Josephus who was born two or three years after Jesus supposed “crucifixion”, makes no mention in all his works about the life and death of Jesus and any interpolated passage is known today to be a forgery.
In his work Origen against Celsus, he affirms in the chapter 35 of his first book, that Josephus when he mentioned John the Baptist, he said that the latter did not acknowledge Christ. It is also a point of interest that John the Baptist considered Jesus as a false prophet and I personally wonder in which idolatrous cult was Jesus baptized then and why, since John the Baptist venerated a pagan river deity Hayyi Rabbi? Certainly, In Mandaeism since Christianity didn’t exist at all at that time.
Josephus remains silent about the event of the darkness during the crucifixion and the zombies coming out of their tombs and circulating in Jerusalem, as well as the massacre of the infants that were estimated to fourteen thousand. Seneca also says nothing of all those events and the shocking violations of the nature’s laws. Pliny the Elder in his work “The history of his own time” also could not have omitted such important events in his valuable historical narrations. He doesn’t even mention the name of Christians in his work. Christians of course destroyed his books leaving only the “Natural History”, following the example of Josephus and Eusebius who destroyed the Chaldean records and the synchronistic tables of Manetho after having copied and used them in their works. The historian, public functionary and writer Philo Judaeous who was contemporary with Caligula, in his works makes no mention of Christ, Christians or Christianity either.
The appellative epithet of Christ, which is a Greek nickname, -it is striking the fact that the Jews used a Greek name to a native Jewish person- was assumed by an ancient superstitious Egyptian sect named “therapeutae” also a Greek name, meaning “the healers”, whose tenets Christians adopted among other beliefs and selected certain passages in the compilation of the New Testament. This is also testified by the Nag Hammadi collection, in which among the Gnostic gospels, copies of Plato’s works and of Hermes Thrice Great were also found, proving the high esteem of the latter.
However, this is also attested by Eusebius in his history Book 2, in which he says, “Those ancient therapeutae were Christians and their ancient writings were our Gospels”. He affirms then that those ancient Gospels although not existed yet in the form they appeared after the third century AD, existed already among the Egyptian monks long time before the Christian era.
Hence, why the contemporary with Jesus’ historians knew nothing about him?
Δεσμώτης
Article URL : https://www.britannica.com/topic/Therapeutae