Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:

[Minimalist]

The Silence Around the God Boy.

Some interesting observations from the book:

Seneca In his book On Superstition, Seneca the Younger took aim at every known religious sect of his time, pagan and Jewish. But he made no mention of Christians, an uncomfortable fact that Augustine tried to explain away quite unconvincingly in his book City of God.6Remarkably, Augustine’s quotation is all that survives from this particular book. It is very curious that it wasn't saved, since nearly everything else Seneca wrote was preserved. Christians should have loved a text that attacked Jews and pagans, especially by such an eminent pagan philosopher as Seneca. It is also the only Senecan text we would expect to mention Christianity, so the disappearance of this particular book out of well over a hundred surviving writings of Seneca seems suspiciously like the work of snubbed Christian monks.

Okay - one example can be overlooked....

Philo of Alexandria Eusebius mentions that Philo also wrote a book on Pilate's persecution of the Jews (Historia Ecclesiastica, book 2, ch.5) - one more book where Jesus certainly should have been mentioned, but obviously wasn’t, since neither Eusebius nor anyone else ever cites this book for historical documentation of Jesus and his famous execution under Pilate’s watch.

but two examples?

Hippolytus of Rome 3rd century Church father Hippolytus’ magnum opus was his ten-volume A Refutation of All Heresies, or thePhilosophumena. At the end of book 1, Hippolytus declares that he will proceed to blow the lid off all the secret teachings of the mystery faiths, but those next two books are mysteriously missing. So the one place that could have told us how much the Christians borrowed or adapted from pagan mystery religions was inexplicably lost from the collection.

Getting a little harder to ignore.

Cassius Dio Early 3rd century Roman historian Cassius Dio (or Dio Cassius) spent twenty-two years chronicling 983 years of Roman history in 80 volumes. The first 34 volumes and the final 20 volumes survive as fragments and in abridgements by other authors. But the 35ththrough the 60th books are complete – with just a single exception: Book 55 (from the years 12 B.C.E. to 9 C.E.) strangely has a considerable gap in it. What’s more, this puzzling blackout is apparently quite pervasive; even subsequent epitomes by other authors don’t know what Dio had to say here, though they can often fill gaps in the text elsewhere. What has been lost – or removed – from volume 55?

 

Oxford historian Peter Swan notes that Dio's surviving material implies that he discussed Herod the Great's death in this section of missing text. 7 If so, this is where we would expect to find mention of the remarkable events Matthew describes: all of Jerusalem being troubled by news of the new messiah (2:3), Herod’s court intrigue with the Magi, his emergency council of all the chief priests and scribes to find the birthplace of the new messiah, his slaughter of the innocents, or the miraculous Star of Bethlehem. Certainly if he had mentioned any one of these, no Christian would have failed to preserve it and comment on it, seeing how desperately they searched for and doggedly latched on to any scrap of historical confirmation for the Gospels. But on the other hand, if Dio didn’t, then this otherwise unlikely hole in the middle of Dio’s record suddenly does make sense – as a victim of surgical editing by displeased Christian scribes.

And lastly, the xtians favorite historical prop...

Tacitus is widely regarded as the greatest Roman historian of all time, but he is best known in apologetic circles for making one of the earliest pagan references to Christ and Christianity. Christians treasured his off-the-cuff mention of Christ (see the appendix). But it appears they didn’t want to save quite everything Tacitus wrote. His history of the emperor Tiberius has a curious gap of two years – from mid-29 C.E. to mid-31 C.E., including all of the year 30, often regarded as a likely year of the Crucifixion.

 

In the American Journal of Ancient History,8 Vanderbilt University classical historian Robert Drews argues that early Christians deliberately expunged the section, and that this one spot was targeted because Christians were embarrassed by the great historian failing to make any mention of Jesus’ death, or any of the spectacular events that occurred at the time of the Crucifixion. If Christians didn’t squelch this passage, its absence is otherwise very strange and hard to explain (unlike other gaps in Tacitus, as Drews notes).

The suggestion in all of these is that these convenient lacunae in the texts serve only one purpose.  To rid the texts of information which would be damaging to the xtian bullshit story then be cobbled together.

This of course would be typical of the power-hungry shits who created the church.