Message #38799

[mccoy]

Interesting topic. The burning of the library of Alexandria reminds us that all the literary material arrived to us is probably but a small amount of what has been written in history. The survival of a book up to  recent times was not a frequent occurrence. Some atheists like to argue that Jesus did not exist because there are no reports of him from historians. The answer is simple: first, I would be surprised if there were many reports of the facts occurred in a backwater region of the Roman empire, involving an unknown figure who claimed to be a king and a saviour. Besides, even if there existed a single scroll with historical references to the figure of Jesus (different from the gospels of religious nature), such a scroll would have had a very low degree of probability of survival. Bottom line, the lack of historical material on Jesus should not be a surprise to us.