Idaho_Shooter: Copies of the New Testament can be found in more ancient manuscripts than any other work of ancient literature. There are an estimated 5,800 ancient Greek manuscripts alone of the New Testament, as well as thousands of others in languages like Aramaic and Latin. And some of these manuscripts were written in the first century on parchment, and they remain intact to this day. And many thousands of them predate the time periods that you mention above.
World renowned New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman is proficient in Greek and Aramaic and he has personally read thousands and thousands of historical New Testament texts…in the original languages…and he concludes that we can have a high degree of confidence that we can reconstruct the original text of the New Testament, the text that is in the Bibles that we use today, because of the abundance of textual evidence we have to compare. He says that any variations are largely minor and don’t obscure our ability to construct an accurate original text. And he’s not only an expert in biblical textual criticism, he’s also an atheist.
I have no doubt of the accuracy of the history recorded in all of the texts you mention. I will be the first to admit the early Christian Church had the most successful PR campaign known to Man.
My comment is more directed at the dearth of remaining history for other important figures.
While it had nothing to do with papists, imagine what was lost with the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
We have many instances recorded of priests burning texts and records in attempts to obliterate a culture deemed to be heathen.
People who choose to brew up their own storms bitch loudest about the rain.
