re: Leftist Melt of the Day Provided by Grok

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I mean, technically he is right. In the strictest sense there are no existing contemporaneous accounts of Jesus.

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He is almost right. The embarrassing part is acting like that's a significant fact or that it means something.

The only people who were written about in real time were people who had PR on retainer. Emperors, more or less. Anybody else was written about after the fact.

Jesus was a tradesman and itinerant preacher who had to rely on donations once he started his ministry just to live. He definitely had no PR department until the church was established, nor should anyone expect him to have had one.

In addition to that not being something that he had access to financially, there would have been no purpose without the church, as the people he focused on reaching were illiterate (as 80% of the population was at that time and place, and the 20% who weren't were mostly upper middle class and upper class).

The "almost" I put above is because Jesus was executed by Rome. There had to be an official record written in real time about that, even if we haven't recovered it. But it would have been available to the historians at that time.

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But there are several near-contemporaneous accounts and Jesus' historicity isn't really in question academically.

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Absolutely. Only cranks in 2026 deny the historicity of Jesus. He was written about more than the Emperor at the time he lived, and that's not counting the Biblical writings...that's all extra-Biblical sources.

And the best evidence suggests that the Gospel accounts were written much earlier than traditionally allowed. The reason modern scholars deny anything could have been written before 70 A.D. is because they deny that Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple. It's not because of any other evidence than that. So they start with that as the earliest date possible and reverse engineer and cherry pick everything into that framework.

But the actual evidence shows that Mark was most likely written between 7 and 15 years after Jesus' death and resurrection. Not 50 or 70 or 100 years later. Basically like someone right now writing a bio-history of Trump's first term.