The non-Christian literary record from the first and early second centuries contains no contemporary account of an empty tomb, resurrection appearances, a midday darkness lasting hours, an earthquake splitting rocks, or deceased “holy ones” walking in Jerusalem. Those details appear only in the New Testament narratives (chiefly the Gospels, composed decades later). What external sources do contain is sparse, late, and limited to the bare fact of an execution under Pilate. Claims that go beyond that, rest on solely on the text of the Christ Movement.
Roman administrative practice was indeed record-oriented for official acts, tax matters, and notable public disorders. Provincial governors filed reports; capital sentences against provincials who attracted crowds or used royal titles were routine enough that individual cases rarely generated surviving literary notice unless they later became politically useful. Pontius Pilate’s tenure (26–36 CE) is attested in inscriptions and in brief notices by Philo and Josephus concerning other incidents, yet no Roman archival extract or contemporary pagan historian describes the execution of a Galilean, Nabataean or Nazarene named Jesus, no mention of the disposal of his body, or any subsequent disturbance at a tomb. The silence is real; it is also the normal situation for most individual provincial executions of the period.
The two most frequently cited non-Christian passages do not fill the gap. Tacitus, writing around 116 CE in the Annals (15.44), mentions “Christus,” who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus,” in the course of explaining the origin of the Christians Nero punished after the fire of 64 CE. The notice is second-hand, roughly eighty years after the event, and contains none of the Gospel particulars, no darkness, no earthquake, no empty tomb, no risen dead. It places the execution under Tiberius and Pilate, not during or after the revolt of 66–70 CE. Suetonius and Pliny the Younger likewise refer to Christians or to “Chrestus” only in connection with later disturbances or legal inquiries; they add no details of a crucifixion narrative.
Josephus’s Antiquities (completed c. 93 CE) contains the famous Testimonium Flavianum (18.3.3). The passage as it stands in medieval manuscripts asserts that Jesus was the Messiah who rose on the third day. Most specialists, including those who accept an authentic core, judge the overtly Christ movement clauses to be later insertions; the shorter reference to “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” (20.9.1) is more widely regarded as original but again says nothing about the manner of death, a tomb, or a resurrection. No earlier manuscript tradition preserves an uninterpolated version that independently confirms the Gospel sequence.
Natural phenomena fare no better outside Christian sources. The Synoptic Gospels describe darkness from roughly the sixth to the ninth hour and, in Matthew, an earthquake and the opening of tombs. No surviving Roman, Greek, or Jewish author of the first century records a matching regional darkness or seismic event tied to a Judean execution in the early 30’s CE. Later Christian apologists (Julius Africanus, citing the lost Thallus) attempted to link a notice of darkness to the crucifixion; the citation is late, the original wording is not extant, and it does not establish a contemporary non-Christian record of the Gospel scene. The rising of the saints and their appearance in the city (Matthew 27:52–53) likewise lack any external corroboration.
The earliest Christian references themselves are not contemporary eyewitness reports of an empty tomb. Paul’s letters, the oldest surviving Christian documents (50’s CE), state that Christ “died,” “was buried,” and “was raised,” and list appearance traditions, but they do not describe a discovered empty tomb, Roman guards, or public phenomena in Jerusalem. Those narrative elements enter the written record with the Gospels, beginning with Mark (commonly dated around 70 CE or shortly thereafter). The gap between the events and the first detailed accounts is therefore measured in decades, and the accounts circulate entirely within the communities that already proclaimed the resurrection.
The event of the sleeping Roman guards at the tomb is thought to be a fictional account through which might turn out to be that their testimony was paid for by The Empire.
This is not to claim his crucifixion never occurred. A provincial execution of a figure later called Christ under Pilate is the element that finds limited, non-contemporary external mention and this is historically unremarkable. It does not show that the specific “record” of the rugged cross, the vacated tomb, the midday darkness, the earthquake, and the walking dead is solely confined to the texts of the Christ Movement. Roman record-keeping, known for being meticulous, preserves no independent witness to them.