(February 24, 2019 at 6:16 pm)Yonadav Wrote:(February 24, 2019 at 6:03 pm)PRJA93 Wrote: How do you mean?
People often use the "very few scholars deny the histrocity of Jesus" line as if it means anything. That some apologists are throwing the religious a bone doesn't change how much evidence exists for a historical Jesus. At best, we can say he might've been real. Maybe.
But I don't know if that's quite good enough to just march on like we know he was real and attempt to discredit anyone who says otherwise.
I'm not arguing for his historicity. I just wouldn't expect to find mention of him in other sources. Folks in this discussion are acting like it is reasonable to expect that he would have been mentioned in one or more of the surviving pagan writings from that time. But I think that it would be a terribly long shot for him to be mentioned in any of them.
Flavius Josephus wrote about Christians ,and their leader,. (that from hearsay.) There is some doubt about authenticity. Josephus was not a contemporary of Jesus
Origins of Christianity.[1][2] Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, written around 93–94 AD, includes two references to the biblical Jesus Christ in Books 18 and 20 and a reference to John the Baptist in Book 18.[1][3] Scholarly opinion varies on the total or partial authenticity of the reference in Book 18, Chapter 3, 3 of the Antiquities, a passage that states that Jesus the Messiah was a wise teacher who was crucified by Pilate, usually called the Testimonium Flavianum.[4][5][1] The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it is broadly agreed upon that it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus, which was then subject to Christian interpolation and/or alteration.[5][6][7][8][9][10] Although the exact nature and extent of the Christian redaction remains unclear,[11] broad consensus exists as to what the original text of the Testimonium by Josephus would have looked like.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
Pretty sure that least one Roman historian wrote some scathing things about Christians as extremists, and pests. Not sure of the credibility of the link below, but worth a glance.
https://listverse.com/2015/02/27/10-anci...istianity/
I think your point about the survival of ancient writings is spot on. In context, first century Christians were just another fringe group of Jews. There was no reason for any ancient writer to waste the papyrus/vellum writing about them. They only got written about when they did something interesting or were used as a convenient scape goat. I suspect this was because no one knew much about them, and what they thought they knew was more likely than not to be scurrilous nonsense as it was with the Jews and ordinary Romans.
The dead sea scrolls are an almost unheard of example of the survival of an original ancient text. The only way texts written in the first century ce, was for them to be copied. This was a specialist job, which took a lot of time to produce just one copy.
Had say apostles had written anything about Jesus , the physical survival of such documents would have been highly problematic. So it's logically possible that such writing did once exist. in 2000 years, none have been found. I'm not confident that they would have been hidden, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
An excellent example of the difficulty of original ancient writings being preserved is the elusive 'Q document/Qsource/Q Gospel" which a goodly number of biblical scholars are convinced must have existed, and which is considered very important. So far, not so much as a few square centimetres of papyrus of the document has been found. That leaves one to conclude: (1) it never existed (2) . it was simply not copied, and was lost (3) it was hidden so well nobody has been able to find it.
Staying with Occam's razor, my money is on number (1)
I found the article quoted below very helpful.
The Q source (also called Q document, Q Gospel, or Q from German: Quelle, meaning "source") is a hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (logia). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's Oral Tradition.[1][2][3]
Along with Marcan priority, Q was hypothesized by 1900, and is one of the foundations of most modern gospel scholarship.[4] B. H. Streeter formulated a widely accepted view of Q: that it was written in Koine Greek; that most of its contents appear in Matthew, in Luke, or in both; and that Luke more often preserves the text's original order than Matthew. In the two-source hypothesis, the three-source hypothesis and the Q+/Papias hypothesis Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q as sources. Some scholars have postulated that Q is actually a plurality of sources, some written and some oral.[5] Others have attempted to determine the stages in which Q was composed.[6]
Q's existence has been questioned.[6] Omitting what should have been a highly treasured dominical document from all early Church catalogs, its lack of mention by Jerome is a conundrum of modern Biblical scholarship.[7] But copying Q might have been seen as unnecessary as it was preserved in the canonical gospels. Hence, it was preferable to copy the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, "where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant".[8] Despite challenges, the two-source hypothesis retains wide support.[6]
