Quote:I was wondering if the Romans kept records of criminals but it seems that they didn't where the lower classes were concerned
Whether they did or didn't - and probably in the case of Roman citizens they did - is irrelevant. The issue is why would scribes take the time to preserve those records across the centuries? If archaeology has shown us anything it is that, monumental inscriptions aside, the preservation of ancient trade records and tax receipts is a matter of chance. There are thousands of cuneiform texts on clay tablets which were baked in fires when the palaces they were located in burned. This is why we have them.
The climate in desert areas such as Egypt or Qumran has fortuitously allowed us to recover documents from thousands of years ago which would not have survived in Italy or Spain or France just because of humidity.
Now with preserved documents - documents which someone made a conscious decision to copy and re-copy across the ages it must be understood that this is a laborious process and the documents which were selected for preservation had to meet the agenda of those doing the copying. I am fully with the group which sees Josephus' Testimoniam Flavianum as a 4th century fraud perpetrated by Eusebius. But it must be understood that without it we would probably not have Josephus' works at all. The xtian monks who copied Josephus
did so thinking they were preserving the words of a man who validated the existence of their "god." In contrast a contemporary of Josephus, Justus of Tiberias ( in Galilee) also wrote a history of the jews. We have the comment of Photius, a 9th century Patriarch of Constantinople who tells us that he has read Justus' work and that he makes "no reference to the appearance of christ." As a result, Justus' work was not preserved. You can bet your ass that if someone had found a reference to the godboy in it we would copies of Justus' work coming out of our asses.
