Posted: Feb 27, 2010 2:03 am
Pierce Inverarity wrote: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.
No, it isn't total at all. We have references to him in the works of his followers that date to within a few decades of his death. Then we have Josephus. Even if you dismiss Antiquities XVIII.63 wholesale (as most scholars don't), there's still Antiquities XX.9 to contend with. And then there's Tacitus. Compared to other Jewish preachers, prophets and wannabe Messiahs of the time - people like Theudas, the Egyptian, Hillel, Gamaliel and the Baptist - Jesus is actually comparatively well-attested.
Yet few bother to doubt the existence of those others, despite them being attested much less fully. Any ideas why that might be ... ?
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.
If I could be arsed I could come up with a string of Jesus Myther-style "maybes" that would "explain" all that and detail how Polybius and co. "invented" a mighty "Hannibal-figure" out of earlier antecedents as a way of "explaining" a series of defeats by totally separate Spanish, Gallic and Carthaginian enemies.
But my analogy between the Jesus and Hannibal wasn't claiming that the two had the same level of liklihood of existence anyway. I was simply showing that if we don't have contemporary sources for someone as clearly significant as Hannibal then it's absurd to base any kind of argument on the lack of contemporary attestation on the similar lack for someone as insignificant as Jesus.
There is nothing remotely comparable for Jesus.
Luckily for me my analogy was not arguing that Hannibal and Jesus were comparable in that respect. See above.