Originally Posted by Solitary Man

Its a possibility. James Robinson maintains that its a possibility, and the wiki follows suit. You stated it as if it were fact.

Originally Posted by jules?

well my idea of 'facts' in history are evidently different to yours. All of history is a guess and we [the collective we] tend to go with the collective/logical guess.

Originally Posted by DCHindley

Jules,

We need to remember that the use to which documents are put are not always those intended by the original authors. For instance, I would suggest that the four gospels were written as "apologies" (clothed as "bioi" = personal life sketches) intended to "explain" the founder claimed by early Christian as someone other than a political rebel. Reason? By the time they were written, Christianity had already morphed into a form of mystery religion and was in fact no longer the political party the Roman government kept treating them as. Later, (late 2nd and 3rd century) they were used exclusively in church worship and instruction, and this is reflected in how they are cited in later Christian literature.

Another thing about early 2nd century Christianity is that they seem to know very little about their early development. They don't know a firm date for Jesus' death, how James the Just died, the manner by which Judas (the one who is supposed to have betrayed Jesus) died, even how or when Paul died. They don't know where specific apostles or disciples worked or died. There are plenty of conjectures offered in 2nd & 3rd century Christian documents, but they come across as guesses, and generally as wishful guesses ("Well, if they were like ideal Christians of our day, their life/death/teaching must have been like this ...").

This is the origin of "authors" attributed to the canonical gospels ("This gospel would certainly have been written by ..."), of Pilate's _Acta_ ("official" reports, although there are some which assume Pilate was a Christian sympathizer or convert and others that make him a sceptic). Et cetera.

The (hypothetical) Pauline interpolations (the proportion of which varies depending upon commentator) are another matter. Regardless of where they are proposed to come from, they seem to have been retrojections of the beliefs of later ages into the documents of an earlier age. Another example of this is the difference between the "short" Greek recension of the Ignatian epistles and their greatly expanded "long" recension from a century or so later.

As for Celsus, I'm afraid that some types of literature simply go out of style and stop being copied. Thankfully the type of Christian defensive work within which much of Celsus' book has been preserved did not go out of style. Some anti-Christian works by pagans survived simply because they were well written (e.g., Porphory ... Celsus was not so well written, just polemical, or Latin authors as this represented high "culture"), or helped Christians orient their history within the framework of events supposedly contemporary to their origins (e.g., Josephus).

DCH

Originally Posted by Solitary Man

Your idea of "fact" in history is different than real historians. No, all history is not guesswork, and facts are those things to be determined with our eyes today. It is a fact, for instance, that cuneiform documents were found in Ebla. It's indisputable, save for the insane. The logical conclusion based on all the evidence is that people there knew/wrote in cuneiform. After eliminating other possibilities as implausible/improbable, if what is left is probable, it becames de facto a fact, but always open to change as new information comes in. Mere hypotheses, such as the one Robinson proposed, are not facts yet.

I'll need something a little more solid than mere rumors. You'll have to do better if you want to present a case.