So uh, wouldn't a massacre of all baby boys in Israel make

>>2479887
God struck all other notes from the records.

>>2479887

It was only a massacre of the baby boys around Bethlehem so possibly not important enough for anyone to record.

Actually, there was a manuscript recently unearthed from a tomb in Tel Aviv that archeologists carbon dated to the 4th century CE, although it appears to be a copy of an earlier scroll apparently written in debased Latin. I'll paste the relevant paragraph:

>I, King Herod the Great, sovereign over all of Judea, hereby order my trustworthy court historian to record for posterity the glorious incident of when I personally commanded my steadfast and loyal soldiers to systematically murder the newborn sons of an entire village of my subjects. Indeed, the bravery of my troops cannot be described in mere words, as many of the lads were taller than a man's knees, and stronger than most house cats. May this record stand forever as testimony to the justice and magnanimity of my reign! It all began around the year 0 when...

Sadly the manuscript becomes indecipherable at that point.

>>2479887
What about the earthquakes and people rising from the grave?

Anon, it's a mythic trope meant to show Yeshua as being divine, relating him to Moses.

The Pharaoh killed all the children in Egypt in an attempt to bump off baby Moses; oh look, the same thing happened to the guy claiming to be the Messiah! Clearly, he is the Messiah :^)

>>2479960
Or, more likely, Matthew invented the event in order to get Jesus into Egypt, so he could leave Egypt to fulfill another prophecy. A massacre of even 20 infants would be enough to spark minor riots.

It's also weird Matthew screwed up Jesus' youth so much, compared to the far more credible Luke (who was Paul's physician). Matthew forgets to mention the census of Augustus, seems to suggest that the Annunciation happened in Bethlehem (as if Mary and Joseph were already living there lol), and says that Mary and Joseph only moved to Nazareth to avoid the infanticide of Herod "the great". Whereas Luke (remember, he's a doctor) rejects this wild goose chase of Bethlehem-Egypt-Nazareth, by telling us that Jesus was born In Bethlehem only because of a home-coming trip for Joseph of Nazareth during the empire-wide census.

It's just so weird that one of Jesus' closest friends just got his story screwed up compared to the more credible Luke (who had a PhD. in Neuroscience).

Arguments from silence, based on a writer's failure to mention an event, are distinct from arguments from ignorance which rely on a total "absence of evidence" and are widely considered unreliable; however arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies.[1][8]

>>2480114
This, we have just as much evidence of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 as we do the massacre of Bethlehem; since only one person recorded each event.

>>2480024
I also read about that discovery, truly amazing

I think even more important is the other manuscript found with it, dating to around 5 BC

It reads;
"I, Caesar Augustus, order that everyone in the Roman empire return to the home in which their ancestors live 1000 years ago so I can take a census, thanks"

>>2480104
You do have the minor problem that there is no record of this supposed empire-wide census, or why that would necessitate people going back to their towns of birth.

>>2480104
the empire-wide census isn't credible either. Judea wasn't even under direct Roman control at the time, nor was there a census of every person that required them to return to their ancestoral home. there was already a decent sizes exile community in Alexandria and Greece and requiring them to return to Judea would be ludicrous logistically

>>2480024
>>2480141
Truly amazing. But check out this letter Jesus wrote in Jerusalem.

"I descended from Heaven to the Earth in order to convert you.In old times, people were religious, and their harvests were abundant; at present, on the contrary, they are scanty.If you want to reap an abundant harvest you must not work on Sunday, for Sunday you must go to Church and pray to God to forgive your sins. He gave you six days in which to work and one for rest and devotion and to tender your help to the poor and assist the Church.Those people who brawl against My Religion and cast slurs on this Sacred Letter will be forsaken by Me.On the contrary, those people who shall carry a copy of this letter with them shall be free from death by drowning and from sudden death. They shall be free from all contagious diseases and lightning; they shall not die without confession, and shall be free from their enemies and from the hand of wrongful authority, and from all their slanderers and false witnesses.Women in peril at child-birth will, by keeping this Oration about them, immediately overcome the difficulty. In the houses where this Oration is kept, no evil thing will ever happen: and forty days before the death of a person who has this Oration about him or her, the Blessed Virgin will appear to him or her. So said St. Gregorious. To all those faithful who shall recite for three years, each day, 2 Paters, Glorias, and Aves, in honor of the drops of blood I lost, I will concede the following five graces:

1st The plenary indulgence and remission of your sins.

2nd You will be free from the pains of Purgatory.

3rd If you should die before completing the said 3 years, for you it will be the same as if you had completed them.

4th It will be upon your death the same as if you had shed all your blood for the Holy Faith.

5th I will descend from Heaven to take your soul and that of your relatives, until the fourth generation."

Truly astonishing.

>>2480164
>>2480177
I'm sorry, what school did you get your medical degree from? Didn't think so.

>>2480133
besides the actual excavation of Pompeii?

>>2480201
When he find the skeletons of infants in Bethlehem, killed around 1AD, that shit-eating grin will be wiped off your face.

>>2480222
It would be nice if the bible did actually have such archeological evidence to back it up. but for this specific incident I don't require such evidence to think it would be reasonable. what would be nice though is if we had some record of the actual decree for the census (we have others around the same time but they wouldn't include Judea or require returning to your ancestoral home) and a contemporary mentioning the massacre. we even have one: Philo of Alexandria. tons of his writings have survived and he was very knowledgable of Judean politics, he's actually a historical witness to Pilate that we have. yet no mention of the massacre. this massacre would equally be fitting to find in Josephus, yet we don't find it there either, only in a non-contemporary anonymous religious tale that doesn't use eyewitness accounts. hmm...

>>2480222

That wouldn't be suitable, you can't date accurately to a specific year and some dead kids is hardly unusual in the ancient world.

>>2479887
Well if you are familiar even slightly with the political realities of the kingdom of Judea and the larger Roman empire and Herod in general you will see how totally preposterous this story is. Luckily the period is very well documented by Josephus and others. It like claiming that Putin ordered all Russian first born to be executed. Just taking a bugi man politician name and inventing shit up.