BUT - it always (and still does) puzzles me how there is no evidence about Moses, the Great Exodus, the drowning of Pharaoh's army, the plaques, etc., etc.

The Egyptians wrote everything down from crop production to the flooding of the Nile. How did Moses and his taking thousands of slaves out of Egypt escape their written history?

would have been mentioned, at least. That would have been a pretty big deal, I think. But, no...

In fact, the embarrassing pharaoh's stelae were erased in an effort to expunge the record.

but they left without any archeological evidence they had ever been there. They also somehow magically created archeological evidence they were somewhere else at the time.

The Egyptians was embarrassed about these things, so they didn't record anything about it. Somehow, I managed not to laugh in the person's face.

He didn't do anything worth writing down.

Hmm...

But, maybe you're right. Maybe young Yeshua just wasn't that big a deal around Jerusalem back then. Just another annoying guy in sandals and robes wandering the streets with a small group of hangers-on. I dunno. Maybe his followers, you know, exaggerated a bit in retelling the stories, and someone finally wrote it down, adding their own embellishments. I don't know, and there's no way to reconstruct it now.

Stories grow the more often they are told, if my family's stories are any example. Great feats of derring-do can arise from mundane events in the past.

Annoying enough to get himself crucified, but not threatening enough to get himself a chapter in Josephus.

Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallos, Mara bar Serapion, etc. wrote about him. Not all of them wrote positively about him, but his existence is fairly well documented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

None of those you mention wrote about a Jesus during the time. They also have other credential problems, especially Josephus who is usually listed first as a historical source. Josephus wrote later than the time period and what we have from him regarding Jesus are translations from Christian monks. Just a few mentions there, odd considering all the mircales; most think the monks inserted those few references.

Not one, according to your own source.

any historical value, that would be Josephus. One of the references in the existing copies is considered to be an obvious insertion by ‘interested parties’, and the other is considered to be actually written by Josephus, but it not contemporaneous. It is as close as we have to any documentation, and it does indicate that the religion’s foundational myths were circulating in the 1st century.

40 or so years after the reported death of Jesus the Nazarene. How much was lost in that destruction? Oral tradition is a recognized method of communicating history as well. Paul, while not meeting the physical Jesus, wrote 1st Thessalonians in 50 AD. There is a pretty good chance that most or all of the apostles were not Greek literate (or even literate at all). All attributed Gospels and many of the letters may be misattributed. It is unreasonable to expect extant documents from the time of Jesus or even shortly after it.


Here are some passages from Thessalonians where Paul conveys a belief in the historicity of Jesus.

...and to wait for His Son from [h]heaven, whom He raised from the dead, that is Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath to come.

For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you also endured the same sufferings at the hands of your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews, 15 who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and [q]drove us out.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep [k]in Jesus.


The oldest extant writing of Paul's epistles is from about 200 AD. As a reference the oldest extant writing of Chaucer is not from his lifetime. The oldest copy of Gallic Wars is from 800 years after Caesar.

My own personal opinion is that there is a man behind the story, but much of the story is made up. Jesus was one of many self-proclaimed Messiahs at the time. Some of which were executed.

Especially Iron Age oral tradition a couple of millennia later.

So, even Paul had his doubts. So much for the historical record.

Few doubt he existed, and most of those without doubts dwell on numismatic evidence. They didn't even know where his tomb was. It was recently found, but then some issued official expressions of doubt.

They look at things like, oh, Flavius J. and even gospel accounts. But there were other historians.

Palestina was a backwater. It was poor. It was the home of a hated ethnic group that did little but give Rome problems and which, in return for not giving it more problems, had a special dispensation *not* to be forced to give sacrifice to Caesar as god. Even with all that, there were still movements to drive out Rome. The sicarii--which may have roots in 20s and 30s AD, but may have originated a decade or two later--did not produce friends.

Palestina had public works and Roman-built-and-planned cities--Capernaum, for instance--but those were for wealthier Jews and for Romans (or at least non-Jews).

As for texts being important things, more than a few researchers suspect that various gospel accounts go back to lists of sayings of Jesus that *were* extant as early as 60 AD and must be older. It's unclear that Paul saw or had any, but that's an argument from silence. They were rendered unnecessary when the edited compendia came out. (In this, it rather resembles the lists of Muhammed texts that Uthman allegedly pulled together to make the Qur'an--if he even was the one to pull it together; note that the lists themselves don't survive for all their awesome awesomeness. It's also worth noting that the first accounts of Muhammad's life date to a century or so after his death, and the time depth of Jesus versus Muhammed's accounts would be about 2000 versus 1400 years.) For all the record keeping, there's no contemporaneous mention of Muhammed or of his mighty military campaigns. (And one can make the argument that if Muhammed existed, he borrowed a lot from pre-existing sources, and that might have been because he saw scattered tribes confronted with two more prosperous or politically better connected groups, Jews and ar-Ruum, both united by a book with a strong prophet at the center of each, each group united by their book and prophet. I mean, how humiliating is *that* comparison? Ahem.)

Not only was Jerusalem destroyed and the territory of Palestina pretty much laid waste during the period when Xianity was still mostly a Jewish "thang", but even then the Xians that were there weren't much appreciated. They may have hung out in the synagogues and done the mandatory rituals, but I doubt that the synagogue leaders were highly appreciative. Note that the Academy set up at Jaffa undoubtedly had a lot of writings, but all that remains are the Tosefta and Mishnah, with the Palestinian Talmud's underlying sources largely gone, Temple and synagogue records erased from history. There were more scrolls and writings than just those, to be sure, but that's it for the strain of Judaism that became Rabbinic Judaism. As for other sects, the Sadducees and the Essenes (etc.), they're gone. It wasn't until the scrolls at Qumran were found that they were known from anything more than a general reference in Flavius J. (and even now the identification is sort of by default, not because of a scroll that said, "We, the Essenes, believe ...) Making it harder, within a century or two the dominant strain of Xianity was gentile and the roots shifted from Torah-observant to pre-Catholic/Orthodox, and the original bearers of the Jesus-sayings lists would have been considered old-school heretical.

The earliest bits of the OT were in Greek from the 2nd century BCE. Want more, until the Qumran texts you'd have to look years after the destruction of Jerusalem. The Old Syriac is older than the earliest most Hebrew texts. Yet there's as much textual evidence for the Tanakh from 560 BCE or so as there is for the Qur'an before the early-mid 700s, and given other finds it's likely that at least portions are hundreds of years earlier. The textual history of the NT is similar--first bits are early 2nd century, but it's still likely Paul's epistles really are mostly Paul's, and before 70 AD.

In other words, your conclusion's like the filling in a Czech buchta: You bite into and are surprised discover it, even though it was baked into the bun by the baker.

Jesus or Muhammad, really, is it? Both have been expanded beyond their importance over time, it seems. Such is religion - fables with a slim basis in fact, expanded into, well, scriptural proportions after the fact.

You see where I'm going with this, I'm sure.

I believe Carl Sagan said that.

extraodinary claims must have extraordinary evidence.

I said that.

evidence is expected for a theory, does weaken that theory and suggests a reworking or further investigation is required.

It is simply lack of evidence.

The Ether, N-Rays, Proton decay, Cold Fusion, all thrown into the scientific wastebin, when there was an absense of evidence to confirm. Carl sagan would agree with that.

To the point the Romans didn't put the faces of the Emperor on the their coinage in that area out of respect for the Jewish prohibition on graven images. That shows serious clout. It was not a poor backwater.

Last edited Thu Apr 25, 2019, 03:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Specimens of the empire's silver denarius and gold aureus, however, did circulate in the region and are sometimes found

These coins were rather more valuable than the cheap prutah issued by the local Procurators and so less likely to be lost

Perhaps his real name was Caesarion.

Last edited Mon Apr 22, 2019, 06:07 PM - Edit history (1)

And his father, perhaps, was Pompey. Pompey may have been the Pandera of the Talmud. He did cast a long shadow in Jerusalem.

And you gotta have somethin' if you wanna be with me.

Not even Paul appears to have believed in an actual human Jesus.

n/t

is the lack of Roman records of the crucifixion under Prefect Pontius Pilot.

Jesus himself though was from an area where only a tiny fraction of the populace could read and even fewer could write (unlike today where reading and writing are taught together). This is from:

Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman

Ehrman is now an atheist but strongly believes that Jesus existed historically.

All those dead kids and Jezuz was supposedly one of them. Their birth certificates were invalid, which made it impossible for the young messiah to get his cart drivers license. No prom date for Jezuz.

So Jezuz grew up outside the system with no System Identification Number, hes was SIN less.

Jezuz was a popular name at the time and itinerant messiahs and faith healers was just as popular a profession. It was hard for youg Jezuz to stand out from the crowd. Turn water into wine and sure enough there was a Jesus down the street turning water into mayonnaise.
Wine may be cool but it doesn't mean shit when you want a good sandwich.

And to top it all off crucifixion was just as popular as the name Jezuz was. Why if all the pieces of the true cross were turned into crosses there'd be thousands of them.

Of course the raising from the dead part is pretty special, except on Easter of course, cause when Jezuz died the graves gave up their dead and there were zombies everywhere.
How ya gonna notice one messiah when everyones Nana was home for Passover dinner?

So as you can see it is really understandable that there was no contemporary records. Jezuz was like a cool rock band from the 80's that only exists now on bootleg cassettes.

It must strike a nerve.

But when you point out the lack of facts, then their faith isn't enough and all of a sudden highly questionable and likely forged sources like Josephus become ironclad proof of something.

One person tried to claim that there were contemporaneous accounts of Jesus, and gave several examples of non-contemporaneous accounts. When that was pointed out, the poster vanished.

Meanwhile, Bible "archaeologists" are digging away hard in hopes of finding some actual evidence. They've been doing that for a long, long time, without any results. Since two millennia have passed, finding such a thing is about as unlikely as people flying up into the sky in the Rapture.

And yet, they persist, all the while claiming that faith is all they need. If that were true, the hunt would have long been over.

As I have said many, many times, the basic premise of all theistic religious logic is that God exists. Since there is zero evidence for such a statement, everything else breaks down in their arguments. There is no logic to theism. It is all a giant circle, leading back to that first unsupported premise that posits a real deity that exists or existed.

Without evidence of its existence, there's no support for anything else having to do with a god or gods.

Faith. They have that, but that's paper thin and transparently unsupported.

Plenty of works of fiction are set in real places, and refer to real people and real events.

None. Yes, places mentioned in the Bible exist or existed. Meaningless. The Bible mentions some actual historical people. Again, meaningless. Neither is evidence for Jesus or his Dad.

basically, I was searching for actual truth and they didn't need that because of faith, I left the room.