L Goppelt concurs, and has this discussion, FWIW. "We would be very much inclined to ascribe special significance to non-Christian information about Jesus because of its ostensible lack of bias. Our expectations would be high, e.g., if the trial folios of Pilate should be discovered on a piece of papyrus. In all probability, however, such a discovery would lead to disappointment since they would offer only a sum of misunderstandings, much like the accounts of Plinius about the Christians.
Such is confirmed through the small number of extant non-Christian sources of information about Jesus from the 1st and 2nd centuries. Among the Roman historians, Jesus is mentioned only once each by Tacitus and Suetonius. What they have to say about him ca. A.D. 110 has been taken from the statements of Christians (re: Nero burning Rome, and Caesar Claudius expelling Christians from Rome, quoted in Antike Jesus-Zeugnisse). This fact is not astonishing at all since, after all, for the empire in this period , the activity of Jesus and his disciples was nothing more than a remote affair with hardly more than a local significance. Conspicuous, however, is the fact that even Josephus, the Jewish historian of the epoch, is entirely or almost entirely silent about Jesus. The two brief remarks about him in Josephus' works bear all the marks of extensive Christian emendation, if they are not entirely interpolated. Ant. 20.9.1 reported briefly that, 'a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, was executed.' This could have been genuine. What is the reason for this silence? He was writing for a Hellenistic-Roman audience for one thing, and wished for this reason to avoid any identification of this movement with Judaism. It had, after all, fallen under suspicion in the entire kingdom since the Neronian persecution. The inner-Jewish, rabbinic tradition speak only rarely and in veiled terms about Jesus or the Nazarenes. The references are so disguised and the information so distorted that one can hardly say with any certainty that they are talking about Jesus or the Christians at all.
PS I hope Christians have not fallen on such hard times that they are dependent on the reasoning of Pres Reagan to explain, finally, the problem of evil--ggggggg!! I (and I hope I can speak for others as well) would not like to entertain any doubts about the goodness of such thinkers as Asimov based on Reaganesque arguments! |
