Christ's History ~ Why the Delay In Recording It?

reply to post by aaaiii

The existing manuscripts show evidence of having been compiled from earlier sources that no longer exist.

Most of the documents are letters, many have clear authenicity.

The 'church' at first was a small Jewish sect that even Roman historians knew little about.

There was no organized institutional 'church' until about 300 AD.

reply to post by Toromos

It weakens the case that he was historically significant.

He was supposed to be the son of God. He was supposed to heal the sick. He was considered fairly profound, something valued by the Romans.

At a time when disease was rampant and medical care was minimal wouldn't he have been well-known even to the Romans?

reply to post by troubleshooter

I tend to question authenticity when there is no clear provenence. The documentation may be based on earlier records. There is no proof.

reply to post by aaaiii


There were lots of healers and miracle workers at that time. (by which I mean what these people claimed for themselves.). The Romans would have shrugged their shoulders at another one. Jesus is portrayed as going out of his way to heal the destitute and the lowest of his society -- that would have set him apart from the others.

Jesus only becomes a world historical figure when the Emporer Constatine says so, hundreds of years after Jesus's execution.

Originally posted by aaaiii
reply to post by troubleshooter

 

I tend to question authenticity when there is no clear provenence. The documentation may be based on earlier records. There is no proof.

Are you looking for confirmation or not?
What you find will depend on your own expectations.

Do you want it to be true or not?

I tend to go with the biblical scholars whether christian or agnostic all agree Jesus existed...
...some accept the supernatural elements some don't...
...but all agree Jesus existed.

reply to post by Toromos

That's exactly my point.

If he was so extraordinary why wasn't he written about while he was alive?

reply to post by troubleshooter

I don't dispute that he existed.

I question his true importance and I wonder about his divinity.



I got confused by my own thread. Sorry.

I can be stupid sometimes.

reply to post by aaaiii


I think what is meant by earlier documents is the Q document. If you look at the gospels of Matthew and Luke they are very similar to each other. The hypothesis is that there existed an earlier document, Q, (from the German word Quelle, meaning source) that the writers of Matthew and Luke bases their Gospels. It's a hypothesis generated to explain the similarity of those documents and doesn't go to their "authenticity", depending on what that means,

reply to post by aaaiii


It depends on who is calling him extraordinary. The Romans didn't think so. The Jewish leaders at the time thought he was a fraud or heretic. Hus followers thought he was extraordinary, but they had other priorities than writing down histories. You must remember at this time the vast majority of the people were illiterate. Writing stuff down for them just wasn't important. Only after there was a need to keep in contact from many places does writing become an issue. These ancient Romans, Greeks, and Jews did not have the same historical consciousness we have today.

reply to post by GD21D

The better question may be. Why did Caesar Augustus never mention this prominent figure in his own writings? Perhaps he was oblivious to the happenings in his own empire. Maybe he was just too busy dealing with other matters rather than addressing the murder of a proclaimed son of a god.

Because Caesar Augustus thought he, himself, was the son of a god.
The empire was mostly concerned with the goings on of the capital and its leaders, and no so much about the to them obscure prophecies of the restoration of the Judean kingdom.

aaaiii

Jesus' own people apparently first wrote about him about twenty years after his death, in the Epistles of Paul. Paul recorded what was important to him from whatever he knew, second-hand, about Jesus' life. Some years later, more conventionally biographical works were written.

The chief reason for the delay seems fairly clear. Jesus' people thought he was coming back in their lifetimes. There was no point writing things for future generations when there weren't supposed to be any future generations.

The other use for writing is to transmit information through space. There's no evidence of any systematic networking among dispersed Christian centers before Paul set up his network. As soon as he did, he wrote things down, business correspondence.

Nobody else wrote anything about Jesus for plausibly the same reasons that few people today write about the many and colorful traveling godmen of India. Unless you're part of that culture, you aren't much interested in reading about magic tricks better appreciated in person. If you are both part of that culture and literate, then maybe the itinerant godman isn't the image of your people you want to present to the rest of the world.

And recall that like the Indian godmen, the Jewish Godman spoke almost exclusively to his own co-religionists. By the time writing lives of Jesus is being done in earnest, that religion, Second Temple Judaism, doesn't even exist anymore, because there was no longer any Second Temple.

Besides, after the first generation (the one that thought it wasn't going to die, but did), Christianity had its own living people to promote the organization by working their own signs and wonders. For example, exorcism is very dramatic, and if it's done in Jesus' name, and it "works," then you might believe other things about Jesus, too. (For example, you might think the first generation simply misunderstood what Jesus meant about not dying, See John 21).

It's a good question, then, but it just isn't a big mystery. The delay isn't so long or so unaccountable that it tells much about the historicity of Jesus. As to the divinity or prophethood of Jesus, that's faith, and so it doesn't really matter whether anybody ever wrote anythning down about that or not. You believe it or you don't, and there's isn't a lot more to it than that.
-

reply to post by eight bits

That's a good answer.

Jesus was one of several "Messiahs" the previous one to him being John (The Baptist) so at the time no one thought anything of it as there was a long history of Son of God/Messiahs worshipped by a small, breakaway Jewish sect that believed God would send a "son".

Jesus' message was one of peace and turning the other cheak which was in stark contrast to the other fire and brimstone religious leaders of the Abrahamic God persuasion.

When the Romans ( in particular the Flavian Dynasty..namely Josephus) were having trouble with the Jews in the Jewish wars around 100 years later they launched the psy-op that is Jesus to get the warlike fire and brimstone warriors that opposed Roman rule to become placid.

This was so succesfull it was rolled out across the Roman empire to replace warrior gods with a peacefull leader that sedated the masses.

In addition to the historical evidence for this there are a number of issues surrounding Jesus as the Messiah namely:

What did the son of god do when he was a child...if you read the ommitted scripts that made up the King James they had him as some sore of magician making birds out of clay...hmmm

The Nativity story relies on Joseph being called back to his place of birth for a census...Romans did do census but unfortunatley these were documented and none occured when the Nativity was supposed to have occured and they didnt require people to return to their place of birth.

Read up on Josephus and the Jewsish Roman wars and it's pretty obvious Rome had the last laugh.

Just for the record, Josephus was considered either a liar or, at least, an embellisher.

reply to post by aaaiii



Your question is a good one.

I think your question stems from our current ability to have almost instantaneous information about topics and events.

The Romans didn't have CNN, newspapers, or the internet.

We have to remember that much of the information obtained in ancient times was obtained verbally.. People would congregate in the city square to hear the "news"., Stories were also told through poem or song from one generation to the next.


Biographies are often written after the fact. The important thing is that the biographer is able to examine letters or better yet interview eyewitnesses surrounding the events of the person written about. This was the case with the accounts of Jesus.

There is precedent for this in the bible. Genesis was believed to be an inspired writing of Moses. He wrote about Adam, Noah and Abraham. No doubt these accounts were verbalized from one generation to the next.



Most people today take the bible for granted.

It's books are thousands of years old, and yet still sparks discussion today.

reply to post by dusty1

And we know how reliable word of mouth is.

It's a little disturbing to be held hostage by an ancient system.

reply to post by aaaiii

And we know how reliable word of mouth is

Actually word of mouth is the best form of advertising anything.

Many businesses rely on word of mouth to stay in business.

If he was such an important figure, performed miracles, spoke profoundly on life, was the son of God, why was there such a long period of time between his death and the actual record of his history? If he was such an important figure why did his disciples not record everything he said and did while he was alive?

Christ came to spread a revolutionary idea.


There are alot of great ideas that were very important, but were not recorded.

Who invented the wheel, what was his name?

If the wheel is so important, why did its users not record the name of the one who invented it?

It's a little disturbing to be held hostage by an ancient system.

Like:

"Do to others as you would have them do to you"?

"Love your enemies"?



These ideas disturb you?

reply to post by dusty1

The point is that stories change over time.

Take ten people and tell one a story and by the time it gets to number ten it doesn't remotely resemble the original story.

So, what about Christ and the Bible?

You have to wonder.



And why would I want to love my enemy. They're my enemy for a reason.

reply to post by aaaiii

TextAs believer in the man, Christ, I have often wondered why his faithful waited 100 years or more to record an historical record of his life.

Because it was the last out of 13 other fables that have heared across time,jesus is fake,its just another revised version of whom the real name of the son of god was called.

reply to post by aaaiii

For one thing, the message was originally being spread by word of mouth.
For another, his very first followers, after the crucifixion and resurrection, were not expecting the world to last long enough for a written record to be necessary. Christ would return and then everybody would know. Once the world was obviously continuing, and the first generation were getting older, they began compiling narratives.

They didn't wait 100 years, though. In "Re-dating the New Testament", John Robinson estimates thirty years or less for the first appearance of the gospels.
There was probably also, according to one popular hypothesis, an early written record of "the sayings of Jesus", the so-called "Q document".The gospels would have been written to incorporate material from that.