We do have historical accounts of other so-called 'messiahs' from that same period, but not one of Jesus.
Odd, eh?
Since you asked, not really.
The claim is that Jesus was a protege of John the Baptist's. John's attested only once in the received corpus of non-Christian writings. None of his
other proteges are attested outside the Christian canon, although what is attested about John makes its plausible that he had some.
In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus is very vague about who's the Messiah, until his symbolic entry into Jerusalem. He's dead within a week after that.
Being "Messiah for a week" just might get lost among the accounts of the many who lasted longer.
Only in the
Gospel of John is there any insistence that Jesus was positioned as Messiah by his mentor form the outset. It is uncontroversial
that
John was written by a non-Jew, for a non-Jewish audience, well after the fall of Jerusalem, at a time when interest in who might have been
the Jewish Messiah was of diminished urgency. I suspect that Gentile opinions about who was the Jewish Messiah never were a serious factor in Jewish
politics anyway.
I imagine an alternate Universe in which the canon includes a Fifth Gospel which comprises exceprts from "I Did it My Way" by Pontius Pilate, "A
Temple is only a Building," by Caiphas, and half a dozen other autobiographies of non-Christian contemporaries of Jesus, all recording their
encounters with him.
In that Universe, atheist activists post on ATS that the Fifth Gospel is obviously fake, because important people like that would have taken no notice
of yet another Messiah.
