aa5874

There is no extent source of antiquity that support your statement that Jesus was known as a healer for any time. No well-known writer wrote about Jesus the Messiah and miracle-worker.

But , you are right that Jesus is the most believed legendary mythical miracle-man ever, today.

freetrader

Responses to DrZoidberg:


Whoops, stop right there! Who said anything about the "Messiah"? We're talking about the Jesus figure. You're implying someone wants to make him the "Messiah"? Why? How do you figure that? Why should anyone want to make this nobody into a "messiah"?

You're leaving something out of the picture. You're skipping a step here. You can't leapfrog like this from one improbability to another. First establish how you think anyone would make him into a "messiah" before you start telling us how they went about doing this.

Remember, he was a nobody who had been in public for only a few months or a year, and doing what? You can't name any other upstart figure who got romanticized into a messiah figure in such a short time. Not only would nobody want to make him into a messiah, but the intended audience would not buy it either.


Again, you're missing the groundwork for any claim that someone wanted to make him into a messiah.

"Messiah" figures or heroes or saviors are not invented overnight, as you're suggesting here. There is no precedent for this. Any such hero figures required decades of development of their program and their preaching to take hold on their followers.

Any fly-by-night upstarts were not accepted and the alleged miracle stories, if fictional, were not believed in. The followers need a respected revered figure upon which to attach the miracle stories -- they will not adopt an unknown upstart nobody as a miracle-worker. It is not true that the stories will be believed and followers will flock to such an instant figure who pops up out of nowhere.

Name any case where such a figure acquired any large following. You cannot. They have to spend years first establishing their reputation.


Yes, you're right that miracle fictions are invented and it's not necessarily "dishonest" or "lying" as we think of it. But it is not the case that such miracle stories are attributed to a nobody obscure blank-slate zero upstart out-of-nowhere nothing figure, which Jesus was if he did not perform any miracle healing acts.

Such stories are attributed to someone of standing, with an established reputation as a charismatic teacher of a long public career who has had a long time in which to accumulate a significant following of disciples. Jesus had no standing to be the recipient of such mythologizing.


That is not true. This is a defamatory misrepresentation of the people of the 1st century. They were ready to believe in miracle stories if these were identified with respected figures of high repute.

But you could not scoop up a nobody from nowhere and claim he did miracles and expect people to believe it. That is not true. You cannot give any examples of that. The 1st-century Greeks and Romans were not the blockheads you suggest, to whom any charlatan could spoonfeed any pigslop that they would slurp up with no discrimination.

One had to earn his way to becoming recognized as a god or messiah or superhuman figure. Yes, the masses would go along with it if the hero figure is someone recognized and who had done some great performances or had earned a reputation and held power and so on. They had to earn their recognition first, and only then could they become mythologized.


That's just a slander against the lower classes. And it is pandering to the upper classes, because the upper classes believed in the miracle stories as much as the lower classes did, and it was even from among the upper classes that the miracle stories originated. And they made up the stories as much to manipulate other upper-class people as the lower classes.

The people who adored the poems of Homer, with all the stories about the gods, were mostly upper-class people, and they believed all of it, every miracle, every heroic deed no matter how spectacular. And this has been true all the way up to the present time, i.e., the upper classes believe in the miracles as much as (or even more than) the lower classes.

Yes, the upper classes have more access to libraries and research and literary scholarship. But they also have more access to the fictions and myths and superstitions, and they spend much more of their time on the latter than they do on science and critical research.


The difference between our thinking today and that of the ancients is not as great as you suggest. We still believe in myths and fictions, and those of the 1st century would laugh at us for some of our nutty beliefs.


Take what literally? If you mean they included some fictions, yes, some of it is fictional. But they believed literally that Jesus performed miracle acts like the ones described in the NT. The only reason they added fictional details is that they did not have the reliable eye-witness accounts to provide them with accurate details.

Nevertheless they believed in the literal accuracy of the events, or the type of events, except for the fictional details. It was about the same as what we call "historical fiction" today. It is reliable for an accurate picture of what happened generally, but not reliable for details. And we have the same sort of thing today -- it is not unique to writers of that time.


You could prove anything you want with this catch-all premise. Julius Caesar didn't really exist. Everyone who wrote about him was only writing symbolically. They didn't mean this guy really existed as a literal physical human. (They tell us with a straight face that he descended from the godess Venus.) No, those events are not to be taken literally, just because someone wrote it in a scroll. They didn't have "literal interpretation of text" back in those days.

Probably the whole Roman Empire didn't really exist either, not literally -- all our information is from scrolls written by poets who didn't believe in literal interpretation. And the coins? Why assume those are literal? Some coins have gods engraved on them, others have heads of emperors who were worshipped as gods. Obviously that's all symbolic -- nothing on any scrolls or coins has any literal meaning.

Likewise inscriptions on walls and designs on pottery etc. No events or people depicted are real. It's all just poetry and symbols.

So here's an instant proof you can use to debunk any belief that anyone has about anything that happened any earlier than about 500 years ago. Whatever evidence of it was only intended as a symbol, so there's no reason to believe any of it ever happened literally.

This is definitely the best kind of argument -- the kind you can use to prove virtually anything you want -- or at least to DISprove anything. The Universal Debunking Argument -- what a great idea! You should get a patent on this argument -- you could cash in on it. You could have got Billy Mays to sell it for you on TV for $19.95.

spamandham

Reliable? Are you kidding? It's hard to imagine a source less reliable than 2000 year old comic books.

...enter, Jesus of Nazareth, born of a virgin, raiser of the dead, water walker and wine wizard.

You are welcome to expound on why you consider such abject nonsense as reliable evidence.

freetrader

[The following quotes are from Diogenes the Cynic and/or Transient. There is some confusion in keeping track. Some of it might be from an earlier post I overlooked, and some of it might be repeated.]


All those figures were famous celebrities. Jesus was not a famous celebrity. How did miracle stories get attached to this nobody whose public life was so short by comparison to these powerful recognized figures? This is a unique situation, not comparable to the examples you are giving.

About the spitting -- the Jesus miracle stories could be reflective of real events, but we don't have to take the details seriously. Of course, who knows what awkward techniques might have been used? what sordid details might be omitted?

Hopefully Jesus did cures without requiring such untidy methods as spitting in the mud and smearing the muddy slime into the eyes of the hapless victim (the cure possibly worse than the affliction?). This kind of detail is the fictional element we can attribute to the writer without the general healing component being fictional.

The most reasonable explanation is that there is a basic core to the story that is true, i.e., the basic healing act, to which the storyteller adds the fictional element to replace details which were easily forgotten and lost because no writer was present at the original event to record them.


Yes, but those real people were always celebrities or highly-recognized prophets or sages who had long public careers during which they accumulated a large following. Since the case of Jesus disrupts this pattern, we need an explanation how the miracle stories became attached to him. His case is unique and not comparable to other examples of magical or divine attributes being ascribed to people.


To equate the Catholic Church of today with the evangelizers who wrote the gospel accounts in 70-90 AD is like trying to drive a popemobile through the eye of a needle, while standing on your head and reciting 50 Hail Marys backwards.

You are continuing to ignore the problem of why those writers would want to mythologize Jesus. If he did no miracle healing acts, then he was a nobody to those writers and also to the audience they were trying to reach with their writing.

You're forgetting that Jesus was not the celebrated Christ back then that he is today and had no reputation or any claim to be anything of note, unless the miracle stories existed in a word-of-mouth tradition already in circulation and believed by the people who were the target audience of the evangelizers. Without Jesus having such standing, it made no sense for the evangelists to mythologize him the way some Catholics today seek to mythologize a saint figure.


If Merlin is a real historical figure, he lived in the 6th century AD, while the first written record of him dates from the 12th century. With such a long separation between the historical event and the written account of it, we can assume that whatever oral tradition was transmitted became tainted with mythological additions that included the miracle stories. This is how many miracle legends evolve.

Even so, it's not unreasonable to believe a real historical Merlin existed who was clever and helped King Arthur or some other king. Maybe he pulled off some stunts that caused people to believe he had magic powers. There's usually a kernel of truth behind the popular legend.

aa5874

It is completely false to claim Jesus was depicted as a nobody. In the NT, Jesus was called the Messiah and had thousands of followers.

John1:41 - Matt 4:24 - Mattt 9:31 - According to the NT, even Herod heard about the fame of Jesus.

Mt 14:1 - Lu 23:8 - The Jews did not consider a Messiah as a nobody.

PhilosopherJay

Hi All,

If Spider-man was not real, how do you explain the fact that no other superhero got his powers through exposure to radioactivity. This is completely different from any other superhero.

Superman got his powers through being from another planet with a different type of Sun. Batman got his powers through being a rich orphan and hilring acrobats and boxers to teach him. Captain Marvel got his powers by saying the magic word "Shazam" which was taught to him by a wizard. All these things are quite different than getting powers through radioactivity.

Sure the Fantastic Four got their powers from exposure to radiation in outer space and the Hulk got his power through exposure to gamma radiation, but that is not the same thing as getting bitten by a radioactive spider.

Besides, Spider-man was only a poor High School student, while the Fantastic Four were all adults and the Hulk was a scientist. Okay, maybe one of the Fantastic Four might have been a poor High School student, but he was not bitten by a radioactive spider.

I defy anybody to name another superhero that was bitten by a radioactive spider. Why would anybody write a story about a poor unknown high school student bitten by a radioactive spider? Who would care? Doesn't this mean that there must be some historical basis to Spider-man?

Warmly, (but a bit tongue in cheek)

Philosopher Jay

Toto

The gospel writers invented the story about Jesus being a humble nobody.

This doesn't sound at all reasonable compared to the explanation that the gospel writers made up the story.

Uniqueness does not imply truth. Perhaps this is just another indication that the gospel writers made it all up.

Yet another indication that the gospel writers invented the character of a nobody who became exhalted, as written in the Scriptures.

freetrader

Amaleq13:


(This is only step 1.) Hundreds of others did the same and were never mythologized into miracle-working gods. Is there more?


You're losing it. The normal thing for followers to do is find another leader. Jesus should have been easily replaceable by any number of other charismatic leaders who could do magic tricks. The followers of John the Baptist had no trouble finding alternative gurus without having to mythologize him into a god.


They did "magic tricks" too?

How and why would they "convince" others? Convince them of what? If they could do their own "magic tricks" then what did they need Jesus for? What "stories" of Jesus? Why not stories about someone who had recognition and some accomplishment? How would these others take any interest in the Jesus figure?

Jesus was a nobody if he didn't do the miracle healing acts. His "followers" (whatever that means) didn't need him for anything. They had all the teachings they needed without him, and the "magic tricks" also. To say they "convinced others" makes no sense, and without the miracle healing acts, there were no "stories of Jesus" to tell people that would have any relevance.

You've lost it. But let's continue to the next step anyway.


What was Paul "persecuting"? A half-dozen mindless idiots who were having no impact whatever on anyone with their delusions? No one was paying any attention to these incoherent babblers.

And what "risen Christ"? Where would he get such a notion and who would believe it? Why should gentiles believe such nonsense? There's no basis for thinking such a fad would catch on. Gentiles would take no interest in an obscure Jewish figure who had done nothing. Yes, they would if this person actually did resurrect from the dead and there were hundreds of reports about it circulating around. But for Paul to introduce this idea for the first time and expect any favorable response -- that's just rubbish.


The only reason this belief increased is that there was already a growing spread of the word-of-mouth stories about the Jesus who did miracle healings and who had resurrected and had been seen alive by many witnesses after his crucifixion. These reports had already been spreading in many different directions and did not come from any one source.

These spreading reports laid the groundwork for Paul to have success in his preaching about the risen Christ. Without this groundwork, it makes no sense to say gentiles or anyone else would buy the "risen Christ" teachings of Paul. To say he could invent this idea and sell it to people on his own is just idiotic babble. What he did was SEIZE UPON something already going around.


No one would waste papyrus on such pap, about a nobody no one cares about, who did nothing that had any impact. Pen and paper was extremely scarce in those days -- you don't waste it on such silly nonsense. He was a NOBODY if the healing acts are fiction. You write about somebody who had a reputation, who had standing, who was unique, who had power and influence.

Yes, today we write about nobodies, because we have that luxury, and there are hundreds of millions of readers from which we might find a small market. But back then it would have been preposterous to think the resources and energy should be wasted on trying to drum up interest in an obscure nobody and make him into a god for no reason.


Nevermind the centuries later -- we're talking about something that happened before 100 AD. How did the "risen Christ" idea catch on before then, assuming he did none of the miracles and did not really resurrect from the dead? So far you've not explained how it could happen.


What they must have had was some chemical they put into the drinking water to alter people's minds. But even this could not have happened, even if such a chemical existed and all the water sources could have been tampered with, because there's no way to explain why anyone would go to the trouble of trying to alter people's minds in order to promote this "risen Christ" silliness.

Why would anyone waste their time inventing this "risen Christ" koolaid to put into the drinking water, even if they could do it? If Paul had such power to get people to believe any cock-eyed nonsense he would serve up to them, he would have just put a "Paul is God" koolaid into the drinking water and would have made himself the new god and messiah figure for the world.

The only reason you imagine Paul could have invented this "risen Christ" figure and sold it is that today this figure is popular and has become established. You are a product of the Christian society which has promoted the established "risen Christ" teaching and conditioned us all to recognize this messiah figure as an object to identify with, and we're accustomed to Christian crusaders or missionaries recruiting new followers.

But back then the Jesus figure had no standing or credibility -- Paul would have had less success with this wacko "risin Christ" crusade than David Koresh or Jim Jones had with their crusade in our time. The vast majority of people laughed at wackos back then just as they do today -- it's not true that they would flock to any nutball who comes along babbling such nonsense at them.

And you are ignoring the question of where Paul got his Jesus idea -- you think he just invented it all. But in addition to the common sense truth that there must have already been a Jesus legend going around before Paul, which he plugged into, there is the biblical text evidence also, of 1 Cor. 11:23-29 where Paul's account of the "last supper" scene contains wording almost identical to that of the gospel accounts of this scene.

How could this agreement of wording have happened unless this story already existed, BEFORE Paul and which also the gospel accounts knew of, and which therefore proves there was also an oral tradition about Jesus before any of this was written? Paul connects the event with the arrest and crucifixion event, saying these both happened on the same night.

And therefore Paul was relying on a Jesus tradition ALREADY in existence before him and widely circulating and probably familiar to his audience. And it is clear that Paul is not narrating to his audience the events about Jesus, but rather that they already know of the general events, and his purpose is to interpret or theologize on this information they already have.

And this is the same with his crucifixion and resurrection remarks -- he is not narrating this to them for the first time, as if they had never heard of this before. Rather, he is ELABORATING on it, or interpreting it, as something they are already familiar with. Just as he expounds on the "last supper" scene and mentions the arrest and alludes to the approaching death of Jesus, so also he expounds on the crucifixion and resurrection, as something they already know about.

So there was already an interest in the Jesus figure before Paul -- he is not the originator of the story, including the story of the resurrection.

Paul mentions the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Cor. 15:1-11. You cannot read this and believe Paul was the first person to preach that Jesus resurrected. If he was revealing this "risen Christ" to his audience for the first time, as though they never heard it before, why would he list several others as having witnessed the risen Christ before himself? Why wouldn't he claim he was the FIRST witness to this climactic event?

He concludes his recounting of the resurrection by saying: "Therefore, whether it be I or they, so we preach and so you believed." Obviously he is saying others also preached this to them and they believed, past tense. Three verses down (vs. 14) he says: "And if Christ has not been raised, then empty too is our preaching; empty, too, your faith."

"Our preaching" he says. These are not the words of someone introducing the "risen Christ" doctrine for the first time to an audience not familiar with this doctrine. This is someone chiming in with others already teaching this and who is preaching it to an audience which already "believed" it and is now receiving some explanation of it from him.

It is clear that Paul considered himself an expert on how to explain the resurrection story or expound upon it, but not as one who had exclusive information on it and was relating this truth to people who otherwise wouldn't know of it.

So you cannot claim Paul introduced the resurrection of Jesus theme -- it already existed before him and he "cashed in" on it, you might say. But since your theory above gives him the role of introducing this theme exclusively for the first time, your theory is incorrect and cannot account for how Jesus became transformed into the miracle-worker messiah and god figure. Because if Paul alone introduced the "risen Christ" idea, with no background for it, they would have laughed him off the stage.


If your premise is that all the miracle healing stories are total fiction, then you don't believe this or any other account of how the healings were performed.

But if you allow the possibility that these events did happen, it's clear that this particular technique was not necessary, as it is omitted from all the other accounts. Since the details can be fiction, we should assume that any unusual techniques named were not really necessary and were not used.

We can also dismiss many of the details in the other narrated healing events, but still accept the general accounts of the healings as an overall accurate portrayal of Jesus as a healer.

Obviously you have fun chuckling about the mud and spit and so will keep bringing it up again and again, for comical effect. I grant that you score some points with this humor, but this does not weaken the case I've made that Jesus probably did perform the miracle healing acts.


Yes, people were prepared to believe in someone performing miracles if it was someone they already recognized as important. But not a nobody. In the case of a nobody, there would have to be very strong evidence, like several eye-witnesses, or the believers themselves would have to be eye-witnesses to the actual miracle events. Only then would they believe it.


No, I'm arguing that in the case of Jesus, the actual miracle events must have really taken place, because people believed it and the reports of his acts were circulating very fast, even though he was really a nobody or a person of no influence or of no importance, or rather, his main importance was the power he demonstrated in the healing acts.

In his case, if he really didn't do any such acts, no one would have believed such stories about him or thought to spread such ideas about him or mythologize him into a miracle-worker, because outside the miracle healing acts, he had no recognition as someone important.

So the only way to explain how he became mythologized into a miracle-worker is that he must have actually performed such acts, and from there the rumors spread all around and new stories emerged and the fictional details became added and the mythologizing process went forward on its own without anyone planning it. And later the evangelists plugged into this already-existing Jesus story because it was there for them to "cash in" on.

It is really nutty to think Paul and the gospel writers invented the Jesus story because they needed a messiah figure. You make up such nonsense because you are at a loss to explain how the Jesus miracle-worker story could have sprouted up so spontaneously and spread so fast if there was nothing to it.

aa5874

Based on the Gospel of John, this is completely false. Jesus was called the Messiah before he did one single miracle.

In the very first chapter of gJohn, before Jesus performed any miracles, Andrew told his brother Simon that he had found the Messiah.

Joh 1:41 -

gurugeorge

How do you know there was a "Galilean" Jesus figure at the start of the new cult? Is Jesus called a "Galilean" anywhere in Paul, for example?

Luke, Mark, John and Acts seem to connect Jesus to Galilee. But they're all much later than you would need to demonstrate early origin.

You can't presume the gospel "story" at that early stage, because much of it can't actually be found in the earliest evidence. The earliest evidence seems to be rather sketchy, and capable of supporting several viable explanations, pending further, more conclusive evidence.

The clearest contenders are: Amaleq13's type of idea, and/or political firebrand, and/or political propaganda, and/or philosophical/literary fiction, and/or mythical entity (Mysteries-like Soter), and/or non-dual mysticism (similar to the Far Eastern type), and/or the self-comforting confabulation of nutcases.

"Real miracle worker" isn't a contender because there are no miracles, so far as honest rational enquiry can tell. But even suppose the doings of this one hypothetical miracle worker among many in the ancient world represented, for some unknown reason, the only genuine miracles ever to have occurred, there's no way you could tell that from the extant evidence, it's not determinate enough - it's not determinate enough even to sift out ordinary historical facts, a lot of the time, how on earth can one imagine it's determinate enough to prove that miracles then occurred, at that time only? You'd need pretty uncontentious and conclusive evidence to go on that side of the scales, against the sheer weight of the non-finding of miraculous events by rational enquiry. The Christian writings, and the scant historical support in non-Christian writings, aren't perspicuously weighty enough to do that job.

Now, some plausible hypotheses are that either a hypothetical "miracle worker" Jesus, or Christians themselves (whether motivated by a mythicist or historical Messiah), might have done "magic tricks", or worked with suggestion and hypnotism, or perhaps herbs, or whatnot. Or they might have been genuinely learned and healed in a way that was amazing enough to be ignorantly interpreted by superstitious people as "miraculous". But again, that sort of thing was pretty common in the ancient world. (Even some of the ancient Greek philosophers were perhaps healers of this type, e.g. Parmenides and Empedocles. And then later of course you have some of the neo-Pythagoreans - Appolonius? - the Hermeticists, and the like. Dispensing healing, often believed in as at least partly magickal, even if actual physical reagents were involved, was at times part of the philosopher's "job" - along with everything from lawmaking and politicking on the one hand, to overseeing fortifications and designing clever seige engines on the other.)