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I can't think of any, offhand, although that's certainly not proof that no such sources ever existed - it has, after all, been a spell.
Well, one occasionally hears about a lost work referred to by Julius Africanus in the third century, in which the pagan writer Thallus reportedly claimed that Jesus's death was accompanied by an earthquake and darkness. But the text is of course lost and it's very possible he was merely told that by Christians. I can't see earthquakes or unnatural darkness going ignored by everybody except the early christians.
As for the Testimonium Flavianium--there is no doubt in my mind that it has been tampered with. To think that Josephus, a Pharisaic Jew, would write such a laudatory passage about a man supposedly killed for blasphemy...well that's just silly.
But that does not invalidate the entire passage. F. F. Bruce, author of Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1974) claims that the uncorrupted passage free from obvious christian meddling would go like this:
Now there arose about this time a source of further trouble in one Jesus, a wise man who performed surprising works, a teacher of men who gladly welcome strange things. He led away many Jews, and also many of the Gentiles. He was the so-called Christ. When Pilate, acting on information supplied by the chief men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had attached themselves to him at first did not cease to cause trouble, and the tribe of Christians, which has taken this name from him, is not extinct even today.
Which is a whole hell of a lot smoother than the corrupted passage and much more in Josephus's style. One could argue that the Christians were being very clever and designed a two-fold deception, one being a modification so obvious that no one would think to doubt the rest of the work, which is really an insidiously clever forgery. But that's reaching a bit (to me, anyway).
all the facts point in one direction.
This is simply not true, and as Quants points out, actually impossible. Your insistence that Jesus's non-existence is fact leads me to believe you've been dealing with some rather biased sources.
Your idea that the Gnostics started the legend needs a lot of fleshing out--why would they do it? And for that matter, which Gnostics were doing it? The Mandaeans, who were very obviously not Christians? The Sethians, who claimed that Christ only revealed himself after his death to a select few (who were people they recieved their teachings from, surprise surprise) and taught them to view his ressurection in spiritual terms? The followers of Valentinus, who did not understand why they were not accepted as orthodox when they believed everything the orthodox Christians did except for the idea of apostolic succession and authority?
And while we're on the subject, what do you make of the early Church's penchant for a direct line of teaching? They made a very big deal out of that. They still do, actually, the Catholic church claims that their spiritual authority goes all the way back to Peter. You claim that their treasured line of apostolic authority leads back to the first century, where it began not with Peter but with a gnostic con man? Who apparently did not let the majority of the other gnostics in on the gag? |
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