That dating convention would stem from what is purported to be the beginning of Day One of what commonly, arbitrarily, and somewhat inaccurately, is known as The First Century. By strictly Christian-derived religious convention, as reflected in the roughly 4-century old (late 16th Century) contemporary Western, Gregorian Calendar, itself a derivitave of the Julian Calendar established by and named for Julius Caesar some two millenia ago, at one time it was purported the Messianic Birth inaugurated a new era, from which date were to be numbered, prior and post, the years. Actually, had there been such an epoch-shifting happenstance, it would have to have occured in the Year Zero, but at the time of the establishment of the Christian Messianic Birth tradition, the concept of Zero had to all extents and purposes yet to develop, or at least had not become a generally known concept. As to the purported year of the alledged Messianic Birth, critical examination of contemporary historic and archaeologic evidence precludes the so-called "Year One" from consideration as the year of the assumed event, adding further meaninglessness to an already arbitrary and imprecise calendrical system.
By the Jewish calendar, the year termed by most Westerners and those tied to Western commerce as 2006 falls across the years 5766-5767, by the Chinese calendar, we are in the year 4704, with the year 4705 beginning in mid-February 2007 by the Georgian Calendar, in the Persian, or Iranian Calendar, this would be 1385, the Islamic calendar has this the year 1427. Other calendars are in use, and many others have fallen from use. The notion of deliniating years from some fixed point is a purely human construct, completely arbitrary, and nought but mere convention.
Maybe I missed something here and I am possibly repeating, as 17 pages is hard to grind through, but is it not possible that Jesus wasn't dead in first place, just badly injured and then he ran away, you can do alot of healing in 3 days. People don't float into the sky its impossible, plus we now know that you will burn up when you hit the atmosphere.
Do the roman sun gods like Mithras & Apollo (Later combined to become Sol Invictus) not have reincarnation stories ? surely if the christian story is true then so must the sun god stories, they both have equal evidence (Actually the sun Gods have more), but hold on maybe christianity is just an updated version of mithras/Apollo/Sol Invictus worship, but then thats another story
The degree of the risk run by early members of the cult is putative . . . there was no official, concerted effort to exterminate Christians until within a few decades of the acceptance of the cult with the empire. Occasional attacks on members of the cult took place because of their refusal to publicly participate in the rituals of the state religion--it were only necessary to "go through the motions," and their refusal to participate was irksome to other residents of a district, who saw it as unnecessarily bringing down unfavorable scrutiny from Imperial officials. Local demagogues could also use such persecutions as a distraction from legitimate greivances.
Accusations of the persecution of Christians during the reigns of the Julian emperors (i.e., those in the line of Iulius Caesar) center around "Nero," (his name was actually Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but he adopted the name Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus when he was adopted by the emperor Claudius, whom he succeeded) who was in fact the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. However, it is based upon a questionable passage in Tacitus, which is universally considered by scholars who do not have a Christian agenda to be an interpolation. After the death of Nero in 69 CE, there followed a period of turmoil during which two military commanders briefly made themselves emperor (Otho and Galba), and a member of the Patrician order, Vitellius, bribed the Praetorian Guard to declare him emperor. That year, 69 CE, was known to Romans as the year of the four emperors, because Vespasian, the first of the Flavian dynasty, finally succeeded Otho, Galba and Vitellius to end the turmoil and establish the new dynasty. Christians were not known to the Romans during the period of the Julio-Claudian and the Flavian emperors, because they weren't known as Christians to anyone, including themselves. The term does not appear until near the end of the Flavian dynasty, and was never in universal use. If they were noticed at all, it was only as a cult of the Jews, who were not well-liked by the Romans. The son of Vespasian, Titus, lead the army which put down a Jewish revolt, which has been blown out of all proportion by both Jews and Christians with dubious claims about the heroism of some of the rebels at Masada.
Jews were not appreciated by the Romans because they were seen as rebellious, and because they often publicly refused to go through the motions of the state religion. Christian martyrs, where the stories are not actually apochryphal, are only significant because of "cherry picking"--Christian "scholars" have made much of them, with scant consideration for historical support of the tales, and ignored other Jews who were also persecuted or murdered because they refused to participate in the state religion. On the whole, the Empire was a secular organization which practiced pluralistic tolerance, with the single requirement of adherence in form to the state religion based on the deification of departed emperors. There was no thought police, and all anyone was required to do was to annually participate in a symbolic sacrifice ritual. Jews and Christians alike attracted malicious attention for their refusal to participate in such rituals. None of the Julio-Claudian emperors, nor the Flavian emperors, had a policy of persecuting the Jews or the Christians. If they rebelled, if they publicly scorned the state religion, they suffered, and almost invariably at the hands of their fellow residents who resented the unwanted attention they drew.
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius all had basically a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. There was no official policy to hunt down Jews or Christians (always remembering that Christians were indistinguishable from Jews from the official Roman point of view), and so long as they did not make themselves obnoxious to their fellow residents, they went unnoticed. When they did "stir up trouble" in the eyes of those around them, they were almost always the victims of mob violence, which the Roman authorities ignored, so long as it quickly ended.
It was not until long after Marcus Aurelius, in the reign of Septimius Severus, that there was any official policy to persecute these people--and once again, it was directed at Jews, from whom Christians were not distinguished. It was also like a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, in that if they kept their heads down, they were not bothered. This policy was not even continued among the members of the Severan dynasty, but was unique to Septimius Severus--he faced two challengers to his imperial authority, and he was ruthless in the suppression of anything that looked like rebellion--the Jews and Christians who suffered largely suffered from an inability to keep their mouths shut and their heads down.
After the failure of the Severan line, you have a period of great unrest and instability in the empire, with forty men proclaiming themselves emperor in a period of under fifty years. Times were not good for anyone, and everyone who claimed to be an emperor spent his time trying to put out of business anyone he saw as opposing his authority, or in a state of rebellion. Once again, Jews and Christians who got killed in that period because they were Jews or Christians almost invariably brought it upon themselves as a result of their acts of public defiance of authority--a risky business in stable times, it was an even more disasterous behavior when so many men competed for the imperial authority.
The first true, official and systematic persecution of Christians, identified as Christians and distinct from all other varieties and cults of Jews, did not occur until the reign of Diocletian, in the waning decades of the third century CE. Diocletian had come to the imperial power over the dead bodies of four other claimants, and as the Christians had made hay while the sun had shone in the previous fifty years to spread their doctrine, and were frequently recruited by Diocletian's opponents with promises of open toleration of their cult, they were seen as dangerous enemies by him. He was dead by 305 CE. Based upon his decrees, many imperial officials continued to persecute the Christians, but that ended almost immediately after the death of Diocletian. Seven men claimed to be emperor in the less than two years after the death of Diocletian and the establishment of the Constantian dynasty by Constantine I, known as Constantine the Great, in 306 CE. Constantine's wife and mother-in-law were practicing Christians, and upon stabilizing the empire under his single rule, Constantine decreed that Christianity would be among the tolerated sects of the empire. (He did not, as Christian "scholars" like to claim, make it the state religion.) Christianity was not firmly established as the state religion until the reign of Constantine II, who took the throne after defeating his opponent, Licinius. Because Constantine the Great (a title the Christians gave him, cause they thought it was really great that he wasn't persecuting them) presided over the Nicean Council of 325 CE, he is often erroneously said to have made Christianity the state religion--however, he took no such official act.
The period in which Christians, as distinguished from all other flavors of Jews, were pointedly and official persecuted was relatively brief, less than 20 years, and took place nearly 300 years after the rise of the cult. Any contention that Christians rushed out in their thousands to be martyred for their faith at any time before the end of the third century CE is pure hogwash.
I've stayed out of this thread because of the laughable nature of the original question. Are we really not to be satisfied until we find forensic evidence of Jesus' death and resurrection? Apart from the zero likelihood that any non believers would risk ostracism (or worse) by claiming Jesus somehow remained alive, just exactly what are we hoping to find?
We could point to the remarkable survival of early Christianity in spite of political conditions which were less than favorable, to say the least. Or we could refer to the tenacity of those who risked persecution and death in order to preserve the word. . . But that has already been done. So what about this?
In the 21st chapter of Luke, Jesus related a prophecy which was partially fulfilled in the first century. I refer to the statement in vss. 20 and 21 where he warns: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. 21: Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it . . ."
First century Christians were aware of this at the time when Cestius Gallus laid siege to Jerusalem, surrounding it and making a thrust right up to the temple walls. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History (III, V, 3), states that the Christians fled from Jerusalem and Judea to a city called Pella.
On the other hand, the Jews rejoiced in their 'successful' rebellion only to suffer the return of the Romans, with superior forces under General Titus. The city, now crowded with Passover celebrants, was surrounded by a fortification of pointed stakes. Few, if any, escaped. Though Titus offered peace, the Jewish leaders refused. The resultant destruction marked the beginning of the Post Roman Diaspora.
That's about as close as I can come to first century verification of Jesus' life and teachings. Even so, I can hardly claim to have seen it with my own eyes. The CBS news team arrived on the scene much too late, so we can't see it on TV; and I'm sure Set and Timber will have a field day with this. But what the heck, it raises many interesting asides.
I could write a book now, post date it and talk of my predictions of wars in the middle east, I will even say "And the burning bush will invade Iraq" then in 2000 years somebody may find it and say "See he was right and his predictions spot on, lets worship him!!"
Well, Neo . . . you've opened a can of worms, but here goes . . .
We tend to look back on the Roman Empire, and to see it's majesty and its military dominance in terms which were not necessarily apparent to other people in the world at the time. The empire lasted for almost two thousand years (more it you count from the foundation of the city). The Romans allege, in their legendary history, that the city was founded in April, 754 BCE. (Rome was occupied by Kelts and sacked in about 390 BCE--almost all of their records and books were destroyed, with the exception of documents in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which were the linen rolls, on which the Censors recorded the names of those occupying public office in each year. When Titus Livius--known generally today as Livy--wrote his monumental history, Ad Urbe Conditus, From the Foundation of the City, he relied heavily on those linen rolls, and upon documents which have since been lost. Therefore, the history of Rome before 390 BCE is known as the legendary history.) The Empire itself saw no break in continunity with the shift of the center of political gravity to Byzantium--renamed Constantinople--and therefore, considered themselves Romans, and that the Empire, even though shrunken once again to that single city, did not end until Constantinople fell to the Osmanli Turks in May, 1453.
The Romans were likely, at first, tributary to the Tuscans (often referred to as Etruscans, because they called their land Etruria). Their legendary history records that there was a dynasty of kings, the Tarquins, from the foundation of the city in 754 BCE until 500 BCE, when the abuses of the last Tarquin, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), lead them to rebel. The largest city-state of southern Etruria (which was a confederation of Tuscan city-states, and not a nation as we think of them) was Tarquinia. It is entirely possible that the Tarquins were not a monarchical dynasty, but a series of satraps, tributary kings put in place to rule Rome as a tributary state. For more than a century after the expulsion of the Tarquins, the Romans fought their neighbors, both Tuscans and other Italo-Tuscan people, such as the Samnites, Sabines, and the Veii. By 390 BCE, the Romans had become sufficiently powerful that all the Latin speaking tribes--the Latins, Hernicans and Sabines--were tributary to Rome, and Rome could defy the Tuscans in arms. This is why the Tuscans hired the Kelts--the Gauls--to attack Rome. The Gauls succeeded in breaking into the city and occupying it, except for the citadel on the Capitoline hill. They were gone within a few months, likely as a result of the disease which would have run rampant with the failure to maintain the water and sewage system. The plundering would have been done in a few days, and there was little reason to remain if the Tuscans could not continue to pay them, and espcially if their men and women (it was a family business) were dying from disease.
Obviously, ancient histories tend to make the story of the people who write them glorious. So we don't know how much truth there was in any ot this, but we do know that by the early 4th century BCE, Rome was free of Tuscan influence, and rather made the Estruscan cities tributary. They then fought the Samnites to a standstill, and when tribes to the south allied themselves to the Samnites, they invaded Campania (roughly, the area to the south around what is now Naples), put the population to the sword, and sold the survivors into slavery, distributing the land among the powerful Senators, who sold it off to the Plebs to obviate discontent over the issue of land distribution.
It is not germane here to go into the issues between the Plebs and the Patres--suffice it to say that "social wars" and "agrarian wars" characterize the Roman polity when they were not actually in arms against their neighbors. Their next big show was against the league of Greek colonial cities in the south, a part of which was known as Italia, and therefore the league of cities was known as the Italic or Italian league. Almost uniformly effective militarily against these city states, the Romans were on the point of overrunning all of Cispadane Italy (Italy south of the Po River), when the Italic League hired Pyrrhus. West of Macedonia, in what we would think of as Yugoslavia, was a kingdom, Epirus, which was as militarily formidable as the Macedonians. The Epirote King, Pyrrhus, was considered the most brilliant general of his day. He brought in a mercenary army, and routinely defeated the Roman armies, and finally fought a great battle, in which he destroyed a dual-consular army (about 40,000 men). In the process his own army was nearly destroyed--hence the term "a Pyrrhic victory." After his final great victory, he is said to have told Dionysius (a representative of the Italic League, not the god) that another such victory would undo him.
The Italic League was undone, bankrupted by the cost of fighting a war which saw the Romans incredibly putting new armies into the field each year, even if the armies from the previous years had been utterly defeated. But this was still considered small time stuff, local squabbles, in the Greek world, which was in its heyday, after the conquests of Alexander III (erroneously called "the Great") a half-century earlier, and now broken into several kingdoms which controlled the Balkan penninsula and all of the middle east and Egypt.
The Romans, of course, were more impressed with themselves than with the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms, especially having won the Pyrrhic war. They controlled all of Cispadane Italy, and were pushing into northern Italy (Transpadane Italy, Italy across the Po River) by building fortified cities and gradually pushing the Kelts (whom they called Gauls) back into the Alps. Long, long before that, for reasons which are obscure, the Greco-Gallic people known as the Narbonensii had allied themselves to the Romans, back in the day when the Romans were still punks, and were still fighting the Tuscans. You would think of Narbonensus as Provence, in southern France; their principle city was what you would call Marseilles. With that avenue open to them, they began to spread along the coast to the west, and entered Iberia (Spain). There the collided with the Carthaginians. They fought three wars with Carthage, which are called the Punic Wars, from the Latin name for the Phoenicians, who had founded Carthage. The first Punic War taught them that they could never prevail without a navy. The Romans were a plodding, dull people, but they were pragmatic to a degree theretofore unknown, and saw right to the heart of matters. They could have defeated the Carthaginians in Iberia, but they'd just have to fight them over and over again. They decided to go for the throat, and in the Second Punic War, landed in what we would call Tunisia, and finally defeated Carthage at home. During that war, Hannibal crossed the Alps, and occupied southern Italy, defeating the Romans in every battle, but losing the war. One of the Consuls when he invaded as Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who followed a policy of hanging on the tail of Hannibal's army, but avoiding battle, and preventing Hannibal from taking fortified cities. He was given the cognomen Cuncator, Delayer, and was known as the Shield of Rome. But it hurt Roman pride, so he was supplanted by a more aggressive general, who took the battle to Hannibal, and another disasterous defeat was suffered at Cannae--Hannibal achieved a double envelopment, and destroyed a dual-consular army. Military men to this day dream of acheiving another "Cannae" in open battle. Fabius was appointed Dictator, took the city of Tarrentum (modern Tarrento, the principle Italian naval base), cutting Hannibal off from his base in Carthage, and forcing Hannibal to retreat after twelve frustrating years in Italy. The Romans defeated the priniciple Carthaginian army within sight of the city thereafter, and Hannibal was driven into exile. The Romans tried to hunt him down, and he eventually poisoned himself. To this day, Fabian means the practice of delaying tactics, or of waiting--c.f. the Fabian Socialists, who are waiting to take over when capitalism fails, as they assert that it eventually will.
In the Third Punic War, Rome laid seige to Carthage, took the city, put the population to the sword, and sowed the ground with salt, so that nothing would grow there, and the site would be abandoned. During the Second and Third Punic Wars, Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, and the city state of Corinth in Greece had allied themselves to the Carthaginians. Rome never forgot a grudge, and they overran Sicily, and took the city of Syracuse, despite the best efforts of Archimedes (you know, splashing in the bathtub, and running nekkid through the street shouting "Eureka!"), who was killed when the city was sacked. They then turned their attention to Greece, took the city of Corinth, and leveled it, literally leaving no stone standing on another stone. They used the building materials to build docks on the Adriatic side, a road to the Aegean Sea, and docks on the Aegean side. The site was unoccupied until Caesar set up a retirement city there for his legionaries in about 50 BCE.
The greatest work of Machiavelli is not The Prince, it is The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. It lays out in great detail the policies followed by the Romans throughout their career to build an empire. They could be the best friends you ever had (provided you were willing to do a little ass-kissing), or the your worst nightmare. A Greek named Polybius, who was born at about the time Hannibal was forced to retreat from Italy, wrote another famous work, often called The Rise of the Roman Empire, although the Greek title just reads The Histories. In it, he describes the organization of the Roman state, and the story of their rise to power after the defeat of the Tuscans. It is an important source, because he sought to explain the Romans to the Greeks, and therefore tells us many things Roman authors don't mention, because they assumed their audience would know those things. The genius of the Roman system is detailed there--it is plodding consistency. What Emerson might have called the hobgoblin of a petty mind stood the Roman in good stead. Every official in Rome had an administrative function, a juridical function, a religious function and a military function. Everyone knew what he was supposed to do at all times. Roman discipline was legendary. (Pyrrhus is said to have looked upon the Roman dead, seeing them lying in regular rows, dead facing the enemy where they stood, and to have wept, saying: "With troops such as these, i could conquer the world.") Consequently, the Romans did not ever seem brilliant, or even particularly bright, and the ancient world consistencly misunderestimated them.
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After Alexander III of Macedon had conquered "the known world," and died, his "empire" broke up into many petty states, kingdoms controlled by the Generals who had made Alexander's conquest possible. In Palestine, at about the time that the Romans were putting the Carthaginians, the Syracusans and the Corinthians out of business, Judas Maccabeus lead an uprising against the "Persians"--actually the Seleucid "empire," a Greco-Macedonian kingdom in what had been Persia. The Jews got a fairly big head out of this. They had always had the big ego of any primitive people--they thought they were hot stuff in Canaan even when most of their neighbors could have swatted them like a fly, but couldn't be bothered to deal with them. After Judas Maccabeus, the Jews really thought they were hot stuff, because they had driven out the "Persians." Judas' taking of Jerusalem, and restoration of the Temple is the origin of Channukah, the Festival of the Restoration of the Lights.
Meanwhile, the Romans were having problems of their own at home. The social and agrarian wars had flared off an on throughout the period of their rise to empire, and culminated in the Marian and Sullan wars, at the end of the second century BCE, at about the time of the birth of Iulius Caesar. Sulla proclaimed himself Dictator for life, and proscribed many ancient gens, or clans, estinguishing those Patrician families in the principle male line. So, for example, although Iulius Caesar was from an ancient clan, the Iulians, or Julians, he was born in Campania, from a "cadet" branch of the clan. The Republic was effectively dead, although they went through the motions. Increasingly, the most powerful men from the remaining Patrician clans would dominate the consulate, and the Consuls exercised near monarchical power, being constantly re-elected. The final struggle was between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey was also from a provincial clan, and he had allied himself with Sulla. At that time, the Romans were conquering Greece and Asia Minor. (Some of the petty Kings of Asia Minor--roughly, modern Turkey--bequeathed their territory to the Romans, others fought bitterly for their independence, the most important wars being the Mithridatic Wars.) Pompey made a name for himself, and was very popular with the Patricians, whose favor he courted. Caesar courted the favor of the people, which was much more canny, and would stand him in good stead.
I'll cut to the chase here--Crassus, Caesar and Pompey formed a triumvirate (rule of three) to rule the Republic, and with the death of Crassus, civil war eventually broke out, which Caesar won. Caesar had overrun Gaul (France) and invaded Britain (not very successfully) within a decade, and was popular with the army as well as the people. Pompey had a reputation as a butcher, and for showing up at the end of a campaign, when ordinary generals had done the hard fighting, and claiming credit for the victory. Whether or not, this was the period in which Rome took Armenia (the the eastern portion of what we call Turkey) and Syria, which included much of what would later be Palestine.
The Jews seethed under new masters, and were less than impressed with the Romans. (The Romans suffered some bloody defeats in the Mithridatic Wars, and in conquering Syria.) To the east, the Parthians successfully defied Roman power. From the perspective of peoples of the middle east, the Romans,since they had first heard of them, had overrun Greece, which impressed no one familiar with the petty city states of Greece and their petty squabbles; and had fought several bloody wars, most inconclusive, and conquered Syria and Armenia only at great cost over many decades. During that period of time, they fought the social and servile (i.e., slave revolts) wars at home, and several civil wars. The establishment of the Principiate Empire by Caesar and Octavian (Caesar Augustus) was lost on them. Within fifty years of Ceasars death, three Roman legions were obliterated by the Germans in the Teutoberger Forest. The Parthians continued to punish Roman expeditions against them. The Jews, with an overinflated view of their own importance and prowess, were always ripe for rebellion, and rebelled in the civic sense against taxation and the impostion of the state religion.
By the time of the death of Nero, 69 CE, the Roman empire looked shakey to those on the fringes who didn't understand the Roman system and its resiliance. In the single year 69, four men claimed to be emperor, two, Otho and Galba, were military men who claimed it by right of conquest, but couldn't make their claims good. One, Vitellius, was a rich Patrician who bribed the Praetorian Guard to proclaim him emperor. The last one, Vespasian was that rarity in Roman military leaders, a competent man (not rare) who was also intelligent and possessed of a broad vision (very rare). He not only defeated all rebels, he put the administration of Ceasar Augustus back on a sound footing, and sent out his very competent son, Titus (who would succeed him) to put down the rebellions in Syria and Palestine.
Perhaps there was a prophecy by your boy Hey-Zeus about a Jewish rebellion which would fail (if your boy ever actually existed). It was not a very great prophetic vision which would have told someone that the Jews would go for it, with the memory of Judas Maccabeus almost sacred to them, and an overweening sense of their own destiny as "god's chosen people." It would take a little more, but not very much more, perception to realize that the Romans were no paper tiger, and that defeat not only did not dismay them, but brought them back stronger than before.
Predicting a Jewish uprising was a no-brainer. Predicting its failure didn't take too much more vision, either. If it had not happened in 70 CE, it would have happened sooner or later anyway, and likely sooner rather than later.
