jfrmeister wrote:
You have the cart in front of the horse.
First you have to establish that jesus existed. That can't be done. There's no independent records of jesus, writen at the time he lived. All accounts are second hand, and after the fact.
Actually, it can be. We have the first four books of the Old Testament, which give full firsthand accounts of the life of Jesus by men who were extremely close to him (such as Matthew, Mark and John), characters such as Luke who were very close to the disciples and other characters in Jesus' life, and people like Paul who had the chance to get to know the disciples and talk with them. Matthew, Mark and John would be firsthand accounts, Paul and Luke would be secondhand (unless you consider that Paul converted because Jesus came to him in a vision), though were extremely close to the disciples and worked closely with them.
As of right now, we have enough old manuscripts to produce at least 5600 individual copies of the New Testament (included in this number are at least 200 full NT copies that are actually quite old), and 97-99% of the New Testament can be reconstructed without any doubts or second-guesses as to what is meant, written or implied, and a few copies written in approximately AD 130, 160, and 200 have been discovered.
The next leading document with this many old manuscripts is the Iliad, at about 643 reported as of 2004. In further comparison, Aristotle's poetics were written approximately 343 BC, and among the only 5 or so copies we have, the earliest one is dated about AD 1100. Ceasar's accounts of the Gallic wars were written between 58 and 50 BC, though the nine or ten copies we have were published at least one thousand years after his death. For the work by Josephus called The Jewish War, the best we have is one Latin translation published in the Fourth Century. We have about nine Greek manuscripts published in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, and two Russian translations from the eleventh/twelfth century. We only have about 20-something manuscripts making any mention of Alexander the Great, to my recollection (that was a few years ago I heard that, so there's probably more). For the most part too, we consider these sources reliable despite the huge lack of more original manuscripts dated much closer to the original events.
That being said, I don't really see how the video's point was valid, considering that accounts of a person's bathroom habits are scarce to begin with.
Last edited by Capriccio on 12 Jan 2008, 10:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.