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From: gnewman@iglou.com (Greg 'Bonz' Newman)
Subject: Re: Noah & other bible myths
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Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 16:48:22 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.skeptic:190920 sci.lang:57896

On 20 Jul 1996 12:39:36 GMT, jking@alnitak.xylogics.com (Jack
King) wrote:

>Greg 'Bonz' Newman (gnewman@iglou.com) wrote:

>: >This really sounds hopeless, but let me give it one more shot.   
>: >The Roman historian Tacitus, who was no friend of Christianity,
>: >writing around 100 CE, tells of Nero's cruel persecution of the
>: >Christians and adds:

>: >       "Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the
>: >   death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the
>: >   procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition
>: >   was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not
>: >   merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but the capital
>: >   [Rome] itself."  _The Annals, by Tacitus_, Book XV, p. 283

>:  And your point is? <truly puzzled>

>:  Are all Christians as weird as you are?  What are you trying to
>: get across by this quote?

>BLINK...Well let me spell it out for you.  The accusation was made 
>(if you had been following this thread), that there was no proof
>that Jesus was nothing other than a fabrication, a myth.  There
>were supposedly no extra biblical sources that confirmed his
>existence.  I purposely avoided citing Josephus for fear of the
>weaping and gnashing of teeth.  Thus the Tacitus quote above.

And Tacitus offers no evidence at all. He could have been
discussing Hercules: Who was the son of Zeus, died, and came back
from Hades.

 Tacitus is reporting that there were Christians in Rome who
believed a myth about Jesus. There were.

 How do you get from that, to the notion that Jesus really did
the things the people in Rome thought he did?







