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..In the early periods, none of the universal religions known to us allowed and unbelieving world to see their creative spiritual impulse which was transforming and reviving everything anew. The quality of dynamic power inherent in the Word of God was perceived only by the small group of those who believed in this creative Word of God and were filled with it. At first the world at large scarcely took any notice of it. Thus Jesus Christ was virtually ignored by contemporary historians. The historians of Palestine, Greece and Rome took no notice of the event which was to change the world of that time and without which the spiritual life of the West would be inconceivable. They paid no attention to the life, works and death of the founder of Christianity. Only Tacitus mentions in his Annals-- and the authenticity of this evidence is questioned-- a "Christ" who, in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, was killed by order of the governor Pontius Pilate, and he continues: "For the moment the destructive superstition had been repressed, but it broke again not only in Judea, the starting-point of this evil, but also in the capital where all that is hideous and shameful congregates and gains adherents." (Annals,Xv:44) (9:2) Even Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish scholar, knows nothing of Jesus-- Philo, who left to posterity a voluminous bulk of works, who was a great expert on the Bible and the Jewish sects and who also mentions Pilate. The report about Christ in 'The Antiquities of the Jews' by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, born shortly after Jesus's crucifixion, is very likely and interpolation from the third century. "The New Testament is the only source of information about Jesus," writes Romano Guardini. To the cultivated Roman of the second century, Christianity was an obscure Jewish sect, a "corrupt superstitious belief," ;and "evil," as Tacitus calls it; only a small part of the population, the Christians themselves, believed in the triumphant progress of this religion. It certainly seemed much more probable that the future belonged to any other of the many religious movements, for instance the mystery cults, some of which were quite eminent. We can see the same process taking place in the history of other great religions: every faith in its early period has had to experience first ignorance, then derision and persecution. At no time have contemporary non-believers visualized a great future for the new-born religion.
(9:3)
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