Would you care to point out what I've said that suggests I've "had trouble with this article"? (Which, incidentally, is an nbc news puff piece).

I think perhaps you should take your own advice.

The article doesn't say this.

Firstly it may be the earliest mention of Jesus Christ, but it might also not be a reference to him, and may in fact date to "the late 2nd century B.C."

Secondly the article does use the translation "magician" for the Greek word "goistas" but it gives no indication that the word signified a travelling performer doing 'tricks' for money. It talks about fortune-tellers and soothsayers, who offered what we might call 'service magic', i.e. magic for functional purposes, not for entertainment. We can't speculate about what individual practitioners thought or believed about what they were doing but we can say with confidence that the people who came to them in large part did so because they believed they could really learn about the future (or in other cases be healed, find their stolen goods or buried treasure, etc). Not a David Blaine situation at all, unless I am to understand that the people at David Blaine's shows believe he actually has supernatural powers.

I am not a historian of first century Greece and I don't speak Greek, so it could well be that the word on the cup does signify an entertainer (though I highly doubt it), but the article absolutely doesn't support the idea that Jesus was perceived as someone who "travelled around performing magic tricks for donations".

This was in the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary - her marriage to the Catholic King Philip of Spain was the thing thatwas agitating Croft and her friends. I don't think Mary had actually burned any Protestants yet at the time of this incident (and Croft certainly wasn't burned), but she certainly did so during her reign.