freetrader

Responses to Diogenes the Cynic, continued


Likewise the events of the Trojan War cannot be traced back earlier than Homer, about five centuries after those events. So those events did not happen? It is reasonable to believe they did happen, even though the time lapse may cause some extra measure of doubt or skepticism. It is still reasonable to believe the main points of Homer even though the probability may be 5 or 10 percent lower because of the long time lapse.

If we can believe, as millions of intelligent educated readers do, that Achilles and Hector did battle at Troy, separated by 500 years from the author who wrote about them, why shouldn't we believe the stories about Jesus which are separated by only 50 years from the time he lived?

What pointless nonsense is proved by pontificating that the event cannot be "traced back" further than the earliest account of it? How much well-established historical truth are you prepared to toss out into the trash bin, how many history books to have cast into the flames as worthless rubbish, how many history classes canceled and the teachers condemned as quacks, based on the fanatic insistence that only what is attested by surviving documents from writers contemporary with the events is worthy of belief?


If you mean Paul, he also excludes any of the sayings or parables of Jesus or any biographical information on him, except the one about the night of his arrest. Also much LATER Christian literature excludes the miracle stories, even though the authors clearly knew of them. These writers were EXPOUNDING on the power of Jesus, not narrating the background of this power, which was already taken for granted by the readers or the audience.


He made no claims that Jesus did anything. But clearly he and his audience knew that Jesus did do something. He didn't need to narrate this over again to his readers, because they already had accounts of what Jesus did. Paul assumes his readers or listeners already know of the deeds of Jesus, from the existing oral tradition already circulating, just as Paul knew it from that source.

Most preachers today, when they deliver a sermon, do not narrate the miracle stories of Jesus, which they assume the audience is already familiar with. That doesn't mean those events did not happen or that the stories don't matter or can be dismissed.


Absent the life-giving power of Jesus as shown in the healing acts, there was no message from Paul and no reward.

No one would waste their time listening to Paul if he did not cite something they believed in or recognized. He alone by himself was not important. Again, if you say he was so special that his audience would fall for anything he served up to them, then he could have claimed his camel was the Christ savior and they would have believed it, according to you.

No, he had to offer them something they already considered credible. Without identifying what that something was, your theory is an empty suit. All hat, no cattle.


If the events really did happen and there really were sufficient eye witnesses so people would believe it, then yes they were remarkable and did draw attention from a wide cross-section of the population. Of course the mere stories themselves, if only fiction without credible evidence, were not remarkable.


Yes, if you start from the premise that the miracle events did not really happen and there were no witnesses and so no credibility to the claims -- then yes, there would be little interest. Again, you are taking your conclusion that the miracles did not happen as the premise for your argument.

You are supposed to build your argument toward your conclusion, not use your conclusion as a premise upon which to build your argument. If you assume those miracle events really did happen and there was evidence from eye witnesses, then they indeed would draw much interest.


Yes, payoffs do matter. While Jesus was still alive, some of those seeking him out were hoping to be healed, which would be a payoff for them. But in the years following, the belief that Jesus had this power did matter to those believers, as a future payoff, especially if he resurrected (or if they believed he did), because that meant he might still have life-giving power which would benefit them in the future.

So there is payoff to believers, at least as a hope, if they believed he really had that life-giving power. But if not, then what hope did they have and what "payoff" could be promised to them? The only way Paul could offer them any "payoff" is through some power that Christ possessed -- and yet, what was that power if he did no healing acts and did not return from the dead? If it wasn't this that gave them hope, then what was it?

You can disbelieve that he had any such power, but how can you say Paul's followers did not believe Jesus had such power? If not, then what did they believe that gave them any hope for the promised payoff? What payoff did Paul promise them on his own that had any credibility?

There had to be some credibility. You cannot claim his listeners were imbeciles who would just believe any nutty idea he cooks up -- it is not true that people will believe any nonsense whatever coming from some kook with no credibility.


And so Paul could have offered them his camel as the savior and they would have slurped it up, being the imbeciles they were. Stop being silly. Of course it mattered what the historical Jesus said or did. Paul "cashed in" on something already recognized, or used the already-established Jesus tradition upon which to build his own cult.

Without making use of an already-existing tradition it is not possible to launch a new successful cult, although an exceptionally talented charismatic figure might get something novel going if he has several decades of preaching to recruit followers.

It is itself a miracle what you're saying Paul did -- where is there any example of a preacher, peddling a new unrecognized messiah figure to an alien culture, out of nowhere, and winning over thousands of followers and promoting his new savior hallucinations into a new religion that spreads to many countries, and doing only 10-15 years of work to accomplish this? You're giving far too much credit to Paul -- you are obsessed with him.


But you won't name one, because you know they have no credibility and the number of believers was pathetically small by comparison. Of course, someone like Buddha or Asclepius acquired their miracle stories over many centuries of mythologizing. But you can't name one who acquired a wide reputation in less than 100 years, as in the case of Jesus, or who didn't require a long career, decades of preaching and crusading, in order to win a large following of believers.


If the belief in their powers did not fade, where are the accounts attesting to their miracle acts? You cannot find a source that attests that Simon Magus actually did perform miracles.

A mere reference from Josephus (or the Book of Acts) saying that this charismatic made claims and that some followers were convinced by him is not a claim that he actually did perform any such deeds. There are no writings which claim he actually did do such acts.

So can you come up with a better example? This one obviously had no credibility that comes close to that of Jesus.

Actually this gets ridiculous, because if you can find one where there really is credible evidence, then OK, maybe he really did perform some unusual acts. There is nothing in my argument to preclude the possibility that there could be some others in history who might have performed an unexplained healing or other "miracle" act.

There is some reason to believe Edgar Cayce had some kind of power to heal or to prescribe cures outside known science, also to make predictions of future events and to read minds. But it's possible they ignored his "misses" and counted only his "hits" -- this is difficult to determine.

In any case, he acquired this reputation over a very long career of service and doing readings. So this long career, where a few "hits" became publicized and "misses" ignored, might explain how fictional accounts could have evolved as accretions, as in the case of most reputed miracle-workers. At least Edgar Cayce must be credited with having some unusual talent, if not even some uncanny ability to read minds in some cases.

There is no need here to insist that Jesus is the only one who ever showed some kind of paranormal powers. But whatever he did, it caused him to become the most widely-reputed healer in history. And no one seems able to explain this if those healing acts never did happen.


There is evidence. The gospel accounts are evidence, similar to evidence for thousands or even millions of historical events that are believed credible. Again, we rely on documents written long after the events for historical facts, even much longer than the gospel accounts are from the events reported in them, like centuries later.

Of course if there are documents directly from the period of the events, that evidence is stronger. But the gospel accounts are relatively strong evidence, being only 50 years past the actual events, considering that some historical events are known only from documents dated even 100 years and later from the events.

Just because the evidence is in the form of later documents does not entitle you to say there is "no evidence" but only that such evidence is a measure lower in reliability than documents dating directly from the time of the reported events.


There's no evidence that they are later accretions. You can draw that conclusion if you start out with the dogmatic premise that any miracle stories ipso facto cannot be true, and then from this premise conclude that the Jesus stories must be later accretions. However, that is the best argument you can give for claiming they are later accretions.


The strongest evidence that he did the healing acts is that these are contained in the earliest narrative accounts of his career, or in the earliest accounts about him outside that of Paul, who gives virtually no biographical information on him.

That he came from the region of Galilee is almost certainly true, but Paul says nothing of this or anything else biographical. So if we want anything biographical, or anything about his acts, we should use the gospel accounts, which are the most reliable source for that information. There's no reason to toss out all biographical information just because it is absent from Paul.

I will reiterate two evidences that Jesus was believed to have paranormal powers at an early point. I already mentioned these earlier, but I will repeat them here briefly.

1) The healing of the Gadarene Demoniac(s) (Mt. 8:28-34, Mk. 5:1-17, Lk. 8:26-37): This story is unlikely to be fiction created by the evangelists for any purpose, because it presents an unpleasant picture of Jesus, who is depicted as a trouble-maker and implored by the residents of the region where it happened to depart from their district.

So this story is probably true in some original form. The best explanation is that Jesus cured one or two deranged individuals, and they made a commotion by screaming, which frightened a flock of swine, which scattered, and some of the swine stampeded over a cliff.

This is probably the best explanation (or something very similar), but if true, then Jesus had power to cure people who had this mentally-disturbed condition. If not, then what would be a better explanation of this story? To say the evangelists just made it up 40 years later makes little sense, unless you think they were trying to mock Jesus. Any story they invent would be designed only to portray Jesus in a favorable light, not to cast aspersions on him.

2) The assault on Jesus by the guards (Mt. 27:67-68, Mk. 14:65, Lk. 22:63-64): This story in the Matthew and Mark versions omits elements which leave it confused, especially the phrase in Matthew, "Prophesy for us, Messiah: who is it that struck you?"

The only way to explain why the writer included this is that he relied on his source and did not invent it, because it serves no purpose or is incomplete without the reference to the blindfold, which Matthew omits. The only way to explain the incident is that the guards were ridiculing a common rumor that Jesus had power to see through solid objects (the blindfold) and ordered him to "prophesy" by identifying who struck him even though he was blindfolded.

So here are two examples of NT accounts which are best explained by assuming that Jesus had some kind of paranormal power, or in the latter case, that there was a popular rumor that he had some such power, such as power to see through solid objects.

These are small indicators, but the more general case is that all the gospel accounts (all the early narrative accounts) attest to Jesus performing the miracle healing acts, and this is evidence similar to much other evidence for events which are accepted as historical.

The only reason to reject this as evidence is the dogmatic premise that such miracle events can never happen, and so therefore any evidence that they did has to be unreliable, and so evidence which would otherwise be accepted as reliable is rejected only because of that dogmatic ideological premise, rather than on the merits or on the facts that are known.

Again, it is fine to say the evidence in such cases is weaker and the probability is reduced, but to just arbitrarily reject all such evidence based on ideological dogmatism is not scientific or rational.


Again, your ideological dogmatism is the only basis for this. You are just dogmatically demanding agreement with your conclusion without any argument other than that you have to be right because it is inherently so, ipso facto. Can you not discern the difference between a premise and a conclusion?

Your conclusion is that these events did not happen, and you are supposed to give us an argument leading to that conclusion. But instead of leading us to that conclusion you are demanding acceptance of that conclusion at the outset, as a premise.

You can "win" any argument by just taking your conclusion and making it the premise and demanding dogmatically that everyone meekly submit to this conclusion which you make into an a priori premise from which all else must follow. Needless to say, that is not a rational argument.


Yes there is such evidence. It is not in the form of surviving documents claiming to have been written by direct witnesses to the events, but evidence does not have to be in that form, and much evidence for events of history is not in that form.

Again, all you can say is that this evidence is a little weaker than that which is from direct witnesses, and that evidence for paranormal events requires a higher degree of skepticism or scrutiny. But that doesn't mean it isn't evidence or that the reported events have no credibility at all. You are disregarding the element of DEGREES of credibility or probability.


And all examples of this that you can give do not compare to the example of Jesus in the NT accounts. By saying the above, you are trying to give analogies to Jesus -- but they are not analogous, because we can explain how all those charismatics were able to amass their reputation for paranormal powers, even if it was fictional. But the same explanations do not apply in the case of Jesus.

You and others here have given several supposed analogous cases, but again, all of them had very long public careers in which to accumulate a following and were highly-reputed respected hero figures in their time, which explains how they became mythologized. But none of that explanation applies to the case of Jesus, who had only a short public career and no recognition or wide repute as someone of importance, outside his reputation as a miracle-worker.


Again -- and again and again and again and you keep making the same mistake -- all of them had long public careers of preaching and amassing followers who worshipped them and wanted to mythologize them. Jesus had no such time to amass any such flock of disciples, outside a very small local group. His reputation was not widespread, as in all the cases you refer to.


I have said repeatedly that it is not "proof" -- it is evidence. It carries weight. The wider the beliefs spread in a short time, the more likely it is that the claims are true, but it is not proof. The probability increases with increasing numbers of eye-witnesses or indirect (2nd- and 3rd-hand etc.) witnesses.


You mean contrary to current mainline science. This only means the probability is lower, and so the requirement for evidence is stricter. You have no basis to dictate that "miracles" are physically impossible, but only that they are less probable and require a higher standard of verification or corroboration to be credible.


His career began in 1940, so he has had almost 70 years of preaching to accumulate a following -- that is no comparison to Jesus. He obviously is talented and charismatic, and in such a long time it is not surprising that a talented charismatic can gain a huge following of disciples who believe he does miracles.

If it's true that he shows some power to "heal" people, then so be it. More likely his reputation is due to the common phenomenon of counting only the "hits" and ignoring the "misses" in all his healing events, and with 60-70 years of healing crusades and impressive charismatic performances under his belt, and with a long list of "hits" over that time, we shouldn't be surprised if he acquired this reputation, even if he has no real healing power at all.

And yet, there's nothing wrong with assuming he might have some limited power to heal, or at least to help people psychologically in some way similar to healing, which makes them think they were cured of an illness. No doubt he is very gifted, whether he has healing power per se or not.

He also does a trick with a pot of ashes where he causes the ash to keep coming out of the pot endlessly. Perhaps he has an uncanny ability to create ashes out of his body which keep coming and coming in some amazing fashion. Maybe it's not magic but a real supernatural power -- does it matter?

Obviously there is no comparison here to Jesus, who had only 1-2 years of public life in which to accumulate his following. We can explain how Sai Baba acquired his reputation, even if all the miracles attributed to him are fictitious, because of his long career and talent to convince people with his charisma. But in the case of Jesus, we have no such explanation available. So the two are not comparable.

You need to give us an example of a guru healer figure who had only a short career, in order for him to be comparable to the Jesus case.

Again, we should not summarily dismiss all the miracle stories about Sai Baba as ipso facto fictional. Maybe he does have some paranormal powers, including some healing power. Has someone made a strong case? With enough anecdotes from witnesses the credibility does increase.

I believe some researchers may have discredited these claims about him, but there's probably no way to be sure. Since he's a contemporary (he hasn't croaked yet, has he?) theoretically they could create a laboratory condition and bring afflicted victims to him for healing and do legitimate scientific testing of his power by examining each victim before and after and so on.

If such a test or investigation were proposed to him and he were asked to cooperate, it would be interesting to see how he reacts. But if no such scientific investigation is undertaken or at least proposed to him, then it is probably impossible to determine how much truth there is to the miracle claims. If it were proposed and he refused, that would cast doubt on the claims for his healing power.

Huon

Oh, everybody knows that Paul had a Chevrolet, given to him by James, who had inherited it of his brother. Athenians 20.7

spamandham

Of course they do. How long of a list of nonsense slurped up by the masses do you require? It would be easy to provide a list of thousands of such examples. In the category of religion alone, I can provide a link with several thousand, not to mention cryptozoology, alien encounters, fairies, leprechauns, etc...all things that are either currently or previously slurped up by the masses.

...and of course, the biggies these days are 2012 and other endless apocalyptic nonsense.

Amaleq13

Acts tells us that people immediately thought Paul was a god because he seemed to perform a single magical act. No prior reports or rumors were needed. Just one single apparent act of magical power. Your lack of familiarity with your own holy book is annoying. Willful ignorance is not a solid foundation for a position. :banghead:

freetrader

Responses to Diogenes the Cynic, continued


How does one invent the story about the demons being sent into the herd of swine and the herd stampeding over a cliff and drowning? What possible explanation can there be how a story like this would be invented (even from half cloth)? What purpose does this story serve to the early church or the evangelists that they would create such a hideous scenario?

A reasonable explanation of what happened is that the event did take place but that the original version of the story got distorted by the time it was recorded in writing. Probably a herd of swine did scatter, frightened by noises from the cured demoniac(s), and some of them ran over the cliff.

If you assume it didn't happen at all, in any way, it's very hard to explain why the writer(s) would invent such a story. But if you assume a basic kernel of truth to the story, that a healing event was performed and some swine stampeded over a cliff, then an explanation is possible.

Why would the gospel writers give us a story in which Jesus caused trouble to the people living there and a group of them came and told him to get the hell out of their neighborhood? It all has the ring of truth to it, except for the demons asking to be sent into the herd of swine.

The sign of a fabricated story is that it promotes the image of Jesus created by the early church or the evangelists, or that it would have an edifying effect on the reader. But how does this story of the stampeding swine promote anything desired by the church or the evangelists, or how does it have any edifying effect on its audience? Or what other identifiable purpose would the evangelists have for inventing such a story?

If they wanted to promote the idea that Jesus did healings, why didn't they just omit the nutty stuff about the swine? Or why didn't they have Jesus rebuke the demons and say "Nay, not even innocent swine shall ye torment, for as the Son of Man hath not where to rest his head, neither shall ye find rest from this day forth" and so on?

They could have made Jesus more heroic, showing that he cares not only for the immediate victim he is healing, but other people too, like the owners of these swine, and also for other creatures and not just for humans. He had said that God cares for the sparrows, even the lilies, so there was a basis for protecting other life-forms and not just humans.

There are many possibilities for an exorcism story without including such a distasteful element as a herd of swine being sent over a cliff to drown. So any real explanation of this has to include the likelihood that they had a story already handed to them, not invented by them, and although they might alter some elements in it, they felt they had to report the main parts of it, including the bad part.

There is a sensationalist element in the story that might have some appeal -- the violence done to the swine and the herdsmen -- but it's difficult to see why the gospel writers would have Jesus play the leading role in causing this disturbance. Arguably the evangelists didn't want to omit the senationalist element, but it's hard to imagine they would totally invent this story, giving Jesus a bad image with the local residents.

So the suggestion that the gospel writers invented this story "from whole cloth" doesn't add up. If it was invented by someone, it must have been someone who was not trying to sell Jesus or present him in a favorable light. The explanation has to fit with facts we know, such as the fact that the evangelists were trying to paint a favorable picture of Jesus, not a distasteful one.

Obviously you are wrong to imply that the gospel writers did no distorting whatever. The fact that the differing accounts contain minor discrepancies shows clearly that each writer made at least small changes from the account he had before him. In this story about the swine, e.g., Matthew changes it so that it is two demoniacs who are cured instead of only one.

So clearly each writer does take liberty with the details, and these can get changed or "distorted," though the writer is not inventing the whole story but taking it from an earlier source.

If you were right that the stories are invented "from whole cloth" by the writers without any distortions or changes or variations, then either 1) there would be no two versions of the same story in the gospels, but each of the four would present their own separate individual stories unrelated to that of the other accounts; and/or 2) we would have some identical duplicate stories in the different gospels without any discrepancies -- neither of these is the case, since we clearly have three versions of several of these stories, and there are discrepancies between them.


By your sense of "dated back" there is nothing we know about Jesus that "dated back" to Jesus, including any of his sayings. There are no known documents before Paul, and no narratives before Mark, so nothing at all "dated back to Jesus" -- and so what is the point? You are saying nothing about the miracle stories, but rather something about the absence of any surviving documents from that period (30-50 AD).

And so -- we'll just rely on the later documents we do have. Just like for any other events which we know happened but for which there are no surviving documents from the earlier point, and so we rely on the later documents.

There is evidence, as in the above case, that the gospel writers did not invent the stories, but rather that they took already-existing stories and made changes in them. Also, you still haven't given any plausible explanation how or why the stories were invented, i.e., why anyone would attribute any miracle acts to this unknown unrecognized Galilean.


How is it not "meaningful" if the beliefs about the miracles do date back to Jesus? You are right to give more weight to the evidence if it is eye-witness testimony directly from the time of the events. That kind of evidence is stronger, and so the probability that the events are true is increased when the evidence is 1st-hand eye-witness testimony.


These figures are all recognized from a long career of doing public performances and winning over their disciples. Assuming the "miracles" they do are fictional, it is easy to explain how they are invented. It is common for devotees to attribute miracle acts to their famous guru. These miracle stories accumulate over time, over many years, and the "hits" are recorded or remembered while the "misses" are ignored, and so the fame of the miracle-worker increases.

Having said this, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that any of the above three celebrities might have done "miracle" acts of some kind, i.e., something unexplainable by current mainline science. We should not summarily dismiss all the anecdotes about them as fiction.

We can explain how the fictional accounts emerge, unlike in the case of Jesus, but it's still possible that any of these celebrities actually did succeed in performing a "miracle" act in some cases. To determine if that is so would require investigating each case, and even then the likely conclusion would only be that in a few cases the odds were against it just being a coincidence, and so it's hard to explain.

Maybe Edward has an uncanny ability to read the subject's mind in some cases, because it is difficult to always attribute it to coincidence or trickery. There are enough other examples of this that it is not unreasonable to believe some people have an ability to somehow pick up signals from another person's mind. Just because current science cannot explain it is no reason to rule out this possibility.

Of course we can dismiss the explanation that the mind-reader communicates with the dead or that he gets his revelation from reading the stars or astrological signs and so on -- this kind of explanation has an appeal, but is without any evidence or verification.

In the case of the contemporary celebrities you mention, we have much reason to doubt these anecdotes, even though they come from contemporary witnesses, because we understand how fictional stories emerge as part of a mythologizing process in the case of celebrated well-known guru figures with a long impressive career, such as these celebrities have had but which Jesus did not have. Jesus is an established celebrity today, 2000 years later, but he was a nobody in 30 AD.


What "corroboration"? You mean a second or third report? So if a second account reports the same event then the historical event is recognized and it becomes "knowledge" of history, whereas if there is only one, then it is rejected as fabrication? It's all black-and-white? That one extra report changes the record and turns fiction into historical fact? And you think it's that simple?

No, each additional confirmation increases the probability of it being true by a small increment. It does not suddenly change from fiction to fact by the addition of only one extra report. And even the one report alone is evidence that the alleged event did happen, even if not conclusive.

There are plenty of examples of something being reported by only one source, and yet that is enough to accept it as probably true, as long as nothing else contradicts it. If a writer from 100 AD says that a king or military commander from 50 BC did something, this alone is evidence that it happened, even if it is not conclusive, but still it is evidence, and as long as it fits with whatever else is known, then it is reasonable to believe it.


Of course not, not even by the most ardent biblical literalists and fundamentalists, or the followers of Sai Baba or Edgar Cayce or anyone else. We're not talking about claims that are known to be physically impossible. We're talking about reported events which are unexplained by mainline science if they did happen, but not that are known to be physically impossible. Believers in these miracle acts obviously don't agree that they are "physically impossible."

Here again you are putting your conclusion before your premise -- your task here is to first prove that the miracle stories are "physically impossible" and then conclude that they could not have happened, not start out with the premise that they are "physically impossible" which makes you win the argument before the argument even begins.


If you insist that something is physically impossible, then the burden of proof is on you. If there are enough reported cases of a certain kind of act or event, then it casts doubt on the claim that it is physically impossible. Then you have to change it to "improbable" rather than "impossible".

Beyond a certain threshold number of anecdotes, it becomes more reasonable to call it a "rare" event or something that usually cannot happen but sometimes does, rather than insist that it can never happen or is "impossible."

Amaleq13

It is difficult to understand how anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the world around them could hold such a profoundly ignorant view of human nature. :banghead:

freetrader

Responses to Diogenes the Cynic, continued


Again, many known historical events cannot be "traced back" from the time of the written report of it to the time the event really happened. You keep wanting to impose a standard of evidence onto these stories that you do not impose onto other events of history.

Also, neither can the parables and sayings be "traced back" any earlier, nor any biographical information and so on, as I have pointed out before. So you are saying NOTHING significant about the miracle stories when you keep repeating this talking point.

Nothing about the historical Jesus, including his sayings, can be "traced back" to earlier than the gospel of Mark, except the few points in Paul, i.e., the crucifixion and resurrection, the night of his arrest, and the names of Peter and James.

Or, if you say the Q passages are earlier, then the miracle events do go back earlier than 70 CE., because they are included in Q.


I'm not "proving" it, but giving evidence or reasons to believe those stories go back as early as anything else we have about Jesus. Those stories are probably as early as the rest, but no one can "prove" any of this one way or the other.

You must admit that the "resurrection" is earlier, and yet you cannot reasonably maintain that Paul invented this, as I have pointed out before. So this also was a part of the probable earlier story of Jesus, along with the crucifixion, the night of the arrest, and the names of Peter and James mentioned in Paul.

And yet obviously there had to be more than this, and from this larger amount of tradition about Jesus, Paul selected these few points to make mention of. For example, to insist that Paul invented the names of Peter and James would be ridiculous. You won't go that far, will you? These were also part of his hallucinations? Of course not. And so how much else was already part of the original story that was not invented by Paul?

Why do you so aggressively pounce on the miracle stories as something that has to be later, just because they aren't in Paul, when almost all the rest is also absent from Paul and not just these stories? Jesus made many trips back and forth around the Sea of Galilee area, attracting some followers, probably preaching -- you think Paul didn't know of this, just because he doesn't mention it? or it never really happened, because it's absent from Paul?

Plenty of early Christian writers omit mention of such biographical matter contained in the gospel accounts. This doesn't mean those events did not happen or that they are not part of the earliest tradition about Jesus.

I am not "proving" what happened, other than the probability that the biographical matter in the gospel accounts, including the miracle stories, are as early as anything else we have about Jesus and were not likely "invented out of whole cloth" by the gospel writers.

You have given no reason to assign a later date to these stories, other than your dogmatic premise that these events could not have happened and so must have been invented later. Except for this advance bias, you have no basis for claiming a later date.


I believe you have since acknowledged that the miracles ARE contained in Q after all, so you are forgiven this error -- go perform 50 Hail Marys and sin no more.

As to Thomas, as I pointed out earlier, this "gospel" is relegated to a much later date by most experts, well beyond the three synoptic gospels. However, a few put it as early as Paul.

Even if we assume the earliest date, the Jesus miracle stories are also virtually absent from the Book of Acts, not to mention many Christian writings in and out of the Bible from later authors who certainly knew of the miracle stories and believed they happened.

Thomas is purely a sayings document, with nothing at all about any deeds of Jesus or any events at all from his life. If we had Thomas only, we might believe Jesus was purely an abstract idea, like Plato's forms or the Holy Ghost, with no physical body or other particular identification in space and time.

This is obviously not what Paul thought, because he mentions at least the one scene on the night of the arrest (1 Cor. 11:23-26), which puts Jesus into a place and time in history.

And his "crucifixion" and "resurrection" of Jesus is hard to imagine as anything other than the reported events which took place just after the arrest, such as the "death" which Paul also mentions in that passage. Also, as mentioned earlier, Paul's "euangelion" makes no sense if it does not refer to the life-giving power of Jesus as demonstrated in the miracle healing acts. What "good news" do you think Paul was talking about?

So only a tiny fraction of Paul is narrative, that one text alone, which explains his noninclusion of the miracles and other narratives, while Thomas is 100% non-narrative, which explains the absense there of miracles or other biographical matter.


It is reasonable to believe something happened if there is a large body of anecdotal evidence for it, even if what happened is unexplainable by mainline science. It is more reasonable to accept the preponderance of the evidence, including anecdotal reports -- at least to regard these as a reasonable possibility -- rather than bow submissively to dogmatic pronouncements handed down by ideologues on a crusade to crush all belief in what they brand as "magic" regardless of what the evidence shows.


I have debunked this before, but will do so again here.

You're claiming that ANY "natural" explanation is always preferable to a "magical" one, and this clearly is not so. Some "natural" explanations have to be thrown out as even less likely than one containing a "supernatural" or "magical" element.

For example, in the case of the Jesus healing miracles, one possible explanation is that there was a vast conspiracy to pay actors to pretend to be victims in need of healing and others to be friends or relatives of these victims. And so they were paid to undergo the healing scenarios and pretend to be cured or be witnesses to it.

Perhaps even real victims were kidnapped and killed and replaced by look-alikes who pretended to be those same victims who were now healed, and likewise their family members were paid, or were also killed and replaced by look-alike actors who then witnessed the healing of their loved ones, and so on.

With enough work and expense and murdering whoever got in the way and replacing them with look-alikes and rehearsing of the actors and scripting them to carry on the deception to make others believe, all being carried on covertly for more than a year (perhaps 2 or 3 years of advance recruiting of actors and rehearsing and so on) before or during the public ministry of Jesus, it was possible, without any "miracle" or other "supernatural" event, to launch the reputation of Jesus the miracle-worker and recruit followers later who would believe the reports of the direct witnesses and later the indirect witnesses.

Such an elaborate conspiracy is quite "possible" as a "natural" action by hundreds of conspirators, keeping the whole matter a secret within their limited circle, and it would explain everything that we know happened. And yet the whole scenario is so improbable that even the actual miracle healing acts having been done by Jesus are a more likely explanation of what really happened.

So depending on the "natural" explanation you come up with, it is quite reasonable to prefer the miracle or "magical" explanation over the "natural" one, if the latter explanation falls short of a minimum required level of plausibility. And the "natural" explanations you have come up with so far are so ludicrous and improbable that they are barely to be taken seriously.

And so it is not surprising that you keep having to impose your arbitrary dogma that no "magic" explanation can ever be preferred over a "natural" one, no matter how ludicrous the "natural" explanation may be, because your suggested ones have been ludicrous so far.


There is limited data, yes, but it's not true to say there is "no data" at all. You examine what data there is. You can always complain that it would be nice to have more data, no matter what you're investigating.

The existing limits only mean we can't PROVE the truth with certainty, but we can still judge what the probability is. Anyone who claims to have proved it one way or the other, or who claims to KNOW the truth for sure, is just wrong, no matter how convinced they are. Die-hard Bible-bashers who say it's all disproved are just as deluded as pious believers who just "know in their heart" that it's all true.

But this isn't to say that nothing from history can be known or proved. "Proof" doesn't necessarily mean 100% absolute certainty, which hardly exists for anything we know. But beyond a certain threshold level of probability we can claim, as a practical matter, that we know the truth or that we "proved" it: Washington was the first President, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, etc.

Did Celopatra really commit suicide? There is a case to be made that Octavian actually murdered her. One could reasonably believe either possibility.

Not all historical truth is known with such certainty as the assassination of Lincoln or D-Day or the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius -- there is also reasonable probability, and below that there is reasonable possibility, and so on.

And no one has defined exactly where the dividing lines fall between the "probable" and the merely "possible" and the "highly improbable" and so on, and yet these categories or degrees of probability do exist and are brought into play in our judgments, both abstract or theoretical judgments which have no consequence as well as practical decisions where there are consequences following a choice.

We can make such judgments on whether the miracles of Jesus really did happen, as we can judge the possibility of other reported events in history. Whatever the conclusion, there has to be a level of doubt remaining.


But it's not "impossible" in the first place if there are cases of it having happened. It can't be branded as "impossible" based on a dogmatic prejudice that it can't happen or just because it doesn't normally happen or because it's unusual or rare or unpredictable. These may reduce the probability but don't make it "impossible."

There is no absolute official solid line between what is "improbable" and what is "impossible." At a certain threshold level of accumulated evidence one way or the other, a scenario or certain kind of scenario crosses into the "more likely than not" category or the "possible but improbable" category or into the "impossible" category.

What has to happen to finally "prove" that a certain kind of "miracle" act is possible after all, or conversely to "prove" that it really is in the "impossible" category? What constitutes evidence to settle whether it is "impossible" or only "improbable" or "slightly probable"? or whether an unlikely kind of claim becomes probable in this or that special case?

What else do we have but anecdotes, or reports that something happened and someone witnessed it? In the final analysis, the increasing quantity of such reports that something happened increases the probability that it happened.

Obviously if the claim is that the performer of the act can repeat it over and over without limit, then this can be tested. But that's not usually the claim, and it's fine to say this lack of testability reduces the probability of the claim being true, but it still doesn't make it "impossible."

Obviously there's no way to test the powers of someone no longer here or to test whether something happened 100 or 1000 years ago. So usually all we have to go on are the reports or anecdotes passed on, mostly in written documents.

There is nothing rational about dismissing all anecdotes or all claims that cannot be scientifically verified in a laboratory. Most claims cannot be verified that way, such as claims about what happened historically, or about how the economy works, or what causes the crime rate to go up or down, etc.

There are ways to argue all these, using logic and whatever data exists and analogies and hypothetical possibilities and speculations -- just because rigid scientific verification in a lab is not available does not mean there is no procedure to argue toward a conclusion one way or the other, using what is available to reach the truth. And in the end any conclusions are less certain than what is proved or verified in a scientific lab.

You cannot name any other way to "test" or "verify" or "corroborate" what happened in the past except by means of the accumulated anecdotes or reports or hearsays or whatever you want to call it. To say anecdotes are unreliable unless they are "corroborated" is nonsense because there is nothing to "corroborate" them with but still more anecdotes in one form or another.

The accumulated evidence for the healing miracles of Jesus is great enough to put them in the category of being a reasonable possibility, having more supporting anecdotes than required for normal or "natural" kinds of events, and outside the "impossible" category. They are not made "impossible" just by being of a rare nature or unexplainable by mainline science.

Amaleq13

Why do you repeat questions to which you have already been given answers? Paul tells us about the miracles he and the other apostles allegedly performed to convince others of the truth of their words but Paul does not mention any miracles by Jesus. This creates a rather obvious problem for those who wish to claim that Paul believed Jesus performed miracles whether they are honest and willing enough to admit it or not.

Why say things so obviously false? Paul does not place that event in any recognizable place or time in history beyond the bare claim that it happened the night before his arrest. That provides no historical context whatsoever so why pretend it does?

You can certainly argue that Paul intended this to be understood as taking place on earth but you've got nothing that actually anchors it to "history".

No, that continues to be an unreasonable logical fallacy no matter how many times you foolishly repeat it. :banghead:

You've been shown your error. Why not demonstrate some capability to learn from your mistakes?

Repeating a logically flawed position does not constitute debunking of anything.

I have to admire your resilience, though, perverse though it is. Lesser men would have succumbed to reason by now.

Wow. You wear your credulity proudly, amigo, but it cannot be the way you actually conduct your life because you most certainly would be dead by now.

And, idiotic as it is, it is still more likely than the notion that actual "magic" was involved. :rolling:

But nobody could "reasonably" believe that she died because someone cast a magic spell on her so this doesn't really help you.

Just enough so one can continue to pretend that belief in magic isn't a childish superstition, perhaps? Nothing but a variation on God-of-the-gaps.

True but you don't have any cases of it having happened. You only have unsubstantiated and often conflicting rumors and gossip.

True. This conclusion should, and does, come as the result of rational thought applied to the evidence.

The probability is reduced to that which is required by the provisional nature of the investigation which, in layman's terms, means "so unlikely as to not deserve any serious consideration absent significant evidence". You've got no credible evidence, so there is no good reason to take your belief in magic seriously.

Nothing and that is why your position is intellectually bankrupt.

You have shown yourself incapable of recognizing what is and is not "rational" so this assertion has no credibility.

...non-existent because inherently unreliable anecdotes do not accumulate to anything indicative except the credulity of those who embrace it. :wave:

freetrader

Responses to show_no_mercy (#123):


I don't "know" it, I suggest it. No one today "knows" when the miracle stories originated.

I believe they are early because no one can give a reasonable explanation how the miracle stories could have emerged later as fictions. When miracle stories like this are invented, it's always in order to attach them to some popular widely-reputed hero figure, not to an unrecognized obscure figure like Jesus was if he did no miracle healing acts.

With no reasonable explanation how the stories might have been invented later, the best assumption is that they were already circulating from the beginning, in 30 AD.

There's no evidence that the stories are of late origin. The only argument for a late origin is the unnecessary dogma that such events are impossible and so the stories have to be fictions invented later rather than real events.

freetrader

Responses to Diogenes the Cynic (#125):


Actually the opposite is the case. It is the wisdom or apocalyptic prophet who is unremarkable -- such prophets are a dime a dozen. And if such a prophet's public life is cut short to only a couple years there is no way people (other than a dozen or so nutballs) remember such a prophet and make him into any kind of deity or messiah figure or anything special that attracts more followers in the future.

The only ones who are memorialized and mythologized are the ones who spent a long time -- decades -- preaching and attracting disciples with their charisma. No short-term "prophet" is mythologized into a hero or savior figure like Jesus was, especially to people of a foreign culture which had nothing in common with the culture that the prophet came from.

Once again (I know this gets repetitious), one cannot name any examples ever from history where such an obscure short-term nobody prophet got mythologized into a god that became widely-recognized and marketed far beyond his homeland and to future generations. He had to have done something unique or noteworthy for this to happen.

Would faith healings and exorcisms "have been unremarkable then as they are now"? Yes, they are unremarkable when they are obviously not real or are faked and the witnesses can detect that the supposed victims did not really experience healing. Usually at these events there is no real healing that takes place, or the results are very ambiguous and unconvincing, and the "hits" are outnumbered by the "misses" and can be attributed to coincidence.

If and when a faith healer really does heal a victim, it is noteworthy and the witnesses do care and report it to others, especially if there are lots of "hits" compared to the "misses." If this happens on a large scale, it is remarkable and has an impact, but presumably that is very rare.

And the best explanation why the Jesus stories became circulated and had an impact is that they really did happen and the witnesses were truly impacted and were driven to report this to others. There's no better explanation how these stories got into circulation and Jesus soon became mythologized into a god.

But if those events were only fictional and Jesus never showed any such power, then yes, the fictional stories would have been unremarkable and would soon be forgotten and would never have been written down and Jesus would have totally disappeared into oblivion. You can give no explanation why anyone should have remembered him or cared about him or written about him or why we should know anything of him today.


No, it's not likely Paul would have paid any attention to this obscure nobody nothing. How would he even find out about him? Crucifixions were regular events -- why would this unimportant one catch his attention?

Actually, it's possible he was there -- it could catch his attention by coincidence, if he was in Jerusalem at the time, but if so he would just shrug his shoulders -- just one more trouble-maker put away, good riddance. There's absolutely no reason to think Paul would be troubled or jarred in any way by another routine crucifixion. Surely the town was not in any commotion over it.

If he was a political dissident or revolutionary, Jesus did not have the 15+ years of agitating and stirring up the poor masses that Che Guevara had during which to recruit followers and become a famous hero. Even if he had some potential to become such a reputed hero, he did not have the time, and so he was a nobody who would have been ignored by Paul and everyone else.


No, there could have been no "Jesus movements" of any kind if he did not do the miracle healing acts. Activists do not seize upon a nobody to make him into a hero -- back then there were nobodies every day being crucified as troublemakers -- Jesus did not stand out at all that he should attract this kind of attention (unless he performed the miracle healing acts), because he did nothing to set himself apart from hundreds of other dissidents or crusaders.

He would have been no more noteworthy than any of the hothead characters we see at those townhall meetings grabbing the microphone and bellowing their anger at politicians. Even Joe the Plumber is more noteworthy than Jesus was if Jesus did not do those miracle acts. He would have been no more noteworthy than a miserable sidewalk preacher who harangues at passers-by and is completely ignored and forgotten.

And in the rare case where that hothead or sidewalk preacher really has charisma and attracts some followers, it takes years and even decades before his following increases enough to get him any recognition beyond his own time and place in history. Jerry Falwell is more noteworthy than Jesus would have been if he had done no miracles, because Falwell had a long career, beginning as a nobody, but attracting followers with his personality over that long career.


To know more about who? Why would they want to know more about a nobody? There was nothing there to know more about. There was nothing there to become obscured -- how can a nobody become obscured? There has to be something there in the first place before it can become obscured. What or who was it that got obscured?


Yes, there was some of that -- prophecies and psalms and other quotable scriptures -- but why would these later writers pick this unimportant Galilean as an object to attach these scriptures to? He had to have done something first to make himself noteworthy before they would pay this kind of tribute to him. They wouldn't deify him like this unless they believed he already was important. What was important about him? Without answering that, your theory explains nothing.


Yes, you can imagine scenarios where such attributions could get started -- probably there are real examples of this, but they all sank into oblivion. Why didn't dozens of other miracle-working messiahs emerge from obscurity?

If it's so easy to get the ball rolling and mythologize a nobody into a god, and since there obviously were dozens or even hundreds of these nobodies running around being worshipped by a half-dozen nutcase followers, why didn't all of these personality cults succeed in getting their hero mythologized and made famous? There is no other who became widely reputed as a miracle-worker and mythologized into a god -- only this one.

(It's incorrect to say there were or are many others -- first, Jesus is unique as by far the most widely-reputed miracle-worker in history, and was so by about 100 AD, and secondly, any others you would compare to him obviously had a long career in which to amass a following -- so Jesus is the only one who started out and died as a nobody.)

Was this just a random-chance choice? Only one could ever rise to fame? -- all of them are equally eligible candidates to become the famous miracle-worker, but conditions are such that only one can "win the prize" of becoming the new messiah? Is Jesus like the queen bee who is the lucky one to hatch first and then goes around and kills all the other queen bee eggs, so there can be only one? and it's just a random chance which messiah candidate "hatches" first, and then this one only becomes the new divine hero?

If Jesus had gotten killed in an accident at an early age, can we assume another Christ would have popped up in his place from among the several hundred or thousand dissidents lurking in the shadows waiting to "hatch" out at the right point and take on this role of becoming the crucified nobody who would later be mythologized into the new miracle-working god?

That would have to be the theory. The Christ was an inevitable figure about to be hatched from somewhere, and the course of events was driving toward a point of selecting one person, a nobody, from among hundreds or thousands of eligible candidates, snatching this lucky (or unlucky) one out and sweeping him up to the surface quickly to be thrust before the authorities for condemnation and martyrdom, after which he would be deified with miracles and all the trappings befitting a deity.

What would be the process of eliminating all the contenders except the one that somehow gets selected? Is this similar to the process of the drone bees that chase the queen up into the air and all die except one that gets to her and fertilizes her? or like the millions of sperm that try to get into the egg but only one succeeds? (or is it only thousands?) What are some other analogies? In both these cases isn't it the strongest one (the strongest drone or strongest sperm) that wins the race? Isn't there always a runner-up which would be recognized if there could somehow be a scorekeeper?

What's a one-winner-only race where all the contenders are totally forgotten except the one that wins? In human struggles, such as wars and political contests and battles between rival gangs or competitions between rival businesses there is always some recognition toward the runner-ups and other top-performing contenders. They are not totally forgotten and eliminated from the historical record.

And if somehow some such one-winner-only messiah contest could happen, shouldn't we expect to see the emergence of similar messiah figures in different cultures? In other words, shouldn't we have a similar messiah from India, and one from China, and one or two from among the native American cultures, and also from small tribal cultures? Also an Arab/Muslim Christ figure?

In all these cultures, the standout deity figures like Buddha and Krishna and Confucius and so on were only the long-career widely-recognized guru figures who amassed their disciples over several decades of crusading and impressing their audiences (in some cases allegedly doing miracles).

But the Christ figure, if fictional, was invented to fill a psychological need for a nobody or unrecognized person of no status or power or influence in the society, and then this one becomes glorified and mythologized and deified far beyond other hero figures. Such a figure is nonexistent in any other culture -- this is a one-of-a-kind case. But there should be more than one case, at least one springing up from each of several cultures instead of from only one.

Is this one-of-a-kind one-winner-only Christ figure a phenomenon which has to be global, encompassing all cultures, and there can only be one for the whole planet? Perhaps Joseph Smith was thinking of this when he had his "revelation" of the Christ figure appearing in the Americas, figuring that the two cultures were separated enough that the New World had to also have its own Christ figure.

It doesn't make sense to say a nobody could be successfully mythologized into a miracle-working deity without explaining why this has happened only once without any other examples of the same phenomenon. If such a deity cult meets a psychological need, there should be other examples of this, and there should be a few competing Christs in the world from which to choose.

So far, the best explanation is that this was a singular case of a person who actually showed unique power, such as that of the miracle healing acts attributed to Jesus.