wgreen wrote:Extrabiblical writings such as Tactius, Thallus, Josephus and others attest to the historical Jesus.
Thallus?Who he? There are no such writings by such a man. This is a Christian myth. Even the dubious quotes by Africanus , a Christian writer, never claim that somebody called Thallus mentioned Jesus.
Tacitus never mentions 'Jesus'. Josephus is,of course, tampered by Christians and so hardly counts as evidence.
If I produced a work by a non-Muslim writer mentioning Muhammad, and admitted that Muslim writers had tampered with it, would you take that as evidence of what the historical Muhammad did?
The fame of Jesus was supposed to have spread far and wide so that even kings were eager to meet him.
Strange that nobody seemed to have noticed all these miracles. Gibbon wrote about it.
But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world , to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.
Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy.
Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect . Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe.
A distinct chapter of Pliny is designed for eclipses of an extraordinary nature and unusual duration; but he contents himself with describing the singular defect of light which followed the murder of Caesar.
