Jesus's sacrifice

[SleepingDemon]

Sleeping Demon- And I supose anything penned by a Christian hand is completely irrelevant to the conversation? To answer your question about josephus, do you know he didn't believe jesus was the messiah? Perhaps he was depicting the socially accepted depiction of him. That would be the earliest actual account of Jesus, unless you count the prophesies of his coming. You're also precluding any possibility of anyone who had seen/heard him from existing a mere 40 years later. The bible also has Moses living 120 years I believe. Josephus was born in 6 and wrote "antiquities of the Jews" in 90 something I think. I think you're exagerating the possibility that they arne't first hand accounts, and I think I've used your own quotes to show that.

Your analogy is a little off to me too. Superman would be considered by many to be a hero. Whether you die or not isn't as relevant to your image as what you've done in that life.

Even if, and i'm not admitting this fully, Josephus did write a paragraph in antiquities of the jews wherein he completely disregarded his orthodox jew faith and wrote about jesus, it would have been based around what people were saying at the time, which wouldn't have been first hand, or probably not even second hand. Josephus never met jesus, Tacitus never met jesus, and it's conceivable that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John never did either. Why did they wait so long after jesus died to write about the wonders that he did? Why would people who walked and talked with god incarnate wait half a century to write it all down? A lot changes in 50 years, memories fade, some things are exaggerated, some things forgotten altogether. Why isn't there any documentation from 30 AD about jesus? Why is it that the only verifiable documentation exists solely in a book written by christians for christians with very little outside and objective corroboration?

Most important however, why is it that someone so important to mankind as a whole, someone who healed the sick, raised the dead, preached to sinners, saved the lost, and walked on water spoken of so little by regional historians of the time? Some of the documentation concerning jesus may have been destroyed over the course of history, absolutely, but surely some of it must have survived. Jesus traveled during his lifetime, he met people, surely someone from 30 AD in modern day Pakistan, or Jordan, or Iraq, or any other region heard of this man, this living god walking amongst us and performing miracles, right? Jesus has as much historical evidence supporting his existence as Hercules and Santa. Prove me wrong.