the new new testament???

That you don't understand this may be the source of all this confusion.The oldest surviving manuscripts of Josephus are from the 11th century. Anything older than that is gone or lost. And who made these surviving copies? Monks. The versions of ancient texts which survived in these circumstances are the ones that monks decided were important enough or holy enough to copy.You've made reference several times to the idea that, if there was controversy over a work, we would have access to all the books arguing this controversy, but we know for a certain fact that this is not the case. Texts generally do not survive. The versions we have are the copies made later. Copying was an expensive and time-consuming business, so the medieval copyists were selective about what they copied. The works of people who'd lost a struggle in the church and were considered heretics were not copied.Consider Celsus. Celsus was an anti-Christian who wrote a work in the days of the early Church fathers explaining why Christianity was absurd in its claims and dangerous to the stability of Rome. Not one copy of his book is known to survive anywhere. The only reason anybody today knows he existed, is because Origen, the church father, took the time to write a lengthy rebuttal. Origen's work was copied by monks and exists today. Celsus' work was not copied, and so it's gone.

Actually, Greek Orthodox monks, in the case of Josephus, but still.

Sorry that I haven't had the time and energy to keep up with replies to this thread, but I just wanted to pop in here to quickly address one pet hate of mine, from Bertot's wikipedia quote:

quote:

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Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce has said "the evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning...It is a curious fact that historians have often been much readier to trust the New Testament records than have many theologians."

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#Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce is clearly an idiot, but sadly his particular brand of idiocy is oft-repeated. I'm referring to this bit:

quote:

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the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning

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People question the authenticity of classical authors all the time. Your quoted article mentions Tacitus' Annals which has several times been argued to be a later forgery. A couple of writers in the 19th century thought that the whole of the Annals was a 15th century forgery, which we now know to be false since we have documents much older than this. Annals is nowadays generally considered to be Tacitus' work. Sometimes, however, the scholarly community eventually realises that works are not authentic. The Bibliotecha of Apollodorus of Athens is nowadays usually listed as being authored by 'Pseudo-Apollodorus' - the reason being that, whilst no one knows who wrote it, scholars have come to agree that it cannot possibly have been Apollodorus of Athens, as traditionally believed.Also mentioned in your quote was the Iliad, the authorship of which has been a matter of debate for centuries. It's controversial whether they was any such person as Homer, and whether the poem was composed all at once or has been edited and had bits added by various authors before becoming the standardised version we have now.I've only spoken about authenticity in the sense of whether or not a work was written in the form we possess it by the person it's attributed to. When it comes to whether the claims it makes are truth or fiction, of course we know that a lot of classical authors lied, made things up, and reported myths with no basis in fact.The only reason people seem to have this strange idea that only the Bible is subject to such criticism, is because when a scholar questions some details about Diodorus Siculus, nobody cares apart from other classical scholars. When a scholar questions something in the Bible, however, lots of people get offended and take notice.

Thank you for your careful consideration of my points.

No, my point was that the authenticity of classical texts is regularly questioned, and that people who claim the Bible is subjected to greater scrutiny only do so because they have no interest in the debates over secular texts. Calling Bruce an idiot was a hyperbolic assertion by way of introduction to this point.