Yeah, let's:
Professional scholarly consensus today comes down on the side of the Paul letters being the earliest extant documentation on Jesus the teacher. A number of Pauline letters, though, are forged, meaning one must be as strict as possible in confining the Pauline letters to those that are most likely authentic. The consensus is that seven of them are. However, one view circumscribes that even further, to four only:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A5... Man and the Myth Paul authentic four&f=false
At this link, you can read up on a certain Morton from the '60s, who analysed the letters and found only these four surviving the "cut": Galatians, Romans, Corinthians 1, Corinthians 2.
Clearly, Morton's methods were strongly criticised by some. I only cite Morton as but one example of a few especially strict voices, merely to shew why it may be best to err on the side of too few authentic sources, rather than too many, for whatever reason. The four Paulines that even Morton accepts as genuine also have the relatively largest preponderance of references (among all the Paulines, genuine, doubtful and forged) to Jesus as a human with a human biography. This is a relatively preponderant characteristic they share with all seven of those Paulines which the dreaded consensus accepts as genuine: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans. ...
The four Morton Paulines are typical of arguably the earliest written documentation we have on Jesus the teacher. At the same time, your examples of Tacitus and Antiqs. 20 (the account of James becoming a pulp) are probably the most disinterested. From both sets of documents emerge an historic human figure.
Only with these first as a working foundation does it make any sense to then apply the philological strata that modern academic scholarship has painstakingly assembled for the rest of the data, applied primarily to certain sayings in the Synoptics and in GThomas. Here is where "multiple attestation", as the academics behind the dreaded consensus term it, comes in. But even "multiple attestation" should be applied circumspectly.
For instance, since modern research appears to have achieved consensus that some written details in GMark, for instance, have been simply transcribed directly in GMatthew and GLuke, one can dismiss such details as purely reflective of one source, GMark, and not three. In such instances, "multiple attestation" is not relevant.
But on the other hand, if contexts for other passages/details in GMatthew and/or GLuke and/or both appear independent from GMark, then "multiple attestation" is more relevant, not in proving anything (again, this is dealing with ancient history, remember), but in rendering such details relatively more rather than less likely. A series of shared sayings falls in the latter independent category.
The dreaded consensus has now determined that a nexus of shared characteristics bears out a singularity of voice and style in a small "family" of sayings found in GMatthew, in GLuke -- and even in GThomas, even though the latter may be anywhere from as early as GMark to as late as the early 2nd century. That nexus of shared characteristics comprises, among other things, peculiarly Aramaic structures of speech, a highly colloquial way of framing certain statements, and/or a heavy dependence on the mundane details of living day-to-day in order to make a point.
Taking together the foundation of the least suspect Paulines, the scanty details in Tacitus/Antiqs. 20 and the shared sayings multiply attested in GMatthew, GLuke and GThomas, it is possible to extract an account of an eccentric rabbi who aroused the ire of the Roman authorities and got nailed.
Galatians 1:18:
1 Corinthians 2:8:
1 Corinthians 7:10:
1 Corinthians 9:5:
1 Corinthians 9:14:
1 Corinthians 11:23:
Romans 6:4:
Luke 11:21-2:
Luke 11:33:
Luke 12:2:
Luke 12:10:
Luke 13:18-9:
Luke 13:30:
Luke 19:26:
Josephus: Antiquities, 20 -- "Since Ananus was that kind of person, and because he perceived an opportunity with Festus having died and Albinus not yet arrived, he called a meeting of the Sanhedrin and brought James, the brother of Jesus (who is called 'Messiah') along with some others. He accused them of transgressing the law, and handed them over for stoning."
Tacitus: Annals, 15:44 -- "But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
Now, these are only the basics from which the most likely biographical details can be reconstructed. Far more sophisticated work is then possible, once one has established the basics culled out here. Striking family resemblances are readily detectable between these basic cites and other related material that is also multiply attested -- in the stricter construction of that term. Chiefly, this involves the sayings: The Luke sayings cited here have similarities to additional sayings similarly shared between GMatthew and GLuke and bearing similar linguistic characteristics. Much in the GLuke Sermon On The Plain, for instance (the bulk of Luke, Chapter 6), seems cut from the identical cloth as the cites here, and since portions of it also appear in different contexts in GMatthew, it appears _likely_ (that dreaded word again) that the bulk of the GLuke Sermon On The Plain in Luke's Chapter 6 may be just as fully historical as the cites provided above.
Extrapolations of such a sort are highly useful in determining which aspects of the extant data are more or less likely to be related to all the cites provided above. But that is a complex exercise requiring intimate knowledge of the myriad idioms in Koine Greek, of a level that I cannot possibly pretend to have.
... Rather, it's the consilience of various pieces of data that, together, make Jesus of Nazareth's historicity more likely than not.
...
I will however ... take the risk of suggesting that there are two tiers of conclusions as to the Jesus-the-human-teacher bio: The top tier, based strictly on the cites provided above, concludes that Jesus was a victim of Roman jurisprudence, because he introduced a new kind of superstition of an uncertain nature, geared partly around social redress (see Luke 13:30). He had at least two brothers, one of whom was named James. The second tier takes all of that as a given, and then, extrapolating from further Aramaicisms and other similar stylistic ticks and textual patterns, enfolds the additional notion that Jesus called for a radically uniform even-handed approach to all people, enemies included, a call that didn't sit well with various demographics of all sorts, leaving him vulnerable to the very first trumped-up charge that might come along. ...
Stone
.
