I hope you realize that you are severely shifting the burden of proof. Claims written to paper are not true by default. It is quite the opposite. And when one objectively researches such assertions and claims, only to find lack in evidence to correlate such claims, one has no choice but to question.
But I wouldn't expect a true presup. to understand what I'm saying.
Do you expect CNN or FOX News to show up with video cameras?
The whole entire point of the Gospel is Jesus began as a poor peasant worker "mustard seed" whose movement germinated & grew until it "moved the mountain" of the pagan empire
It started small, the only people who had "eyes on" were:
- Jews who became Christians
- Jews who rejected the Christians & whose survivors became modern Rabbinical Judaism
- Romans
All three groups make more mention of Jesus Christ in the paltry meager amount of writings to have survived until today, than anyone has a right to expect or demand.
Roman writers knew of conflicts regarding "Chrestus" causing quite a commotion in Rome, Josephus mentions him specifically. (Pilate's own wife allegedly viewed Jesus as a magical holy man.)
Jewish accounts call him a "sorcerer".
Every direct
eye-witness knew of him, acknowledging both his existence and profound to even supra-natural para-normal phenomena to accompany him.
If all that was true, what
else would you expect to have on hand, today, in the scant records surviving from the 1st century? Video? Photographs?
CNN & FOX weren't there with cameras rolling. But Jewish Christians, Jewish non-Christians, & Romans all were there with pens slowly scrawling across paper, parchment & vellum.
What
does come down to us is, there was a man & movement, and widespread reports of supra-natural phenomena occurring around them.
If that really was true... what
else would you expect to have to "prove" it? Video? Photos? Gravity waves? Neutrinos & dark matter particles?
You are raising your bar completely out of the realm of any & all possibilities. "I won't acknowledge even the
possibility... b/c CNN & FOX weren't there to video record it and air it on TV"
IF it was true, the evidence we would reasonably expect to have... is exactly what we
do in fact have
Even if we can't automatically accept everything we "hear" from the first century, e.g. John wrote the Gospel of John... neither can we automatically reject it, either
What we hear from the 1st century is, "John wrote the Gospel of John"... that claim is possible, plausible, probable -- who
else would have bothered, in the 1st century, when the movement was still small? What
other "Pillars of the Church" were there with Authority in the early Christian community? If not John, then... Paul? Peter? Mark, Matthew, Luke?
You really only have a few names to choose from, and even if we somehow got mixed up, and Peter wrote John, John wrote Mark, and Luke wrote Matthew, it doesn't really change the authority or accuracy of the writings
You are basically inventing unknown shadowy "Ghosts of history" who popped into the year 100 AD, wrote the Gospels, and passed them off to the entire Christian community, which entire community was gullible enough to accept the fraudulent attributions to the early Church Pillars...
If John didn't write John, who else did? Some random guy nobody knew, knows or remembers? It's more likely that some random dude wrote John... and successfully passed it off as genuine John... rather than just attribute it to John, the man in the right place, right time, with the right training & authority to write the book?
Which of those theories is more parsimonious?
- John = right place, right time, right training, right authority, on scene, on hand, pen in hand
- ??? = mystery man who "simulates John", acquiring all those same attributes, but isn't John
I mean, what, maybe it was
Batman's great great … great grand ancestor! Maybe T-1000's time-travelled back to the 1st century and impersonated John!
Or, maybe, just maybe... it was just John -- cause there was
nobody else who was going to
bother writing for the "nothing" Christian community the Romans didn't even really care about at the time
