On Jan 23, 1:11 pm, "Jeckyl" <no...@nowhere.com> wrote: >
<roger.pea...@googlemail.com> wrote in message

news:8da77adc-7d38-4aba-94e9-690fa40a42e@21g2000hsj.googlegroups.com...

Please do. But I think that you will find that actually there are no
"historians writing around that time".

I didn't notice the 'historians' part .. my apologies .. I was meaning
things like miltary reports, etc etc.

No hassle. By 'military reports' I think we must mean papyri, etc,
and I don't think any of these exist outside of Egypt (unfortunately).

I am sure we have many writings from
that period, and none mention jesus. Surely something as important as
the
events (particular around his birth and death) would have been recorded
at
the time.

Important to whom?

But that isn't the key issue here.

Most people are sure that things 'must' exist, because few know what
does exist of ancient literature. But 99% of all ancient literature
is lost (the estimate is by Pietro Bembo, but N.G.Wilson agrees with
it).

Do you mind if I repost (slightly amended) something I wrote on this
type of argument long ago? I think it may be relevant.

(Starting here:)This whole genre of argument (which we see widely
circulated online) is actually based on lack of information. For
instance the policies and person of the emperor Tiberius, master of
the Roman world rather than just a minor religious figure on its
extremes, are themselves almost entirely known to us from the accounts
of Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio. All of these were born after
Tiberius died.

Ancient history cannot be written in the manner of modern history.
Surely evidence for Jesus must be of the same kind and type as that
available for everyone else? It is not an argument against the
historicity of Jesus that Roman literature has mostly perished; it is
an argument against the validity of the discipline of ancient
history. Only a single Roman literary source of any kind written
between 30-50 AD survives -- a volume of poems.

Rather than go on about this, allow me to quote E.M.Blaiklock, "Man or
myth" (1983), p.12-13. The book was in response to a polemic by John
Allegro. Dr Blaiklock was Professor of Classics at the University of
Auckland, and died in 1983. The author was a professional writing
about his area of expertise, although he was also a Christian
rebutting an attack on his religion. Rather than offer my own opinion,
I'll quote verbatim.

The facts should be checked of course. In a popular book intended to
be read by people unfamiliar with the writers mentioned, Blaiklock has
to do more than give a bare list if it is to be readable, so there are
brief snapshots of the people and society. But here we are concerned
with the data, I suggest.

==Contemporary Literature==

The New Testament, of course, is the chief literary source for the
life and work of Jesus Christ, and to that mass of monumental evidence
the theme must soon return. To say, as J. M. Allegro somewhere does,
that 'there is no worthwhile contemporary evidence outside the New
Testament that Jesus ever existed,' is no true contribution to
discussion. The four words outside the New Testament strip the
assertion of meaning. Historians would be glad to have such authentic,
multiple, congruent evidence on more personalities and events of
ancient history.

What do we mean by 'contemporary evidence'? It is a sombre fact that
practically everything written during the lifetime of Christ has
perished. Parts of one unimportant historical work survive from the
years of His ministry or their vicinity. The badly written history of
Rome by Velleius Paterculus, a retired army officer of Tiberius turned
amateur historian, was published in a.d. 30. The procuratorial records
of Palestine were much less likely to be preserved. Two-thirds of
Pilate's name has recently been found in an inscription at Caesarea
along with a reference in one word to a shrine of Tiberius-an oddly
brief authentication of the procurator and his preoccupations. Jesus
is authenticated in no other way, outside the gospels, save by
Josephus and a sentence in a Roman historian. Such has been time's
destruction. The decade of the forties has left little, save that the
pleasant fables of the Macedonian freedman, Phaedrus, were written
during those years.

The same remark is almost true of the surviving literature of the
fifties and sixties of the first century, when the first three
gospels, and most of the letters of the New Testament were being
written. Bookends set a foot apart on this desk where I write would
enclose the works from those significant years. Curiously, much of it
comes from Spanish emigrants in Rome, a foretaste of what the Iberian
peninsula was to give to her conqueror-senators, writers, and two
important emperors, Trajan and Hadrian. Paul had foresight when he set
a visit to Spain in his program.

The full list of Spanish contributions from the decade of Nero's
principate, in which Christians first attracted official attention, is
interesting.5 Caught like Paul in that evil tangle of events, and
destined for death like Nero's Christian victims, were the
philosopher, writer and statesman, Seneca, and his nephew, the poet
Lucan. Seneca was the most considerable figure in Roman letters since
the great literary flowering of the Augustan Age. He was born at
Corduba about the time of the nativity, won wealth and station
(judging neither inconsistent with philosophy), suffered exile under
Claudius (rather unphilosophically endured), and returned to Rome to
serve as tutor to the youthful Nero. This was in a.d. 49. During
Nero's early years Seneca, in partnership with Burrus, the bluff
commandant of the household troops, gave the Roman world five years of
good administration which became legendary. In the early sixties,
horrified by Nero's mounting license, Seneca retired to write his
philosophical treatises and letters, works of noble worth which may be
dated round 63 and 64. Seneca died in Nero's Terror of 65 which, like
Hitler's fierce reprisals after the Bomb Plot, was launched on Rome's
upper class when a conspiracy, clumsily mounted by one Calpurnius
Piso, failed. The story of Nero's mad years and Seneca's death is told
vividly in Tacitus' Annales.6 We possess quite a sturdy volume of
Seneca's writings. They are a fine contribution to Roman literature, a
monument of what is called 'Silver Latin'.

Seneca's nephew, the precocious twenty-six-year-old poet Lucan, died
in the same tragic aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy. We still have
his long poem on the century-old civil war between Julius Caesar and
Pompey. Its competent verse fatally roused Nero's artistic jealousy,
and no more than such a provocation was needed to earn a death
sentence from that vulgar sadist.

A third and luckier Spaniard was an old soldier named Columella. He
had actually served in Syria during the years which saw Pilate's
recall from Judea and the establishment of the church at Antioch.
Twenty-five miles from Rome, at Ardea, he took up farming, like many
an old soldier, and in a.d. 60 published a book on agriculture.

Another writer, better known to the modern world because of Henry
Sienkiewicz's brilliant novel Quo Vadis and the striking (though
historically faulty) film made from it, is Gaius Petronius. This
indolent aristocrat was murdered in a.d. 66 by Tigellinus, Nero's
evil commander of the Praetorian guard. Petronius was a notorious
voluptuary, though he proved an able governor of Bithynia. He earned
the nickname of 'Arbiter Elegantiarum' (judge in matters of taste)
from his competent direction of the young Nero's pleasures. Petronius
wrote Satyricon, the only novel from his century known to us. Large
fragments tell of the disreputable doings of three Greek scamps in the
Campanian seaports. We see in the Satyricon, as this romance is
called, the common life of Italy in slum and market-place in that age
of money-making and vulgarity, of crime and lowered standards of
morality-the proletariat, [not] to be discovered elsewhere in the
writings of that decade except in the first five books of the New
Testament.

The list is now almost complete. The satirist Persius died in a.d. 62
at the age of twenty-eight, a delicate young man and the victim, no
doubt, of Rome's malarial climate. We have a few hundred lines of his
laboured verse. There was also the man called the Elder Pliny, to
distinguish him from his nephew, Pliny the letter-writer, of whom more
will be said in the next chapter. This able man, a soldier and later
an admiral of the fleet, has left us a mass of books called Historia
Naturalis, a collection of odd facts about the world of nature and
built out of the same sort of academic diligence shown by Benjamin
Disraeli's father, the bibliophile Isaac Disraeli, in his daily
fossicking in the British Museum. Pliny died of heart failure, the
victim of his lively curiosity, at the time of the eruption of
Vesuvius in a.d. 79. There are only two remaining extant authors.
Asconius Pedianus became blind in a.d. 64. Some fragments of his
commentary on Cicero survive. Quintus Curtius may have been busy on
his history of Alexander the Great during this time. Both are minor
figures of literature, unknown save to specialist scholars.

Of this handful of writers would any have been likely to mention
Christ? Perhaps Seneca, if in fact he met and talked with Paul. But
there is small likelihood that this pleasant medieval legend is true.
Besides, in a.d. 64, in the summer of which year Nero took hostile
note of Rome's Christians, Seneca was a distracted and tormented man.
A year later he was dead, driven to suicide by the mad young tyrant
whom he had sought in vain to tame.

==Later Literature==

The seventies saw stable government in Rome again, under the Flavian
dynasty, whose founder, Vespasian, had emerged victorious from the
shocking events of a.d. 68 and 69, which saw the suicide of Nero, and
four contestants for his principate locked in quadrilateral civil war.
Little literature survives from the period, but consider the few
surviving publications, and ask whether one dead in Palestine forty
years before, or his less remote but scattered, decimated Roman
followers, would have been likely to find mention. Tacitus, destined
to be a great historian and a greater stylist, published a minor work
on oratory in a.d. 81. Martial, another Spaniard, was writing
epigrams. Hundreds of these witty poems survive from the seventies and
eighties-clever, sometimes scurrilous, often brilliant. He does not
clearly mention the Christians, but how many were alive or left in
Rome after that searching assault on the church in a.d. 64?

The nineties saw the last flowering of the 'Silver Age' of Latin
literature. Quintilian, yet another Spaniard, published his twelve
books on oratory in a.d. 95. This is an interesting date, for it was
about that time that the fourth gospel was written. Statius, the poet,
had already published Silvae. Tacitus commenced his fine historical
work in a.d. 98 with two small books. One was a monograph on his
father-in-law, Agricola, who had governed Britain in the late
seventies and carried Roman reconnaisance cautiously to Scotland. It
was one of the very few biographies to come from the literature of the
ancient world. The other monograph was a book on Germany. Would
Quintilian or Tacitus be likely to mention Christ or the church in
such works?

Juvenal, Martial's friend, had hardly begun to write before the end of
the century. Like Martial's poems, his mordant, satiric writings touch
life at various levels and from many wry angles. He mentions
scornfully the Jews, whose shanty town was evident outside the walls
of Rome, but he does not mention the Christians. Could one expect him
to know them? Their faith was proscribed. They sought to escape
attention. Satirists fasten on absurdities thrust on their notice, and
Juvenal found enough absurdities in Rome.

Tacitus must have begun writing his historical works of greater note
as soon as the tyrant Domitian died. This was in a.d. 95 when John
published, or had recently published, his gospel. Tacitus's Historiae,
written early in the second century, deal with the year a.d. 69 and
inevitably mention the ghastly Jewish war. His Annales, which pick up
the story of the emperors at Augustus's death, were given to the world
in a.d. 116. Large portions of both these fine historical works
remain.

The Annales gives a detailed account of Nero's persecution of the
Christians of Rome which began in the closing weeks of July 64. It is
a highly prejudiced account, accepting the slanders which so vividly
reveal the basis of persecution of the Christians in the first
century, but it mentions Christ and His suffering under Pontius
Pilatus, Tiberius' procurator of Judea. We shall return to this
passage later.

A friend of Tacitus was Pliny, the nephew of the old scholar who died
in the eruption of Vesuvius. Pliny, like Petronius, once governed
Bithynia and in the years a.d. 110 to 112 wrote for advice to the
emperor Trajan concerning the church which almost had the province in
its grip. Pliny's spies and investigations provided the governor with
some accurate information about the origin and practices of the church
(quoted in the next chapter), but failed to confirm the slanders which
Tacitus, a few years before, had put too uncritically into his
powerful Latin. We shall not add Suetonius to the list. Though
Suetonius has a garbled reference to Christ, he wrote after a.d. 120.
It suffices for our present purpose to halt within a generation of the
death of the last witness to the living Jesus.

Two of the four major writers of Rome, whose works survive from the
generation in which John's literary activity falls, do mention the
church and its Master. The quibble of J. M. Allegro and other critics,
that a figure so significant as Christians claim their Lord to have
been would have set contemporary writers talking, is thus seen in its
absurdity. It is remarkable that Christianity, which probably reached
Rome in the forties of the century,[1] should, in fact, have so
rapidly commanded attention and found mention in relevant literature.
We shall next examine those references more closely, and then turn to
Flavius Josephus, the clever Jewish priest who became secretary to the
emperor Vespasian and wrote in Greek the story of his people and their
bitter clash with Rome.

[1] Such is the inference if the Nazareth Decree is dated correctly in
the principate of Claudius. See E. M. Blaiklock, Archaeology of the
New

Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), pp. 77-83. --end--

All the best,

Roger Pearse