No Jewish or Roman historical text contains any reference to Jesus for at least sixty years. That’s more than “a few decades.” And one text, two average lifetimes after the fact, is far from “widespread.” And that reference, in the Antiquities of Josephus, is widely recognized as a forgery. And indeed, quite demonstrably is a forgery, down to every last word (see OHJ, Ch. 8.9). The second reference in Josephus that Gathercole mentions was also not written by Josephus but inserted centuries later (as the latest peer reviewed literature demonstrates: see my Journal of Early Christian Studies article on it, reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, and summarized in OHJ, Ch. 8.10).
We have to wait twenty more years before we get any other reference to Jesus as a historical person, in the Annals of Tacitus (contrary to Gathercole, Pliny, Tacitus’s friend and contemporary, never refers to Jesus as a historical person). And that reference is probably also a forgery (as the latest peer reviewed literature demonstrates: see my Vigiliae Christianae article on it, reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, and summarized in OHJ, Ch. 8.10). But even if it isn’t (indeed even if the reference in Josephus isn’t), neither of those references has any indicated source but Christian hearsay, which by then was just aping the Gospels. Consequently, neither of these sources can corroborate the Gospels. They are not an independent source. It is incompetent (or dishonest) of a historian to cite sources that aren’t independent as if they were multiple or independent sources.
No non-Christian ever noticed Jesus, or ever found any record of him outside the Gospels.
Including Josephus and Tacitus. Even if anything in them about Jesus were authentic.
That’s a problem. Although it’s not a huge problem—if we accept the Gospels all lie about how famous Jesus was, and thus conclude against their wild narratives that Jesus was actually a nobody, then it’s entirely expected no one would notice him in the literature of the era. The real problem for the historicity of Jesus is the absence of any reference to Jesus visiting earth in the earliest Christian documents. Because those “dozens of Christian writings” Gathercole refers to, are just the Gospels, which are wholly mythical and absurd and unsourced and a lifetime too late (OHJ, Chs. 8 & 9), and the Epistles, most of which are forgeries (a fact concealed by Gathercole)—and those that aren’t, never place Jesus on earth. They only describe him as someone seen in visions, and known about from hidden messages in scripture and communications from heaven (OHJ, Ch. 11).
- but there is one quote that resonates:
and looking for answers why their god would let that happen. 
