dang I see I properly butchered the title, submitted halfway through changing it probably
I am aware of the FAQ on Jesus and the difficulties of sourcing something so far away in time as well as unimportant when compared to, say, rulers of large states. A bunch of mentions about a local preacher and his cult seems (at least to me as a layman) more than reasonable to assume he did exist.
So I'm wondering – what other fairly important historical figures are also sourced by a relatively small number of historical documents or documents far removed in time etc.?
Obviously I'm asking because the question of Jesus' life gets people on the internet riled up from time to time, so I'm interested in whether there's someone like that whose existence is readily accepted while not being subject to over the top scrutiny, unlike Big J.
Pretty much any other early first century Jewish preacher, prophet or Messianic claimant in the early first century AD is also found only mentioned in one or perhaps two documents, all of which were many decades after the fact.
This is the case for Athronges, John the Baptist, Onias, Hillel, Theudas, the Samaritan prophet, Judas the Galilean, the Egyptian prophet or anyone else you care to mention who was like Jesus. Most of these people are mentioned by just one historian - Josephus - without whom we would not know they existed at all.
This is also the case for most people in the ancient world. We don't even have any contemporary references to Hannibal, so to expect them for obscure Jewish peasant preachers in a backwater province is asking a bit much.
That's why this "no contemporary references to Jesus therefore he didn't exist" argument only tends to convince historical illiterates. Anyone with any grasp of the nature of ancient source material just finds it amusingly naive.