Originally Posted by Textcritic
When speaking of "records" I believe most people are referring to official administrative documentation of the daily on-goings of the Roman Empire. These are the sorts of documents that do not exist, and there is not much evidence that Roman government was this well organised in the first place.
It depends entirely upon what you believe is "remarkable". Furthermore, based on their writings and descriptions about Palestine, I am fairly certain that Tacitus, Heroditus, Pliny or whoever neither understood nor cared much about distinguishing one particular Jewish sect from another. In the first century CE and much of the second at least, Christians were still attending synagogues, reading Jewish scriptures, and celebrating Jewish festivals. In what way would they have appeared interesting enough to garner special attention?
Pretty decent by what standards? Certainly not by modern estimations, and I think most people have a tendency to either overestimate the extent and quality of evidence, or simply project modern expectations of what they imagined constituted "Roman record keeping" backwards. Again, our sources are pretty sparse, and not just for the existence of Jesus, but for the daily activities of huge numbers of people and instances.
Right. But again, this should not come as any surprise, because most of our sources about everything in the Roman empire are sparse, and they do not really function like you seem to imagine that they should. We know that there were hundreds of so-called "mystery religions" throughout the empire, but we know virtually nothing about them. We know even less from Roman historians about the practices of mystery religions than we do about the presence of Christianity. Should we then become dubious about the existence of mystery religions?
It seems to me that you along with a number of mythicists are dismissing all the evidence in the Gospels and in Paul for the existence of Jesus, on the basis that they are agenda driven sources. That may very well be, but they are still our best sources for the life of Jesus, and they do in fact contain a good deal of historical information, even amid the clutter of propaganda and "mythicised" exaggerations. In this instance, I am using the word "myth" differently, to note that many of the stories we have about Jesus have been developed or even cut from whole cloth to express various theological ideas.
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