Footnotes: 1) See Gary Habermas book The Verdict of History. Its central objective is the delineation and extrapolation of these sources. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona's book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus is the most extensive publication on the historicity of the resurrection to date, on page p. 233 they document 42 separate sources (Christian and non) within 150 years of Jesus' death. (1-A) Krishna: a sourcebook By Edwin Francis Bryant p. 148 Quoting Sarala's Mahabharata "'[Jara] tageted them (Krishna's feet) with his bow and discharged an arrow. Lo it peirced the left foot of sleeping Shri Krishna, who started up, saw blood oozing out from his foot and felt a sharp pain. 'Who' he wondered 'could inflict such pain on me?' "Jara came close and recognised Shri Krishna..." p. 150 "Jara removed the arrow from Shri Krishna's foot. Shri Krishna collapsed the gandiva with his right hand and looked at Arjuna. His spirit left his body". 2) Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 128. "...Let's look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke. Compare that to Jesus' forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That's more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each."
"What we have concerning Jesus actually is impressive. We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we'd have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross. Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion. In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death." 3) Ibid footnote(2). 4) Lee Strobel, The Case For The Real Jesus, 177 5) The Christian Combat Manual: Helps for Defending your Faith: A Handbook for Practical Apologetics, 2007, p. 206.
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