I gave references to back up what I said. Goober didn't even do that.
In the matter of references, I supplied a list of historians in my previous post. If you like, I can supply an extensive bibliography, though it's in book form, not hyperlink form.
Or were deliberately written to sound that way. Remember that at the time Christianity was in its infancy and was trying very hard to establish itself. Appeals to witnesses would be very useful in legitimising what would otherwise have been viewed as heresy.
An appeal to both friendly
and hostile witnesses is suicide unless the events described were irrefutable. A hostile witness would be only too happy to refute a false claim. But no hostile witness could disprove any of the events in question; they could only interpret or construe them for their own purposes.
So in the case of the John some 50 years after the death of Jesus. Even the earliest writings are 20 years later. So nothing was written at the time and to be honest it's dubious that any of them were written by the same people that are claimed to have written them.
Not only is it not dubious, it is
probable that they were written by their claimed authors, given the documentary record. Furthermore, 20 and 50 years is an
incredibly short time by historical standards. Numerous historical accounts were passed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years before they were written down in the first place.
Incidentally, we haven't even touched yet upon the extensive quotations to be found in the letters by the early church fathers. The widespread availablility of quotations (sufficient to reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament, according to Sir David Dalrymple) and the dates of the church fathers' letters themselves, lend further credibility to the dating of the primary documents.
So 120 years after the death then.
As Scotty pointed out, Irenaeus became a Christian 37 years after the death of Jesus, not 120.
I asked for a contemporary quote and you've given me quotes from people who weren't even born when the crucifixion supposedly occurred. This is exactly what I mean when I say that there are no contemporary records that mention Jesus. Every single thing is from at least 20 years later with most being from much later.
Except that Jesus himself was, from the world's point of view, a passing fad. He came out of nowhere, enjoyed tremendous popularity for a short time, and then was unceremoniously rejected by the people and executed as a common criminal. There may have been records kept of his life, but after his execution very few people would have judged them worth preserving for more than a few years, any more than a person of today would want to keep a newspaper around for more than a few days.
It was only later, after Jesus's followers grew to noticeable size, that his historical significance became apparent. And even then, non-Christian writers were more concerned about the phenomenon of Christianity itself, and its immediate implications, than how it got started in the first place.
You've yet to show a single record mentioning Jesus from even 50AD that is from a non-Christian source.
Try this one, from the Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. Not from 50AD, but pretty close:
But not all the relief that could come from man, not all the bounties that the prince could bestow, nor all the atonements which could be presented to the gods, availed to relieve Nero from the infamy of being believed to have ordered the conflagration, the fire of Rome. Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished with the most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but throughout the city of Rome also.
I have no problem accepting that that much might be true based on how quickly Christianity started up. And given how much agreement there is over the life of Jesus 50 years later a lot of those points could be true. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I'd put the odds that there was a real Jesus as higher than that there wasn't.
But my point is that even that much can't be proved from the writings of the time. And given how quickly even modern cults can spring up, believing in all kinds of nonsense, it is possible that the entire story of Jesus is a fabrication.
Except that cults do not spring up under the sort of persecution experienced by the early Christians. They had everything to lose and little to gain by witnessing to the historical accuracy of the gospels and epistles.
Secondly, disqualifying all the Christian documents on the basis of partiality is not justifiable. No judge would toss out a case based on the fact that the only witness to a crime was the victim himself.
Finally, you have long since crossed the line of reasonable skepticism and are now engaging in counter-advocacy. You're not following Aristotle's literary dictum that "the benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself". Based on the number of extant Christian manuscripts, their proximity to the events they describe, and their corroboration by other sources;
especially when compared to the same statistics for other historical records, there is no reason to reject them as historically accurate.
