Reply #262: Repeating myself, but I gotta take a crack at that 'evidence'

[onager]

Premise 1: There is a general consensus about certain facts of Jesus's life. Among those are: 1) Jesus was a preacher that advocated radical claims to his divinity and his ability to defeat death...

In the context of first-century Judea, there was absolutely nothing "radical" about Jesus or his message. He was just one among many religious crackpots and windbags cluttering up Jerusalem at the time, all claiming to be the Messiah or his close associate. Sort of like Oklahoma today. For some vivid descriptions of the breed, written just a couple of decades later, see The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus.

You want a "radical" messiah? Josephus mentions one of those, who came along just a few years after Alleged Jesus' death, around 37 CE. That messiah was a Samaritan who gathered an anti-Roman mob around their holy mountain, Mt. Gerzim. Pontius Pilate - that fellow depicted in the New Testament as a dithering coward who gave in to mob rule - immediately called out the troops. In short order the rebels were massacred and their messiah was executed.

Premise 2: Resurrection is one explanation of these events.

The resurrection of ANY Formerly Living Person would be a singular event in human history. Xians often seem to forget that by the time Jesus went Tango-Uniform, resurrection was pretty much ho-hum around Judea.

According to the New Testament, Jesus was the fourth person to be resurrected from the dead; after the daughter of Jairus the centurion (Matthew, Mark, Luke), the widow's son (Luke), and Lazarus.

And according to the gospel of Matthew - on the day Jesus was crucified, practically the whole dead population of Jerusalem got out of their tombs and walked around, chatting with the locals and generally taking a day off from the tedium of the afterlife. No one else, in or out of the gospels, mentions that interesting little event. I wonder why.

Oh, I know! Because Xers have explained it to me many times. It was a long time ago and there was no mass media to tell the story and Jerusalem was just a dinky little Middle Eastern backwater and almost everybody was illiterate, etc etc.

Er...except that Jerusalem was a major provincial city of the Roman Empire and a major regional commercial center. It was the religious heart of the Jewish nation. To ensure good communication with the wider world, the region was served by a deep-water port constructed by Herod The Great at Caeserea. It also had a large literate population, from Roman clerks to merchants to Jewish scribes.

Oh, and around 59 BCE, Julius Caesar had already founded the first daily newspaper, the Acta Diurna, delivered around the empire by special couriers. One of its purposes was to keep the Emperor informed about doings around the empire. Which presumably would have included an army of zombies wandering around Jerusalem.