Rogan then asked about the Jewish understanding of days as it related to Jesus being dead for three days. He also wanted to know how many people who claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus actually wrote something down about it.
“We have Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark and Luke,” said Huff, although he noted that Mark and Luke were “not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community” and that Luke even notes that fact at the beginning of his gospel.
However, there were accepted conventions for how biographies were written during that period in history, as seen in the examples of Quintilian, Lucian and Josephus, “who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history,” Huff said. Luke follows their style when he writes in his gospel that he’s interviewing eyewitnesses and writing “an orderly account.”
“And so he’s saying, you know, I’m going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day,” said Huff.
Rogan next asked if, since we have accounts of the resurrection happening, we also have accounts denying that it happened.
“The only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as Gnostics,” said Huff. “And they’re not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They’re denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy, where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.”
While it seems odd to our modern sensibilities, Huff said, “in the ancient world, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims.” Rather, they tended to be skeptical of “why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.”
In fact, Huff said, there is “an ancient writer who mocks Christianity” but takes for granted that Jesus did miracles simply because Jesus grew up in Egypt. The writer says that “Egyptians are magicians,” so Jesus “just learned the magic when he was a child.”
Huff went on to note other interesting facts about the historical evidence for Jesus, including that Jesus has an unusual number of writings attesting to his existence, given his lack of prominence in society. The only other contemporary who has a similar amount of documentation of his life is the Roman Emperor Tiberius, “the most famous, most powerful person at the time.”
Another interesting point is that the followers of Jesus were both monotheistic and ethnically diverse, in contrast to the Jews, whose monotheism was associated with their ethnicity, and the Greeks and Romans, who were polytheists.
Later in the discussion, Rogan asked how the canon of the Bible was determined, and Huff explained how the early church decided which books should be part of the New Testament and why they excluded some.
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