For anyone who actually read the Bible....

[LeftyMom]

53. I'm sorry, you're apparently unfamiliar with the primary sources of the period.

As I was already explaining, we don't have doctored royal histories and nothing else to go on (for the murkiest parts of the Dark Ages that's the sort of evidence we have, the classical period is enormously better documented.) We have letters. Endless letters. We have military orders high ranking and low. We have inscriptions. We have receipts. We have poems and drama and visual art depicting the current and recent events of the period. Because so many people wrote about prominent events we know who's accurate and who's not, and what certain people's biases are, because we can check them against each other. It is a remarkably well documented period- we probably don't know as much about what was going on anywhere in Europe again, excepting Constantinople, for a thousand years.

So the idea that Jesus was hosting thousands of peasants for the Sermon on the Mount in the most troubled Roman province while escaping official notice, while performing miracles and taking jabs at the Roman state, and that this was such a pain that he was put to death but nobody wrote a thing about it for a lifetime makes about as much sense as saying Caesar sent a mission to the Americas and nobody thought to draw a map or write a receipt for supplies. It's a well documented period, we already know that disturbances in Judea would be recorded because they happened and they were (see documentary evidence for the Bar Kochba rebellion or for the Roman response to early Christian preaching or the endless hand wringing about Rome's murky relationship with Herod.)

For that matter, the biblical depiction of Herod doesn't match up at all with the historical figure. Different personality, and the dates don't even match up to his reign (he would have died already. We have a pretty good idea of when he died, via a few different sources, and it's only debatable within a few years.) We also have great evidence of his reign (since the ancient Romans and the ancient Jews were both highly literate cultures with a great love of record keeping) and no, there's no hint of anything like the massacre of the innocents. So literally the one verifiable interaction with a well documented historical figure in the whole account is a complete fabrication.