Weekend Economists Pull the Easter Rabbit Out of the Hat April 18-20, 2014

[Tansy_Gold]

50. If there were any evidence of a "historical" Jesus

The Vatican --- or anyone else who had it --- would have published it. If they're sitting on anything, it's evidence to the contrary that they don't want out there because it would upset their very comfortable apple cart. And whatever else it might have, the Vatican didn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi codices.

And things get lost over time, especially when there are no "modern" means of preserving them. Look at how much was lost when the Baghdad Museum was looted in 2003. What will scholars say a thousand years from now when they go looking for the writings of T. E. Lawrence and there are references to them being in the Museum but, hey, they aren't there any more?

We have no way of knowing what records, even from the Roman bureaucracy, may have been lost.


I guess my scamdar goes on alert any time I see someone claiming they've done an analysis that's totally unique and never ever ever done before.

I've already cited Schonfeld; The Passover Plot was published in 1965.

Irving Wallace's 1972 novel [I[The Word, though clearly fiction, contains some of the same concepts and addresses some of the same issues, including the lack of historical evidence, the conflict between conservative orthodoxy and radical populism in the church, what "Christianity" really means, etc.

So I just don't find Zuesse's claims of exclusive analysis very convincing.


What I find amusing, however, is that Zuesse presents his "facts" in a manner that calls to mind the "facts" that Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh presented in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. When Dan Brown "borrowed" those "facts" and wove The DaVinci Code from them, Baigent and Leigh sued for copyright infringement. Brown won (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Grail) because the court said, basically, you can't copyright "facts." Baigent and Leigh weren't prepared to admit much of HBHG was, ahem, fiction.

Again, though Wikipedia isn't the most unassailable source, the basics are there, along with a lot of links to a lot of related material, some of it fiction, some of it non-fiction.