But I don't regard the gospel accounts as reliable. Nothing was apparently written down when Jesus was alive, so the gospel writers were recording hearsay many years later, which is often not factual.
Whether you believe them is not relevent, but you cannot disregard them as documents written within an acceptable time of the alledged facts occurng.
Were you to do this, you might as well dismiss Manetho, Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, Bede, etc - all of whom are core resources - to a point - for historians ov various disciplines, all writing after the events they describe, and three of them only available to us in copied manuscripts which are many centuries after the events themselves.
The fragment I described above - and to which I gave you a link - had to have been written before 90 AD.
I'd contend, knowing how strong papyrus can be, that the fragment was so degraded through use that it might have been a decade or more in circulation before it was incorporated into the cartonage mask...that meansbetween 70-80 AD.
Let's assume this fragment was a copy of a copy of the original MSS. That puts the original between 65-70 AD - thirty or so years after the events it contains.
Why do you dismiss this as history, but accept Tacitus, Suetonius, Bede - or, for that matter, Shauma, Starkey, Beard - modern historians, not all of them to my taste, who nevertheless write on things which happened tens, hundreds or thousands of years ago?
