Quote:You do know that less than an estimated 3% of the population durning the time of Christ could read or write.
Probably pretty close to accurate and not worth quibbling about. (There are degrees of literacy....Roman legionaires were taught to read and write but few could have handled the dialogues of Plato...but they could read the duty roster for cleaning the legionary latrine.)
The problem is that we are speaking of the people who COULD read and write and did so fairly well. Yet no Greco-Roman or Jewish author bothers to mention even an outlandish story involving your boy. Not one.
At this point xtians usually try the old "Judaea was an outpost of the empire" routine which was certainly no longer true after Herod the Great built the port of Caesarea. No. Judaea was part of the empire and more importantly it was sitting on major commercial routes. Ideas...not just merchandise...flow along those routes. Still, NOT ONE REFERENCE TO A DEAD JEW COMING BACK TO LIFE.
In the second century, Lucian writes of xtians in The Passing of Peregrinus, c 165 and Celsus writes, On the True Doctrine c 170. So, we see that after xtians did begin to spread that Greco-Roman writers did mention them and comment on what they considered their barbaric doctrines.
But not in the first century. Not even once.
