The First Century Void

[Minimalist]

They have to.  It is a corner they have painted themselves into. 

Without the TF the earliest mention of this jesus character does not show up in the record until c 180. 

They can't face the reality of that so they have to try to do CPR of the mummy that is the TF!

[RoadRunner79]

[Fake Messiah]

[Amarok]

[Minimalist]

Well, again.  It is all they have.  And when you don't have much that which you do have becomes over-valued.

No one knew this better than Eusebius, himself.

[Cyberman]

Let's grant, for the moment, that the TF is only a partial interpolation; that Josephus mentioned the character as a thing believed by xtians, but all the cocksucking was added later.

Why? Why 'sex up' any of it, if there was any contemporary and compelling evidence at all? Why the need to fabricate evidence?

I'll wait.

[Minimalist]

J. Warner Wallace?  That's the best you can do, RR?  Like I said, you are embarrassing yourself.

Let's move on to First Clement which is an intriguing pile of shit with no stated ties to anyone named "Clement" and which is proving difficult to date.
EarlyChristianWritings cites dates between 80 and 140 but again, it really doesn't matter when it was first written, what matters is what happened after the last editors got through with it.

Tradition dates it to c 95 AD due to a line supposedly referring to the persecution of Domitian.  The problem there is that there was no persecution by Domitian, at least not of xtians.  He may offed a few Jews and/or political rivals associated with his father's and brother's campaigns in Judaea.

But Carrier is arguing, mildly, for a date closer to 60 AD for 1 Clement on the grounds that he does not seem to know about the destruction of the temple.  Yet, no where in the entire work is there so much as a mention of Jews.  (Most of it seems to be a re-hash of OT gibberish and post proto-orthodox power grubbing.  [Obey your bishops, obey your king, obey, obey, obey, you dumb fuck xhristards.]  In short, whoever wrote 1 Clement did not give a flying fuck about the Jews or their temple but was ostensibly trying to exert some authority for the "Church of Rome" in xtian circles which it most certainly did not have until much later.  This is a chastisement of xtians in Corinth. Thus why Carrier expects to see a reference to the temple being destroyed escapes me.

However, where Carrier is correct is that First Clement does not know fuckall about any recent historical jesus.  Much as with the earliest "pauline" writings jesus is nothing more than a cosmic figure who does his thing in outer space.  He, like "paul" has never heard of Mary, Pilate, Nazareth or any of the named gospels which jesus freaks swear were so important.

Even more oddly, our earliest manuscript dates from the 11th century but was not found until 1873 in a Greek text which was found in Constantinople.  We do know it was written by a scribe named "Leo" for all the good that does us!

[Secular Elf]

[Minimalist]

In order for the first epistle of peter to not be a fraud there would have had to have been a "peter."  He's like Little John or Sir Lancelot.  Just a made up character in someone elses story.

[Secular Elf]