According to Gospel
Jesus was well known in the vicinity of Jerusalem in the first decades of the CE. He had grown up in nearby Nazareth. He had preached to large crowds. He had been to parties with rich folks. He had healed desperately ill people, even after they died. Then He made a big altercation in the Temple. By the week of the Passion of Christ, many if not most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem knew about Him. Many knew Him by face. He had lots of followers, including The Twelve.
Then He did something that got Him the ire of the local Jewish authorities. Likely the big deal in the Temple, but who knows. They hired one of His own to turn Him in. They turned Him over to Pilate. Apparently the evidence was weak, Pilate tried to foist the problem off onto Herod. Herod wasn't buying it, so Pilate summarily ordered Jesus to be tortured and crucified, the way Jewish terrorists/ freedom fighters generally were at the time. He was scourged to within an inch of His life. Then dragged naked through the streets of Jerusalem on the busiest day of the year(last shopping day before Passover) , carrying His own execution device, then nailed to the Cross to die in front of God and everybody. Then a Roman stabbed Him with a spear.
There is also mention of a solar event and an earthquake strong enough to damage the Temple. But not all the gospel writers remember that.
If the story had ended there(as it did in the original version of the oldest gospel, Mark), nobody would remember. Jesus would be just another troublesome Jew executed by the Romans before they leveled the Temple, and kicked the Jews out of Judea. It happened often.
But the story goes on. Jesus reappeared a few days later. Better than new, only a few scars as proof that He actually was the one crucified last Friday. Thomas checked it out for himself.
Given the facts, the place and time, and human nature, there are a few things a rational observer would expect.
The first would be crowds. A bunch of people saw that Jesus guy dragged through the streets to His death. Then they spent the next couple of days eating and hanging out with family, as people do on holidays. So lots of people, regardless of how they viewed Jesus, knew about the events of Friday. Jesus, Alive!, would be a huge big deal. A secret like that cannot be kept. People would care, even if they didn't believe in the Trinity. And Jesus was around for almost 40 more days. Then He Ascended to Heaven. The crowds would be wild.
People would hang on His every Word. They would want to know everything possible about His prior life and lineage and teachings and Everything. The spot He was born, His girlfriends, the spot from which He ascended. .... People would have wanted to know everything. And would have done anything to please Him. Throw themselves against the Romans in His Name. Erect statues and monuments, take in His Holy Mother, follow The Apostles around insufferably, pass stories about seeing Jesus's own sandal once with my own eyes to the grandkids...
But none of that happened. Nothing. It is impossible to find a credible reference to Jesus's existence before the Jewish diaspora. The Romans didn't notice. The Jewish authorities didn't notice.
Hardly anyone remembered anything until Paul came along. By then, nobody even remembered where Jesus ascended. A few decades after that, people started writing things down. But the writings were vague, not terribly consistent, and extremely incomplete. The earliest ones were pretty barebones, later ones had lots more supernatural details. But there is nothing like accounts of Jesus and His story anything like contemporary with Jesus.
Nothing.
And here is the biggest gap of all. What did The Risen Lord teach, do, or say during the 40 Days? Did everyone just forget? Didn't they care? It is like Jesus went on vacation during the most momentous time He was on earth! He could have explained Trinitarianism. Produced a code of Christian behavior that would exclude the Crusades, EuroChristian colonialism, and slavery in the Americas.(just to name a few)
But none of that happened. Absolutely nothing of interest is recorded as happening during The Risen Christ's 40 days with us fallible humans.
The remarkable lack of historical evidence, when it should exist in piles, is why I doubt that the character in the New Testament is more than a legend created later, for the purposes of humans. Nothing to do with God.
Tom
