What evidence are you referring to? Which "evidence" did you cite for Jesus?
Post
#2772.
Jayson - as you must well know, that post of yours does not give any evidence whatsoever to show Jesus was a real person.
Here is what you actually said in that post #2772 ….
One Letter by Mara Bar-Serapion written no earlier than 73 CE and not later than the 1st c CE.
One Letter by Mara Bar-Serapion written no earlier than 73 CE and not later than the 1st c CE.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ante-N...on_of_Serapion
What are we to say, when the wise are dragged by force by the hands of tyrants, and their wisdom is deprived of its freedom by slander, and they are plundered for their superior intelligence, without the opportunity of making a defence? They are not wholly to be pitied. For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samos by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand? Or the Jews by the murder of their Wise King, seeing that from that very time their kingdom was driven away from them? For with justice did God grant a recompense to the wisdom of all three of them. For the Athenians died by famine; and the people of Samos were covered by the sea without remedy; and the Jews, brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom, are driven away into every land. Nay, Socrates did “not” die, because of Plato; nor yet Pythagoras, because of the statue of Hera; nor yet the Wise King, because of the new laws which he enacted.
One document titled, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars and within that, the chapter The Life of Claudius by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus : ~120 CE
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Li...rs/Claudius#25
He forbade men of foreign birth to use the Roman names so far as those of the clans were concerned. Those who usurped the privileges of Roman citizenship he executed in the Esquiline field. He restored to the senate the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia, which Tiberius had taken into his own charge. He deprived the Lycians of their independence because of deadly intestine feuds, and restored theirs to the Rhodians, since they had given up their former faults. He allowed the people of Ilium perpetual exemption from tribute, on the ground that they were the founders of the Roman race, reading an ancient letter of the senate and people of Rome written in Greek to king Seleucus, in which they promised him their friendship and alliance only on condition that he should keep their kinsfolk of Ilium free from every burden. Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.
As far as your first source & quote is concerned from Mara Bar-Serapion - the very first brief look in Wiki (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Bar-Serapion) immediately shows that Mara Bar Serapion is someone for whom they apparently cannot even guess any likely date of birth or date of death. So we do not actually know when he lived. And in Wiki, for the estimated date of that letter, it does not say 73 to 1st cent. AD, it says about 73AD to 3rd century AD. Here’s the Wiki quote -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Bar-Serapion
See also: Mara Bar-Serapion on Jesus
Mara's letter to his son begins with: "Mara, son of Serapion, to Serapion, my son: peace." The letter was composed sometime between 73 AD and the 3rd century
But your quote from Mara Bar-Serapion, has in any case, nothing at all as any evidence of a real Jesus. And to that we might also add the caution of yet again asking (as it seems we have to ask with every such claimed
“1st century!!” document ever quoted about Jesus) - what is the
actual date of the earliest extant readable copy of this letter?
As far as your second example of evidence is concerned, where you quote from Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus -
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus is someone who is supposed to have lived from 69AD until after 122AD (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius). So on that basis he would not even have been born until long after Jesus was supposed to have died! And could therefore not possibly have known himself what Jesus might ever have said or done.
He can at the very most, be yet again (as with Josephus and Tacitus and the rest) merely be repeating hearsay stories of the day. And again as with Josephus and Tacitus, failing (afaik) to tell us who gave him such stories. That is not by any stretch of the imagination reliable credible evidence of a living Jesus.
Added to which we have to ask the same question yet again - although the date for that Suetonius writing is given as 120AD, I don’t suppose we have any original copies do we? In which case, what is the actual date of the earliest extant copies that were actually used to quote that sentence?
