Before moving too far on, there is a point that I have to address, as it’s one that Britt and Wingo bring up multiple times, and is one that is all too common among mythicists. Why did no one write about Jesus earlier?
Britt and Wingo put it like this:
“This is one of the first problems we noticed about the Gospels. You have a miracle worker who routinely healed people, fed thousands, cast out demons, and literally raised a man from the dead, but apparently no one thought to write these things down for another 40 years. Eventually writing a biography of just some random preacher is one thing, but waiting an entire generation to write about the actual son of God seems like a travesty.”
Often, I put forth a challenge to individuals who make such a claim: list one person writing at that time who should have mentioned Jesus but didn’t. Who is one person who was writing about Palestine during the first century, who didn’t mention Jesus?
The answer is no one. We simply don’t have people writing about Palestine in general. No one really cared about the area. But what about the idea that the Romans were great record keepers? That they documented everything?
That’s a modern myth. While it is true that the Romans kept extensive records in part, that’s really only part of the story. There are things that the Romans documented more. Such as history regarding Rome proper. But this extensive documentation didn’t extend to every aspect of society, or to all reaches of the empire.
We also have to realize that we’ve lost many of the Roman records that once existed. If written records aren’t purposely preserved, and copied over time, most will vanish. Other times, written records will be reused as the prior information on them just isn’t deemed important. Fires also destroy records, and during war, as nations are conquered, records are lost.
Meaning, even if there were more records about Jesus, it doesn’t mean we would have them. Simply, we can’t rule out the possibility of earlier sources because we currently lack them.
Taking this all into consideration, let’s still assume that Mark is our earliest Gospel, and that it was written in 70 AD. Is that really meaningful? No, for two main reasons.
First, Mark isn’t our first mention of Jesus. Paul precedes the Gospel of Mark by two decades. Right there, we’ve cut that gap in half. Now sure, Paul doesn’t give us a lot of details about Jesus, but that’s not the intention of his letters. His letters are only part of a conversation, which appears to begin with a specific congregation asking Paul theological questions, or at times, Paul hearing of congregations that are going through various troubles. Paul writes back to address such.
This brings us to the second point. We can assume that the congregations that Paul is writing to already know the story of Jesus. Paul doesn’t have to explain to them who Jesus is, or that background. Why? Because these are individuals who have already accepted the message of the Christ movement, of what would become Christianity.
This movement precedes Paul, as he tells us quite clearly. After all, he was persecuting this movement prior to joining it. This means that we can push the message about Jesus back even further. And we have to realize that the way in which this movement seemingly was being spread was through missionary work; through word of mouth.
The reason for this is largely because we are dealing with an oral culture, one in which the vast majority of people could neither read nor write. Yet, we know that from early on, this message was being spread, the story of Jesus was being told, through oral means.
It should be clear then that the fact that we don’t have earlier writings is not surprising. It’s what we, as historians, expect. It’s how history generally works.
The problem is that so often, people don’t have an understanding of how history works. Since we live in a written society, people tend to retroject their own situation into the past. But we can’t do that. We need to realize that for most of the past, people lived in oral societies. Most information was passed down by word of mouth through oral tradition, and only written down later on.