Comparing Literary Evidence for Jesus and Nero

Some people doubt about Jesus, but believe the accounts about Nero. Yet the surviving literary evidence for Nero's activities dates back no earlier than the literary evidence for Jesus.

No surviving first-generation literary sources have been discovered so far for Nero, only second-generation sources.

And the most relied-upon sources are precisely the same literary sources for Jesus (Tacitus and Josephus).

The literary sources for Jesus are also more in number than what have so far been discovered for Nero.

Furthermore, the best and earliest sources for Nero are contradictory on some major points (Tacitus and Suetonius).

Yet the accounts about Nero tend to be accepted with comparatively little question, while Jesus is more often doubted. I find that academically inconsistent.

What I see happening is that a small number of contradictory accounts about Nero, which by their own admission were only second-generation accounts, are largely accepted - while a larger quantity of accounts about Jesus, which claim to be eyewitness accounts and which have not been proven otherwise, are largely rejected. It seems to me therefore that Jesus should be treated at least as reliably if nor more reliably than the accounts about Nero, if the same literary rules are to be applied. If that's not happening, there must be a reason for it other than an academic reason.

When I say there are greater numbers of sources for Jesus, I'm not just talking about Biblical sources either. But I also think it's unacademic to outright reject the Bible as a source just because it's the Bible.

The four Gospels were written by different individuals, a number of whom claimed to be eyewitnesses. Even if in reality they were only second-generation accounts, as some critics ponder (without proving), the Gospels would at least be as good as the evidence for Nero which is only second-generation evidence.

And yet the Biblical evidence for Jesus (the Four Gospels), even though they are arguably better than the sources for Nero, tend not to be treated seriously as sources, simply because these four separate sources written by four separate authors were centuries later put together with other pieces of literature and together called "The Bible" - as if that somehow makes them illegitimate as sources. It's a bit inconsistent, I think.