Not to mention that the gospels openly record that Jesus was ridiculed, rejected and despised as a nutjob and unrepentant sinner and drunk who was ultimately executed as a common criminal of no account.
The obvious reason for lack of historical corroboration is that no one recording important things going on back then would have thought otherwise.
Not the type of person even worthy of a footnote.
The only reason the name of Jesus is known at all unlike every other first century drunk is because the people who knew him personally believed in him and knew that he wasn't crazy to claim to be the messiah after hearing him teach and seeing with their own eyes Jesus reveal things that had been kept secret since the foundation of the world.
So the lack of evidence is evidence of a cover up? See, that's what happens. Problem with your theory is if the gospels were true many things would have been impossible to ignore. All the multitude following this rabbi around and him performing miracles of various sorts. Josephus droned on and on in daily minutia but didn't think it worthy to mention a dude walking on water, feeding thousand with a little bread and fish, healing lepers and cripples. It was a small enclosed community, surely the word got around.
And as I mentioned before, the earthquakes, walking dead eclipse. All pretty hard to ignore.
Also contemporary to the time was Philo. Now he loaned money to Herod and knew some of these characters personally. But more importantly was on the forefront of revisioning the OT in Hellenistic thought. We would consider it new age today. He was the first one we know of to use the term Logos to describe the physical operations of god.
Looking at the whole thing with no excuses or spin it's obvious the NT writers were familiar with his work, knew the OT only by the Greek translation, the Septuagint, putting oral stories into the written word.
Please don't put words in my mouth.
I did not say that the lack of evidence is evidence of cover up.
I said that the lack of evidence outside of the gospels is explained by the fact that Jesus was considered an unrepentant sinner and criminal of no account, most likely insane..
The style of writing used was the exact same style used in writing the OT. The entire story of Jesus can be factually and literally false but absolutely true at the same time depending on which way the words are interpreted.
Of course a story like feeding the multitude is impossible to be literally true but if you can perceive that it was never about feeding a large crowd of thousands of people with two fish and five loves but teaching a large crowd with seven disciples, represented by two fish and five loaves of bread, then it tells a hidden story that conforms to reality, the miracle being such a large and skeptical crowd was satisfied with his teaching and miraculously turned seven disciples into twelve represented by the 12 baskets full of the uneaten pieces of teaching, the little things that the crowd could not swallow.........
Part of the problem and an obstacle to understanding is that the word miracle is misleading. Originally they were recorded
signs that God was with Jesus. These signs became demonstrations of divine power over reality when superstitious romans completely ignorant of Jewish thought, belief, and traditional literary expressions usurped authority over scripture and came to their own dumb conclusions..ie., Jesus was an edible mangod who hosted a magical fish sandwich party in the desert, raised the dead and was executed because God loved the Romans so much....etc...
In the same way there is rational way to interpret every single miracle of Jesus that conforms to reality. One need only apply well known and long established literary techniques, metaphors, allegory, homonyms, hyperbole, etc., to discern what was deliberately hidden by Jews who believed that Jesus was the Holy One of God.
If you look and look and keep on looking you will find it.
If you don't look, you will find nothing...
