Reply #110: I disagree [View All]

[TechBear_Seattle]

There is a way to establish that the Romans and the Sanhedrin were very careful and detailed in their recordkeeping: we have what appears to be a very large part of their records.

There still exists hundreds of thousands of documents, at least, detailing Imperial justice. Roman records of trials and criminal proceedings are universally as scrupulous and detailed as the records of the Inquisition and give name, lineage, city or town of origin, jurisdiction, charges, date of trial, date of judgement, verdict, punishment, who administered the punishment, and a full accounting of expenses from the judge's salary to the labor of the slave who cleaned up after floggings, down to the last unica.

As for the Sanhedrin, again, we have a large library of minutes and proceedings. We have an even larger corpus of Jewish jurisprudence that comes from other contemporary sources, including early copies of commentary on the Torah (about 150 years latter, these commentaries would be collected to become the Talmud.) The Jewish attitude towards law, especially religious law, was to meticulously investigate every point. There are records of people who were brought before religious courts on charges: these trials always lasted several days and were always public events. Every argument was recorded, every charge weighed against the Law, every reference to the Torah cross-referenced.

There is a principle in logic commonly known as "Occam's Razor." It states that the simplest of several equally possible explanations is most likely the correct explanation. Applying this prinicple, it is much more likely that the events of the Gospels did not occur as recorded -- assuming that they took place at all, which I do not concede -- than to have both the Roman bureaucracy and the Jewish religious council both violate fundamental rules of jurisprudence and foundational procedures.

Further, I am not "using the details of a roman (sic) execution to impeach the big fact of existence." The way you phrase that implies that I have already conceded that Jesus existed at all. I have not. That is my point: details of a Roman execution do not exist, even though such details were meticulously recorded. While absence of proof is not proof of absence, it does lend weight to the argument that the Jesus of the Gospels did not exist.

Likewise, we can establish from a large body of work the exact procedures of a Jewish religious trial as it would have happened in the early part of the first century, and we can establish just how important was observing the forms and traditions of legal jurisprudence were to the religious leaders of the day. The Gospel accounts of Jesus' trial by a Sanhedrin court violate nearly every one of the established procedures; Occam's Razor requires us to conclude that the Gospel accounts are wrong. Again, that alone is not proof of absence, but it does undermine the assertion that Jesus existed.

We are not talking about someone who was merely "a vagrant son of a carpenter from a backwater part of a backwater province of an empire 2000 years ago executed on trumped up charges." We are talking about someone who, according to the Gospels, stirred up religious authorities enough to totally throw away religious law and legal procedure to get him out of the way, despite the fact that these religious laws and legal procedures were at the very heart of a culture under assault by foreign occupation. We are talking about someone who, according to the Gospels, was executed as a major political threat by a legal system that kept detailed records of the cost of washing the blood from whips used to flog people who stole bread. Whether the charges were trumped up or not is irrelevant: he was charged with a major crime and then executed on conviction of that charge. That Judea was a "backwater" is also irrelevant: because of the political turmoil there during the Roman occupation, Imperial scrutiny on the province was very close. Roman legal documents during the first century CE from Judea tended to be even more meticulous than was the Imperial standard, and the Roman bureaucrats in Judea was even more punctilious than most Imperial officials. While the lack of any documentation at all by these sources is not conclusive, it does lend weight to the argument that Jesus did not exist.

As for your argument about four different oral traditions. May I point to six different versions of how a tussle between Paul Bunyan and is giant blue ox, Babe, formed the Grand Teton mountain range and conclude that Paul Bunyan therefore existed? Can I cite several different ancient legends about Oddyseus at the Siege of Troy, and therefore conclude that he really existed? And what about the hundreds of thousands of accounts from children about Santa Claus.... you get the idea, I hope. The existence of an oral legend is not proof that the subject of the legend was real. That is part of what I mean when I speak of independently verifiable documentation.