Jesus of Nazareth ישו הנוצרי

His years are disputed. His birth is put at 6–4 BCE (3754–3757 AM), his death at 30 or 33 CE (3790 or 3793). No source gives exact dates, and so what stands here is a window and not a lifespan.

What is known outside the Christian books, and it is little. Josephus mentions him twice; the longer passage, the Testimonium Flavianum, is almost certainly retouched by a Christian copyist, and the dispute is only over whether it is retouched wholly or in part. Tacitus (Annals XV.44) speaks of the execution under Pilate as the origin of the sect. There is no further gentile or non-biblical first-century testimony.

What the Jewish side says. The Talmud in certain passages (Sanhedrin 43a, 107b; Gittin 57a) contains stories that medieval polemicists and censors referred to him; modern scholars differ over whether he is the subject there, and whole passages were cut by censorship from the printed editions and restored from manuscripts. Maimonides in Hil. Melakhim 11 treats Christianity as an error, while noting that it, like Islam, prepares the world to acknowledge one God. The talmudic passages cannot be printed as biography: they are disputed both in their text and in their reference.

What is not in this article. Neither an argument about his teaching nor an examination of the gospel narratives: a reference on Jewish history is no place for preaching or for polemic. Here there is only what a reader needs to see who lived alongside whom on the timeline.