(April 15, 2012 at 8:52 am)Christian Wrote: GAIUS SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS (69 - 130 A.D.)
Suetonius records the expulsion of the Christian Jews from Rome (mentioned in Acts 18:2) and confirms the Christian faith being founded by Christ.
THALLUS (~ 52 A.D.)
Thallus' explanation of the midday darkness which occurred during the Passover of Jesus' crucifixion. Thallus tries to dismiss the darkness as a natural occurrence (a solar eclipse) but Africanus argues (and any astronomer can confirm) a solar eclipse cannot physically occur during a full moon due to the alignment of the planets.
CELSUS (~ 178 A.D.)
He went to great lengths to disprove the divinity of Jesus yet never denied His actual existence.
Then we have the account of Jesus Christ in The Bible!
The Bible is a collection of 66 books (39 Old Testament, 27 New Testament) written over a period of 1500 years by approximately 40 different authors about creation, history, prophecy and Gods plan for all of creation.
This fact is a miracle ALL by itself!
How can 40 different authors over a period of 1500 years write a collection of work that doesn't contradict itself??
This line of reasoning is fallacious and I imagine being ripped to shreds once I am done here. A miracle you say? Well if these books were written in the same geographical area that was obsessed of preserving their own culture and identity, then I expect at least some sense of unity regardless of the time span.
An account of 66 books? First, you are not acknowledging the apocrypha used by the Catholics and the book of Enoch in the Ethiopian church and I have no doubt there are other churches who pick and choose what books to read. The point? The 66-book compilation, most are familiar with was selected artificially and not (super)naturrally. If a group of church fathers started reading Christian literature (including Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Mary, Acts of Paul, the Didache etc) and only picked the ones they liked, then the collection of the bible is nothing extraordinary. Yet this is the case (Council of Carthage).
Lastly, the bible is not unified, from the first pages of Hebrew scripture we see conflicting accounts of creation written from a typical Judean and a priest independently to the last pages of Revelation, where the image of Jesus in the Gospels (itself conflicting) lies in tension with the Jesus in Revelation, and also in tension with Jesus in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters.
