There is, in fact, no scant breath of evidence that any gospel was written based on any such lost source; their anonymous authors cited none. People can "hypoth

There is, in fact, no scant breath of evidence that any gospel was written based on any such lost source; their anonymous authors cited none. People can "hypothesize" a "sayings source" all they like, but any conclusions based on it are worth as much as the hypotheses: garbage in, garbage out. Nowhere else in history does making up imaginary sources pass muster. The synoptic gospels do not, in fact, agree, neither among themselves nor with the literally dozens of others omitted. They blatantly contradict, instead, despite that each author visibly had all the previous texts ready to hand. Contradicting earlier texts was the whole point of writing it. Paul insists, as I said. He probably lied, but neither he nor anyone else writing before Mark reports a live Jesus ever saying anything. All of Paul's elaborate logical arguments supporting what he clearly identifies as his personal opinions could have been cut short if only he could have cited Jesus having said the same thing. He also never answers anybody else citing Jesus, either to concede the point or explain why what that Jesus had said didn't apply. If Ignatius et al. had claimed Roman persecution, we could reasonably suspect later forgery, and their testimony would be moot, but their not asserting it when it became so central to later doctrine speaks volumes. Do you pretend that if it had happened, none of them would have heard of it? The lack of mention is a hard nugget of fact we cannot doubt, and that demands explanation. Tacitus manuscripts were in the hands of the Church for many centuries, where they could insert anything they liked, just as they did in Josephus. (We even know precisely who inserted the TF into Josephus.) We have zillions of examples of them doctoring things so ham-handedly as to make it undeniable. Anywhere they were more careful, we don't know about. Pliny's mention of a historical Jesus is reporting hearsay from (former) Christians. If he had known anything about Nero slaughtering them, he would not have been so visibly at sea about why any were executed. Is it possible that early Christians were comprehensively persecuted? Sure, nothing is certain. But the balance of reliable evidence indicates not. If we were to take the persecution as given, we would then have no explanation for the wholesale forgery of myriad transparently false cases. Those were, recall, what we started out trying to understand.