it seems that the majority of modern scholars consider that Josephus really did write something here about Jesus, but that the text that has reached us is corrupt.[93] However, there has been no consensus on which portions have been altered, or to what degree.
In the second, very brief mention, Josephus calls James "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ."[94] The great majority of scholars consider this shorter reference to Jesus to be substantially authentic,[95] although a minority has raised doubts.[96]
In antiquity, Origen recorded that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Christ,[97] as it seems to suggest in the quote above. Dr. L. Michael White argued against authenticity, citing that parallel sections of Josephus's Jewish War do not mention Jesus, and that some Christian writers as late as the third century, who quoted from Josephus's Antiquities, do not mention this passage.[98] However, Alice Whealey has shown that it is far from clear that any third century Christians other than Origen quoted from or even directly knew Antiquities.[99] While very few scholars believe the whole Testimonium is genuine,[100] most scholars have found at least some authentic words of Josephus in the passage,[101] since some portions are written in his style.[102]
The main reason to believe Josephus did originally mention Jesus is the fact that the majority of scholars accept the authenticity of his passage on Jesus' brother James. Arguably the main reason to accept that Josephus also wrote a version of the Testimonium Flavianum is the fact that Jerome and Michael the Syrian quote literal translations of the text in a form reading, more skeptically than the textus receptus, that "he was thought to be the Christ" rather than "he was the Christ." The identical wording of Jerome and Michael the Syrian proves the existence of an originally Greek Testimonium reading this, since Latin Christian scholars and Syriac scholars did not read each others' works, but both commonly translated Greek Christian works.
Shlomo Pines and a few other scholars have argued that the version of the Testimonium written by the 10th century Arab historian named Agapius of Manbij is closer to what one would expect Josephus to have written, and the similarities between the two passages imply a Christian author later removed Josephus' conservative tone and added interpolations.[103] Pines cites Josephus as having written:
At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and (he) was known to be virtuous and many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not desert his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.[104]
However, it has been argued that Agapius' text is almost surely a paraphrase of the Testimonium from the Syriac translation of Eusebius of Caesarea's Historia Ecclesiastica, and that it is Michael the Syrian's Syriac Testimonium, which also derives from the Syriac Historia Ecclesiastica,along with the Latin translation of Jerome that are the most important witnesses to Josephus' original passage on Jesus.[105]
[edit] Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger, the provincial governor of Pontus and Bithynia, wrote to Emperor Trajan c. 112 concerning how to deal with Christians, who refused to worship the emperor, and instead worshiped "Christus".
Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods, and moreover cursed Christ " none of which those who are really Christians, it is said, can be forced to do " these I thought should be discharged. Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years. They all worshiped your image and the statues of the gods, and cursed Christ.[106]
Charles Guignebert, who does not doubt that Jesus of the Gospels lived in Gallilee in the first century, nevertheless dismisses this letter as acceptable historical evidence: "Only the most robust credulity could reckon this assertion as admissible evidence for the historicity of Jesus"[107]
