Extrabiblical Accounts of Jesus

Longtime reader/commentator Poosh asked the following in comments:

Fly, if you're out there, and have some easy off hand links etc with you, could you grab some real historical evidence for the existence of Jesus?

Thanks!

Well, Poosh, I'll direct you to the following links:

CARM - Extrabiblical Accounts of Jesus

Wikipedia - Historicity of Jesus Christ

I'll quote the two that I'm most familiar with, Suetonius' Life of the Deified Claudius, chapter XXV...

Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.

... and Tacitus' Annals, book XV, chapter 44:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

The fact that neither of these are particularly glowing reports about Christ are examples of historical verisimilitude, which is to say, they lend credibility to the historicity of the Bible because they're not the kind of thing that people with a pro-Christian agenda would make up. Suetonius is a reliable historian in some respects, though many of his stories are tabloidesque; Tacitus, on the other hand, has proven extremely reliable as a historian, and writing from a pro-Roman, anti-Jewish/Christian point of view is precisely what one would expect from a Roman court historian of the time, which we know that Tacitus was.

A long answer (that could be longer) to a short question, I know. I hope this helps.