freetrader

Doug Shaver:


How about "hypothesis" instead of "premise". If you entertain the hypothesis that Jesus really did perform miracle cures and that his resurrection really did happen, then you have a clear explanation for how the account of him spread beyond his death via word-of-mouth and finally led to the New Testament documents which we know did emerge.

On the other hand, if you reject this hypothesis, then what is the explanation for how the accounts of him came to be promulgated?

It is possible for a reasonable person to entertain either hypothesis -- he did or he did not perform such acts. And the hypothesis that he did seems to explain the later events better than the hypothesis that he did not.


My hypothesis that he did perform such acts would be disproved, or better, rendered much less probable, if a plausible explanation can be given for the results that occurred later, i.e., the rapid spread of the new Christian cult, or Jewish-Christian cult, centered on this reputed miracle-worker.

Obviously no account of these events can be resoundly proved or disproved. But some explanations or theories are more probable than others, depending upon how well they can account for what we know followed from the earlier events we're trying to uncover. I suggest that the historical development which we know happened later down the line, like 100-200 years later, after the period in question (about 30 AD) points back to the existence of a historical person who performed miracle cures and who resurrected from the dead. Though the details of the actual event may differ in some major aspects from the biblical account which emerged later, still there needs to be some core element which was preserved and which explains all that later took place.

No doubt some other explanations can be put forth. But I think they might be less probable than the one I'm giving here.


I don't assume all the stories are true. Some of them might be total fabrications from beginning to end. For example, I think both the Bethlehem stories are total fiction. I may be wrong, but I suspect they are complete fiction, not just in detail but in toto.

But are you willing to entertain the possibility that some of the stories might be true, or at least partly true? The reasonable approach is to entertain any hypothesis to consider how it squares with whatever we do know for certain. Does your hypothesis about what really happened originally (the period around 30 AD) fit in with the later facts we can be more certain about?


Of course not.

The question here is not how the stories came to be believed, but rather, how they came into existence, especially, how the story-tellers came to choose Jesus as their object. Yes, people believe stuff that's not true, and also story-tellers do make up stories or claim things that are not true. But why would Greeks choose an unknown unimportant Palestinian/Galilean to be the superhero for their story? This is the question which is not being answered, and without this answer, we don't have an explanation for how the new religion got started or how the NT accounts came to be written.

But if he actually did perform the miracle acts, then we have our explanation. Let me add, if he not only resurrected, but if also he ascended into the sky. Now if this event really took place, then certainly we can understand how the story of this person came to spread rapidly and a new movement centered on him took place among Greeks and others.

But if he did no such remarkable act, then how did this new cult get its start and spread so rapidly?


If you assume he did not exist, then your job is even more difficult. To explain stories about a nonexistent person is certainly more difficult than stories about an existent person.

Again, it's not a question of people believing fiction stories, even stories about someone who didn't exist. But the question is how the stories came to be, or why the story-tellers invented them, and in particular, why did they choose a Palestinian figure as the main character or hero for the story.

If story-tellers have the luxury of creating a superhero for people who are ready to believe in such a figure, why wouldn't they choose someone of their own culture? Who were these story-tellers anyway? Was the inventor just one person or many? Doesn't it seem there were many imaginations involved in the process rather than just one? And yet how did they all somehow agree to converge in on this unlikely foreigner (barbarian?) from the land of the squabbling Jews to serve this purpose for them?

This is quite a strange scenario. A much more plausible explanation is that the superhero figure was already supplied to them by the facts happening before them, and that they did not have the luxury of choosing him on their own.


If it's the superior marketing skills of the Jesus promoters that made the difference, why did they waste their talent on this nobody Galilean who did nothing noteworthy? Why didn't they choose someone with more credentials and more popularity and higher profile?

And who were they marketing to? Did they make a profit off JC? No, these promoters must have been aiming at a long-term campaign, selling their product to future generations, 100 years or 200 years down the line. What was driving them? How did they all come together on this plan to sell this product to future consumers, and how did they happen to settle on the unknown Galilean as their instrument?

Again, a more plausible explanation is that the hero figure in this new movement was a given -- he was a performer of miracle cures and other acts which attracted an enthusiastic response, and thousands joined into the new movement, perhaps with conflicting elements as different ones each came with their own interpretation and vision and plan for action, and a new social disturbance evolved outward from this, spreading in many directions, identifying with the hero figure who had demonstrated life-giving power and so claiming to have a share in that power and deriving authority from him or the source he must have been connected to.


But why was it alleged? If he was a nobody who did nothing noteworthy, why would anyone allege he was the son of god or expect anyone to believe it? Why wouldn't they pick someone with more credentials to be their son of god? and again why not a Greek rather than a barbarian Jewish Galilean rabble-rouser who really didn't succeed in rousing much rabble anyway?


But why should they put forth a nobody Galilean as this god or this someone authorized to speak on God's behalf? Why did they choose JC for this role, when there were many others of higher repute and more credibility? If he did nothing special, nothing unique -- why did they choose such a nobody?


But why did they choose JC for this sales campaign? this promotional crusade? What were they selling? and to whom? why? And why would they choose a nobody Galilean barbarian to serve as their selling tool when there were so many other choices that should be more successful?

He was already dead (or gone up into heaven), so it wasn't his charisma they saw as a tool for manipulating people. So, what did they see in this nobody who had no recognition? Can you believe they were smart enough to predict the future and recognize that somehow this would-be legendary figure would sell in a new revolutionary way never before imagined?

This just has no credibility. There is no incentive, no profit motive for the promoters, because all the impact of this would be centuries into the future, not for their profit at that time, plus there is no way they could have predicted the later success that would come from using this instrument for their campaign.


But why would they WANT to convince anyone that this man, THIS PARTICULAR MAN had something to say. Why did they zero in on this obscure nobody from the east and work themselves into a frenzy to convince the whole world that this man had something to say -- what nonsense -- surely such insanity is much less likely than the simple explanation that this man was already there, a given -- he had already displayed unique power and so had a command over the minds of thousands and then millions of followers who were already believing he was a messiah or god or something special.

And these promoters, these ones who did the selling job -- they were ONLY CASHING IN on a pre-existing superhero figure who gained this status by the miracle acts he performed. So it all happened spontaneously, not through a conspiracy by someone who chose to transform him out of nobody status into a god.

Diogenes the Cynic

What reports would those be?
By this reasoning, no one without magic powers could ever be remembered.

The claims about Jesus being a miracle worker were accretions to the cult, they were not incipient to it. The earliest written claims about a Historical Jesus. There is actually no evidence that a single person ever made a firts hand claim -- or even a second -- hand claim, that Jesus did any magic tricks.

Contrast that to Vespasian, for whom we DO have eyewitness testimony that he performed a healing miracle.
Cite?
There is no evidence that his actual followers ) if they existed, and if HE existed) ever DID spread those stories about him. The miracle stories don't arise until decades after the alleged crucifixion, and they come from sources which have no primary, or even secondary provenance.

What is your evidence that a single person ever claimed to have personally seen jesus perform a miracle?

Your contention that legends about historical people can't accrete supernatural claims is so specious and so readily refutable that I'm amazed your even trying to make it.
The Greeks, as such, didn't start it. Paul did. Paul's mission to the Gentiles worked, in part, because he fused it with mythological motifs and ideas they were already familiar with, but also because the message resonated with some specific demographic groups -- notably, slaves and poor people. The assurance that a God was going to come back and subvert the class system -- smiting the rich, putting "the last first and the first last" was very appealing to them. Paul's bizarre fantasies suited their own cravings for divine justice and vengence against the boot heel classes to a tee. They believed it because they WANTED to believe it. Remember, Paul's original message was that Jesus was going to come back in their own lifetimes. It was something they actually expected to be able to experience for themselves, just like the Hale-Poppers really thought they were going to fly away on a magic spaceship.

One other thing that should be pointed out is that the Gentiles Paul was preaching to had no means of verifying anything he said for themselves. They had to take his word for it. He was a skilled sophist who was able to distort or gloss Hebrew Scripture in such a way as to make his rantings sound more erudite, and create a superficial appearance that his message had the support of studied scholarship and exotic Jewish prophecy, and he was able to be very convincing to uneducated, naive and credulous little populations of people who were greatly dissatisfied with their positions in the status quo.

The question you should really be asking yourself is not why Greek Gentiles believed it, but why Palestinian Jews did not. Why isn't there any evidence at all that a single person actually living at the same time and place as Jesus ever claimed to have seen him perform a miracle or come back from the dead?
The Mishnah would have mentioned a Messianic claimant doing magic tricks. I'm pretty sure it would have also taken notice of something like zombies crawling out of their graves and invading Jerusalem.


Incidentally, all this aside, The one truly massive, gaping hole in your thesis is that it's impossible. We can't suppose that Jesus did miracles because miracles are impossible. The impossible should be presumed to be impossible until proven otherwise. Magic is never an intelligent hypothesis to explain anything.

neilgodfrey

My point is to encourage people to quit parrotting what they read others say about texts and read them for themselves and make up their own minds. If anyone wants to compare the gospels with the Apollonius story they cannot do any better than reading both the gospels and the Apollonius story. Not just bits of each, but the whole lot of both.

I had read so often how similar the two were, so was quite struck when I came to read the Ap story because it was really so unlike the gospels -- not at all what I had been expecting after what so many others had said.

Sure there are some points of similarity, but then there are points of similarity between some ancient "novels" with love stories as the main theme and the gospels too -- surviving crucifixions, dead being thought to come out of tombs, miraculous divine interventions, prophecies fulfilled -- one might just as well say (ignoring the dates) that gospels were an inspiration for some fiction, too.

Or maybe the more adequate explanation is that they all share common features of the literature -- and the fictions -- of the times rather than that one copied the other.


Neil

mountainman

Resource Articles for Apollonius of Tyana

(1) Eusebius' Many Books Against Apollonius

You might like to commence with the 4th century political polemic
of Eusebius against Apollonius. Eusebius evidently thought the
figure of Apollonius was a real historical figure, and cites Apollonius
as an expert on "The Abstinence from Sacrifice".

(2) The Generous Inscription to Apollonius

'This man, named after Apollo,
and shining forth Tyana,
extinguished the faults of men.
The tomb in Tyana (received) his body,
but in truth heaven received him
so that he might drive out the pains of men
(or:drive pains from among men) .'

--- Ancient inscription, translated C. P. Jones

Where is a similar inscription to the historical Jesus?

spamandham

Not really, because nonsense claims of equal caliber were commonplace at the time, and widely accepted as true.

For example, even the much venerated Josephus records events which almost certainly never happened...such as flying chariots around Jerusalem, a lunatic Jesus son of Anius who could foresee the future, a mother (coincidentally named Mary) who ate her own child, and much more tabloid nonsense.

So, for everyone who was not an eyewitness, there was nothing particularly amazing about the claims attributed to Jesus. Thus, these claims are not the reason Christianity spread.

It isn't necessary to identify exactly why it happened in order to dismiss the nonsense. All that is necessary is to identify the existence of a plausible natural explanation - be it correct or not.

Are you telling us you are simply not clever enough to come up with 1 plausible reason why the story might have spread even if the miracles never happened, or do you deny that a plausible, albeit unproved, natural explanation always trumps an implausible and unproved supernatural explanation?

rfmwinnie

And to add to this Jewish literature at the time abounds with faith healers and miracle workers. Included in this is the man who stood in a circle to make it rain, rabbis who resurrected people from the dead, sages who could feed multitudes with little food, wise men who could control all manners of storms and other natural phenomenon. And yet, in all of this, there is nary a mention of Jesus? It was common to record those events and no one recorded a single one about Jesus?

The best explanation for this is "what if Jesus really did miracles?" I think other explanations are far more likely.

freetrader

Philosopher Jay:

At least one difference here (and there's probably more) is that the Superman publishers do not claim or believe that the hero figure in their stories is a real person who really does those deeds. However, the writers of the Jesus accounts probably did believe their hero figure existed in history and really did perform the deeds they describe or ones like them.

What makes the Superman stories fiction is not that there are superhuman deeds in them. Even if there were no superhuman deeds in those stories, we still know they are fiction, because we know of the writers and publishers of the stories.

On the other hand, the portrayal of Jesus doing superhuman deeds is rejected as fiction precisely because they are superhuman deeds and not for any other reason. But there should be a more critical reason to reject something as fiction, i.e., some reason other than just a dogma that superhuman deeds cannot be performed and therefore all such depictions must ipso facto be fictitious.

A more rational or scientific view is that the probability is less in the case of miracle acts or superhuman deeds. So all else being equal, if one account contains such elements and another does not, the one containing the superhuman or miracle element is less probable than the other.

It is reasonable to consider the miraculous as less probable, perhaps much less probable, but it is unreasonable to automatically rule it out entirely in the absolute sense. In a case where something highly unusual or unprecedented is experienced, it is appropriate to expand the range of explanations to include the more improbable.

So if one is dealing with a singular event in history which goes contrary to all precedent, one should consider the possibility of forces at work in that case which in the ordinary course would be highly improbable.

freetrader

Philosopher Jay:

A further distinction between Jesus and Superman is that the deeds of Superman are actually less probable in terms of the kind of deeds in question than those of Jesus.

The Jesus deeds are mainly the healing events. Frankly, the other deeds like walking on water and turning water into wine are less probable than the healing deeds. I would not argue that those acts must have taken place. Though not to be ruled out, they are much less likely than the healing acts, for which there is some precedent in human experience.

Historically, there are reported cases of healing which seem to be performed outside the known scientific/medical methods. Although many of these may be dismissed as illusionary, there are cases which defy explanation and appear to be genuine healings.

There is probably a psychological element to many illnesses which allows the possibility of cure through mental processes. Probably no one has figured out this element or knows how to manipulate these processes to produce any high rate of cures. But there have been healers who had some degree of success.

Stories of resuscitation from death, of which there are many, may be explainable as cases where the deceased had not really expired, but then again it would be rash to dismiss them all and insist dogmatically that a return from death is absolutely impossible. There is room for doubt in this area.

In the case of Jesus, a good explanation would be that he at least had a uniquely high degree of healing power (even if it was less than a 100% success rate -- obviously the higher the success rate the better) and with that same kind of power he also was able to bring himself back to life after having been killed. Though such a thing is in the realm of high improbability, we're dealing with a case in history where something highly unusual happened, so the more improbable has to be considered.

mountainman

Have you ever heard of Jesus Clark Kent,
Loius Mary Lane, Jimmy Crispus Olsen and Perry
Eusebius White? Daily planet reporters in the
fourth century ....

We have a meteor crater ...



Billy Connolly suggested Jesus was Mexican on account of his name.

Doug Shaver

Agreed.

The scholarly community has proposed many such explanations. Some of them I find only marginally more credible than actual miracles, but others I find prima facie quite plausible. Point being: There is no shortage of alternative hypotheses about Christianity's origins. If you personally find none of them credible except your own, so be it.

I believed they were all true for a few years, during my years as a fundamentalist. After I stopped believing in miracles, I continued to think that the gospels were mostly true with respect to their nonsupernatural elements. I believed that for most of my adult life, until only about 10 years ago.

I'm quite convinced that it fits very well indeed.

Perhaps to make a point about how spiritually enlightened a person can be in spite of being unknown and unimportant.

Yep. I have no argument at all with that.

I don't assume it. I infer it as the likeliest explanation for all the extant evidence about Christianity's origins.

Oh? In every library and bookstore I've ever visited, the works of fiction have outnumbered the works of nonfiction.

Maybe you mean to suggest that it's harder to explain people believing that a story about a nonexistent person is a true story. I don't think that that is as rare an occurrence, historically speaking, as a lot of people seem to suppose. At any rate, it is certainly not the case that if it happened with Jesus, then that would have been the only time it ever happened.

I don't think that's how the gospels came to be written.

I have no idea who they were, but there were many people involved in the process. I'm not sure what convergence you're referring to. The documentary record suggests a great deal of divergence instead.

You might be supposing that I think Christianity began with the gospels. I don't. I think Christianity as we know it started with a religion that Paul joined sometime in the early middle first century and for which he provides the earliest surviving documentation. His Jesus Christ, I believe, was not anyone who had ever lived in this world. When the gospel stories about Jesus of Nazareth began circulating, many decades after Paul's time, some Christians got the idea that their central character was the same person Paul had written about, and in due course, that idea became orthodox.

By the time the gospels were written, it was widely presumed that Christianity had begun as a Jewish sect. It would follow that in any story about its founder, he would be a Jew.

I've already noted the possibility that the storytellers wanted to say something about the irrelevance of credentials to spiritual wisdom. As for his popularity, the gospels claim that Jesus was extremely popular with the masses. And why, according to the stories, did the Jewish authorities want him dead? Because he was getting too high a profile, that's why.

Probably nobody would. That is one reason I doubt that the man actually existed. If there was a real Jesus of Nazareth, then he was just another itinerant Jewish preacher, maybe with a lot of charisma but certainly no miracle-worker. But in that case, it is not credible that he would have been deified, especially by any group of Jews. But according to the earliest known Christian writings (Paul's), he was deified within a very years after his death. That is not credible, and so I infer that there probably was no real Jesus of Nazareth.

Eternal life.

Anybody who would listen.

Same reason any salesman has ever sold anything. There was a market for it. And there still is.

I do not believe and never have believed that monetary gain is the only thing that can motivate people to propagate ideas that they believe in.

They didn't have to predict anything. Do you think Joseph Smith or any of his contemporaries had any inkling of how successful the Mormon religion would become? Do you think Muhammad knew or needed to know how successful Islam was going to be?