spamandham

What drives any new cult? Do we really need to get into a psychoanalysis of the founders of Christianity in order to dismiss the miracle claims? You are making much too much of nothing.

freetrader

Diogenes the Cynic:

You mean no authenticated documents written by someone claiming to have seen Jesus do miracles (only documents saying there were witnesses, which there may have been, and documents claiming to have been written by a witness but really written much later).

Yes, no doubt there are thousands or even millions of events that happened historically which meet that description. The record of those events was written later. Are you throwing out 90% of all recorded ancient history because there are "no contemporary claims" attesting to the events?


Again, you mean no surviving documents written by a contemporary. Obviously there was contemporary testimony about him, just none written down that survived, as most things were not written down, and most of what was written down did not survive.

And there are millions of known historical figures who fit this description.


You're repeating yourself. Yes, there are many historical figures we know exist who meet this description. To assume they didn't exist would be silly.


No, people were claiming he did miracles from the time he allegedly did them. You just mean they didn't write it down or if they did the document did not survive. There's no reason to assume the Gospel of Mark as we have it was the first document written about Jesus and the miracles he did.

Most documents did not survive. And most of what is recorded in the synoptic gospels probably was taken from previous documents as well as word-of-mouth and so already existed earlier.

We don't need to throw out 99% of all the historical record, as you're suggesting we must do to meet your criteria for what's believable.

Many things happened and were spoken about without being written down at the time, and many more were written down but the document did not survive. Now beyond that, perhaps 1/10 of 1% of the things that happened were written down at the time it happened and the document survived (probably more like .00001%). For the rest we must rely on what was written down later.


Probably true.


Speculation. There could have been contact with a contemporary. We don't know.


You mean "magic" never existed? There's no such thing as magic tricks? Magicians have never existed? Our topic here is healing events which might be unexplainable by current medical science.


Again, you mean there's no surviving document about it written by a contemporary. That certainly describes 99% of even major events we take for granted from that period.

I don't know if the assassination of Caesar is recorded for us by a contemporary of the time -- I won't waste my time trying to look it up -- but e.g. if it is not actually in a surviving "history" document written by a contemporary but is first recorded in a document from 50 or 100 years later, that doesn't change the fact that the event took place and we would still believe it even if the first surviving record of it is from 50 or 100 years later.

Certainly the vast majority of our knowledge of events from that period was not recorded in any contemporary document but appears first in documents much later than the event occurred. So then your great theory of history "blows out of the water" 90% of our knowledge of everything that happened, not only back then but probably up to the 20th century. What a bombshell!

You've not only disproved the miracle stories of Jesus but 90% of everything else we thought we knew from history. That's a good day's work -- you should receive a Nobel Prize for your earth-shaking discovery.


They had evidence. The mere fact that no document from a contemporary survived down to us does not indicate that people then had no evidence. It's only because you start out with the dogmatic premise that the stories are false that you can claim they had no evidence.

Homer and those who heard his poetry had evidence for the events of the Trojan War. Just because their beliefs were probably not all accurate does not mean the word-of-mouth tradition they trusted had no reliability as evidence for past events or that all such events must be fiction.

We assume most of the miracle events are fiction, but we can't arbitrarily condemn them all as fiction -- we have to make allowance for the possibility that some were true, or better yet, partly true.

Since the number of such stories (or near-miracle stories) is vast, it's unreasonable to assume all of them are 100% fiction. In many cases there is a likely core of truth, and then the final version of the story got exaggerated. There must be thousands of examples of this.

The original story could itself be amazing, and yet not quite in the "miracle" category, but the exaggerated version expands it to beyond what is scientifically possible. And in some cases there may not be a scientific explanation based on current known science, and yet the reputed event could still be true.

This explanation is often much more realistic than the rash judgment that the whole thing is "rubbish!" "impossible!" "not a shred of evidence!" etc. etc.

Herodotus tells a story about two young men who yoked themselves to a carriage and pulled it about 9 miles, a superhuman feat, when they had a deadline to make and no oxen could be found for the job, and when they arrived there successfully, the two heros collapsed dead on the spot and were buried and memorialized with a monument.

Did this really happen? A high-strung skeptic probably just says "Bosh! Rubbish! Bah, humbug!" But a good explanation is that it really happened and perhaps the distance or other details became exaggerated, so that it was not really as impossible as the final version of the story presents it.

Where an alleged event defies current known science, we must factor in the lower probability but not dogmatically rule out any chance it could be true. In a case where you have to make a decision to act, there's a point where you close off further discussion and choose one way or the other, and relying on a miracle to happen is hardly ever a reasonable choice. But the question whether the historical Jesus did miracles is not in that category.


Well again, you're wrong to say they didn't have "a shred of evidence," so since your premise that they believed without a shred of evidence is false, then your above conclusion is wrong.

However, let's grant that many of the believers were unskeptical and believed whatever they were told, which obviously happens (people also believe real events this way, like when they watch the evening news) -- the real question is: Where did they get these beliefs, who was telling it to them, and why were they telling it?

Whose idea was it to make Jesus into a miracle-worker? Why did they choose him for this role? Why didn't they choose instead John the Baptist or Hillel or Socrates or Zoroaster or any number of other established figures of repute for this role? What was the point of making a hero savior out of this unimportant Jesus figure?

Everyone keeps avoiding this question and wastes time arguing against points that are not being made. It is agreed that people do believe stories that are not true. The question posed here is not about the psychology of the believers or why they believe uncritically, and there is no claim here that because people believe something it must therefore be true.

No, the question here is about how the claims they are believing came to be presented to them in order to get them to believe. Whose idea was it, and why, to make Jesus the Galilean into a god and present such an unlikely one to the gullible as a messiah savior figure?

No one has answered this yet, and until they do, the best answer is that they chose him because he did in fact perform those miracles, which is how his reputation became established and made him a credible messiah figure.


His theology/christology -- perhaps, yes, you could say they took his word or something like that. However, not facts he presented about the historical Jesus. His readers or audiences already had a general knowledge of the historical Jesus from word-of-mouth, external to Paul, and they did not believe this picture only from Paul.

They knew about the resurrection of Jesus from word-of-mouth, not from Paul. His theologizing on this theme would have been worthless if his audience did not already have this idea in their heads from other sources than just Paul.

Just because Paul claims some kind of elite source for his knowledge does not make it so. A preacher or prophet typically claims to have some private special Source not available to others, and the listeners mostly accept it.

But if Paul had said to them something like "Jesus was a Persian and the Son of Zoroaster, and his death was by being burned at the stake in Persepolis, not by crucifixion in Jerusalem, and he rose up from his ashes like the Phoenix and flew up into Heaven to sit at the Right Hand of Zoroaster" and so on, do you really think his listeners would have believed a word of it? You know perfectly well they would not have, but more likely would have stoned him or run him out of town on a rail.

So you need to stop this nonsense that Paul could make up anything he wanted and his listeners would swallow it.

I think I see where you get this cliche that it came from his hallucinations. Yes, Paul tried to establish his credentials by making subjective claims this way. And yet, what he says about the historical Jesus did not come this way despite his claim to some kind of secret channel of information.

His "last supper" memo of I Cor. 11:23 illustrates this point. This may be his most clearcut reference to the historical Jesus. He says: "For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks . . ." etc.

What kind of talk is this? He's claiming he received this "from the Lord" to then be "handed on to you" like he's some kind of intermediary between the Lord and the flock, and maybe their minds are too immature to receive the wisdom directly.

Who knows what special status Paul is claiming here for himself? (His phrase "handed on" is the same as the next phrase "handed over," same Greek term, which could mean Paul thinks he's sort of "betraying" what he "received" from the Lord, or kind of "sneaking" it to others not in the "inner circle" or something like that.)

But getting beyond his elitist thinking, what is he actually saying? He's not giving them anything he alone had access to. There were others who also knew this story about the night when Jesus was arrested -- perhaps not all Paul's listeners knew the detail of it, but surely some did, and there was access to it independently of Paul, and so obviously he could not just make up anything he wanted, but had to stick to the common version of the story.

Since this story is common to both Paul and the gospels, which presumably were mostly independent of each other -- Paul didn't change his ideas to fit the gospel accounts, which didn't yet exist, and the gospel writers, even if they knew of Paul, don't seem to have drawn from him for their accounts -- we can then assume there were many details about Jesus, beyond just this "last supper" story, which were common to both Paul and the gospel writers, and also were current in word-of-mouth form if not even in some early bits-and-pieces written forms as well.

The resurrection story is almost certainly an example of this, although Paul gives no details of it, not because he didn't know the details but because what he gives is preaching, not narration.

So Paul's source is not really hallucinations or a subjective source, despite his claim to have some special elitist access to the truth directly from God. Every indication is that there were other sources (oral tradition) for the beliefs his listeners had about the earthly Jesus, and Paul relied on those sources too.

This doubtless included the miracle stories, and without these the Jesus figure would have had little or no currency with Paul's listeners and his preaching about Jesus would have made no impression on them -- they would have responded, "Who's this Jesus or this Christ character he keeps babbling about? Is this another one of those crackpots?"

show_no_mercy

How do you know this?

freetrader

Diogenes the Cynic, continued


Yes, but where do the "crazy things" come from in the first place? They won't believe the crazy things unless you attach them first to something they relate to. If Paul had offered them Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi, they would have dragged him out of the synagogue and hanged him from the nearest tree.

No, when you manipulate people, you have to start out offering them something they relate to, something they already have an attachment to, and only then can you start playing the mind games with them and mold them to your designs.

And how does the preacher choose which "crazy thing" to manipulate his audience toward? When Paul preached to the Athenians and other Greeks, what was this Christ figure he was presenting to them? If the historical Jesus did not have any special power, such as that of the miracle cures or that of his bodily resurrection, then what was it that Paul found in the Christ figure that was important?

Setting aside the mindset of his readers or listeners, what was Paul's mindset that possessed him to choose this Christ figure to promulgate to the Greeks? You can't empty out the Jesus figure of all content, saying he had no power of any kind, but still maintain that there is a Christ figure of some kind left which the evangelist will take on his travels to peddle to the heathen. What is he peddling?

There has to be some content left there for the preacher to peddle. Otherwise it makes no sense to say he went out peddling "crazy things" -- What "crazy things"? and why? Why this crazy Jesus thing and not some other crazy thing that would have made more sense? There has to be some reason why the peddler chooses this "crazy thing" to peddle and not another, such as one of the Greek gods or some other recognized figure the gullible audience would much more likely relate to.


He's obviously selling something people will buy. But why did the proselytizers choose the Jesus figure as their product to peddle? You can't come up with an answer. If Jesus actually performed miracles and resurrected from the dead, there is an obvious answer. But if he did not, there is no explanation, because they could more easily have sold a Greek hero or a Hillel or a Zoroaster or other more reputed hero figure than the unknown Jesus figure.

If you believe John Edward is clever at doing what he does and has performed well at giving his audience what they want, and if you are comparing him to the Christian proselytizers selling the Jesus figure, then you must believe those proselytizers were clever at selecting this particular person as their messiah figure for the gullible masses.

So, why do you believe that was a clever choice? Why do you think the choice of this unknown Galilean was clever? If you don't have an answer, then you cannot compare them to John Edward.

You have to throw out this analogy, because you obviously do think Edward has cleverly identified what his audience wants, and if you put the Christian proselytizers in the same category as him, then you must also judge them as clever for their choice of the Jesus figure as their product. And yet you cannot show any reason to make that judgment. So the two are not analogous and this example does not strengthen your case. You must find an example which is analogous to that of the Jesus proselytizers.

In comparing Edward to Jesus, on the other hand, we can see what Edward's ability is, if it's something that goes beyond known science. It is a mind-reading ability of some kind.

Even if he has some power, it is not a power to communicate to the dead, but an ability to somehow read a person's mind and pick out from it enough to amaze the subjects, and this is interesting. On the other hand, the power Jesus displayed was a life-giving power of some kind, which enabled him to heal and also to resurrect from the dead.

I knew an engineer who had a degree in physics and was very scientific and skeptical about things who swore that he and his wife could read each other's minds. They had many anecdotes to prove this, that one would say something just as the other was thinking about the same subject. They were both card-carrying Humanists and very disbelieving of religious claims and almost all paranormal stuff.

So I take it seriously that they might have had some element of a mind-reading capability. If the phenomenon is experienced and attested by reasonable people, then one must at least be open to the possibility, even though it lies outside the current known science.


This example does not prove your point that people will believe anything, because hardly anyone believed this one. Just because a few weirdos believed this character does not translate into "people will believe anything."




It's time to pick apart this notion that "people will believe anything" and therefore the fact that people believed in the miracles of Jesus is no indication that it really happened.

The truth is that all of us including you do believe things because others believe it. The fact that a certain preponderance of others believe something does give us reason to believe it, and we do believe many things only because others believe it first. And it's not generally wrong for us to believe this way, even if what we believe is something that defies our own reason or common sense.

I'll give an example: I believe (and I suspect you also) that it has been proved that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a curved line. This has allegedly been proved by modern physicists who apply Einsteinian physics instead of Newtonian physics.

I believe they have proved it not because of any reasoning I understand but simply on their authority -- somehow they can prove this, and if I were to delve into it and figure it out, I would finally understand it and see the proof (but I don't delve into it -- I just take their word for it, as most people do.)

I take it mostly on faith that they are not just playing word games, i.e., they are not just redefining the words "straight" and "curved". If that were the case, this would be pure semantics and sophistry and really would border on fraud by these scientists, and I have reason to believe they are not engaging in such a thing.

So I believe it only because they believe it, or claim it. And everyone else who is told about it seems also to take their word for it, even though hardly anyone knows how they proved it. So huge numbers of people are believing something here which defies their own reasoning and experience.

So here's an example where it's apparently not wrong to believe something on the basis of other people believing it. The question is: why do we believe something only because others believe it? It must be that there is good reason in some cases to accept what others believe as true. But IT'S NOT JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE SCIENTISTS!

It is not that we must always believe everything scientists say and never believe anyone else. It may often be scientists in such cases, but even if they're not scientists or recognized experts, we can believe something others believe if it appears they had good reason themselves to believe it.

Now let's consider the claims about the miracles of Jesus. Millions were finally recruited into becoming believers. Why did they believe it? Was there good reason?

The way it happened is that they heard it from others who believed it from still earlier ones and these from earlier ones yet until it reached back to the ones who witnessed it originally.

If the events really did happen, there would be strong initial impressions on the witnesses and they would tell others and the word would get passed on for generations. So hypothetically there is a way the beliefs would pass along in a process where each recipient of them is believing for a good reason.

You can't automatically rule out all beliefs of this description, but you can examine the process at every step all the way back to the original claims of what was witnessed, and flaws may be found, perhaps are found in most cases, which undermine the beliefs and make them improbable.

But each case has to be looked at individually. You cannot just dictate that all reputed events that are believed this way have to be fictitious. If a miracle element is contained in it, then yes, that reduces the probability, it has to be factored in.

There are no documents from 35 or 40 AD about these events. Paul's letters later show familiarity with the historical Jesus in at least the one "last supper" text, but otherwise he doesn't talk about it. But his listeners must have known the general outlines of the story.

There must have been some word-of-mouth tradition going on, and we don't have proof of what was contained in this tradition. If it included the miracle stories, then it suggests those go back to the original events, i.e., the belief that those events happened.

If you could prove those stories were not in the original word-of-mouth tradition, that would make them probably untrue. But still, there must have been the original word-of-mouth tradition. What was that tradition? What was contained in it? What was there that would make Paul's listeners give him any credibility? Why did they care about the Christ figure he was talking about?

If they believed that figure had done the miracle acts, that explains why they cared. We have an explanation. We know why they listened to Paul and took him seriously.

But if the miracle stories are not there, then what was in that early tradition (30-50 AD) which made them interested in the Jesus figure and motivated them to listen to Paul and to care about the Jesus figure he was presenting to them?

If you can't identify what it was in the early tradition that would interest them, then the best answer is that it must be the miracle stories, because of the power they indicate he must have possessed (assuming they believed the stories were true). So if you can't name something else, the most reasonable assumption is that those miracle stories were a part of the original word-of-mouth tradition.

Were there also other reputed miracle-workers running around who were believed in? If so, whoever they were, the number of believers in them must have been small and they fizzled out soon after he passed from the scene, probably because he really showed little or no power.

The simple truth is that the greater the impact and the more the belief expanded outward, the greater is the likelihood that the stories about the miracle-worker were true.

If there are other comparable examples where you could say, "But look at this miracle-worker over here, he had an even greater following, why don't you believe in him too?" then fine, let's look at that example and see.

"But the stories get distorted when they're passed on from one person to the next and one generation to the next." Yes, and so the details are probably not reliable. But the basic message, that Jesus did such acts -- he healed the sick, made the blind see, etc. -- that basic story is the same, even if the details get changed.

The point is that the process of transmitting the stories along until they were finally written down has enough integrity that the basic picture of Jesus as a healer is preserved and credible.

You don't undermine it just by pounding your fist on the table and bellowing that there are no surviving eye-witness accounts. Much of our accepted historical record is believed without needing such surviving eye-witness accounts.

And it does not follow from this argument that therefore everything anyone believed must have been true because they believed it. No, we can look at any example you want to cite and consider whether it is believable or not. In this case, the stories are believable (not the details, but the general picture they present), or it's reasonable to believe them or at least consider them as a reasonable possibility.

Did people believe other things that were not true? Of course. But maybe some of those other stories they believed were also true. Look at each example individually. It's irrational to lump all the stories together indiscriminately and throw them all out.

The presence of some false beliefs and superstitions and so on does not prove that all miracle stories must be fiction or that people never had any good reason to believe such stories. We have to look at each case individually.

freetrader

gdeering:


You're going beyond the topic with this. I'm making the case that Jesus did really perform miracles (or this is plausible, it's a reasonable possibility, and the facts we have cannot be explained otherwise).

What this means, whether he was the "son of God" or why God would send someone like this to do such miracles and so on is adding too much and would drag the topic on endlessly. Plus I am much less confident trying to come with answers to such questions.

Diogenes the Cynic

What was offered to them was the promise of seeing Jesus come down from Heaven to kill all the rich people and give the poor their just rewards. Religion is sold by its compensators, not by the empirical credibility of its claims.
No, it doesn't work that way. What you offer them is a reward for belief. You should read Stark and Bainbridge and learn something about religious compensators.
How many times are you going to ask this same stupid question? Paul was a psychotic, ok? That's your answer. Paul didn't choose his Christology cynically, like a first century L. Ron Hubbard. He was a nutcase. He hallucinated that Jesus was talking to him and telling him he was going to come back. Paul was then able to convince a few vulnerable people that his hallucinations were divine visions. The fact that Paul believed it is not meaningful, nor is the fact that Paul's audiences took him at his word about his "divine revelations." It wasn't like they had any way to verify anything, and that's why -- as I keep saying -- your argument is fatuous. No matter how convinced Paul's audience might have been, they were convinved only by words, not evidence.
No, that isn't a fact at all. I believe nothing only because others believe it, and even if that WERE the case, it wouldn't mean that any beeliefs were justified, and it certainly wouldn't refute the assertion that people are credulous and will believe anything.
This is incorrect. Such geometric axioms are not applied within physical space/time. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," is a geometrical statement, not a statement about the physical universe.
This is sophistry. You don't HAVE to take a scientists's word for anything, and scientists certainly don't. The thing about sciences is that it's based on repeatable tests and verifiable evdience. No conclusion is ever accepted on the authority of a given scientist. No matter who that scientist is, he still has to PROVE them. Science is not like religion. Authority plays no role. Nor does faith.
Not because they were shown any evidence. That we know for sure. And "millions" is an exaggeration. It didn't get into the millions until Constantine gave it a sword.

Millions of people also believe in Joseph Smith's golden tablets, by the way, and they believe it with better evidence. Believe in Smith's revelations have also spread further more quickly than belief in Paul's. So what do you do with that?
Of course not. They believed it because they wanted to
The miracle traditions do not come from "witnesses." There isn't a shred of evidence that any witnesses claimed that Jesus did miracles, and the earliest Christian literaure makes no such claims either. The miracle claims go back only as far as the Gospels.
The fact that the miracle traditions cannot be traced back any further than 70 CE kind of blows a hole in that argument, doesn't it?
What part of "there ARE no original claims from witnesses" do you not understand?
What story?
The evidence we have shows only sayings and parables in the pre-Pauline tradition. There is no hint of a miracle tradition before the Gospels, not even in Paul.
You're the one with the burden of proof here, son. If you want to assert something something existed in that tradition, you're the one who needs to prove it.
Yoiu can read Q and Thomas to get a pretty good idea.
You keep asking the same questions over and ober again long after they've been answered. They believed Paul for the same reason people believe any other cult leader. because they wanted waht paul was OFFERING them. They wanted the REWARD.

One thing we know for sure is that they didn't see any proof that Jesus did miracles, so your assertion that genuine miracles would be necessary in order to convince an audience is refuted by that fact alone. We know for a FACT that they believed unproven claims. Since it is already known for a fact that they believed fantastic claims without proof, your entire contention that people don't believe crazy things without proof is immediately defeated.
Asked andd answered, but it should probably be pointed oput that Paul's message and whatever sayings tradition originated in Palestine were not the same thing. They were interested in Paul's message. not the original Jesus tradition.
The miracle stories cannot be traced back further than the gospels. The earliest Christian litearture does not include miracle stories. Paul himself did not make any claims that Jesus performed miracles. What interested people in Paul's message (and it's not necessary to go back any further than Paul. Whatever any possible historical Jesus said or did is irrelevant to Paul's cult) was the promised REWARD. There was nothing remarkable about miracle stories. Miraculous claims, all by themselves, would not have drawn much interest. It was what you could promise them as a PAYOFF that mattered.
Plenty.
Simon Magus is a notable example, and yes interest did fade after they were dead because they were dead, but belief in their magical powers did not necessarily fade.

There is no vidence that Jesus was originally believed to have been a miracle worker, though. Those are later accretions. If you want to keep asserting that any of his original followers credited him with magic tricks, you need to prove it, not just assert it.
There is no truth in this whatsoever. First of all, miracles are impossible. Second of all, there is no evidence that anyone ever claimed to have seen Jesus do a miracle. Third of all, the world -- both past and present -- is filled with people who have been able to comvince people that they can do magic. India is filled with religious miracle workers, some of them with millions of adherents. The fact that people believe something is not proof that it's true, especially when the thing they believe is physically impossible.
Sai Baba. He has a giagantic foillowing -- millions of believers in his own lifetime.
This is not an argument that educated people make about miracle traditions. There is no distirtion in the Gospels. The stories were simply invented from whole cloth.
There is no evidence that any such beliefs dated back to Jesus, nor would it be meaningful if it did. Look at Sai Baba. Look at Benny Hinn. Look at John Edward.
Not without some kind of corroboration, they aren't, and physically impossible claims are never believed EVER. You need to quit trying to shift the burden of proof. The miracle stories attributed to Jesus cannot be traced back any earlier than c.70 CE. If you want to allege that they existed before then, PROVE it. Your thesis will also have to contain an explanation for why these miracles are not mentioned in Q, Thomas or the Pauline corpus.
No it isn't. It is NEVER reasonable to believe in magic.
It's irrational to ever conclude that a magical explanations is better than a natural one.
In order to examine a given case, there has to be sonmething to examine. There is no data to examine with regard to miraculous claims attributed to Jesus 40 years after his alleged crucifixion. Having said that, the impossible can ALWAYS be assumed to be impossible until proven otherwise.

freetrader

steve_bnk:

Yes, in some cases they don't really insist that they believe them literally. But in cases where they do, we need to look at the example and consider what the probability is. Nothing I've argued precludes the possibility of other miracle stories also being true.

And it's not a black-and-white true-false judgment each time. Since we can't know for certain, we can only make the judgment of less probable and more probable, or even try to put a percentage number on it. Such numbers are only wild guesses, of course, and yet it helps in comparing one belief to another, so that if this particular belief would be 60%, then that other less probable one might be only 20 or 30%, and so on.

Further, there is nothing in the argument here for believing the miracles of Jesus which leads to the further conclusion that all Bible miracle stories must therefore be true. Not at all. Many or most of them are probably fiction. You have to look at each one individually.

Even if most miracle stories can be proved fictitious, which is probably the case (maybe 99% of them), it is a rash leap of faith to dogmatically pronounce all of them fiction.


Or take something written centuries ago and twist it into a prophesy and fulfill it (or twist something later into a fulfillment of it). We can distinguish these fiction "miracles" from the more believable ones.


And such stories die and the whole matter is forgotten, not passed on by word-of-mouth to future generations and finally written down and spread across half the known world.

Or better, it gets passed around with a few other similar stories, the miracle-worker gets a reputation, and after 20 years of scoring enough hits and finding ways to explain away his misses, he becomes famous enough to earn a one-phrase mention in Josephus, but otherwise passes into oblivion because his hits were too few to leave a lasting impression.


I'll bet he really had some doubts. If this guy and enough others were running around insisting it was true and claiming there were eye witnesses, it would be worth looking into. Since it's a current case and not centuries ago, the first step would be to ask him to witness it himself or produce a direct eye witness.


Especially if he really did perform miracle acts. Then it would stir up enough interest that new cults would form to worship him and they would publish "gospels" about him and "epistles" and create a Catholic Church and all kinds of heresies and then breakaway Protestant churches and they would persecute each other in the miracle-worker's name and so on.

Yes, it's not hard to see how that could happen.

Toto

This is not true. The Greek term that Paul uses for handing over is a specialized term that is used when traditions are handed on. There is no implication of betrayal.

Paul talks of Jesus being handed over, not betrayed. The idea that he is talking about betrayal is imported from the gospel story, but is not in Paul.

steve_bnk

There was some analysis based on non canon writings that Judas was a trusted friend of JC given the task of orchestrating a safe handover. It would have been the Jewish custom to pay a fee to anyone partcipating in a community service in what would have been law enforcement in the day.

Toto

This sounds like some interpretations of the gospel of Judas, but I don't think it is accurate.

I think you are posting things that you half remember or half understand. It is not helpful.