Told by whom? Are you aware of what are textual, manuscript, epigraphic, etc., evidence for virtually every name known to us from antiquity consists of?Actually, I am told, that rules out very few people.
As I understand it Paul and Josephus both wrote of Jesus at least three decades after his alleged death, that's not contemporaneous.
"We had a brilliant linguist named Gordon Messing in our outfit, he had gone to Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in linguistics, he spoke seven or eight languages, and read twenty. It used to be jokingly said, and it was almost true, that Gordon Messing's idea of fun was to translate Flemish into Sanskrit, and vice versa."
That's from a 1967 interview by J. N. Hess of S. J. Spingarn of my grandfather's participation in a WWII intelligence group. Decades later another author (son of a friend of my grandfather) wrote My Father the Spy which also attests to certain WWII activities of my grandfather. Neither of these accounts were written by those who were contemporaries of my grandfather, and neither were written within 20 years of the event described (one was written some ~50 years after these events and after my grandfather was dead). There is a difference between contemporaneous composition and contemporaries.
Paul was a contemporary of Jesus as was Josephus (and likely the author of Mark). In all probability, none of the above knew Jesus, but Paul knew Jesus' brother and we have good reason to believe Josephus had personal knowledge of Jesus' brother. Had Paul written a decade earlier or a decade later it wouldn't really matter. People who were alive and witnesses to things that happened during WWII wrote (or passed on) accounts over 3 decades after the end of the war. They were still contemporary. Likewise, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and virtually all those we might identify as ancient historians or as having composed accounts of ancient history wrote decades after the events in question. Perhaps the foremost biographer of all antiquity, Diogenes Laërtius, is a nebulous figure whose birth and death we are only able to guess at, who wrote about persons who died centuries before he was born, and whose writings survive in a handful of medieval copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies and so on. In fact, for most authors from antiquity we have only manuscripts that date ~1,000 years after the authors died that we know contain errors but that we are unable to access the extent of.
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