Absence of Evidence

So let me explain what I think it means. It is a complete absence of evidence, not an absence of some evidence we would expect to find, if the proposed entity was present.Until relatively recently we lacked the technology to detect exoplanets. That was an absence of evidence, not evidence that exoplanets did not exist. Similarly the Oort Cloud is not - yet - observed, but that is not evidence that it does not exist. (Although Young Earth Creationists have claimed otherwise). Again, the reason is that observation is too difficult.Or another from this forum. There is no official Roman record of the execution of Jesus. Since we do not have Roman execution records from Judaea covering that time, this is an absence of evidence that is not evidence of absence. The records - the evidence - are absent. If we had a complete set of those records - but the record for Jesus was missing - it would not be an absence of evidence. In that case - where we would have a strong expectation of finding the record - it would be evidence of absence.

Getting executed - even crucified by the Romans - doesn’t seem to have been enough to get noticed. We know it happened to others, who aren’t identified.The supposed miracles on the other hand seem to me sufficient to attract attention and I think we can reasonably say that the Gospels are not accurate on that count.

I would agree with the title so long as we understand that it is evidence AGAINST Christianity.

Firstly let us note that your contributions to the thread are more apologetics than discussion of the real issues.

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Keep in mind that at that time, less than 10% of the overall population was even literate and of those even fewer who could write statements

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Which is really only relevant to the lack of records of relatively unimportant people. It doesn’t really explain, for instance, why John the Baptist gets more attention from Josephus.

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And then we have the controversy over who actually wrote the Gospels, the motive(s) in writing them, and the whole issue of redactors.

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Which is primarily due to a lack of evidence.

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Which to me is indicative of a story worthy of a smear campaign. In my mind, it is a subjective suggestion that a spiritual war/conflict did in fact exist within human nature. There was a lot of interest in suppressing and changing the story.

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There doesn’t seem to be much interest from non-Christians in either suppressing or changing the story.

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The evidence of the believers themselves does in fact score a point for my critics. The problem is that you assume that if Jesus were actually real, there would be absolutely no waffling among believers

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Wrong. The problem is that I assume that believers should at least manage to be both honest and decent. I’ve seen too many examples to the contrary - lack of honesty in particular - even among liberal Christians.

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According to the story, Peter denied Jesus 3 times. Was Peter being honest and decent?

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According to the story Peter was in fear of his life. I’m not expecting absolute under-any-circumstances truthfulness. Just the level that can be expected from an ordinary person in ordinary circumstances.

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What im saying is that the literate people of that time were likely non-believers and had no interest or sense of urgency in touching the story. The minority who were literate did not want the story to spread. Why you think i'm dishonest is unclear. All that I am doing is speculating.

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What you are doing is making up excuses. Urgency is not an issue. Nor is belief - although Jews should likely be counted as believers. If Jesus had worked unique large-scale miracles it is very likely that someone would have reported something.

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Oh they reported it. My theory is that the powers in charge did not want it spread or reported

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Which is at least adjacent to conspiracy theory. There is no particular reason for “them” to suppress the story. Your “theory” is just something you made up.