A Jewish preacher, or just possibly a composite of such individuals, who practiced in the Holy Land some 2,000years ago.
So, Luke, who wrote his Gospel concerning the life of Jesus, and who stated that he did comprehensive research and interviewed eye witnesses who were alive at the time to see what Jesus did and taught, to ensure that his account was true and certain, was actually lying or mistaken? As part of his research, he would have spoken with Mary, the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the 12 Apostle who were with Jesus for three years, many of the people who were healed and had demons cast out of them, probably Nicodemus, one of the priests who supported Jesus. He would have seen many of these people personally, because they would have still been alive at the time Luke researched and wrote his Gospel.
To say that Jesus was not a real Person who lived until 33 A.D. is to say that Luke was writing a fictional tale. Also, the very place where Jesus was crucified and the tomb where He was laid, have been discovered. Even the stub of the iron bar that the Roman soldiers drove into the wall of the tomb to keep the stone in place so it could not be moved to enable anyone to get in and steal the body of Jesus, is still there. If nothing else, that shows that whoever was put in that tomb and the stone put in place, the Roman authorities put special and unusual security measures to ensure that no one roll that stone aside and gain entry to the tomb. No such security measures were evident on any of the other tombs in Jerusalem.
Here are some interesting facts:
What did non-Christian authors say about Jesus?
As far as we know, the first author outside the church to mention Jesus is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote a history of Judaism around AD93. He has two references to Jesus. One of these is controversial because it is thought to be corrupted by Christian scribes (probably turning Josephus’s negative account into a more positive one), but the other is not suspicious – a reference to James, the brother of “Jesus, the so-called Christ”.
About 20 years after Josephus we have the Roman politicians Pliny and Tacitus, who held some of the highest offices of state at the beginning of the second century AD. From Tacitus we learn that Jesus was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect in charge of Judaea (AD26-36) and Tiberius was emperor (AD14-37) – reports that fit with the timeframe of the gospels. Pliny contributes the information that, where he was governor in northern Turkey, Christians worshipped Christ as a god. Neither of them liked Christians – Pliny writes of their “pig-headed obstinacy” and Tacitus calls their religion a destructive superstition.
Did ancient writers discuss the existence of Jesus?
Strikingly, there was never any debate in the ancient world about whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. In the earliest literature of the Jewish Rabbis, Jesus was denounced as the illegitimate child of Mary and a sorcerer. Among pagans, the satirist Lucian and philosopher Celsus dismissed Jesus as a scoundrel, but we know of no one in the ancient world who questioned whether Jesus lived.
I know that this is a little off topic, but you made the statement about Jesus and I am responding to it by way of appropriate discussion.
