(January 28, 2015 at 5:13 pm)SteveII Wrote: How can you say that no one wrote down anything? Just because we don't have earlier writings than the gospels do not mean that there weren't any.That's a pretty big gap there, though, isn't it? God comes down to earth, performs miracles and gives talks that inspire, is crucified (an event that triggers an eclipse, an earthquake, and a zombie invasion) and brings himself back... and the best you can do is assume that all of the accounts written until the gospels didn't survive?
SteveII Wrote:Most of the church's growth happened outside of Palestine so that fact that Josephus didn't speak more on it is understandable.I'm referring to the Testimonium Flavianum, in which Josephus supposedly identifies Jesus as the Christ and tells of his resurrection. It's not the sort of thing one tells in passing before moving on to more mundane matters, nor is it the sort of thing you mention once and then never bother to return to, as if it wasn't any big deal.
Because other than that, the other references to Jesus are either vague or simply tell that there were Christians but don't say anything about Christ. God himself came to earth and people were just too busy to notice, it seems.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould