Fortuna

Hi Johnny Skeptic,

to answer your question, outside of the New Testament writings ther isn't much at all about Jesus or early Christians and this should more than raise some eyebrows.

Here is what I know of it.

Flavius Josephus.

The historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote about 40 years after Jesus, has only 2 very very brief mentions of him. One is the famous Testimonium Flavium. This is almost universally acknowledged as a total or partial forgery.
Even if it is only partially forged, it really tells us very little. Just that he was executed and that his followers are still around. But, that is really questionable as we will see in a moment. The other reference is just a note that a certain James was his brother.

Now here is the really strange part. When we read the New Testament, they make it sound as if there were a good number of Christian converts in Judea.
Josephus writes a very detailed story of the Roman-Jewush war which occur about 35-40 years after Jesus's death. The strage part is that, Jospehus gives us great detail about some of the various factions in Judea. He tells us about the big 4 (Sadducees, Pharissees, Essenes, and the rebels). He mentions other in other parts, the sciarii, some zealot groups, etc. But, not once does he mention a Christian faction or anything that remotesly resembles them. This is 30 years or so after this religion supposedly was spreading like a plague. In all of his book about the war, not a single mention.
Well, there is one exception I should note. Josephus English translator Whiston tells us that there is one copy of Josphus's War that contains the Testimonium Flavium, normally found in his other book, Antiquities. Outside of that, nothing.

The Jerusalem/Babylonian Talmud.

What little there is about Christians seems to comes from a time after the Roman Jewish war, and frankly it looks like polemic from the second century or so. However, ther are some descriptions of some Messiah like people from about the same time as Jesus. Yehuda of Galilee (also known from FJ), Benjamin the Egyptian, Ben Tabbai, and a curious figure named Yeshua ben Pandeira. There is one striking similiarity to Jesus and that is that Pandeira is executed on the eve of Passover like Jesus. However, he seems to predate the NT timetable for Jesus by 1/2 a century, and that not all that certain and the facts are thin. Interestingly though, Talmud does give us some info about a few messiah like leaders

Justus of Tiberias - This guy was supposedly known to Josephus, and lived in Galilee and wrote a history of the area abut the time of Jesus. His work is not extent, but one of the churhc fathers (Photius, I believe) had access to and read his history amd there was not a single mention of Jesus. We know this only through Photius, who was astonished that Justus knew nothing of him (Jesus).

Tacitus - Tacitus also wrote a history of the Roman Jewish war. While not as detailed and from a different perspective, The Christian faction is not mentioned there either.
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But, it gets strange.........................

However, there ARE reports of Christians in Rome a decade or so before the RJ war. This occurs in an account of the great Fire of Rome from Tacitus. There is another earlier, though as I understand it disputed text that also tells of Christians in Rome. There is also the Trajan Pliny correspondence from later in the first century talking about what must have been a large group of Christians in Bythnia. However, according to Pliny, It seems as though he was mostly able to persuade many to give up their Christianity.
He says ;

I get from this that Pliny was able to convince most of them to give up their Christianity. This seems strange given what we find in the NT. Even Pliny remarks about their obstinency, but seems to have gotten control fairly easily.
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Archeologically, as I understand it there are no early, mid or late first century artefacts or inscriptions that suggest a Christians presence.

The NT documents themselves, with the exception of Paul, all seem to have been written after the war. IMHO the evidence is fairly clear on this.

Many Christian will argue that the NT gospels in fact prophecied the RJ war. There are problems with this. The synoptic problem of what looks like identical text in 3 of the 4 is especially troubling. The problem with those who would claim it as prophecy to me are ;

1 - What outs me off about them is that they are too selective. They allow for their beliefs in prophecy and miraculous claims for their own beliefs but deny it to other groups with similiar claims. for example, many who make this claim scoff at the Muslim claims and those of Fatima and Lourdes (which are fairly modern and relatively well-documented).

2- The addition of more specifics moving from Mark to Luke.

3 - The further knowledge used in a Daniel comparative, an "Abomination to cause desolation"

4 - There are other part of these gospels that hint at other events that occur during the time of the RJ war. For example, the legion demoniac. There are pro-Roman inferences in these texts that would seem to have been very out of chracter for Judeans.

5 Some of these miracles come almost verbatim from the Tanakh and seem to be designed to show a literary connection. Even outside of the mircles, some of the parallels to Tankh are uncanny. The use of phraseology almost directly taken from it. There must be a literary connection and it is both literal and thematic. The Jesus-Barrabas sequence is just too obviously conencted to the old Yom Kippur ritual.

About miraculous events, the main problem with prophecy and miraculous events is that, if we allow for miracles and prophecy, we must do so fairly across the board. What now happens is that we have even better support for several other miraculous events outside of Christian claims ! BY allowing for them, we create many more problems than we solve. Add to that the fact that many of the things they believed (i.e. The source of sickness and disease, their beliefs about the stars and planets) all turn out to be false in the light of modern science, and we have less reason to accept their claims.



I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

andrewcriddle

It is difficult to be sure, but IMHO the people Pliny gets to renounce Christianity seem to mostly have been people who had been interested in Christianity some years before but had dropped out before Pliny arrived in Bithynia. These people were then denounced to Pliny by personal enemies as a result of quarrels about other matters.

Andrew Criddle

Fortuna

Andrew,


I'm not so sure I agree totally with what you assert here, Consider the source, this is the guy who tortures a couple of deaconnesses to find out what he needs. So he leaves no doubt, this guy will torture and execute you sans hesitation. Earlier in this letter he said ;

So, as you say, and I agree, in the first group seems to be those falsely accused.
But in describing the second group, we hear something that seems inconsistent;

"Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, "

See what I mean. I declared that I was a Christian, but then I denied it ??? These people on the second and third questioning (as Pliny describes above) told Mr Pliny just what he wanted to hear. As Pliny hears it ;

"asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years."

It just sounds too much to me like Pliny is givng them a chance to deny it and they are taking him up on it. Like us saying;

"Yea sure, I used to hang around with those guys, but I got tired of it" (sweat beads forming on my forehead)

For me, it has that ring of convenient denial.

But still, even taken the other way it appears that many must have gotten involved with it and just got bored with it or some such. It almost comes off like just another mystery religion one was fascinated with for a while.

The other factor in Pliny's letter that makes me believe that many Christians were in fact deconverting was this final remark by Pliny ;

So, what he seems to be saying here is that, the temples were almost deserted (in other words, many had become Christians), but now since Pliny's actions, thing are returning to normal.

This doesn;t leave much doubt that, the large majority of these Bythnian Christians chose to be healthy pagan rather than dead Christians.

But, and what my point is, this is FAR from the understanding we get from the NT and other Christian texts works that make it seem as if people are just magically transformed by it, etc.

My take on this is that, the Christian who chose to be martyrs were in fact a very small number. And that is what we would expect.

andrewcriddle

The deaconesses are explicitly described as slaves. Under Roman Law Pliny is forced to torture them in order for their evidence to be kegally admissible
In the early days of Christianity people probably did drift in and out. The formal catechumenate may have developed partly to ensure that people did not become full members without demonstrating long term committal.
I suspect that there had been a loss of interest in the traditional cults extending far beyond Christians a loss of interest of which the rise of Christianity in the area was more a symptom than a cause. Pliny's defence of traditional values caused people who had lost interest to prudently return to the traditional cults.
I agree that most Christians were unwilling to be martyrs. I think the Christian texts about the problems dealing with those who had given way under pressure make that clear.

Andrew Criddle

the Radio Star

You stole that from a post I made a couple of months ago.

judge

Surely they would have posted some exploits on the internet, don't you think?

Spanky

How did he steal this from you? This is just common sense. I've had these exact same thoughts. Did you steal my thoughts? Stay out of my mind, mister! :huh: :huh: Surely, surely you jest???

Johnny Skeptic

Radio Star was kidding. What he meant was that he had made similar arguments, not that I stole his arguments. It is just a figure of speech that I have seen used before at the IIDB.

Spanky

O.K.

the Radio Star

Johnny was using me as a source. He redacted my thoughts along with other unknown sources.