In his very
informative new book, Christobiography,
Craig Keener wrote the following about the thousands of lost manuscripts in the
first century:
The limited extant first-century sources
available today should not be used to judge what sources ancient writers
typically had available. Ancient authors obviously had access to many sources
that are no longer extant (cf. the many contemporary histories of Nero noted in
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.154;
the forty-four volumes of Pompeius Trogus extant only in epitomized form [see
Justin, Epitome pref. 4]. C. 700
volumes of Chrysippus [Suetonius, Life of
Aulus Persius Flaccuus 7]). For example, Pliny the Elder, while explaining that
he could not survey everything (Pliny, Natural
History pref. 18), notes that he surveyed about two thousand volumes and
supplemented them with other data. He complains that many of these sources
plagiarized others without crediting them (Pliny, Natural History, pref. 17). Other cases were not plagiarism but
deliberate literary referents to classic works. Other cases were not plagiarism
but deliberate literary referents to classic works, for those ingenious enough
to catch them. Seneca’s secretaries recorded the philosopher’s dying words,
which Tacitus decides not to report because, he claims, they remained too
well-known in hi day to merit repetition in his work (Tacitus, Annals 15.63). Tactius normally follows
annals and earlier histories (sometimes specified only when they became notorious)
(E.g., Tacius, Annals 4.34-35), but
also consulted personal memoirs perhaps half a century earlier (Tacitus, Annals 4.53). (Craig S. Keener, Christobiography: Memory, History, and
Reliability of the Gospels [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2019], 215-16)
This should
caution LDS critics, as it shows that, just because a text is, at least at this moment, in time lost (e.g., the
writings of Zenos and Zenock, two prophets mentioned in the volume) does not
mean, ipso facto, such texts never
existed.
