Mageth

And you objected to my use of the adjective "magic"?

sotto voce

If it's a form of circular argument, as is usual these days of demagogues, it's invalid.

Sarpedon

If it were me, I would have used the money to buy or otherwise aquire a corpse, put it in the tomb, and pretend nothing had happened. After a few days, all bearded male corpses look the same. I am disqualified from being in the bible, because I am not an idiot.

So you admit that the bible authors were prone to exaggeration? What else might they be exaggerating?

500 people rising from the dead would be the single most amazing thing ever. It is utterly implausible that no one else would have recorded this earthshaking occurance. Jerusalem was a major city, and had a literate population. Have you ever read Seutonius? He records plenty of less exciting supernatural events.

Except, you know, it could have CONFIRMED part of your story.

Mageth

"Magic star" == "supernatural star."

You would have saved a lot of trouble by just admitting I was correct in my description in the first place. E.g., "Yes, it was a magic star."

You're accusing me of demagoguery for using an adjective to modify "star" which you eventually (after a lot of pointless dodging) admit is correct.

sotto voce

Is that right. I have no experience of this, personally.

So was Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, an idiot? He is estimated to have possessed a very high IQ, yet he believed the Bible. An even higher estimated score is that of Goethe, who wrote:

"It is a belief in the Bible which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life."

Just that some translations exaggerate. Best to keep up-to-date.

Quite so. But if the appearances were in private, to believers, as with Jesus after his resurrection, the general public would not have noticed anything.

Sometimes, the more literate people are, the less they 'see'.

Indeed, but published historians tend to take account of current, ahem, 'influences' when they decide what they are going to write about.

But there is no compulsion about the biblical record, is there. No coercive Euclidean proof.

And it's not my story. It's a story that forced the Roman Empire, and many since, to adopt it as 'gospel truth', without any of my help.

sotto voce

No, no. It's just that certain media celebrities use the word as a pejorative, and scholarly types like us must be aware of that usage. Best to use 'supernatural' to be on the safe side, imv.

Diogenes the Cynic

It's only a pejorative if you can actually articulate a qualitative or empirical difference between a "supernatural" event and a "magical" one. I see them as completely synonymous and interchangeable. How are god powers different from magic powers?

Diogenes the Cynic

It was more Constantine doing the forcing than the story.

Sarpedon

You need to knock off the snide remarks about me missing the point if you are going to whiff that much.

andrewcriddle

One problem here is that if you define Q as including all the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke that aren't in Matthew, then the non-Q non-Mark material in Luke and Matthew will obviously strongly diverge.

IMHO there may be passages in both Luke and Matthew, such as the healing of the centurion's servant, that were not in Q.

Andrew Criddle