Early Secular Accounts of Jesus' Death

Josephus writes, "When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified..." (Antiquities 18.64)

Tacitus, "Nero fasted the guilt [of the burning of Rome] and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name has its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate" (Annals 15.44, c. AD 115)

Lucian, "The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day-the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account" (The Death of Peregrine, 11-13)

Mara Bar-Serapion, writing to his son from prison, comments, "Or [what advantage came to] the Jews by the murder of their Wise King, seeing that from that very time their kingdom was driven away from them?" (In the British Museum, Syriac Manuscript, Additional 14,658. See The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translation of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325).

Talmud, "on the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged" (Talmud, Sanhedrin, 43a). Yeshu is Joshua in Hebrew. The equivalent in Greek is Iesous or Jesus.

Today's popular unsaved Dominic Crossan, writes, "That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be".