lpetrich

That "Sunday School" picture is what Xian apologists never tire of giving us when they are not trying to rebut history-based skeptical argument. Then they call their Lord and Savior an irrelevant nobody.

Furthermore, the Gospels themselves make Jesus Christ seem like a big celebrity, someone who could attract big crowds of admirers, and later, detractors. The Gospels' accounts of his last days in Jerusalem are luridly dramatic enough to be worth writing about, I think.

The Testimonium Flavianum? That's so out-of-character that many people consider it a forgery. Perhaps some scribe's marginal notes that got mistaken for part of the text.

Arguments from silence are sometimes valid, as when the silent ones ought to have known about something.

Kapyong

Gday,

So, you claim Juvenal could not possibly be expected to mention Jesus, beause he mentioned NOTHING BUT doings in the City of Rome.

Let's see if Juvenal mentions things outside Rome :


Satire 1 :

"a slave-born denizen of Canopus"
(a city in the Nile delta)

"and those triumphal statues among which some Egyptian Arabarch"
(possibly an allusion reference to Julius Alexander, a Jew who was Prefect of Egypt A.D. 67-70.)

"But just describe Tigellinus and you will blaze amid those faggots in which men, with their throats tightly gripped, stand and burn and smoke, and you(*) trace a broad furrow through the middle of the arena."
(The passage refers to the burning of the early Christians, and the dragging of their remains across the arena.)

Satire 2:

"In the first place, they are unlearned persons, though you may find their houses crammed with plaster casts of Chrysippus"
(The eminent Stoic philosopher, pupil of Cleanthes.)

"for their greatest hero is the man who has brought a likeness of Aristotle or Pittacus"
(One of the seven wise men of Greece, b. circ. B.C. 652.)

"or bids his shelves preserve an original portrait of Cleanthes."
(Pupil and successor of Zeno, founder of the Stoic School, from about B. C. 300 to 220.)

"Never did the quiver-bearing Samiramis the like in her Assyrian realm..."
(Mythical founder of the Assyrian empire with her husband Ninus.)

"Our arms indeed we have pushed beyond Juverna's shores,"
(Ireland)



Satire 3 :

"They are as ready of speech as Isaeus,[9] and more torrential."
(An Assyrian rhetorician: not the Greek orator Isaeus. )



So, Juvenal DOES mention things - people, places, events OUTSIDE Rome.
He COULD have mentioned Jesus easily.


Source:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat3eng.asp


K.

mountainman

A more recent discussion is The Licona controversy and Matthean Zombies

mountainman

Not only was the author Lucian a satirist, but a large number of additional books in his name have been assessed as being the result of 4th century forgeries. The basis of the cult of Glycon story is probably the cult of Asclepius, whom the emperors did sponsor both on their coinage and by patronage of the Asclepian temples, shrines and libraries until as late as Diocletian. See Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Emma J. Edelstein, Ludwig Edelstein, Gary B. Ferngren.

mountainman

This list is about (1) the mention of Jesus. What would analogous lists about

(2) the mention of "Christians" and
(3) the mention of "the books of the Canonical New Testament"

look like, and how similar would these lists be to this list?




Gregory Hays' 2003 translation of Meditations
Hays' endnote for 11.3 says:

"This ungrammatical phrase [like the Christians]
is almost certainly a marginal comment by a later reader;
there is no reason to think Marcus
had the Christians in mind here."

Maxwell Staniforth's 1964 translation of Meditations
The translation is as follows:

"Happy the soul which, at whatever moment the call comes for release from the body, is equally ready to face extinction, dispersion, or survival. Such preparedness, however, must be the outcome of its own decision; a decision not prompted by mere contumacy, as with the Christians, * but formed with deliberation and gravity and, if it is to be convincing to others, with an absence of heroics."

The corresponding footnote reads as follows:

* If these words are authentic and not a later insertion,
they are the only reference which Marcus makes to the Christians.
C.R. Haines, however, in the Loeb edition of the Meditations,
points out that the clause is

'outside the construction, and in fact ungrammatical.
It is in the very form of a marginal note,
and has every appearance of being a gloss
foisted into the text.'

This is simply a polite way of saying Marcus has been interpolated by a later hand.

aa5874

Roger, you are USING an Argument form Silence.

The Gospels do NOT ever state that Jesus was a crucified nobody.

The Gospels STATE Jesus was WELL-KNOWN even by Herod the Tetrarch.

Matthew 14:1 - Mark 1:28 - Luke 5:15 - And now the Pauline writings.

Philippians 2 Incredibly, Roger's claim that Jesus was a NOBODY is based on SILENCE.

Jesus of the NT had a NAME ABOVE EVERY NAME on EARTH even above the DEIFIED EMPERORS of Rome and GREAT Multitudes came to hear him according to the NT.

But, listen to Roger.

Roger, Roger!!!! It is an argument from Silence that Jesus was a NOBODY and that is why he is hardly mentioned in writings of antiquity.

The 1% of history CONTRADICT you. In the SURVIVING texts, Jesus was the MOST SIGNIFICANT character in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

Roger, your argument from SILENCE is fallacious.

cornbread_r2

The NAB Catholic bible footnote for this passage reads:

[...]"The earth quaked...appeared to many": peculiar to Mt. The earthquake, the splitting of the rocks and especially the resurrection of the dead saints indicate the coming of the final age. In the Old Testament the coming of God is frequently portrayed with the imagery of an earthquake (Pss 68, 9; 77, 10), and Jesus speaks of the earthquake that will accompany the "labor pains" that signify the beginning of the dissolution of the old world. (24, 7-8) For the expectation of the resurrection of the dead at the coming of the new and final age. see Dn 12, 1-3. Matthew knows that the end of the old age has not yet come (28, 20), but the new age has broken in with the death (and resurrection; cf the earthquake in 28, 2) of Jesus; see the note on 16, 28. "After his resurrection"; this qualification seems to be due to Matthew's wish to assert the primacy of Jesus' resurrection even though he has placed the resurrection of the dead saints immediately after Jesus' death.

From their perspective Matthew is just hammering home some well-known portentous imagery. It's like the starting gun for the new age.

ktsai

I recently had a discussion with a friend about the lack of historical evidence of Jesus and he disagreed with me and pointed me to this site. The site claims that there are many extrabiblical and secular historical accounts of Jesus. Does anyone know if any of this has any merit?

Toto

These are the standard list of indirect or dubious references that allow Christians to think that there was a Jesus.

Tacitus - mentions Christians and Christ, but not "Jesus." This could be hearsay from Christians, and a decent case can be made that this reference is a forgery. Interestingly, the volume of Tacitus' history that covered Palestine around 30 AD has not survived, and their is no mention of its contents in commentators.

Josephus - forgery, plain and simple.

Julius Africanus refers to Thallus, who mentioned a period of darkness. No mention of Jesus.

Pliny - mentions Christians who sing a hymn to Christ as a God. No observation of Jesus.

The Babylonian Talmud - a source that cannot be dated, and could be quite late.

Lucien of Samosata - a second century Roman satirist who mocked Christians for their gullibility. No observation of Jesus

Mara Bar Serapion does not actually mention Jesus, only that the Jews killed their wise king.

The Gnostic writings - Pete will be happy to learn that someone takes these mystical fantasies seriously as history. But the Jesus described in the Gnostic writings was not human.

And then this hoary, false-on-many-levels chestnut:

Perhaps the greatest evidence that Jesus did exist is the fact that literally thousands of Christians in the first century A.D., including the twelve apostles, were willing to give their lives as martyrs for Jesus Christ. People will die for what they believe to be true, but no one will die for what they know to be a lie.

If Christians died, it was for refusing to honor the Roman Emperor, not for asserting a belief in a historical Jesus.

Roger Pearse

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