.
"Glad to answer Tacitus, the younger Pliny wrote him a letter containing an extensive eyewitness account of all he saw and knew about his father’s death, in around 1,500 words ...
"Pliny’s response peaked Tacitus’s curiosity and questions even more, and he wrote again, asking what the younger Pliny himself did in the days immediately following that tragedy. Pliny again obliged him with an account of that in a following letter. As Pliny says, ‘the letter which you asked me to write on my uncle’s death has made you eager to hear about the terrors and also the hazards I had to face’ afterward. This is the kind of exchange of letters we should expect to have from the earliest Christians ...
"... [One would expect that] The same burning desires exhibited by Tacitus and eagerly satisfied by Pliny would have been multiplied a hundredfold in the two decades of Paul’s mission, given the number of Christians and distant churches there were [supposedly] by then, spanning three continents. For not even one person to have ever exhibited this [same level of] interest in writing, nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre ...
"This oddity is all the greater given that there were countless moral and doctrinal disputes arising in these congregations (the very reason Paul wrote such long and detailed letters), which must necessarily have rested on many questions that the actual facts of Jesus’ words, life and death would have addressed, answered or pertained to. Such facts would thus necessarily become points of query, debate and contention. Which in turn would have involved eyewitnesses weighing in, either directly (writing letters themselves), indirectly (by dictating letters through hired scribes, which were abundantly available for just that purpose; there were surely even scribes within Christian congregations willing to volunteer), or by proxy (communicating with educated leaders like Paul, who would then relay what they learned) ...
"... if no Christians were interested in any details of Jesus’ life, then they cannot have transmitted any details of his life, either ... you cannot claim the Christians were simultaneously keen to accurately preserve memories of Jesus and completely uninterested in any memories of Jesus. So the notion that ‘they didn’t care about any of that’ is simply a non-starter ...
" ... so far as we can tell, no letters sent to [Paul] ever asked or tasked him with discussing or mentioning such things. No event in Jesus’ life, no details of Jesus’ life, ever had any relevance to any of the occasional issues he addressed, and no one ever used such events or details in any argument Paul ever had to confront. No one was even curious about such things ...
... It’s also improbable that even casual or incidental mentions of historical facts about Jesus would never arise, not once in twenty thousand words. Like Paul’s happenstance mention of baptizing for the dead (1 Cor. 15.29) or the fear of what angels might do if Christian women don’t cover their hair in church (1 Cor. 11.9-10) or the fact that Christians will one day judge the angels (1 Cor. 6.3). Paul lets slip countless incidental details like these about Christian practice and belief, not because he was required to but simply because that sort of thing can’t really be avoided. You would actually have to try very hard not to ever mention anything in twenty thousand words beyond the bare few facts you need to communicate ...
"... Lüdemann likewise finds modern excuses for this implausible:
"Glad to answer Tacitus, the younger Pliny wrote him a letter containing an extensive eyewitness account of all he saw and knew about his father’s death, in around 1,500 words ...
"Pliny’s response peaked Tacitus’s curiosity and questions even more, and he wrote again, asking what the younger Pliny himself did in the days immediately following that tragedy. Pliny again obliged him with an account of that in a following letter. As Pliny says, ‘the letter which you asked me to write on my uncle’s death has made you eager to hear about the terrors and also the hazards I had to face’ afterward. This is the kind of exchange of letters we should expect to have from the earliest Christians ...
"... [One would expect that] The same burning desires exhibited by Tacitus and eagerly satisfied by Pliny would have been multiplied a hundredfold in the two decades of Paul’s mission, given the number of Christians and distant churches there were [supposedly] by then, spanning three continents. For not even one person to have ever exhibited this [same level of] interest in writing, nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre ...
"This oddity is all the greater given that there were countless moral and doctrinal disputes arising in these congregations (the very reason Paul wrote such long and detailed letters), which must necessarily have rested on many questions that the actual facts of Jesus’ words, life and death would have addressed, answered or pertained to. Such facts would thus necessarily become points of query, debate and contention. Which in turn would have involved eyewitnesses weighing in, either directly (writing letters themselves), indirectly (by dictating letters through hired scribes, which were abundantly available for just that purpose; there were surely even scribes within Christian congregations willing to volunteer), or by proxy (communicating with educated leaders like Paul, who would then relay what they learned) ...
"... if no Christians were interested in any details of Jesus’ life, then they cannot have transmitted any details of his life, either ... you cannot claim the Christians were simultaneously keen to accurately preserve memories of Jesus and completely uninterested in any memories of Jesus. So the notion that ‘they didn’t care about any of that’ is simply a non-starter ...
" ... so far as we can tell, no letters sent to [Paul] ever asked or tasked him with discussing or mentioning such things. No event in Jesus’ life, no details of Jesus’ life, ever had any relevance to any of the occasional issues he addressed, and no one ever used such events or details in any argument Paul ever had to confront. No one was even curious about such things ...
... It’s also improbable that even casual or incidental mentions of historical facts about Jesus would never arise, not once in twenty thousand words. Like Paul’s happenstance mention of baptizing for the dead (1 Cor. 15.29) or the fear of what angels might do if Christian women don’t cover their hair in church (1 Cor. 11.9-10) or the fact that Christians will one day judge the angels (1 Cor. 6.3). Paul lets slip countless incidental details like these about Christian practice and belief, not because he was required to but simply because that sort of thing can’t really be avoided. You would actually have to try very hard not to ever mention anything in twenty thousand words beyond the bare few facts you need to communicate ...
"... Lüdemann likewise finds modern excuses for this implausible:
- "The argument that [Paul] could assume his readers’ familiarity with these [facts] because he had already passed them on in his missionary preaching [and therefore never had to mention them] is not convincing"."
