(February 24, 2019 at 9:33 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: All well and good, but nothing in there about why christianity wasn't ""noticed" earlier. That question carries some assumption that a kernel of the christian narrative is true. If there were miracles falling out of every hat and the whole ane was abuzz with jesus and his wonderful travelling disciples..yeah, someone might have noticed.
In fact people did notice, centuries later when some version of any of the above was true. In the time frame the christians allege, in their own self serving and heavily retconned history, there was nothing like that to notice. By the time there actually were "travelling disciples" spreading the newly formed christian faith by recounting stories about miracles, pagans immediately discarded them as derivative superstition. Even the christians knew their shit was manufactured. Iraneus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr all opined on diobolic mimicry.
The notion that demons, knowing what was to come (this is rich, because they butchered the OT "prophecy" themselves) established a plethora of religions to mimic and thus discredit the future christ. In reality, rather than the "historical documents" of the NT and whatever it's curators chose to preserve, it appears that the worlds first reaction to christianity was the appropriate one. Bunch of superstitious nutballs out in the sticks, doing silly shit. Now pay your taxes.
I'm not a big believer in the historicity of Jesus. What I have said about it is that the account of his interaction with Jewish authorities doesn't make sense. It looks an awful lot like something that non-Jews might imagine would happen when some contentious Jew is brought before Jewish authorities, but isn't at all like what would actually happen. So from a Jewish perspective, the story looks pretty made up.
But arguments like yours aren't very compelling. It sounds like the reasoning of someone from the 20th century who thinks that someone like Jesus would have been in all of the newspapers and on TV. The chances of anyone becoming widely known during their lifetime back then was incredibly small. Thousands of people could see you perform some miracles, and stories of your miracles wouldn't spread far beyond the people who had actually seen it. Stories of your miracles would be competing with a bunch of other stories about other people that we have never heard of. A few might write about it, but the chances of those few writings surviving to our times would be small.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
