Blaise Pascal is right to have jotted in one of his baroque notebooks that Jesus lived “in such obscurity… that historians writing of important matters of state hardly noticed him”. And Erich Auerbach is right to have stressed in a book he wrote in Istanbul, exiled from Hitler’s Reich, that Jesus’s death was “a provincial incident”. This is what makes it so remarkable that the life and death of an impoverished Galilean rabbi are described in a number of non-Christian texts from the first centuries of our era.
