The following information is taken verbatim from Encyclopedia Britannica (1980), Vol. 10, page 145. This information is being included "for the record".

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The history of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth reveals nothing of the worldwide movement to which he gave rise. He lived and taught in a remote area (Palestine) on the periphery of the Roman Empire. His life was of short duration, and knowledge of it remained hidden from most of his contemporary world. None of the sources of his life and work can be traced to Jesus himself; he did not leave a single known written word. Also, there are no contemporary accounts written of his life and death. What can be established about the historical Jesus depends almost without exception on Christian traditions, especially on the oldest material used in the composition of the first three New Testament Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), which reflect the standpoint and outlook of the later church and its faith in Jesus.

Non-Christian sources are meagre and contribute nothing to the history of Jesus that is not already known from the Christian tradition. The mention of Jesus' execution in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus (XV, 44), written about AD 110, is, nevertheless, worthy of note. In his account of the persecution of Christians under the emperor Nero, which was occasioned by the burning of Rome (AD 64), the Emperor, in order to rid himself of suspicion, blamed the fire on the so-called Christians, who were already hated among the people.

Tacitus writes in explanation : "The name [Christian] is derived from Christ, whom the procurator Pontius Pilate had executed in the reign of Tiberius." The "temporarily suppressed pernicious superstition" to which Jesus had given rise in Judaea soon afterward had spread as far as Rome. Tacitus does not speak of Jesus but, rather, of Christ (originally the religious title "Messiah," but used very early among Christians outside Palestine as a proper name for Jesus). The passage only affords proof of the ignominious end (crucifixion) of Jesus as the founder of a religious movement and illustrates the common opinion of that movement in Rome.

An enquiry of the governor of Asia Minor, Pliny the Younger, in his letter to the emperor Trajan (c. AD 111) about how he should act in regard to the Christians (Epistle 10, 96ff.) comes from the same period. Christians are again described as adherents of a crude superstition, who sang hymns to Christ "as to a god." Nothing is said of his earthly life, and the factual information in the letter undoubtedly stems from Christians.

Another Roman historian, Suetonius, remarked in his life of the emperor Claudius (Vita Claudii 25:4; after AD 100) : "He [Claudius] expelled the Jews, who had on the instigation of Chrestus continually been causing disturbances, from Rome." This may refer to turmoils occasioned among the Jews of Rome by the intrusion of Christianity into their midst. But the information must have reached the author in a completely garbled form or was understood by him quite wrongly to mean that this "Chrestus" had at that time appeared in Rome as a Jewish agitator. Claudius' edict of expulsion (AD 49) is also mentioned in Acts 18:2.

Josephus, the Jewish historian at the court of Domitian who has depicted the history of his people and the Jewish-Roman war (66-70), only incidentally remarks about the stoning in AD 62 of "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ ..." (Antiquities XX, 200). He understandably uses the proper name "Jesus" first (for as a Jew he knows that "Christ" is a translation of "Messiah"), but he adds, along with a derogatory "so-called," the second name that was familiar in Rome. A second passage in the same work, known as the "Testimony of Flavius" (XVIII, 63ff.), is without doubt a later Christian insertion, because it contains a complete summary of the Christian teaching about Jesus.

In the Talmud, a compendium of Jewish law, lore, and commentary, only a few statements of the rabbis (Jewish religious teachers) of the 1st and 2nd centuries come into consideration. Containing mostly polemics or Jewish apologetics, they reveal an acquaintance with the Christian tradition but include several divergent legendary motifs as well. The picture of Jesus offered in these writings may be summarized as follows : born as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier called Panther, Jesus (Hebrew Yeshu) worked magic, ridiculed the wise, seduced and stirred up the people, gathered five disciples about him, and was hanged (crucified) on the eve of the Passover.

These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Christian testimonies about Jesus were collected in the New Testament. Though they certainly represent only a selection from a much broader stream of tradition (Luke 1:1-4), these testimonies are a very valuable and representative selection. They are, however, of very different kinds. From many of them next to nothing can be learned about the historical Jesus.

The oldest New Testament writings, the genuine letters of Paul (written in the 50s of the 1st century), contain little information about the life of Jesus. Paul, the Apostle, who had not known Jesus personally (II Cor. 5:16), shows no interest in Jesus' biography. At the centre of Paul's thought and proclamation there stands only the theologically important significance of the death, Resurrection, exaltation, and Second Coming of Jesus Christ, contained in numerous short doctrinal and creedal formulas. These formulas the Apostle himself occasionally characterizes as being the tradition that he has received and handed on (I Cor. 11:23ff.; 15:3ff.) or they are in other ways indicated as a given tradition (Rom. 1:3ff; Phil. 2:6-11).

The most important sources for the life of Jesus are the Synoptic (parallel view of sources) Gospels : Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The Gospel According to John, the Fourth Gospel, assumes a special position. Though it offers some parallels to the other three, and though the independent traditions in it may in individual cases have historical kernels, the tradition in John shows that the gospel has reached an advanced theological state. Because a theological conception has been incorporated in the account to such an extent, this Gospel cannot be directly used as a historical source. It is also the latest of the Gospels, written about AD 100.