hatsoff

You don't know much about Troy, do you?

TySixtus

Once again...

Finding a city is not in the same realm of having someone rise from the dead. The details of the story are insignificant. Or did Troy crumble to the ground and rebuild itself three days later?

And for the record, my senior year in HS I took a course on the Illiad. I read the book and talked about it for 4 months. It's one of my all time favorite stories, and it's the only book I took with me when I deployed twice.

So yeah, I'm familiar with it.

Ty

hatsoff

You're absolutely right. That is not my point, however. Rather, I am saying we must not discount evidence (like Homer's myth-saturated Iliad, for example) just because it is flawed.

Good. You're probably more familiar with it than I am. So you should see that myth and history are often interconnected.

Didymus

But one of the key "attestations" cited by Christian apologists is Tacitus' brief mention of Jesus and the Trial. They claim Tacitus' reference as evidence for a historical Jesus because Tacitus MUST have gotten his information from official Roman records. That's rubbish, of course. He could have gotten his misinformation from any number of sources.

In any case, the trial of Jesus, had it taken place, would have been an extraordinary event. Nowhere else in the history of the Roman Empire do we find a Roman prefect surrendering to mob rule by executing a revered man because he offended the local (non-Roman) religious establishment. And where else did the local sky turn dark at noon and the earth shake and the dead rise from their graves, all at once, and for no natural reason?

Despite protestations of "argument from silence," it is significant that no contemporaneous non-Christian reported any of that.

Didymus

Doug Shaver

Are you going to tell us what you know about it that makes it analogous to the resurrection in terms of prima facie believability?

hatsoff

No.

Tigers!

Maybe it points to a weakness in Pilate's character.
Our records of the Roman Empire, while copious, are probably not broad enough for you to claim that nowhere else did a local perfect surrendered to a mob.
The Jews were renouned for their religious sensibilities. Pompey noted their devotion to their God when he captured the Temple. An incident that could/did not have occured elsewhere in the Empire doesn't not prove that it could not happen in Judea. History is full of unique events.

Amaleq13

Indeed and we know that because those are precisely the sort of events that historians tend to record.

Check and mate.

Doug Shaver

If the claim were that it certainly never happened, your point would be well taken. The historical issue, though, is not what we can infallibly know but what we can reasonably believe. If the evidence, although incomplete, is consistent in depicting Roman rulers as unintimidated by mobs, then we reasonably believe that mobs could not intimidate Roman rulers. A particular exception would have to be established by particular firsthand evidence. We have no firsthand accounts of Pilate's confrontation with Jesus' accusers.

We have Josephus's observations on Pilate's character. It certainly did have weaknesses, but vacillation apparently was not one of them.