Evidence for Jesus outside the Bible?

[Minimalist]

You said you believed Christians were never martyred.

You don't listen very well, do you, Hannah? The world is not ALWAYS or NEVER. Sometimes reality is a little more nuanced than that and I'm gathering that you don't handle nuance well, either.

Xtians were most assuredly persecuted during the Roman Empire. We have actual evidence in the form of decrees but they date from the middle of the 3d century. By that time not only had xtians become numerous enough to be notable but a series of significant disasters, military and otherwise, had hit the empire and one can just see these xtian shitwits ( as they do today everytime there is a fucking earthquake!) merrily proclaiming that its good news because it means fucking jesus is coming back. The Romans, concerned with far more practical issues, took great offense to these morons and their ludicrous joy at disaster.

In January 250, Decius issued an edict for the suppression of Christianity. The edict itself was fairly clear:

All the inhabitants of the empire were required to sacrifice before the magistrates of their community 'for the safety of the empire' by a certain day (the date would vary from place to place and the order may have been that the sacrifice had to be completed within a specified period after a community received the edict). When they sacrificed they would obtain a certificate (libellus) recording the fact that they had complied with the order.[2]

While Decius himself may have intended the edict as a way to reaffirm his conservative vision of the Pax Romana and to reassure Rome's citizens that the empire was still secure, it nevertheless sparked a "terrible crisis of authority as various Christian bishops and their flocks reacted to it in different ways." [2] Measures were first taken demanding that the bishops and officers of the church make a sacrifice for the Emperor,[9] a matter of an oath of allegiance that Christians considered offensive. Certificates were issued to those who satisfied the pagan commissioners during the persecution of Christians under Decius. Forty-six such certificates have been published, all dating from 250, four of them from Oxyrhynchus.[10][dubious – discuss] Christian followers who refused to offer a pagan sacrifice for the Emperor and the Empire's well-being by a specified date risked torture and execution.[11] A number of prominent Christians did, in fact, refuse to make a sacrifice and were killed in the process, including Pope Fabian himself in 250, and "anti-Christian feeling[s] led to pogroms at Carthage and Alexandria."[11] In reality, however, towards the end of the second year of Decius' reign, "the ferocity of the [anti-Christian] persecution had eased off, and the earlier tradition of tolerance had begun to reassert itself."[11] The Christian church, though, never forgot the reign of Decius whom they labelled as that "fierce tyrant"

Try to remember that Pliny, 150 years before Decius, did not give a rat's ass about religion. The law those xtians had broken was about holding secret meetings not religion. The Romans cared about sedition. They were notoriously tolerant of religion and incorporated many foreign cults into the Empire.

We have nothing from the Romans prior to Decius that they conducted anti-xtian pogroms as a matter of direct policy. This is not to say that there may not have been sporadic incidents across the empire where xtians were killed but we do not have any record of systematic persecution on the scale that later church writers invented. As Celsus tells us c 180 AD:

We are citizens of a particular empire with a particular set of laws, and it behooves the Christians at least to recognize their duties within the present context: namely, to help the emperor in his mission to provide for the common good; to cooperate with him in what is right and to fight for him if it becomes necessary, as though we were all soldiers or fellow generals. This is what a good man does: he accepts public office for the preservation of the law and of religion, if it becomes necessary for him to do so.

Even by 180 it can thus be seen that xtians were making a fucking nuisance of themselves and had attracted the attention of the upper classes.