Malachi151

I'll take a guess:

The Criminal Acts of Christendom?

S.C.Carlson

Geschichte = history.

Stephen

Malachi151

Is there an English translation of this book? The history of Germany religious criticism blows everyone else away of course, but in many ways I think that America is doing a good job as well, because it seems to me that Americans are more motivated to criticize religion now because it is such a problem here, whereas in Europe is seems that some of the popular criticism and the rates of publications of anti-religious works is below that in America. Mayb that's just because I don't see those works, aftrall they do have Dawkins, but it seems like a lot of books that are critical of Christianity and religion get published here, but of course we have much less criticism on TV and things of that nature.

Ben C Smith

Gesundheit.

You ought to have that looked at.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

It would be most interesting to see the ancient source that states that the imperial archives of the early Roman period were destroyed "by the Christians." Please tell us more.

As far as I know Roman official records don't exist today for the same reason that most ancient texts don't exist; the society that produced them perished, and no-one was interested in copying 99% of whatever existed in 500 AD. (Of course even by then early imperial texts were lost, as we learn from the Codex Theodosianus).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

ynquirer

The Christians had the control of the texts for more than a millenium? They only had the choice what to copy, what to burn, what to pur on index, make autodafe? Is this what you really imply - that the Christians simply could have destroyed and forged the texts? Not just the tiniest evidence that they positively destroyed the imperial archives that were the source of information for both Tacitus and Suetonius?

If this is your evidence, it is extremely poor to say the least. Your 8 volumes times 700 pages in German might have produced a little more explicit evidence, mightn’t it?

But OK, a deal is a deal. Here is my evidence that Annals 15:44 is authentic.

The question on the authenticity was raised like this:

The mention to Sulpicius (Severus) happened to be a blunder, into which some of us, I included, ran for a while. Yet the argument goes on, and it is interesting:

As it seems, the MS could have been forged by the monk at Monte Cassino or else at any time from the eleventh century to present day. However, there is indication that it wasn’t forged.

As there is no external evidence that the MS was forged - there is evidence only that it could be so - we must pay attention to internal evidence, that is, evidence of facts, things or notions as mentioned in the suspect text that either could or could not be there depending on whether the text is assumed authentic or forged.

My internal evidence that the text was not forged is a mention that Pilate was a procurator of Judea. Think of it. Even today there are a number of distinguished researchers on the NT that are fully convinced that such a mention is a mistake, for they believe that Pilate was a prefect rather than a procurator. Apparently, they still ignore that some prefects to rule troubling provinces were bestowed on especial powers and called procurators - and these were members of the equestrian order just like Pilate was. How could an eleventh century monk or such people as Bocaccio, Niccolo Niccoli, Bracciolini, the Medici, or whatever librarian at the Laurentian in Florence have known better?

jakejonesiv

Then it is under the table. The alleged Neronian punishments of Chreistians recorded into the extant version of Tatitus Annals are considered doubtful by many. It is martyrology unabashed.

Jake Jones IV

jeffevnz

I agree that there would be a bias toward preserving Christian works, but most documents of any kind have simply been lost.

Preserving and/or copying a large number of non-Christian works that corroborate the NT, such that they would survive to modern times, would require an extraordinary amount of disicipline. I find it unlikely that the Church even cared about such documents, since it probably didn't anticipate modern skepticism of Christian literature.

Malachi151

This is also quite wrong, because we DO have thousands of documents by early Christian writers and writers whose concepts are compatible with Christianity, such as Philo.

Not only that, but we also have references to thousands of other documents and "books" and records among these writing that covered much more mundain topics, and we do have writings of Christians who looked for records in the Roman sources. We know that the Christians did look for such records, and that they did complie every piece of evidence that they could find.

As for "not anticipating skepticism", this is quite wrong indeed. The skepticism of Christianity was very very strong up until the 5th and 6th century, and even then there were still skeptics who spoke out on occassion.

The Christians put together tons to works that sought to "prove the truth of their religion", and to "defend their savior".

We have Christian works on this subject from the 2nd century through the 5th century, with most coming in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They discussed looking for records of Jesus' execution in the Roman archives, this was proposed and carried out, they did look.

There is no reason to believe that if something were written that confirmed the existance of Jesus and the Christians had knowledge of it, that we wouldn't know about it today. At the very least, even if we didn't have a copy of the document itself we would have a quote from it or at least a reference to it. The Christians would have jumped on it like magots on week old trash, and we know that this is true because they pounced on all of the references that we do know about, they were quoted ad-nauseum, and we have hundreds of references to them.

TedM

I'm coming late to this discussion, so forgive me if I'm too out of context here, or this has already been covered.

If we have quotations of the TF or other secular works ad-nauseum by Christians in say the 5th century and we have no such quotations in say the 1sts or 2nd century, what does that tell us? IMO nothing, necessarily, because Christians in the 5th century may have had both motive and means which Christians in the 1st or 2nd century did not. If it can be shown that earlier Christians had BOTH motive and means to quote a TF passage or some Roman archive, then an argument of substance can be made. If that cannot be shown or at least shown to be a reasonable assumption, then I see little value in supporting any kind of argument by referencing such silences.

I'm curious what you think are the most telling silences we have by the 'early' Christians with regard to the secular works, and your reasons..?..

ted