bacht

There is also the question of whether an historical report resembles events known in our own world. The example was used here recently of war: we know that wars happen today, therefore we can accept that they happened in the past. Do miracles happen today? If not then why accept that they happened in the past?

The underlying assumption has to be the consistency of physics over historical time, with the consistency of human nature as a secondary assumption.

Toto

Actually, we assume that miracles never happened because every investigation into alleged miracles has revealed either mistake or fraud or a phenomenon that can be explained with ordinary scientific principles, and we assume that the same physical laws were in effect 2000 years ago as are now.

Modern Christian apologists have to argue that God can perform miracles and chose to just that one time 2000 years ago (more or less), but now for His own inscrutable reasons, refuses to perform any more.

show_no_mercy

lol

"Son" of man and "Sun" of man only make sense as a play on words in English. Do you think if English were good enough for Jesus and the gospel writers, that it should be good enough for us as well?

Transient

Well the gospel message is an incredible message to the poor so the church says.
So incredible that for anyone with a brain it is totally incredible.
It does offer what most human's need however - reason for existence, how it all happened & great hope for the future. What a product to sell eh? It's dynamite really.
No wonder it still sells.
When you are down & out - who cares about arguments as to whether it is real or not - just grab it and run with it.
What a crazy universe we live & die in.

show_no_mercy

It's not a presumption, it's a conclusion. Do you accept that since you got burned touching a hot stove the past 9,000 times that the next time you touch a hot stove it isn't going to burn you? This is basic induction. Miracles have never happened in 100% of the cases in modern times where miracles are said to have happened. Therefore it is reasonable inductive inference to conclude that miracles didn't happen in the past either.

Or are you also open to investigating Santa Clause, Thor, faeries, the Loch Ness Monster, Elvis still being alive, Tupac still being alive, UFO abductions, John Frum, and the myriad of other silly unevidenced propositions that run the gamut of human imagination with the same quick acceptance as the miracles in the NT?

If you remove the supernatural from these ancient sources and corroborate them with other contemporary ancient sources, then the chances are that we can start molding an accurate history. What we would call "objective history" didn't quite exist in the ancient world.

That's the entire purpose of peer review. Individual people can't be trusted.

Minimalist

Any history, when written by the winners, is of doubtful value.

And back then, history was always written by the winners.

spamandham

Are the Gospels credible history? ...do they offer reasonable grounds for being believed?

No. They're nomologically absurd at face value. But then, the same can be said of most ancient documents. That's why we analyze them.

So from that perspective, the right question is whether or not they hold value to us in understanding history. To that, I would say yes.

bacht

I suppose we can twist it different ways, seeing the gospels as a record of religious development, or as propaganda - history is never objective and never finished, there will always be new interpretations of existing evidence, or new evidence to interpret - there are often indirect benefits, like maybe learning about Greek vocabulary or manuscript production techniques etc

mountainman

Dear spamandham,

Saying yes is just the first step. We would really like to know a number of things about the historical appearance of the gospels such as:

1) who wrote them?
2) when were they written?
3) where were they written?
4) who recorded their writing?
5) what is out earliest physical evidence?
6) why were they written?
7) what are the non canonical gospels?

Now I imagine the mainsteam answers to this are:

1) were they written by Hegessipus' uncle Lithargoel?
2) were written really in the early 2nd century?
3) were they scribed in Greek in Rome?
4) did Papias record living eyewitnesses, does Eusebius cover all bases?
5) fourth century (Codex Sianaticus), excluding the P42 like (paleographic) fragments
6) they were written so that we could believe the word.
7) the non canonical gospels are a textual critics nightmare (too hard basket)

Best wishes,


Pete

Minimalist

I agree. But there are also outright lies inserted into the texts.