Is there any evidence that the NT texts were not written where they were found in Egypt?
Some argue yes, others argue no.
The debate over this centers around what Alexandria was, and how we have textual fragments which survived Alexandria that also have fragments or citations outside of the Library of Alexandria.
Because we know this happened, and considering the proposition of Alexandrian origin being presented, we cannot draw a conclusion to Egyptian authorship or origin inherently; though we can postulate.
Also: something else to keep in mind - several non-Egyptians were librarians, teachers, and writers in the great Library, which only adds to the complexity of drawing a conclusion of Egyptian authorship.
Is there any evidence that the Jesus story in the NT was first told & written where the events supposedly occurred in Judea?
Some argue yes; others argue no.
However, specifically, tracking any oral tradition is nearly impossible.
Usually we can only know that a culture relied more on oral tradition than textual at some layer of their society rather than specifically what those oral traditions were. Sometimes we are lucky and some oral traditions pass through history well enough preserved to talk to descendants who still pass on the oral tradition, or someone notes somewhere what they have heard a people orate to each other.
These are few by comparison to the volume of information that is oral tradition of human civilization, however, so this is always a problem.
What we do know is that oral tradition was the standard method of dispersion for the Judean region outside of the Law and priest cast related demographics with the fervor and training to write so profoundly.
How did any writers in 4th-6th century Egypt know anything to be true about a miraculous messiah living 300 to 500 years before in Galilee?
I don't know how suspicious we should be about that. But on the face of things it's hardly supportive of Jesus if we find that the story appears to have been written far away in another country, and not actually known from the region where the events were supposed to have happened.
The post you cited of mine was not an argument for an historical Jesus.
It was a post which only rose some address to concerns regarding a proposition that Egyptians wrote the texts in question as a hoax due to the texts notably being found in Egypt in their earliest fragments.
Raising address unto the full conclusion of a proposition such as this does not inherently follow with "so therefore an historical Jesus was true".
No, instead, it only suggests that the above conclusion reaches too far for the explanations given and the information known to us.
It is one thing to reject the proposition of an Historical Jesus; it is entirely another to assign an origin, authorship, and cultural ownership.
For example -
- why is it that remnants of around 900 different Dead Sea Scrolls survived at Qumran, very close to Jerusalem and close to the activities of Jesus, and yet no similar writing has apparently ever been found about Jesus in that region?
The DSS were written mostly on parchment (only a few on papyrus, and one famously on Copper). Although papyrus may not survive well in the climate of Judea, why couldn’t the NT writers have written on parchment as the DSS writers did in that same region. Especially since the DSS writers had apparently been doing that for around 200 years in that region before the very earliest dates possible even for non-extant (i.e. non existing!) gospels or epistles of the NT … the actual extant relatively complete NT papyrus mss from Egypt apparently date at the very earliest as 4th-6th century ... whereas the DSS from the actual region close to Jerusalem date from c.170BC through to c.70AD.
So the DSS did survive in vast number in that exact region around Jerusalem and from a time typically up to 500 years or more before the earliest relatively complete and useable extant copies of the Egyptian-found gospels and epistles of the NT.
Again, I am not arguing for an Historical Jesus, but you seem to be questioning why we have such a find as the DSS texts while none regarding the gospel texts.
The DSS were not so easily preserved, and it is recognized quite openly in most commentaries upon them that we are so very lucky to have them preserved from this period in history for we have so very little left from 1st c CE Judea due to the Roman's nearly complete annihilation of everything in Judea.
They destroyed the entire temple library, the entire treasury with the coin still in the treasury, entire cities; everything.
The DSS were stashed away in the caves and as such were luckily able to survive destruction and offer, then, a secondary source to many documents found in Cairo (such as the Damascus Document, but there are many other such duplicates between the two locations; of course, there are many more unique to the DSS find itself).
So that the DSS survived in no way should influence our expectation of any group's texts.
We should not expect to find Sadducee party texts, nor any by even the High Priests, nor any legal documents by the Judges.
That we found the DSS is amazing and precisely one of the motivating reasons for such passionate interest in their preservation by the historical community.
A reminder: this in no way argues for an Historical Jesus.
