Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[Aractus]

Richard Carrier denies you "consensus."

He's a complete quack. Stop quoting from fringe scholars who aren't respected by their peers.

I get it from your apparent taking them at face-value, and assuming that others (namely James) would not only do so, but endeavor to report their entirety as, ahem, gospel truth, when in fact any time an author sets pen to paper, he does so with an agenda.

Yes and his agenda is as clear as Paul's...

The consensus of biblical scholars is as valuable as the consensus of creatards.

No it isn't! It has the same value as a scholarly consensus in any other field. WWII historians for example. There is no difference, whatsoever in believing in Jesus Mysticism and in believing in Holocaust Denial. And in fact there are more scholars (within their field) who doubt the Holocaust than there are that doubt the historicity of Jesus. If that's what you believe then you have lost all credentials for critical thinking and for evaluating evidence.

It is based on taking a prior assumption as if it were proven true. There is no evidence given for the existence of Yeshua outside of the bible and a few insertions by later christian scholars into non christian documents.

So what? There doesn't need to be any more evidence than that. This is a point made by numerous historians - not just NT scholars, but ancient Rome historians as well. Are you saying their expertise is worthless as well??

And frankly I'm not convinced either way on Yeshua, there is too little evidence there for to say, definitively, yay or nay. But I'm pretty convinced that if there were a real Yeshua, instead of being the genesis of the christian religion, he was probably a proto-zealot, being leader of a small (possibly violent) anti-Roman group who wanted to restore the theocratic kingdom of Jewish legend.

That hypothesis is laughable.

Edit: As regards the writings, I wasn't talking about the dates of their provenance (because that is an estimate), I was talking about the earliest date we have for a substantial part of a single christian document from the new testament (or other similar documents rejected by orthodoxy). The oldest example of a largely complete document is a copy of Luke dated to c.200CE. We have older fragments, but they are little better than a small part of a leaf containing word and sentence fragments. Either you misunderstood me, or you deliberately misconstrued me in an attempt to make me look bad. Given your track record my money's on the latter.

So what? Later copies are all that exist of almost anything with very little exception from the period. The earliest copy of Antiquities by Josephus is from the 10th century and it's incomplete.