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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")


Another example illustrates how easily this scholarly dictum is overlooked in popular discussions about Jesus. In a long feature article in the Australian Rationalist (Spring, 2005) the Secretary of the Victorian Labor College, Chris Gaffney, sought to demonstrate, among other things, that the evidence for Jesus is very much lacking:

[G]iven that there are no contemporary references to Jesus while he was supposedly alive, we may even doubt his existence. There is not one mention of him in the many missives that passed from Palestine to Rome.

The statement is misleading on a number of levels. By ‘contemporary references’ Gaffney means documents written during Jesus’ public ministry (AD 28-30). The assumption here is that only evidence written on the spot should count as real evidence. This would pretty much debunk the entire historiographical enterprise in one fell swoop. If contemporaneous record were the test of historicity, we would have to dismiss the existence of most of the people of the ancient world, including most kings, senators and generals, whom we generally only know about through accounts written after the fact.
  No doubt there were ‘many missives’ between Palestine and Rome but not one such document has survived.
 
 

There is a more glaring mistake in Gaffney’s remarks. No doubt there were ‘many missives’ between Palestine and Rome during the governorship of Pontius Pilate (AD 26-36) but, as I pointed out in my response to his article, if Gaffney has found one, there are thousands of historians waiting to read it! The reality is, not one such document has survived.

But leaving aside Gaffney’s gaffs, even if we did possess some correspondence between Jerusalem and Rome during this period, should we expect to find a mention of Jesus in them? Perhaps. History does sometimes throw up unpredictably detailed information, as the letter of Dionysius illustrates. But history is rarely obedient to expectations. I suspect that even if we were to find a batch of letters between Pilate and Tiberius for the very year of Jesus’ death (AD 30), historians would not expect to find mention of him. There were thousands of Jewish trouble-makers in this period, and thousands of executions too; the chance of any one of them appearing in such randomly discovered correspondence is very small.

Jesus was a ‘marginal Jew’

There is another point worth making. Whatever expectations we might dare to hold about the ‘evidence for Jesus’, logic dictates that they should start from a low base. Why? Because Jesus was a very minor figure.

For Christian readers this might be difficult to appreciate—believers tend to think of Jesus as the most significant man in history and certainly the founder of the world’s largest religion.  But it has to be remembered that in his day—and for probably the half century after him—Jesus was hardly known at all outside the strip of Roman ruled land known as Palestine.

Even within Palestine Jesus was by no means the most famous religious figure. The great Rabbi Hillel, who died when Jesus was a boy, would have been a far more recognizable name than ‘Jesus son of Joseph’. Jesus had a relatively small following by comparison. The movement he created—what he called the ‘kingdom of God’—really amounted to just a few hundred men and women out of a total Palestinian population of about two million. A century after Jesus, when Christianity had started to spread throughout the Roman world, Christians still only accounted for an estimated 1 in every 1200 persons.
  Even within Palestine Jesus was by no means the most famous religious figure.
 
 

Jesus himself noted the marginal nature of his movement in one of his parables:
  What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. 32 Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade (Mark 4:31-32).
 		 

Humanly speaking, no one could have predicted just how large the tree Jesus planted would eventually become—today over two billion people claim to be Christian. During his lifetime, however, the ‘mustard seed’ was a perfectly apt description of the (apparent) significance of this reputed healer and teacher from Galilee. One of the leading US scholars of the historical Jesus captures this historical reality perfectly in the provocative title of his three-volume masterpiece, A Marginal Jew. In the Introduction he notes: ‘From the viewpoint of the Jewish and pagan literature of the century following Jesus, the Nazarene was at most a ‘blip’ on the radar screen.’  Given Jesus’ marginal profile and the sheer randomness of surviving historical evidence it is frankly surprising that we have so much evidence for the man from Nazareth.

Dr. John Dickson
Director of the Centre for Public Christianity
Honorary Associate of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University (Australia)