Re: Can you love your enemy and still kill him

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 21:10:37 -0400, Stan Brown
(the_stan_brown@xxxxxxxxxxx) said:

[snippage]

> The Romans kept excellent records. Why is there no record of his
> trial before Pilate? Why did the Jews have no record of his trial
> before Caiaphas and Annas, or of the money paid to Judas, or of he
> riot he caused in the Temple -- or of even a single miracle? Any of
> those would be _evidence_. Again, the lack of such evidence does not
> prove he was pure myth, but it's simply not accurate to say that
> there is any proof of his existence.

As far as the Romans go, I don't believe they *did* keep excellent
records. They certainly couldn't use their archives with anything
remotely resembling modern efficiency, maybe not even medieval
standards. More specifically, from their point of view Jesus was no
different from any other Jewish prophet / rabble-rouser (of whom there
were very, very many in the first century AD). His trial simply wouldn't
have been a big deal for them. It certainly would never have made it
onto an inscription (which are the only 'records' that we have from the
ancient world) because it would have served no-one's purpose to have
such an inscription erected. Laws, decrees and benefactions to the
community were the only documents so displayed. Offhand, I can't think
of *any* surviving epigraphical evidence of the kind that you're asking
for, so its absence in this specific instance isn't a valid reason for
doubt.

The testimony of Josephus isn't admissible, because the relevant passage
as we have it is very clearly an emendation or an outright interpolation
by later Christian copyists (it acknowledges Jesus as the Messiah, which
Josephus definitely did not!), but Suetonius records a story current in
the 60s AD that 'Chrestus' incited his followers to start the Great Fire
in Rome, which enabled Nero to use the Christians in the city as
scapegoats. Obviously this can't be reconciled with the accepted life of
Jesus, but it's a pretty straightforward error on the part of the
gossip-mongers in Rome, and in any case indicates that there were people
calling themselves 'Christians' in Rome a mere thirty years after he is
supposed to have died. Okay, this isn't direct evidence that he existed,
but it gets you to within a generation of the Gospel events, and is a
tradition independent of Christian writings. As I said above, there
would probably never have been any 'official' Roman record of his
existence or execution, and even if there had been, *nothing* of that
kind survives.

There are many people in the ancient world for whose existence we have
less evidence - Pythagoras springs to mind as a quite possibly fictional
character, and there's hardly any more 'independent' evidence for
Muhammad than Jesus (pseudo-Sebeos of Armenia is the only one that
springs to mind, and is not without problems). But I think you're asking
for more proof than is reasonable, and I can't think of a reason why he
would have been invented that explains the existence of a group of
followers more convincingly than the notion that he really did exist.
Whose interests would have been served by inventing him? Cui bono? It
would seem to me to be entering 'conspiracy theory' territory.
--
Matthew
.

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