Not only are these events taken—so to speak—as gospel because of the frequency with which they’re attested, but there’s also the compelling argument that it would have been bizarre to make them up. With the baptism, it’s strange that Jesus should have had to be baptized at all considering John performed the procedure to remove one’s sins (Jesus, we should remember, was supposedly without sin).
With the crucifixion story, it’s hard to rationalize why early Christians would have invented such a drawn-out, painful, and frankly rather embarrassing death for their founder. That it unless early Christian martyrs were trying to project a story of martyrdom onto their leader to give them a sort of inspirational role model. In fact, we know that many early Christians—the 1st century AD bishop Ignatius of Antioch, for example—saw Christ’s death as a model fit for imitation.
Of course, it’s not so much Jesus’s death in the Christian texts that troubles skeptics as his later resurrection. I don’t want to go into the supernatural elements; suffice to say that there were enough from the beginning. In Galatians (1:11-12) Paul writes that the gospel he’s preaching is not of human origin. It was instead “received by revelation from Jesus Christ“. It’s more worthwhile to move away from these texts and turn to accounts written by (roughly) contemporary non-Christian authors.
The first and chronologically closest was Josephus (37 – 100 AD). He spent his later years living comfortably in Rome, writing the history of his people under the patronage of the Flavian emperors. But rather than Roman, Josephus was actually Jewish. He’d actually fought against the Romans during the First Jewish War, and was only spared his life because he correctly predicted his captor, Vespasian, would one day become emperor.
Jesus appears twice in Josephus’s writings—firstly in a passage about the death of James, Jesus’s brother, and secondly when Josephus writes about Jesus being crucified by Pontius Pilate. There are a few problems with Josephus’s accounts. Not only was Jesus was a common name (with no less than 20 appearing across Josephus’s works) but the passages that stress this Jesus as “the Messiah” or “a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man” look forced and out of sync with Josephus’s general style. They could well be later additions by Christian scribes.
There’s also the issue that, considering Josephus had a habit of being very, very thorough, his documentation on Jesus leaves a lot to be desired. He leaves out certain historical nuggets central to Jesus’s story—such as King Herod’s massacring of infants—that you’d expect to find, particularly given that his was a detailed history of the Jewish People. Our Roman writers, who we’ll now look at, had very different interests.