>>Is there any evidence you (AR282) will accept that there were any Jews in Palestine in the period when Jesus is generally alleged to have lived?<<

I suppose.

>>Ossuaries maybe? (Since you don't accept literary evidence<<

Evidence of what?

>>and seem to believe that there were no Christians prior to Eusebius, let alone any with Hebrew-sounding names.)<<

And I said this when? Quote it please.

>>I am trying to figure out how you or anybody else could seriously claim that there is no evidence that there was ever anybody named Jesus or Joshua or Isaiah at the time in question.<<

I'm sure plenty of people were named that. I'm saying none of them were the gospelic Jesus or served as the model or we'd have read something about him from many independent sources and there are none.

>>The evidence that there were such people (though Isaiah may not have been a very common name) and that at least Jesus/Joshua was, like John and Joseph and Simon, a very very common name at the time seems to me incontrovertible. Yet you baldly assert the absurdity that there is no evidence of this.<<

I've asserted no such thing. Quote me saying that please. Josephus's works are rife with men named Jesus and some of them suspiciously close to the life of the gospelic Jesus but could not have been him because one was a marauding bandit in Galilee and another was a nutcase in Jerusalem who got killed by a stone hurled from a siege engine. And they lived too late to line up with the chronology Christians insist we follow.

>>When did history begin in your view (I get the impression you're into a much younger earth than the Bishop Ussher-style creationists)?<<

You seem to think that histories were always written the way they are now. Our method of writing histories today is greatly changed from the time when only monks and scribes were literate. They had established no historical method. Histories and record-keeping in Europe were not likely written before the 11th century or so. There was a nova in the heavens back then that was ignored in Europe's writings but could not possibly have been ignored when looking up at the sky. The Chinese studied it and wrote about it voluminously. The Indians of the America drew it on the ceilings of caves. Europe? Not a single, solitary word. For a people who explored the world and founded science, their utter lack of curiosity of such an amazing spectacle as a nova seems completely unexplainable. Unless they simply weren't keeping records then.

But feel free to insist that I just said Europeans didn't exist before the nova because that's the same weird conclusion-jumping you did earlier in your post.