RE: I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!
August 17, 2009 at 10:40 pm
(This post was last modified: August 17, 2009 at 11:51 pm by Jon Paul.)
(August 17, 2009 at 9:10 pm)Eilonnwy Wrote: By the way, there is contemporary evidence for other historical figures at the time, like Caeser and Herod.Special pleading again. Incomparable examples. Jesus was a peasant in Galilee, not Caesar. There were many magicians at the time, and this was nothing special. People who hadn't eyewitness experience of Jesus, and especially non-Jews, would likely confound Jesus with a magician, or an obscure sage, foolish Iudean, heretic, or any other number of things. As Graham Stanton says, "There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first- or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher."
(August 17, 2009 at 9:10 pm)Eilonnwy Wrote: ']Well, this is a presupposition. Most scholars believe that there were earlier writings that the Gospel writers had at hand (Q and several other unknown earlier writings that have been attempted to be reconstructed), which have subsequently been lost.
We can conclusively know for a fact that they exist. Yet we cannot have contemporary evidence for someone who was supposedly known to have performed miracles and raise people from the dead? Absolutely none of his supposed apostles wrote anything down?
As to why we could expect there would be little documentation outside of the Jewish, religious literature of the apostles; here are some of the reasons.
Quote:The non-Christian sources for the historical truth of the Gospels are both few and polluted by hatred and prejudice. A number of reasons have been advanced for this condition of the pagan sources:
* The field of the Gospel history was remote Galilee;
* the Jews were noted as a superstitious race, if we believe Horace (Credat Judoeus Apella, I, Sat., v, 100);
* the God of the Jews was unknown and unintelligible to most pagans of that period;
* the Jews in whose midst Christianity had taken its origin were dispersed among, and hated by, all the pagan nations;
* the Christian religion itself was often confounded with one of the many sects that had sprung up in Judaism, and which could not excite the interest of the pagan spectator.
It is at least certain that neither Jews nor Gentiles suspected in the least the paramount importance of the religion, the rise of which they witnessed among them. These considerations will account for the rarity and the asperity with which Christian events are mentioned by pagan authors. But though Gentile writers do not give us any information about Christ and the early stages of Christianity which we do not possess in the Gospels, and though their statements are made with unconcealed hatred and contempt, still they unwittingly prove the historical value of the facts related by the Evangelists.
We need not delay over a writing entitled the "Acts of Pilate", which must have existed in the second century (Justin, "Apol"., I, 35), and must have been used in the pagan schools to warn boys against the belief of Christians (Eusebius, Church History I.9; Church History IX.5); nor need we inquire into the question whether there existed any authentic census tables of Quirinius.
(August 17, 2009 at 9:10 pm)Eilonnwy Wrote: No historian bothered to mention a man who was executed for being the king of the Jews? I know it was 2 thousand years ago, but historians did exist at the time, why do we have absolutely no account of Jesus until 40 years after he is claimed to have died?Again, that's the most pessimistic view. That's not needed, unless you really want it to be a pessimistic scenario, which of course you do. The account we have at hand can be said to have been written down as early as 15 years after his death even with the first versions of the first Gospel, and even earlier than that with Q and the first writings. In either case, the writings took place within the life of his Apostles and contemporaries.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton