Carrier addressed the stupidity of the argument about the so-called evidence for jesus versus Alexander the Great, thusly:
Quote:A greater gaffe in defense of Jesus' historicity is to make claims that are conspicuously opposite the truth of the matter, as when E.P. Sanders boasts
that 'the sources for Jesus are better . . . than those that deal with Alexander[the Great]'. A more suicidal remark for his case could hardly be imagined.
Unlike Jesus, we have over half a dozen relatively objective historians discussing the history of Alexander the Great (most notably Diodorus,Dionysius, Rufus, Trogus, Plutarch and more). These are not romances or propagandists, least of all fanatical worshipers, or anyone concerned aboutdogma, but disinterested historical writers employing some of the recognized skills of critical analysis of their day on a wide body of sources they had avai lable that we do not. Which doesn't mean we trust everything they
say, but we still cannot name even one such person for Jesus, and ' none' is not 'more' than half a dozen.
Lest one complain that these historians wrote 'too late', this is actually of minor significance because, unlike Jesus, they still had contemporary and eyewitness sources to work from. In fact, our best historian of Alexander is Arrian, who though he wrote five hundred years later, nevertheless employed an explicit method of using only three eyewitness sources (two of them actual generals of Alexander who wrote accounts of their adventures with him). He names and identifies these sources, explains how he used them to generate a more reliable account, and discusses their relative merits. That alone is quite a great deal more than we have for Jesus, for whom we have not a single named eyewitness source in any of the accounts of him, much less a discussion of how those sources were used or what their relative merits were. Not even for the anonymous witness claimed to have been used by the authors of the Gospel of John, which claim isn't even credible to begin with (that source is almost certainly fabricated, as I ' l l show inChapter 10, ), but in any case we're not told who he was, why we should trust him or what all exactly derives from him.
And that's not all We have mentions of Alexander the Great and details about him in several contemporary or eyewitness sources still extant, including the speeches of Isocrates and Demosthenes and Aeschines and Iyperides and Dinarchus, the poetry of Theocritus, the scientific works of Theophrastus and the plays of Menander. We have not a single contemporary mention of Jesus-apart from, at best, the letters of Paul, who never even knew him, and says next to nothing about him (as a historical man),
or the dubious letters of certain alleged disciples (and I say alleged because apart from known forgeries, none ever say they were his disciples), and(again apart from those forgeries) none ever distinctly place Jesus in history (see Chapters 7 and 11). The eyewitness and contemporary attestation forAlexander is thus vastly better than we have for Jesus, not the other way around. A nd that's even if we count only extant texts-if we count extant quotations of lost texts in other extant texts, we have literally hundreds of
quotations of contemporaries and eyewitnesses that survive in later works attesting to Alexander and his history. We have not even one such for Jesus (e.g. even Paul never once quotes anyone he identifies as an eyewitness or contemporary source for any of his information on Jesus).
And even that is not all. For Alexander we have contemporary inscriptions and coins, sculpture (originals or copies of originals done from life), as well as other archaeological verifications of historical claims about him. For example, we can verify the claim that Alexander attached Tyre to the mainland with rubble from Ushu-because that rubble is still there and dates to his time; the city of Alexandria named for him dates from his lifetime as expected; archaeology confirms Alexander invaded Bactria; etc. We also have archaeological confirmation of many of his battles and acts, including the exact time and day of his death-because contemporary records of these exist in the recovered clay tablet archives of Persian court astrologers. None of this is even remotely analogous to Jesus, for whom we have absolutely zero archaeological corroboration (e.g. none of
the tombs alleged to be his have been verified as such), much less (as we have for Alexander) actual archaeological attestation (in the form of coins, inscriptions and statues-claims to the contrary are generally bogus, as I'll discuss in Chapter 7, ).
It's ridiculous to claim the source situation is better for Jesus than for Alexander the Great (or indeed any comparably famous person of antiquity). The exact reverse is the case, by many orders of magnitude. This is not the way to defend the historicity of Jesus.
On The Historicity of Jesus, pgs 21-23
