For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

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.

Even when it's a matter of chance it's likely that fragments of records about lower class criminals would have turned up by now if the Romans had kept any. And I wasn't talking about anything to do with Jesus - see further on in this post.

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.

You'd be surprised what can survive outside Egypt and Qumram. Vindolanda Tablets

The Vindolanda tablets are the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. They are also probably the best source of information about life on Hadrian's Wall.[1][2] Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian's Wall).

Wooden tablets have been found at twenty Roman settlements in Britain.[18] However, most of these sites did not yield the type of tablet found at Vindolanda, but rather "stylus tablets", marked with pointed metal styli. A significant number of ink tablets have been identified at Carlisle (also on Hadrian's Wall)[19]

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.

What's that got to do with what I said in Post ~287?

we'll never know the names and crimes of people who were executed in the arenas. Maybe the real truth is on the lines of one loony Christian plus 19 ordinary criminals and the Christian writers recorded it as 20 Christians.

This has nothing to do with Jesus because the Bible doesn't say he was executed in an arena. The lack of records makes it impossible to know the real number of Christians who were thrown to the lions as opposed to the number that the Christian writers wanted people to believe had been martyred.

I did a quick search for the word criminal and executed on the Vindolanda Tablets site but nothing came up. (It's running very slowly at the moment.) The tablets did reveal a lot of interesting things about life in a Hadrian's Wall fort, though.

One of the tablets confirms that Roman soldiers wore underpants (subligaria),[12][13]

There are only scant references to the indigenous Britons. Until the discovery of the tablets, historians could only speculate on whether the Romans had a nickname for the Britons. Brittunculi (diminutive of Britto; hence 'little Britons') found on one of the Vindolanda tablets, is now known to be a derogatory, or patronizing, term used by the Roman garrisons that were based in Northern Britain to describe the locals.[14]