Good points from John which I think conclusively answer beliefs some (not myself) Christians may have that moral ideas and equality were absent pre 30-33AD.I've appreciate both standpoints in this Blog! I think the source of Jesus' & Paul's beliefs has to be founded in OT theology due to their context which was most certainly Jewish?

(James Thompson, on "Atheism and the Good Life")

A research and media organisation promoting

the public understanding of the Christian faith

Why is there so little evidence for Jesus?

John Dickson

A common complaint of my sceptical friends is that, if Jesus really lived and did some of the things the Gospels say he did, there ought to be a lot more evidence confirming such things. Where are the reports of Pontius Pilate? Why didn’t Emperor Tiberius mention this Jewish rival to world domination? How is it that there are no Jerusalem court documents referring to such an obviously explosive character? Why is there so little evidence?

Part of the answer is that, in fact, we have very good evidence for the broad outline of Jesus’ life – from both Christian and non-Christian sources. In this article, however, I wish to explore the assumption behind my friends’ complaint. In short, their views about how ancient history works and what results we can expect are ill-informed by the realities of the discipline.

The randomness of history

Ancient History is a game of ‘joining the dots’. It is about connecting texts with artefacts with archaeological remains in an effort to piece together a plausible picture of events and people from the past. And, unfortunately, the ‘dots’ of history are usually unnumbered and incomplete.

Imagine a thousand years from now someone trying to piece together what life was like in your neighbourhood with nothing to go on but a few random remains: the foundations of twenty houses, the ruin of a gym, thirty local newspapers (over a twenty year period), a couple of hundred shopping receipts, a piggy bank full of coins, some letters between lovers and numerous unrelated household items including pictures, teapots, a fridge and some novels. On the basis of these there would be much that we could say about your stomping ground.

From the house foundations we could work out the average size of a family and, from that, the population of the region. From the newspapers we could discern some important events and probably also something of the social and political views of the district. From the coins we could say something about the system of government. From the letters, receipts and novels we could make judgments about the use of language, the state of the economy and the nature of social relationships.

All of this would be accurate, to a point, but the reality is, most of what life was really like in your neighbourhood would remain hidden from us, even from the most perceptive future historian.
  What has survived of the writings and buildings would amount to … much less than one per cent
 
 

This really is what it is like to study the ancient world. What has survived of the writings and buildings of, say, first century Jerusalem, Rome or Athens would amount to the tiniest fraction of what was actually penned and constructed in the period—much less than one per cent. This ‘fortuitousness and fragmentariness of surviving sources,’ as Martin Hengel puts it, means that history is rather hit and miss. The randomness of what remains (and what does not) and what is discovered (and what is not) guarantees that what we know about the past is accidental and lop-sided. Let me offer an example.
By a chance discovery of some ancient Greek letters written on papyrus we happen to know about the plight of a certain second century BC tax official named Dionysius son of Zoilus. One evening while strolling home from a recently opened public bathhouse, poor old Dennis was mugged by a certain Philon and friends (ironically, Philon means ‘love, friendship’). In his letter, Dionysius describes his utter humiliation, and he implores the city guard (who also happens to be named Philon) to arrest the thugs and investigate the case.  It is a delightful, random portrait of life in ancient times.

But contrast this intimate snapshot of a lowly bureaucrat with the fact that we do not possess a single such personal letter from Emperor Tiberius, who ruled the Roman world from AD 14-37. Such is the unpredictability of historical evidence.

Is absence of evidence evidence of absence?

What has this got to do with Jesus? In the first place, the randomness of history—that is, the unpredictability of what survives—should caution us against assuming what kind of evidence we ought to possess for the life of Christ. A principle of historical enquiry I learnt early on in my studies states: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (you might want to read that a couple of times). In other words, just because historians cannot find documentary or archaeological corroboration for an event or person does not mean that the event never occurred or the person never existed. Two glaring examples come to mind.

In passing, the Gospel of John mentions two public baths in Jerusalem—one in Bethesda featuring five covered colonnades and one in the district of Siloam.  Archaeological digs in the city had failed to discover these pools. Some scholars, such as J. Marsh and N. Krieger, began proposing that such geographical details in John’s Gospel were fictitious and intended to be symbolic: perhaps the five colonnades of Bethesda represent the first five books of the Old Testament (Marsh’s hypothesis); maybe ‘Siloam’ (which means sent) is just a metaphor for Jesus sending a blind man to wash.
  the randomness of history … should caution us against assuming what kind of evidence we ought to possess for the life of Christ.
 
 

Then, between 1957-62, a series of archaeological investigations uncovered a pool in the very area described by John; and, yes, there were five colonnades, one on each of the four sides and one across the middle dividing the pool from west to east.  As Urban C. von Wahlde writes in his recent review of the topic: ‘The discovery of the pools proved beyond a doubt that the description of this pool was not the creation of the Evangelist [John] but reflected accurate and detailed knowledge of Jerusalem, knowledge that is sufficiently detailed to now be an aid to archaeologists in understanding the site.’  

We would wait another forty years before the other pool came to light. In June 2004 during sewerage works in the Siloam district of old Jerusalem workers accidentally uncovered a huge public bath.  It was still being excavated when I visited the site in March 2007 but already you can see that the pool is about fifty metres long with steps leading into it from all sides. It is definitively dated to the first century.  Imagine the scholarly embarrassment at the discovery of such a large non-metaphorical pool of Siloam.

Commentators who had doubted such geographical details were making the fundamental mistake of supposing that absence of corroborating evidence was evidence of absence. Scholars are usually much more wary of such assumptions. Cambridge professor Graham Stanton puts it succinctly: ‘as every student of ancient history is aware, it is an elementary error to suppose that the unmentioned [or undiscovered] did not exist.’
  it is an elementary error to suppose that the unmentioned [or undiscovered] did not exist
 
 

Page 2