Originally Posted by mushymanrob:
“could all contemporary accounts of him be lost?... thats possible, but unlikely, surely all those who witnessed him and who supposed to have started the eary church would have gathered and kept all the evidence...
..... and still no one of you can explain why oral tradition from the thousands that saw him died out - thus rendering his message of salvation a failure!”
“could all contemporary accounts of him be lost?... thats possible, but unlikely, surely all those who witnessed him and who supposed to have started the eary church would have gathered and kept all the evidence...
..... and still no one of you can explain why oral tradition from the thousands that saw him died out - thus rendering his message of salvation a failure!”
This is the only point I'm going to address because your posts are now becoming tiresome soundbites with absolutely no evidence to back-up your arguments.
Those who witnessed him DID keep the evidence - it's made very clear in the writings of Paul and in the Gospels that his disciples spread the message as far and as wide as they could. And as you've already been shown, the beginning of Luke's Gospel makes it clear that "many" had written accounts of Jesus' life, teachings and appearances.
The oral traditions certainly did not die out. One of the earliest church creeds - one that is still found today - is found in 1 Corinthians 3-5 and even atheists agree (http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11069 - the author of "The Christian Delusion"!) that this can be dated to within several years of Jesus' death.
You can ask until you are blue in the face for "contemporary" writings about Jesus and you will not find any. You won't find any for anyone. People were by and large illiterate and poorly educated. It was not accepted tradition to keep "diaries" or to write down information as it occurred. When it came to historical biographies, tradition dictated that these were only written about the most important people, and only after their deaths.
There are virtually no documents that have survived Christ's era. Velleius Paterculus (ca. 19 B.C. – A.D. 30), a retired army officer and amateur historian produced a“badly written history of Rome covering that age from the end of the Trojan War to the death of Livia (A.D. 29) - that's about the best we have.
The impossibility of what you are asking can be put into context through the life of Pontius Pilot. Our best evidence for his existence, prior to a discovery of a concrete slab bearing his name discovered in 1961, comes from the same external sources we have for Jesus' existence - Josephus and Tactius. Here was a man who served the Roman government for ten years in one of the political hotspots of the empire. He himself was embroiled repeatedly in controversy (we know this from Josephus' writings). And yet, there is not a solitary Roman, Jewish or any other contemporary archival document that so much as mentions his name. All we have to tie him to the era is a concrete slab - something that we will never find for Jesus, who was not a Roman prefect but, to the Romans, a common criminal, and to the Jews, a dangerous blasphemer.
And there's another very good reason why writings about Christ are only found after his death. Because, for Christians, the resurrection of Christ means everything. If that never happened, then Jesus was nothing more than a Jewish upstart who was crucified by the Romans - and there's no reason to write about him. But the disciples, his followers and those who he also appeared to clearly believed he had risen from the dead - now, whether you believe that or not is not the debate we're having, but it is a very logical reason why Jesus would not be written about until after his time. Resurrection from death moved Jesus from merely a great teacher or a prophet to being the Son of God - and that was something worth recording and writing about.





