Do you really want to know why the roman guards gave Jesus a vinegar-soaked sponge to drink?

[thucythucy]

32. "Is very telling"

I don't think so. You said it yourself, "by the 2nd century the Christian ministry was off and running."

Prior to that it was just another sub-cult among probably hundreds that came and went in the various provinces. So it makes sense, given the paucity of documentation from that era in general, that this one cult among hundreds or thousands wouldn't have garnered much interest until it began to take root. Caesar's notes about the Celts in his books are the great exception, not the rule when it comes to Roman documentation of the various religions and cults they encountered all around the Mediterranean Basin.

In fact, the Roman lack of curiosity about other cultures has been noted by historians. For a sea-faring people it is remarkable they made so few attempts to explore the African or Asian coastlines. There were few if any Roman expeditions even into the Baltic, which is remarkable given that sea's strategic importance to the empire.

Here's a quote from H.G. Wells (yes, THAT H.G. Wells) I've always enjoyed:

The Roman Empire "had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant of geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions of Russia, Central Asia, and the East.... The clue to its failure lies in the absence of any free mental activity, and any organization for the increase, development, and application of knowledge. It respected wealth and despised science. It gave government to the rich, and imagined wise men could be bought and bargained for in the slave markets when they were needed. It was therefore a colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire."

The vast majority of the empires inhabitants were serfs and slaves, conditions among whom wealthy Romans cared not a jot, so long as their interests weren't threatened. When they were threatened the go to response was violence of the most brutal kind. Like Stalin, the average Roman emperor believed "the shortest distance between two points politically was organized violence."

This, I think, explains two phenomena which otherwise seem almost inexplicable--certainly remarkable. The first was the military defeat of the Empire at the hands of less sophisticated and even less numerous "barbarians." By the time the various tribes--the Huns, for instance--came knocking, the vast majority of the inhabitants could have cared less for the "Roman peace." Had the empire been seen as worth defending, the "barbarians" would have been driven off.

The second is the rapid spread of the various apocalyptic cults, Christianity among them. What made Christianity so attractive to the "99%" (actually, probably more like the 99.999%) was that it was a theology that spoke to the experience of slaves, outcasts, the poor, the oppressed. Herein lies, in my opinion, the great innovation of Christianity. The central figure of its myth isn't a triumphant Hero or God, but rather a political prisoner arrested, tried, and tortured to death by the powers that be (i.e. the Romans). This is what made the cult so attractive and so subversive.

Of course, by the time of Constantine's "conversion" Christianity would be co-opted into becoming just another tool of Roman (and then Roman Catholic) hegemony. Constantine largely succeeded in rendering Christianity as an organized religion compliant and comfortable. Which legacy remains with us today.

So no, I don't think the lack of a Roman account of any Jesus of Nazareth is particularly telling. What IS telling to me, as I tried to explain in other posts here, is the lengths to which 2nd generation Christians tried to retrofit the Jesus story so that it complied with Jewish scriptures--the very awkwardness of the attempts tells me there must have been some original germ of a story that couldn't be ignored because too many people in the original cult were aware of at least some of the true facts. For instance, that the person Jesus came out of Nazareth, not Bethlehem. That Jesus was arrested during Passover, and that for all his "miracles" he was unable to escape the death so common for those seen as a threat to the established order. And that he was a person of considerable charisma who made enough of an impression that some of his followers were willing to risk imprisonment and death to keep his memory alive.

That's my take, anyway. All this is speculation, of course. But I don't see lack of contemporary documentation of the life of this one person as proof positive that he didn't exist.

Best wishes, and happy whatever you do or don't celebrate!