Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.
Ugh. Why’d I write “B.C.E.” when I meant “C.E.”? Oh well, I guess it didn’t confuse anyone. Anyway, besides a handful of people who question the usual gospel dating and try to argue that it was really considerably later, I know there’s also a tiny minority of scholars who date the life of Jesus much earlier, as much as a century or more before what the standard story reports. Hence, I’d wondered if you were a subscriber to one of those theories. It means having to assume some of the references to contemporary events in the gospels are just wrong, but honestly the standard story also has to do that; it just has a different set of mistakes it needs to explain away. Still, it’s a pretty tiny minority theory, and I haven’t really investigated what the evidence for it is supposed to be.