Gospel of John controversy

[Rev. Rye]

Herodotus? Why would he be relevant with Jesus when he wrote centuries before Jesus was even a thing? Or, for that matter, Livy, who died before Jesus would have started his ministry and whose works only went down to about 9 BC (with the surviving parts only reaching 166 BC)?

I literally just the day before yesterday had some idiot post an unsourced meme of alleged "historians" he claimed knew about Jesus and that was one of the names on the list. Plato Aristotle and Homer too. This was the idiot's "evidence".

Somehow, I doubt that textual reliability is just down to number of copies and how long it took for any surviving copies to be written down. Then again, if they counted the actual textual variants, it’d probably have torpedoed their claims.

Also, how did they only get seven manuscripts for Plato when there’s a minimum of 250 known?