aa5874

You are merely making unsubstantiated presumptions about Paul and Marcion.

Marcion could NOT have written or most likely did not write the Pauline Corpus.

Marcion's God was NOT the God of the Jews and Marcion's Son of God was NOT Jesus of the Canon.

Marcion preached ANOTHER GOD and ANOTHER Son.

Ephraim the Syrian wrote Against Marcion and there is virtually NOTHING about the Pauline Corpus and gLuke.

There are several Jesus cult writers that either did NOT acknowledge the Pauline Corpus or claimed Marcion did NOT use the Pauline Corpus.

See Justin' writings, Hippolytus Refutation of All Heresies, and Origen' "Against Celsus".

Marcion's Son of God was a Phantom and without birth.

Paul's Jesus was the Son of God but made of a woman.

The Pauline Corpus is incompatible with the teachings of Marcion.

Tommy

Only Josephus? Didn't the Herods have court chroniclers? Even a humdrum letter from 35 CE would be interesting if it didn't mention what (presumably) would have been wildfire rumours of someone who had miraculously fed 5000 men, then 4000, then died and appeared to over 500. Any source about Herod the Great from about AD 1 would be telling if it didn't mention the massacre in Bethlehem.

Toto

The only Jewish sources that survived the Jewish War were the Dead Sea Scrolls, hidden away in caves. Most of these have been carbon dated to before the 1st century BCE.

Anything written about that time has only survived because either it was buried in the Egyptian sand, or Christian monks made copies before the originals disintegrated.

It sounds like you are trying to reproduce Remsberg's list of writers who could have mentioned Jesus but didn't.

This list has been the subject of lengthy commentary in this forum, which you can find by checking the archives. There is extensive discussion of whether any of these authors could have been expected to mention Jesus or the events in the gospels.

aa5874

Some manuscripts of the DSS have been dated to the 1st century.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls

Josephus mentioned characters that were of far less significance than Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos and God the Creator who supposedly abolished the Laws of the Jews.

It is claimed that the Pauline writers were in Rome, and in other MAJOR cities of the Roman Empire telling Roman citizens that they must BOW to the name of Jesus the Lord in heaven, earth and even under the earth.

By the time Josephus wrote Antiquities of the Jews and his Autobiography there should have been documented Gospels and Epistles circulating in the Roman Empire.

The Pauline Corpus is completely uncorroborated and shows NO influence on non-apologetic writers who wrote of events BEFORE and AFTER c 70 CE up to c 180 CE.

Roger Pearse

99% of ancient literature is lost.

There might be some category confusions in your query, when you refer to "documents". Documentary texts are things like letters and legal contracts on papyrus, dug out of the sands of Egypt, where what we have is the original. There are undoubtedly papyri from this period; but by definition these tend not to be useful. A man drawing up a house-sale is not interested in current events.

Our other source is literary texts. These are primarily transmitted by copying. The earliest copy known today of most ancient literary texts is medieval or later, and for most of them only one copy survived the middle ages. These are texts like Josephus, etc.

The word "contemporary" can mean various things, but is always a red flag, because ancient historians tend not to use it. It gets used by modern historians, who have far more data than they can possibly use, and have to find some axiom to cut down the sheer volume of testimony. Ancient historians have to use *everything*. This is why discussions about the origins of Christmas in the 4th century AD reference the unknown scholiast on Dionysius bar Salibi, writing in the 13th century AD.

For all first century history the main sources are Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, supplemented by Josephus for Jewish affairs. There is quite a lot of literary work centred on Rome, of course, but it rarely mentions outside affairs.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

aa5874

Even if 99% of ancient literature is lost the remaining 1% consists of thousands of manuscripts about Jesus of Nazareth, born of a Ghost and a Virgin, the Logos and God Creator.

A man may be selling his house because of current events.

In any event, a piece of papyri which shows an actual date for a house sale in antiquity is an extremely useful significant piece of data to be used in paleography and carbon testing.

Ancient Legal contracts found on papyri, especially those that are found with the date of the contracts, are literally goldmine for those involved in Paleography and C-14 testing.

Roger Pearse

We need to be careful to avoid a possible confusion here. I'm referring to 99% of the works composed in the period, not to copies of the works. Manuscripts contain copies of works. One work may exist in many copies. :-)

The 1% of surviving texts is, of course, skewed by what was important to the people who copied. Thus we lack quite a bit of 2-3rd century texts, because they were out of fashion in the 4th century when the roll was abandoned in favour of the modern book or codex. We have quite a bit of 1st century work because writers like Tacitus and Juvenal came back into fashion then. Equally the text that exists in most copies is the bible; because most medieval copyists were monks. The texts that are next in line are the important church writers such as Augustine or Chrysostom; and for the same reason. But beyond these broad influences, a lot of texts survived (or didn't) by sheer accident.

Indeed so ... until we realise that, in antiquity, they didn't have BC and AD. Which means that a documentary text with a contemporary date is not always as useful as it might be, unless we know how to assign whichever system of dates and months and regnal years / consular years / etc was in use to the corresponding year AD. The first to attempt this horrific task was our friend Eusebius of Caesarea in his Chronicle, book 2; and he didn't always get it right.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
PS: Eusebius did not have AD or BC either; but he created an "A.A." (Anno Abrahae, year from Abraham), from the earliest date he felt he could actually date, and thereby created the concept of a single system of numbering the years for all nations and periods of history. AD was invented by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century.

James The Least

I don't know why people think Revelation is a Jewish document. If that were the case one might expect a reference to it somewhere in Jewish rabbinical literature, but of course there is none. Because it is an exclusively Gentile-Christian document, albeit one steeped in knowledge of the LXX. There were, of course, Gentiles who became Joudaioi by joining the Jewish religion, but Revelation's author takes a swipe at them ("those who say they are Jews but are not, but are really a synagogue of Satan"). The author clearly believes he is neither Jewish nor a God-Fearer, but a Christian.

James The Least

You might as well give up on this line of thinking right now, because it's a total dead end. We actually shouldn't expect any papyri from the ancient world to have survived, much less specific letters from specific periods that we foolishly believe are more important than other periods.
Besides, one could easily argue the other way -- the massive amount of literature created and preserved by the church is de facto "proof" that a miracle man did exist in the middle east -- what else would have caused them to write so much and preserve it for centuries?

Jarhyn

Of course the same may be said about the Buddha, Karishna, or Gilgamesh. Ancient texts, beyond legal documents and tax records only reveal what people BELIEVED about a time, and do not directly correlate to history. The most you can garner from an ancient document is that at one time someone asserted the content.