Religion

Just copies of histories written down after the events by people who weren't present.

That a ruler and chief administrator, even a minor one by Imperial terms, in an area that was rife with Roman public works would leave some physical traces behind is expected. Which is why, if you read critical works in the 1950s, there's doubt as to whether Pilate even existed or if he, too, was some made-up figure.

Doubt's easy. Was reading this archeological account of a dig in Jerusalem. Apparently in the 1099 First Crusade there was an attack on a Muslim fortress. Attacked from the south, the fortress held. The Crusaders had to cross a ditch, and while they tried to fill it in it still provided enough protection to the fortress and disruption to the attackers that the southern attack failed. It wasn't until there was an attack from the north that the fortress fell. That was the accounts, histories written centuries ago about that event.

However, historians were like, "WTFs a ditch doing there? Why should there be a ditch? There ain't no f-ing ditch there now. The historian wasn't personally, there, so maybe somebody just made it up. Maybe the historian made it up? C'mon, prove it to me--and if you can't prove it, then I think you're either lying or just really in error. Let me authoritatively theorize how the historian's error happened and tell you the truth about what actually happened, and that'll get me another publication for my c.v." Except that a recent dig at the location showed there was a ditch there at the time of the attack. All the critics bet on their own ego and took lack of physical evidence but with near-contemporary accounts as evidence of absence. No southern attack in 1099. No Pontius Pilate.

We're willing to believe indigenous oral traditions from the Americans and Africa that go back hundreds and hundreds of years. But if was written down from eyewitnesses, if it was written down 20 or 30 years after the fact, well, who can trust *that*? (Listened today to a historian talking about the Clotilda, and discussing accounts written down decades after the fact by writers of the last surviving male from that slave ship, in which they discussed things that happened during the man's childhood. People using those texts are working at a greater remove in time that gospel writers would have been from 30 AD. Some things we believe true because we want to; some things we believe false because we want to.)