by "Wells and his predecessors": "Arguments from silence" are to be rejected, because "it is wrong to suppose that what is unmentioned or undetailed did not exist". Van Voorst further argued that the early Christian literature was not written for historical purposes. Dating the "invention" of Jesus around 100 AD is too late: the Gospel of Mark is generally considered to have been written around 70 AD. The "development [of the Gospel traditions] does not necessarily mean wholesale invention, and difficulties do not prove nonexistence". Wells could not explain why "no pagans and Jews who opposed Christianity denied Jesus' historicity or even questioned it" The rejection of Tacitus (Annals) and Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews) ignores the scholarly consensus. Proponents of the "nonhistoricity hypothesis" are not driven by scholarly interests, but by anti-Christian sentiments. Wells and others do not offer "other, credible hypotheses" for the origins of Christianity. In 2003, Van Voorst added an eighth "final argument"—that Wells had since accepted the "historical basis for the existence of Jesus". In his book Did Jesus Exist?, Bart Ehrman surveys the arguments "mythicists" have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first raised at the end of the 18th century. Regarding the lack of contemporaneous records for Jesus, Ehrman notes that no comparable Jewish figure is mentioned in contemporary records either and there are mentions of Christ in several Roman works of history from only decades after the death of Jesus. He adds that the authentic letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament were likely written within a few years of Jesus' death and that Paul likely personally knew James, the brother of Jesus. Ehrman writes that although "our best sources about Jesus, the early Gospels, are riddled with problems ... written decades after Jesus' life by biased authors", they "can be used to yield historically reliable information". He adds, "With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul)", which he says is "pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind". Ehrman dismisses the idea that the story of Jesus is an invention based on pagan myths of dying-and-rising gods, maintaining that the early Christians were primarily influenced by Jewish ideas, not Greek or Roman ones, and repeatedly insisting that the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus