Why Are There No Contemporaneous Documents that Mention Jesus? [View all]

There's documentation of lots of things around that time, and even long before. Even Cyrus the Great was well-documented back in 539 BC. Here's that specific document:



It wasn't that people didn't record stuff. They did. the Egyptians, for example, recorded all kinds of things. But they didn't record anything about Jesus, despite Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt, according to much later documents.

Around Jerusalem, there were scribes of all kinds, writing in Hebrew, Greek. Aramaic, and Latin. Nothing about Jesus. Some of his disciples must have been literate, but none wrote anything down, apparently.

Odd, because the story was that Jesus was the Messiah. You'd think documents talking about him would be treated as precious writings to be protected and consulted. But, no. Herod was around, and there are plenty of records of Herod, although nothing that refers to his supposed slaying of male babies around the time of Jesus' birth. Nothing about the census, either that sent Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.

Only a couple of generations after the time Jesus was supposed to have lived were there documents that still exist mentioning him, and not many of those, either, despite a new religion growing. Why?

It's a puzzle, isn't it? An interesting puzzle, since people did write things down in those days, especially important things. Now, a couple of millennia later, it's unlikely that we'll turn up any new documents that have gone undiscovered, so it will probably continue to mystify scholars, who have long been searching for some such record.