(January 3, 2015 at 11:41 pm)Lek Wrote: I don't know of any archaeological excavations that reveal the existence of Plato. How many historians from Plato's time write of his existence? The oldest surviving manuscript of any of Plato's works dates to 895 AD. That's about 1,300 years after his supposed lifetime. Yet virtually everyone believes he did exist. Most historians today believe that Jesus did exist. The manuscript evidence for Plato's existence doesn't hold a candle to the manuscript evidence for Jesus, of which the earliest copies date to one to two hundred years after his lifetime.
The manuscripts that date 1-2 hundred years after Jesus' alleged death are as reliable a source to prove divinity as 'The Iliad'.
Your claim to the dates of Plato's oldest surviving works is odd. As written works were not stored on hard drives or the cloud and actually written on physical stuff that deteriorates, it is only logical that they would have to be copied again and again or eventually biodegrade and be lost forever. The argument for manuscript evidence, for either side, is weak.
Plato, however, should be given the benefit of the doubt for existing because he was a just a normal dude. If his followers proclaimed that half his DNA came from god, he never sinned, turned water into wine, fed 6,000 people with 4 fish, bled through every pore in his body, got crucified and then resurrected after 3 days and then continued teaching in Athens although he had been executed as an enemy of the state, and you know, some government officials might have noticed him and said, 'huh, didn't we just kill him?' If that was part of Plato's legacy then there would be a lot more skepticism about his actual existence and the 'miracle's he performed.
