Quote:Lucian of Samosota was only born in 125 A.D. and I'm unsure what time he wrote this
That's okay, R/R79... can't expect you to know every detail of ancient history and you are utterly correct about the usefulness of hostile witnesses. In fact, hostile witnesses ( or even neutral witnesses) at least are not likely to be propagandists as in the case of the original gospel writer. That's why even something like the Doctrina Jacobi would be useful for xtians if they had something like it.
So Lucian wrote the Death of Peregrinus. Here's what we know about Peregrinus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrinus_Proteus
So Lucian is commenting on the death of an actual person which happened in 165 AD and thus we can date the writing to sometime after 165. Simple enough.
There are interesting facts that we can extract even from Lucian's satire and I'll ask you to hold that thought because I'll be coming back to it. First, Lucian as a greco-roman writer was perfectly willing to paint with a wide brush. Peregrinus joined the Ebionites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites
There were blasted by the early church curmudgeon, Irenaeus, in his Against Heresies in the later 2d century. But such distinctions are lost on Lucian. A xtian is a xtian is a xtian, as far as he is concerned. Next, like all the other earlier greco roman sources that xtians try to use, Lucian writing in at least 165 gives no indication of knowing about any "jesus." My guess is that that part of the story had not fully crystallized by that time....or certainly had not spread very far from its point of origin.
Lastly, Lucian is writing a satire. He is poking fun at xtians and I agree with your point about hostile witnesses. He at least provides a basis that such ideas existed. But we can never know the intent of most of the writers. For example, we have no 'cover-page' for say, The Acts of Pilate. Xtians insisted that this was a real report written by Pilate but suppose the author was simply wondering to himself...." if Pilate had written a report, what might he have said?" You cannot know the intent of an author and the author is not responsible for the conclusions of later believers who chose to accept the nonsensical as factual. We owe Lucian a debt for making it clear that he was a satirist but he was not the only one in antiquity.
