What, that some guy got baptised, was a travelling preacher with a following, and got crucified is extraordinary? Also this isn’t about Bible scholarship (as such). The Bible doesn’t contain The Book of Tacitus.
You brought up Tacitus, not me. He isn’t out of bounds now.
If you follow Mark (the first written Gospel) the ministry only lasted about 6 months. Something to keep in mind.
A guy is born in a one horse town no one ever heard of. He migrates to John the Baptist turf. In 6 months he has
Convinced 12 people in a poverty riddled area in a culture that emphasised familiar loyalty to abandon their work and families
He has mastered faith healing, speech writing, and magic tricks.
He somehow found the exact part of the Sea of Gallie that you can walk on rocks that are just under water and setup events such that only the youngest apostle sees him doing it in a storm.
With no money or power he convinces Lazarus and several others to fake their deaths. He has also gotten a local pig farmer to go along his ruse. Amazingly not one of those people decades later reports the con.
He convinces his 12 apostles and who knows how many other camp followers to go to the powder keg that was the Temple during Passover and start trouble. While everyone knows exactly how Romans deal with people doing stuff like this. The Romans even had a codified law that proscribed crucification. And yet none of them chicken out.
All the events in his life just happen to be mirrors of well known Jewish stories. Somehow he makes sure of this.
All the saying he says match up with dead Talmud authorities or a Greek translation of part of the OT. He makes a point to not quote from any book that was not yet in that translation. Go find me him talking about the Book of Esther for example.
But it doesn’t end there. Your buddy Tacticus openly wonders why the political movement still exists decades later. For a reason. They didn’t last long after the main guy was killed. Still think the claim is ordinary? I challenge you to demonstrate it. I want you, a regular Joe, with only the money in your wallet to go to some backwater of American civilization. Say Mississippi. Convince 12 men to stop working and follow you around barefoot. I then want you to take them to the Superbowl and rush the cops. 50 years afterwards your movement better be still around.
As I said the best explanation for the data is a long running con. James and Peter made it up, grabbing local legends, and kept pumping it out. You want to know why Paul didn’t know about the Tomb? Because that detail hadn’t been invented yet.
Noone is talking about the historical veracity of resurrection here, miracles, or anything of the sort. You’re getting religion all mixed up with history.
In that case there is nothing left. To save the claim you have made it so small you hope to squeeze it in. The exact opposite of what you do in science. You are supposed to look at the evidence and build models. Over time you are supposed to make larger and larger claims, right now you are going backwards. Starting from a big claim and saying less and less. As the limit approaches infinity you will say nothing at all.
You see just because it’s reasonable to believe that Steven Segal can’t knock someone out with zero physical contact doesn’t mean that it suddenly becomes sensible to deny the existence of Steven Segal. His Bullshido is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, his existence very much not so.
Analogy is false and also a strawman.
Also you didn’t answer my question. If Paul was interviewing Christians for decades and obsessed with this one key detail how come he got it wrong? Could you imagine a DEA agent never knowing what LSD was?
Edit: forgot to mention that he makes sure specific events in his life align with other would be Messiah leaders. For absolutely no reason whatsoever.