This is an interesting if useless comment. The Bible is a compendium of sources that were not Biblical at the time they were produced. They were produced by men who wanted to record history. Luke wanted to record history from the perspective of an historian, the others with other agendas. However, they were not setting about to create the New Testament, they were only trying to record what they had seen and heard. Approximately four centuries later a group of religious scholars determined to collect these writings and call them Scripture. They did this after they were written and had long been accepted as historical.
Suppose there had been six other accounts written. Is it not likely that those documents would also have been included by those same scholars into the Scriptures?
To say that the sources are all Biblical is merely to say that they were all collected by believers. That does not disqualify them in any way.
What you really should be looking for is an historical document, or rather a collection of such documents, that contain similar historical details but deny the truth of the New Testament. That would be more powerful - a collection of documents from the same time frame that attack the historical accounts of the Gospels and were not included. But such documents do not exist, despite the fact that the religious and political rulers of the day were extremely interested in discrediting the nascent religion.
Care to speculate as to why not?
Shalom.
Care to speculate as to why not?
Bingo. Here's the procedure: first, pre-define the word "proof" to mean "any account of this resurrected man by anyone other than those who were convinced of his deity by the experience."
And then, of course, declare victory when no such "proof" surfaces.
Excellent point.
"Extremely interested" is correct. The anti-Christians accused the Christians of all sorts of things, including child sacrifice and cannibalism. The Romans (e.g., Diocletian) would have made a great show of these documents -- if only to make the arena games more "interesting" for the irony of the Christians being killed for a lie. Yet the excellent Roman records of the time are mysteriously silent on the singular topic of those conflicting reports.