Dirge

The Romans tried to stamp out Xianity. The easiest way to stamp out the new religion would be to prove Christ didn't exist. That would have been easy enough back then, if Christ didn't exist, since it could have been demonstrated they never crucified anyone like Jesus Christ. Why didn't they?

mod note: split from this thread

Toto

I don't think that would have worked. The central factual claims behind Mormonism have been shown to be false, but Mormonism is thriving. New religions are not based on rational evaluation of the evidence, but on some other need that is fulfilled.

mens_sana

Whether it would have worked or not is a different question. Here the question is why didn't they try it?

I think they did try it when they crucified Jesus of Nazareth (not to be confused with the post-resurrection Christ). I'm guessing that the movement was so small that they thought that killing the leader would end the whole thing — and indeed all the disciples abandoned the movement (denied Jesus/fled the city). By the time the authorities realized that the movement had not died off — it originally was not distinguishable from Judaism — it was too late to try anything other than persecution.

DaMan121

How would it have been any easier than now? Scientology and Mormonism have been thoroughly refuted yet they still have millions of members.

How do you know they didn't? And what movement? Christianity didn't begin until decades after Jesus' supposed death. How exactly do you fight a story?

Dirge

But why wouldn't they try it, when there were fewer Xians, or mention it in some text, even if it wouldn't have worked? Killing Xians wasn't succeeding. In that point in time, records were not destroyed, lost, or decayed, and memories grown weak. Instead of the Romans just saying the Xians pray to Jesus as if he were a God, why not add he never existed? They should know who they crucified.

aa5874

The main problems with Christianity are the chronology,the veracity of the actual events and the identifying of the different Christian sects. It is difficult to determine when events occur and whether they actually happened as written and the sect of Christians being described.

This is Eusebius in Church History 4.11.9 highlighting the ambiguity of the word "Christian" in reference to the followers of Marcion..

So, even if they were Christians in the first century or any century, it would still have to be determined if they were of the doctrine of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Toto

The Romans didn't care what Christians believed, they only cared that Christians were forming a social group that might subvert the state. And if they thought that Jesus was a god, it wouldn't do any good to prove that he never existed as a man.

In addition, by the time that Christianity started to make an impression on Roman officials, Jerusalem had been destroyed, and there would be no way to prove that Jesus never existed. We don't know that records were still around, or that they kept good records of every crucified trouble maker.

Sheshbazzar

The Romans could not prove something didn't exist, that had never existed in the first place, in its inceptions it was insignificant and virtually invisible, by the time they were even aware of the evolving story and its cultic movement there was nothing tangible to disprove, how would you go about disproving the existence of an invisible and disembodied god to believers in an invisible and disembodied god?
No demonstration or denials would have effectively persuaded the fanatics back then any more than they would today. Apologetics were (and still are) invented to cover every contingency, and when nothing else avails to avoid a confrontation with the facts, the believer can always fall back on his goddidit.

storytime

Why is it thought that Romans crucified Jesus when the story says that Pilate turned Jesus back over to the authority of the Jews, under Herod's authority to act. Having that authority then would assume that Herod maintained his own soldiers for punishment on the Jews. As the story also says fo the Jews when they confronted the Roman governor, "we have a law". In other words, the Jews were in alliance with Rome and Rome had seen it wise to allow Jews to maintain their own legal authority that governed their religious or civil society.

What was the society of Rome like in those days? A boiling pot of different gods and beliefs? Anything imaginable could be believed and worshiped? Sounds like todays world doesn't it?

Sheshbazzar

Unlike Toto, I do not believe that there ever was an actual physical "Jesus of Nazereth" for the Romans to crucify. Only a shadowy but purely legendary messianic story figure loosely based upon the Scriptures promised deliverer, on Hebrew word-plays and upon midrashic expositions of what the Messiah would do, and what he would say when he came among them, these eventually became converted into claims of what he DID do.
I believe the core of the NT was fabricated out of a group of publicly popular sayings and images of the Messiah, that being so, there was never an actual JC for the Romans to kill, No apostles, and most certainly no thousands of disciples of an actual man, only adherents of a popular Jewish hope and ideal.
In the course of time the story was expanded with many elements and ideas that were borrowed from, and appealing to Greek culture, and this wholly fabricated story was finally put into writing by writers, none of whom were actual eyewitnesses to the stories that they wrote.
This was followed by a period of "refining" the texts through additions, deletions, and interpolations until Constantine took strong measures to "fix" and standardize the text, methodically destroying as "heretical" all variant or non-conforming versions.