Christians, would you have saved Jesus, if you had he chance?

[Ignorant]

The point however is that these redacted texts need not represent the actual chronology of the events they describe as they weren't necessarily written contemporaneous with the events they describe.

Sure, that's fine. The Church isn't all bent out of shape because the Synoptics record Jesus beating people up at the Temple right before is passion while John records it at the beginning of his ministry. I'm with ya.

If the Pauline epistles are any indication, letters were being written between the various churches by approximately 50 CE. That we don't have evidence of these other letters makes your expectation an unrealistic one. Also, much of the so to speak expected documents would not exist as the tradition may have been largely oral.

Fair enough. So early Jesus legends and a church developing by 33 CE, you conclude, is the best hypothesis to account for the data?

What Justin Martyr may have thought during the second century is little evidence of what transpired a century earlier.

I didn't offer Justin Martyr as evidence of the events which transpired nearly a century before. I offered his reference to "The Acts of Pilate" as evidence that ADDITIONAL Roman documents existed which attested to Jesus's crucifixion under Pilate, which someone like the Roman emperor could consult for himself.

By what means are you dating the crucifixion? As pointed out, the Gospels come too late to bear indisputable evidence of when the 'events' in them actually occurred. They claim that they occurred under Pilate and Tiberius, but that could just be an arbitrarily asserted connection. As you said yourself, people at the time dated events by who was in charge; so if you wanted to place a narrative in a certain time, you would claim the participation of historic figures. That would explain why Pilate is involved in the sentencing of an obscure rabbi; simply put, he wasn't. Inserting Pilate into the story is just a false dating of events.

I take the claim of Pilate and Tiberius to be authentic. An obscure birth in an obscure town is easy to invent and difficult to doubt if you are living at the time. A Roman public execution for religious reasons in Jerusalem during the time of Passover, while perhaps easy to invent, would also be easy to doubt and ignore had it not happened. If you read the narrative, Pilate himself doesn't quite understand why he's in the story either. The narrative itself communicates Pilate himself as confused as to why the Jews would seek him out.

If there was no historical obscure rabbi named Jesus crucified in Jerusalem during the Passover, you'd think the Jewish authorities would use that as an argument. "I was there, Paul. Nothing you are preaching even happened. There was no Jesus, no crucifixion during Passover, no empty tomb on the third day." Instead, we have a record of them saying, "The disciples came by at night and stole his body!"