Posted: Feb 26, 2010 11:45 pm
There is not a single historical source by anyone that actually saw Hannibal, not one. So Hannibal didn't exist?
Aha. But the silence about Jesus is total. The man is completely invisible to history. I believe you miss a key difference between the historical figures you cite and the case of Jesus. You see, somebody had to have led the Carthaginian forces across the Alps and into Italy. Somebody had to defeat Scipio and the fleet from Pergamum. Somebody had to have been the brilliant tactician that had every military leader of the era learning and imitating his tactics. There's a big "hole" in history if we remove Hannibal from the picture, so it's not a matter of having a source from anyone that actually saw him. So much about our historical record of late Republican Rome would have to be rewritten to remove Hannibal that it's far more likely that he existed than that he did not.
There is nothing remotely comparable for Jesus. There's nothing in the historical record that he needs to have done. We have some texts, and evidence of a religious tradition. We have evidence of mythmaking and literary invention, which do not require an inspiration in reality, though they may often have it. Please tell me you can see a difference between indisputable figures of history --figures without whom we would need to start from scratch on reconstructing the history of the period-- and debatable figures like Jesus and King Arthur, who, if they existed, left no trace other than stories of dubious provenance told about them.