AProudLefty (11-02-2021)
AProudLefty (11-02-2021)
there is no serious scholar of antiquity who denies a historical person named Jesus of Nazareth existed.
We simply don't know if anything contemporary was written about Jesus.
Almost no papyrus scrolls from 2000 years ago survived, or were hand copied for future generations of posterity.
There were not journalists, newspapers, or mass media in the first century AD.
It is extraordinary that anything was written at all in the first century about a peasant teacher from Galilee.
The NT accounts of miracles are undoubtedly embellished. During his life, Jesus was an itinerant peasant with a ministry of a few dozen people in a backwater, rural Roman province.
Not exactly something that was on the Roman radar
Only emperors, kings, and the high artisticracy were thought worth committing to written record on papyrus.
Almost all information was passed around by oral tradition in the Late Bronze Age..
The fact that multiple, intelligent independent sources attest to a historical peasant named Jesus within a few decades of his execution is remarkable in the context of the first century.
It is substantially more compelling evidence than we have for the existence of the founders of Buddhism, Confucianism.
Confucius is not even mentioned in history until hundreds of years after his death, when his teachings passed down orally began to be written down.
The information we have about Sidartha Guatauma was written down hundreds of years after he died.
But the consensus among almost all reputable religious historians is that Confucius and Sidartha Guatauma were real people who at least inspired the writing of the Analects and the Buddhist canon.
christiefan915 (11-07-2021), Doc Dutch (11-02-2021)
Oral or physical, like a martial art/yoga, leave no record behind them except their adherents. The adherents, IMO, themselves are good evidence. The ripple that can be traced back in history as it grew out of Jerusalem and Judea, then crossed the Med into Rome. That's history.
Literacy in the time of Jesus was quite high, but it was mainly limited to reading Finding a writer appears to be the major issue. No doubt there were places that sold writings like a telegraph office. The Gospel of Thomas specifically mentions the writers of Jesus; Didymos (twins) Judas Thomas. I won't assume they followed Jesus around 24/7, but it's reasonable that if Jesus gave a sermon, that someone would be there to write it down.
. : https://www.baslibrary.org/biblical-...-review/29/4/4
The first factor to consider is how prevalent literacy was in Jesus’ time. Full literacy means being able to read and write proficiently, but degrees of literacy vary; people who can read, for example, may not be able to write. A common view is that of W.H. Kelber, who claims that, in first-century A.D. Palestine, “writing was in the hands of an élite of trained specialists, and reading required an advanced education available only to a few.”
"Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
Cypress (11-02-2021)
Remember that the Library of Alexander was destroyed? No telling how much was lost.
nice work
The New Testament explicitly mentions that the disciples Peter and John were illiterate.
Since Jesus and rest of his disciples were generally of the same socio-economic class, it is reasonable to presume they could not write either.
Even if literacy had been one hundred percent in 33 AD, that would still not mitigate the problem of preservation. It simply defies the laws of physics and chemistry that a Papyrus scroll or velum parchment would survive 2000 years for us to read, short of an extraordinary act of preservation, or deciding the scroll is so important that hand-written copies should be produced decade after decade, century after century for posterity sake..
The moral of the story is that the cumulative evidence for a historical Jesus is compelling, and even stronger than the evidence for a historical Confucius, Laozi, or Buddha (though I tend to broadly accept their historicity too).
Last edited by Cypress; 11-02-2021 at 02:21 PM. Reason: Typo
AProudLefty (11-02-2021), Doc Dutch (11-02-2021)
Legion is a Legion- In his own mind!
Jack (11-02-2021)
Thanks for the points on their literacy. The sayings and stories from Jesus as spoken to the writers seems important enough to keep.
Agreed it's be extremely rare for parchment to survive that long. It appears the Dead Sea Scrolls are one of those rarities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Origin
I have no doubt Jesus existed and that many of the sayings in the Gospels, including Thomas, were his. Consider the technological differences in what would have happened had Jesus arrived a thousand years earlier or a thousand years later?
There was even less writing in the region in 1000 BCE. There might not be anything in writing.
"Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
Agreed about campfire stories until written languages. That had been around for about 3000 years by the time of Jesus.
https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing...-writing-begin
From Mesopotamia to the Americas, discover how different regions around the world adopted writing at different times and for different reasons.
Full writing-systems appear to have been invented independently at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, and shortly afterwards in Egypt at around 3200 BC. By 1300 BC we have evidence of a fully operational writing system in late Shang-dynasty China. Sometime between 900 and 600 BC writing also appears in the cultures of Mesoamerica.
There are also several places such as the Indus River valley and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) where writing may have been invented but it remains undeciphered.
Although these dates suggest that writing could have spread out from one central point of origin, there is little evidence of any links between these systems, with each possessing unique qualities.
"Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
AProudLefty (11-02-2021)
A tragic loss. If someone had a time machine, robbing the Library at Alexandria before each fire would be a good target.
Not that Caesar's burning was accidental but the Christian burning and Muslim burning were the old religion vs. science conflict.
https://www.mymcpl.org/blogs/histori...ary-alexandria
There's a decent movie about Hypatia vs the Christians on IMDB TV "Agora" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/Despite all this, the library is most famous (or rather infamous) for its burning. Throughout its near 1,000-year history, the library was burned multiple times.
According to Plutarch, the first person to blame is Julius Caesar. On his pursuit of Pompey into Egypt in 48 BCE, Caesar was cut off by a large fleet of Egyptian boats in the harbor of Alexandria. He ordered the boats to be burned. The fleet was destroyed, but the flames spread to the city and the library. It’s not known how much of the library was destroyed.
When Caesar documented this attack in his account of the civil war, he left out the destruction of the library; however, this is not uncommon of Caesar, who often left out damaging facts about himself in his writing. However, despite this loss, the library lived on. According to reports, Mark Antony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls for the library well after Caesar’s attack.
The second, more famous, burning of the library came at the hands of Theophilus who was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 CE. He turned the Temple of Serapis into a Christian church. It is likely that the collection was destroyed by the Christians who moved in. Some sources say nearly 10 percent of the library’s collection was housed in the Temple of Serapis. In the following years, the Christian attack against the library escalated, and the last great pagan philosopher and librarian, Hypatia, was tortured and killed.
The final blow came in 640 CE when Alexandria came under Muslim rule. The Muslim ruler, Caliph Omar, asserted that the library’s contents would “either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” The contents of the library were then supposedly used as tinder for the city’s bathhouses. Even then, it is said that it took six months for all the materials to burn.
"Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
AProudLefty (11-02-2021)
"The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first. That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. "
https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-pl...-and-evolution
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