Jesus Christ didn’t keep any records. He surrounded himself with fishermen – a poorly educated inner-circle who never took notes. They may have been illiterate. Jesus didn’t have a scribe – or even a broke, out-of-work writer – on staff with him and his Apostles. Why?
Ancient History
What makes ancient history “ancient”? It happened a long time ago, that’s what. Let’s look at some old staples of Ancient History, shall we?
- Plato lived from 399 BC to 347 BC. He wrote The Dialogues of Socrates. Plato was a devoted student of Socrates for over 40 years. He witnessed everything Socrates said and kept a record of it for posterity. Why? Because it was important.
- Socrates lived from 470 BCE to 399 BCE. He is known as the Founder of Western Philosophy. He was “Chronicled” by Plato and Xenophon.
- Aristotle lived from 384 BC to 322 BC. The Corpus Aristotelicum is a Chronicle of all Aristotle’s recorded lectures – probably written by Aristotle himself and his numerous students. Andronicus of Rhodes compiled Corpus around 60BC. A copy of The Corpus Aristotelicum was burned when the Great Library of Alexandria caught fire in 48 BCE when Julius Caesar set fire to merchant ships in Alexandria’s’ harbor as a battle strategy during his Egyptian Campaign.
- Draco of Athens wrote his famously harsh laws in 625 BC – after which Solon codified a “less harsh” version in 550 BC.
- The Code of Hammurabi was written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian in 1755 BC by court scribes under the direction of King Hammurabi.
- The Ancient Egyptian funerary text The Book of the Dead was written on papyrus during the “New Kingdon” Egyptian Era in 1550 BC by court scribes.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in Sumer (Uruk) in 2100 BC in the Akkadian language by priestly scribes.
- The Holy Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita was written in the second century BC by Hindu Priests.
- Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle in 335 BC, who wrote of Alexander’s life and deeds.
- The Iliad of Homer and the Odyssey of Homer were written by him in the Eighth or Seventh Century BC. These were lengthy Epic Poems.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 were the oldest known written records of the Hebrew Bible. They were written in the Third Century, BCE on papyrus and copper by Hebrew Priests.
Orders from Emperor Tiberius to his generals and Babylonian shopping lists in cuneiform exist. And the best we can do when it comes to Jesus our Lord is a “New Testament” written by a bunch of guys 325 years after his crucifixion who never met him?
This is – frankly – unbelievable.
Think about it. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. Jesus Christ. He walked throughout Galilee and Jerusalem preaching his Gospel – a “New Covenant” with mankind – with twelve Apostles. These Apostles were mostly fishermen. Wherever they went, momentous events occurred – raisings of the dead, castings out of devils, forgiveness of sins. Miracles wondrous to behold. Miracles that struck fear and awe, as well as love and devotion in the Jews.
Jesus was sent by “God the Father” to preach and ultimately be crucified and sacrificed for our sins. He knew what he was doing. He knew what was going to happen. He’s God. He knows everything. He had to know that in the future, all his followers would crave and thirst for his “Word” – not some fuzzy memory thereof compiled into a book by people who didn’t know him, witness his miracles or attend his crucifixion. His verbatim word. The real deal.
Was our Lord remiss?
Where, then, are his chroniclers? Why didn’t he have with him 24/7 a secretary or scribe to write everything that he said and everything that transpired down on papyrus, copper, animal skins – some medium of record?
Every record I list above was written by or at the direction of its author – hundreds of years before Christ ever walked the Earth. Considering that Jesus was the Son of God the Father – and was undertaking a divine mission of salvation for all mankind – why didn’t anybody write anything down when it happened? Why aren’t there any substantive, authoritative and contemporaneous writings?
Why do Christians have to content themselves with second-, third- and fourth-degree hearsay accounts of what Christ preached? The only Apostles we have writings from that knew Jesus and hung around with him were Matthew and John. At the end of their lives, they dictated to a secretary their recollections about Jesus fifty or sixty years after his crucifixion. They died soon after they finished their “deathbed” dictations, and we are told that whatever is in the New Testament attributed to them is accurate.
Why didn’t Matthew or John take notes contemporaneous with their day-to-day interactions and experiences with Jesus? Why did they wait until days before they died to reduce everything to a record?
We’re talking about the purported Son of God here. Nobody wrote anything down when the biggest eschatological event in human history was unfolding in real time? How is this possible?
Why? Were these guys illiterate fishermen? Unlettered? Uncomfortable with the written word? Were they told not to write anything down to deprive authorities of ammunition to use against them in a court prosecution for blasphemy or treason?
Surely Jesus would have known that written records would have made his expanding ministry easier to proselytize Jew and Gentile alike. Instead, the Jesus Christ opted for a future wherein his inner-circle and missionaries had to fumble about with second-, third- and fourth-degree hearsay renditions of his words. Why?
Is there, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Vatican Library, a scroll written by Jesus that methodically and substantively memorializes his transformational message of salvation and gives us an authentic and authoritative historical account of what happened from his birth onward?
Epochal historical records – a few examples of which I’ve set forth above – exist today for our analysis. Why are there no writings from Jesus? Why didn’t he share his life with friends who could write?
Why is the only historical record of Jesus we have from a Jewish-Roman Historian named Flavius Josephus, who wrote around 50 AD that in the first century “…. there was born Jesus, a wise man and a doer of startling deeds.” That’s it. That’s all he wrote.
How do we know that Jesus Christ really existed? Because of the few words of Josephus, myths, legends and the recollections of Matthew and John in their dotage. Stitch it all together and you’ve got a humdinger of a narrative – but is it authoritative? Historically bulletproof? So many years, so many Popes, Bishops, Commentators, Preachers and Clergymen blathering on and on about God, Salvation, Heaven and Hell.
If only Jesus left us his story in his own words. Something irrefutable. Something majestic. A record that wasn’t an interpretation of his teaching or a commentary or an allegory presented by some inner circle underling who was vying for praise and recognition.
Oh, well. As the Jesuit guys in the black Cassocks say, “It’s all a matter of Faith…..”
Right. Here we go again….
Copyright, 2024 Jon Croft
Email: vlchek1@gmail.com
(PS: Note: This will be my last Jesus topic article)
