Clivedurdle

An iron age smith, able to take some earth, heat it and transform it into a sword, was seen as a magician, a miracle worker. One of the ancients actually lumped wimmen, druids and smiths together as practitioners of witchcraft.

Arthur C Clark's dictum about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic also applies in the past.

Are we missing the plot if we dump miracles as supernatural? What if they are stories about technologies related by someone who ain't got a clue what is going on?

Has anyone listed miracles according to this criteria?

mountainman

That is why the true history of antiquity needs to countenance the
impact of Apollonius of Tyana, and the ancient Pythagoraean philosophy
which has been, due to the resistance of biblical studies, been called
neo-pythagoraeanism and neo-platonism.

IMO, and I am willing to be corrected by reasoned argument, the
Mainstream BC&H theory views the pythagoraeans effectively as a tribe
of philosophers (gather up the authors of antiquity writing this genre,
starting with Apollonius, and not Amonius Saccas) which was like a
river that met the river of the tibe of christians and became at its
confluence the "tribe of gnostics". A little further downstream, the
pythagoraeans are calumnified in the Eusebian 2nd century CE history
due to their daemonic behaviour, leaving the gnostics. The same
purification process is then achieved further donwstream where the
gnostics are calumnified and leave the pure tribe of christians with
the river bed of Eusebian historical literature.

How this relates to your original question is simply this.
The Pythagoraean influence was what we still call scientific.
Or at least it would be called proto-scientific.
The Pythagoraean theorem is used in the Theory of Special Relativity.

Examine very very carefully the statements of early christians surrounding
the efficacy and nature of talismans created by Apollonius. The following
article has some relevant information:

http://www.mountainman.com.au/Hermes...even_Brown.htm

Of course this brings in the relationship between astronomy and astrology,
between chemistry and alchemy, between mathematics and logic and the
manner by which the (essentially) pythagoraean knowledge moved from
the Roman empire into the Arabian, before it was received back into the
European revival of knowledge hundreds of years afterwards.

Apollonius of Tyana appears, at least through the citations of the Islamic
writers, as having been the bearer of some of this proto-scientific
knowledge at its earliest reception.

This should be relevant to your question because not only was Apollonius
charged in this manner with the proto-scientific, which was understood
as something related to the natural world and its natural processes, but
he was also charged with the miraculous.

Again, Julian's wretched Eusebius play a big hand in defining what
we ought and ought not think and conceptualise concerning Apollonius,
occassioned by the (note the century!) 4th century writer
Hierocles, who first noted the striking, unparalleled similarity between
Apollonius and Jesus, after 300 years of purported literature.




Pete Brown
http://www.mountainman.com.au/apollonius_of_tyana.htm

GakuseiDon

I read where someone reversed this: that a technology distinguishable from magic isn't sufficiently advanced.

gstafleu

Where would the technology come from? Which country, in the reasonable vicinity of Palestine, had a technology so advanced that it could do things that looked like walking on water, changing water into wine, multiplying fish and food etc etc? The Romans were perhaps more advanced than the Palistinians, but even so I have a hard time imagining what they could do that would look like the miracles.

Clivedurdle

I saved a post to word because of server breakdown and now it has lost all formating!