Diogenes the Cynic

I agree. Freetrader does not appear to be interested in a dialogue or in having his questions answered. He's ignoring the answers he's been repeatedly given, ignoring the questions that are being asked of HIM, and at this point simply engaging in strident repetition of the same fatuous and amply refuted witnessing points. There's no debate going on here, just a street corner preacher harranguing passers-by.

freetrader

PhilosopherJay:
One could argue with your oversimplified psychoanalysis of the ancients and their view of the world vs. ours today. It's questionable that they really took the stories of the gods literally any more than we today take our TV and movie heros literally. Millions of TV viewers talk about the characters almost as if they are real people -- can you really prove a basic difference in the manner of believing in such fiction characters today vs. belief in the gods and other fiction characters 2000 years ago?

Perhaps our own mythologies today will be seen as equally naive by those of the distant future. In 10,000 C.E. they might lump us in with those of the 1st century, saying "those naive primitives back in the first 2-3 millenia C.E. believed in supernatural tales and other fictions because they didn't have the sophisticated information sources we have today. By the year 2000 they were entertaining themselves by putting their myths into motion pictures and other images on their primitive viewing machines, and their tales and myths were believed by the overwhelming majority of people who viewed them religiously every day and worshipped their hero figures and didn't understand that they were only fiction. They couldn't distinguish between fiction and non-fiction like we can today. Don't believe anything from those 21st-century savages -- it's all fairy tales."

It can be argued that stories of the supernatural and of miracles and superhuman feats are just as prevalent today as ever, and people seem to believe such folklore as much today as they did 2000 years ago.

Yes, today we have more information sources, but that also means more sources for conveying our fictitious hero stories, and with mass media we are more susceptible to being brainwashed and propagandized and manipulated into believing what those in power think is good wholesome material for us, and although there may be a greater diversity of manipulators out there competing with each other, which is good, they also have much larger audiences to manipulate and can stampede huge masses of people toward this direction or that, having at their disposal immense technological tools for manipulating us that were unavailable to the story-tellers 2000 years ago.

And for all we know, if those from 2000 years ago could somehow have seen ahead and viewed us today, after marveling at some of our technology (or perhaps being disappointed at what little progress we've made), they might shake their heads in dismay at our mythologies and pathetic hero figures and wonder how we can be so manipulated and stampeded into believing all the garbage we take for granted, but which they could recognize as being fiction, being outside our culture and therefore free from all the programming we undergo from infancy.

We keep hearing the cliche that in those days there were millions of miracle-workers running around and people believing fairy tales without any skepticism and no sophistication to distinguish fact from fiction, as if separating fact from fiction inherently means filtering out everything that resembles a miracle story.

Obviously there were lots of miracle stories back then, just as there are today, and the vast majority of these are fiction. But there are different kinds of such stories -- they are not all to be lumped into one category.

There were far more fiction stories that were NOT miracle stories than ones that were. Fiction does not equal miracle stories. We can identify fiction in many ways, and just saying "It's a miracle story so it must be fiction" is a gross distortion.

If the mythologies of that time shed light on whether the Jesus stories are credible, then we need to look at particular ones, maybe just one or two that are the most relevant, and examine the nature of them and compare them to the ones in the NT accounts of the Jesus acts.

I notice there isn't much interest in doing this, because the inevitable result is that those mythologies have very little resemblance to the Jesus acts and really do not shed any light on the latter.

Simply put, when a real comparison is made, the Jesus acts have a much higher probability of being true, or of reflecting real events similar to the ones described in the NT accounts, whereas the mythologies which are imagined to be similar to them are much less credible and of much lower probability.

So instead of just repeating the same cliche over and over about the simple-minded ancients and their myths, offer one or two examples (choose the best ones for comparison) and let us examine them seriously. You will probably be disappointed as you go looking for your examples and cannot find any good ones to make your case.


Can you prove they accepted the mythological stories as facts? And where is the proof that only those who were literate had doubts about the mythologies, or that only the illiterate believed the mythologies literally while the literate did not? I think you are grossly oversimplifying the dichotomy between the literate and the illiterate.

Further, the gospel miracle stories are not necessarily in the same category as those mythological stories. There are similarities and there are important differences. Also there are important differences between one gospel miracle story and another. Not all these stories can be lumped into the same category, as though they must all collectively be equally true together or equally false together. No, some of them are more credible than others, or some more probable and others less.

Also, any particular healing story about Jesus is likely to have incorrect details in it. It is difficult to speculate someone being present with pen and papyrus right on the spot to note down the time and place and names of the ones healed and so on.

Also some stories may be mainly fiction, though they were written by someone who sincerely believed such events did happen, from popular rumors, and the details they filled in were extensive enough to say the whole story as recorded is really fiction, and yet still it may reflect real events from 10 or 20 or 30 years earlier. These then would be similar to "historical fiction" which can be a reliable guide to what really happened, though the particular details from the storyteller are fictitious.

Continuous pontificating about the 1st-century simpletons and unreliability of anything they say is rather pointless until we single out particular examples for serious comparison. Some stories are almost certainly fiction, but others are in a more doubtful category. To throw them all out uncritically and condemn all such accounts as fiction is just as naive as saying one must believe or disbelieve everything in the Bible uncritically without distinguishing one part from another.

The same is true with judging the accuracy of Homer or Herodotus or Virgil: some of what they say is fiction, some is doubtful, and some has a certain probability of being accurate. We can pick and choose, we don't have to lump it all into one big heap and pronounce one verdict on all of it. And likewise not all miracle accounts can be lumped together without distinction into one heap and declared all true or false.


Do libraries necessarily cause people to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction? It's in the libraries where all the fictions were recorded so people could learn them and become programmed to believe them, and then go out and teach them to others.

Perhaps the information channels serve as much to promote fiction and brainwash people as to improve their ability to separate fiction from reality. Your point that users of libraries automatically are made more sophisticated at distinguishing fact from fiction is an oversimplification.


You think they concentrated on the few skeptical and cynical writings? No, they read the myths and the religious scrolls and poetry that contained myths and decrees from those in power and the "histories" which contained more myths. And 90% of the philosophers they read were as much believers in the myths as the average man on the street.

How many of the classical authors derided the myths and gave logical arguments against believing in the gods? These were a tiny percentage compared to those who promoted the legends and a minute percentage of the ones read by the literate who had access to libraries.

For all we know, the most sophisticated people in Roman society were peasants in the fields (maybe just a few who did a tedious job which allowed them to daydream while they worked, and whose thinking drifted off into asking questions about the world they found themselves in), who thought about things and figured out some answers, and if they had been able to get published and we could read them today we could see that they had a better understanding than Plato or Aristotle or other revered wise men of the ancient world.

The very best philosophers in history were undoubtedly the ones never published, if for no other reason than just because there are so many of them compared to the few who were published, and these only because they were rich or had connections to the rich and powerful and also because for whatever reason they had the luxury of not having to work in the field 90 hours per week and so had some leisure time and access to writing tools etc., none of which makes a person wiser or smarter but only luckier, and so we have no reason to assume these published authors really had inherent superior ability to understand the world over that of the average peasant in the field.

And so the point is that your 1% elite were not as sophisticated as you imagine and probably could not distinguish fact from fiction any better than a very large number of the lowest members of the social pyramid. I suggest within that 99% there were a greater number who had this sophistication than there were within the 1% elite, probably a much greater number, and their ideas just never got recorded.

Also, it was from within the elite that came all the originators of false beliefs and mythologies and scams, and they used the libraries and scrolls and their ability to read to help foist their deceptions onto the unwary.

So be careful not to exaggerate the superiority of the 1% elite to distinguish myth from reality and the great liberating role played by their scrolls and libraries.


"they" recruited? Who's this "they"? What "Christians"?

An error that you (and the others) keep making when you try to refute the theory I'm presenting (that Jesus likely did real miracle acts) is that you want to concentrate only on the ones recruited or proselytized and who naively believed the miracle stories, and you completely ignore the behavior of the ones doing the proselytizing.

You just assume these proselytizers exist somehow as a given, without any explanation, like a premise, or like space-and-time which needs no explanation but is just there always and forever without any need to take notice of it.

Where were these proselytizers in 30 CE? Did they exist at that time? Who were they? Where did they come from? When did they suddenly pop in on the scene? in 50 CE? 80? What got them going? Nevermind the naive ones being proselytized who were so easy to dupe into believing the Jesus tale. WHO WERE THE DUPERS?

Were they a conspiracy of body-snatchers who suddenly landed on the planet around that time? You just keep assuming they were there at some point and give no plausible explanation how their conspiracy got started.

Once the grand plot is under way, once the machine is rolling along, then yes, it is easy for the gullible to be lured into believing the stories. But who was trying to lure them and why? There has to be an earlier point from which the stories originated, a point at which the messiah figure is adopted and the miracle stories added to his profile.

There is a pattern to the origination of such stories, and the one to whom these stories are attributed does not fit that pattern and is not analogous to the examples of miracle-workers you can name. The pattern is that the hero at the center of such stories is always a recognized figure with a long career, or he is an ancient hero with a long tradition. The Jesus case does not fit this pattern and so is irregular.

If you dismiss the Jesus miracle figure as just one more in a series of similar cases, it is necessary to compare him to other examples to see if he really fits into that series.

So what is needed is to get beyond the generalizations about the naive primitives who believe everything without critical thought, poking fun at their simple-mindedness and congratulating ourselves for being superior and smarter than they were, and instead look into particular examples of other miracle accounts of the period for comparison.

Is the Jesus case really just one more of those or does it go into a special category, and if the latter, how unique is that category? If this is a totally singular case, then perhaps the probability of such uniqueness is really less than the more simple explanation that he must have actually performed the miracle acts, which explains how the proselytizers bypassed the normal channels and came to choose this unlikely Galilean as their messiah hero figure.

freetrader

PhilosopherJay, continued:

This put-down language to describe those of the 1st century is not helpful in getting at the truth about what really happened. If you want to be a closed-minded dogmatist, you can automatically rule out every story about anything unusual in history -- it has to be fiction. But if you allow unusual events, then the question becomes: how unusual? It's just a matter of degree -- there is nothing inherent to "miracle" events that makes them absolutely impossible, whereas other unusual events are possible. There is nothing logical about drawing that line.

We can distinguish different kinds of "miracle" accounts and say some are less likely than others. You can try to define "miracle," but any definition you come up with will not clearly identify every case for certain -- there will be borderline cases or examples of something which we cannot clearly put into or outside that definition. In the final analysis, it's just a matter of some reported unusual events being so rare that we must be highly skeptical, others being less rare and so a little less doubtful but still less than 50% probable, and others that are believable but still unusual or puzzling, and so on, with every shade of gray in between.

In Apocryphal writings there are stories of Jesus making mudpies which he tossed into the air and which turned into birds and flew away. Or a story about Mary who floated up and down the stairs without touching the steps with her feet. And so on. Such stories as these are not in the same category as healing miracles done by Jesus. However, they are similar to some other Bible miracle stories, like turning water into wine, which is more dubious, so it is necessary to distinguish and reasonably judge that some stories are more probable than others. Some examples of "paranormal" events are more likely than others -- to just slosh them all together into one category and say it's all hogwash is uncritical and lazy and rash. Some highly unusual events do happen which are difficult to explain by current science.


But why not a fictional Greek or Roman figure? Or if the targeted audience wanted an Eastern hero, why not a Syrian or Arabic or Hindu figure, etc.? There were many ready-made fictions already available, which could easily be molded into whatever shape would meet the demand. Or if it had to be someone totally new, they could have fabricated a fictional Egyptian or Persian or Phoenician figure, etc. -- a Jew from Galilee would be about the least likely choice for a fictional hero to offer to the Greeks and Romans as their new god.

What other example is there of a fictional hero, given a fictional place and time in history, who proceeds to become widely believed in as historical and worshipped as a god within 100 years after being invented? If it's true that fictionality is an advantage, then we should expect to see some other examples of this. It's an advantage and yet there's only one successful case in history?


In addition to the silliness of drawing comparisons to Batman and Superman, which were known by their fans to be fictional, you are continuing to miss the point by obsessing on the believers or consumers to whom the superhero is being marketed, rather than focusing on the more important players, i.e., the promoters of the product being marketed.

By drawing this comparison, you are showing that you believe the original Jesus promoters or creators consciously started out not believing their figure was real but knew he was a fiction and that the miracle stories were fictititious. Your analogy is false unless you think they made a conscious decision to promote a fiction character as a real historical figure. Actually, for your analogy to be correct, you must believe they even expected their intended audience or market to NOT believe in the fiction but to just rally around the hero figure the same way movie fans rallied around Superman and Batman.

On the other hand, if you're totally oblivious to the promoters and don't care about them, then you're not going to figure out how the Jesus figure came about and your analysis has no merit. To explain the origin of the miracle stories or the hero figure performing them, you have to account for whoever created and promoted the figure among the ignorant gullible masses to whom he was marketed.


Your argument works if you start from the premise that the hero figures being compared do not in fact perform the reputed acts attributed to them. Each has followers who believe they are for real, but both are "frauds" let's say. And so in such a case the "fraud" hero figure which is a total fiction has a greater chance of success or gaining popularity than the "fraud" hero figure who is a real historical person. Also the reputed acts attributed to them are similar.

So for example both hero figures are said to be baseball home-run champs. Both are really frauds, but one is fictional and the other a real historical person. So in that scenario, the fictional figure is more likely to win a following than the real historical person, and the truth is that neither is a home-run champ.

In other words, a fictional fraud is more likely to succeed than a real-person fraud, perhaps because the latter is more likely to get caught or is more likely to show weakness at some point (perhaps someone will see him picking his nose or he gets caught with a prostitute or something else that detracts from his image, whereas the fictional hero is never seen).

But that's only if you begin with the premise that the acts attributed to the hero are fictional, which is not the case in your examples above, but about cases of fraudulent persons who really had no accomplishment such as was claimed or believed.

But if you take the premise instead that the reputed great deeds of the hero are real acts performed by the real historical person (as in your above examples), then the truth is that this real person hero is more likely to become a success than a fictional character, because although we're assuming both have a following of believers, there is no way the followers of the fictional character can have the same degree of certainty of their hero that the real historical hero gains through actual performance of those deeds before live witnesses who attest to those deeds.

So for example, if some people believe in the fictional Superman, that figure might acquire a following, but it could never become as popular as a real Superman, if one should exist, who would really perform the Superman deeds for real. That real figure would surely be the most amazing of them all and would gain the greatest following of believers by far.

Likewise a real Babe Ruth would be more popular than a fictional home-run champ that no one ever sees. And of course any comparison of a Babe Ruth or Leon Trotsky etc. with Superman is innappropriate because you can only compare heros of the same type (a hero who saves the whole human race from annihilation will obviously be more popular than a hero who only topples a Czar or who only wins the World Series with a home run, assuming both are equally real or equally fictitious).

Probably the worst flaw in your argument comparing a fictional hero with a real historic reputed hero is that we don't have examples of the fictional heros (with followers who believe they are non-fictional real historic persons). We have fictional heros whose followers know they are fiction, but not ones with followers who believe they are real rather than fiction. What example of such a thing do we have from history?

For our purpose here, it must be a figure who was believed in soon after his alleged lifetime, 100 years later or so. This would rule out figures like Romulus & Remus and Hercules and Achilles, because if they are fictional no one believed in them 100 years after their reputed historic time, but only centuries later, whereas if they were real persons then they aren't examples of fictional characters.

Are there any examples of kings or emperors or great military commanders or great philosophers or prophets who were revered within 100 years of their reputed time in history but who were totally fictional characters who did not exist at all?

I think you are proposing something which might be totally unprecedented in history. If Jesus was such a figure, totally fictional, then he is probably the only example, the one unique singular example in all history of a figure who became believed in literally and widely revered as a great hero within 100 years of his alleged lifetime and yet who really was a total non-existent fictional character.

Of all the possible fictional characters historically, what case would come the closest to such a thing? Shakespeare? Johnny Appleseed? Paul Bunyan? King Arthur? Zorro? Rip Van Winkle? If we include bad guys, or villains, perhaps Count Dracula? Liberty Valence? Darth Vader? Notice how silly it gets trying to come up with examples.

None of them come very close. Either they are real historic persons, or obviously fiction and not believed in literally. There's probably someone who comes closer, but only someone with a very limited reputation and with a very small band of followers, not a group that spread rapidly like the early Christ cults in the 1st and 2nd centuries.


No, the normal beliefs in the supernatural were attached to long-standing deity figures and to ancient heros and to famous celebrities with long public careers. The emergence of the Jesus figure with superhuman power does not fit into the normal pattern of beliefs in the supernatural and requires a different kind of explanation.


There have been many times when the information transference technology was as poor or worse than at this period, so why don't we have other examples of the Jesus scenario, i.e., a hero figure arising as a nobody with no reputation or celebrity status like all the other great miracle-workers and prophets, and spreading rapidly to widespread hero status within 100 years or so. We should expect more Christ figures, and yet there is only one.

How can you claim to have easily explained something which is a unique singular case and yet your explanation calls for other instances of the same phenomenon, since the causes you cite span vast reaches of time and cover all cultures and environments around the globe? We should be seeing similar Christ figures popping up many times throughout history and throughout the planet on all continents.

These could be real historic figures or fictional characters -- whichever the Jesus figure is, we should see the same such figures popping up in many times and places rather than only one. The closest ones we see were all sages or prophets who had long careers and worked for decades to accumulate their following, and likewise reputed wonder-workers with long careers to establish their reputations and get their names into the history books.


You mean all other civilizations outside the Roman Empire were able to distinguish fiction from non-fiction and had no similar mythologies of their own? Since that's obviously not the case, and virtually all other cultures had the same psychological needs you're describing, plus the lack of information technology which you also note as a factor, then we should be seeing similar Christ figures throughout other cultures as well, not just in the Greco-Roman world.

Again you are obsessed with psychoanalyzing the ones who are targeted by the proselytizers and believe what is presented to them, but you overlook the proselytizers themselves, as if they are to be taken for granted and need no explanation. To explain how the Jesus cult took hold and spread, you have to explain those who packaged the new miracle messiah figure and marketed him to these innocent unsuspecting masses.

What drove those proselytizers? Yes, there were people who invented miracle stories, either somehow believing them even though they were fictional, or knowing they were fictional but judging that the masses needed such stories.

But, they did not then attach such fictions to an unknown figure who had no credentials and no standing as a revered figure. Nor did they attach them to a totally non-existent fictional figure. What drove them to either invent the fictitious Galilean figure or to seize hold of a nobody Galilean to make him into a god to be sold to the unsuspecting masses?

Until you explain what drove these ones, the ones who mass marketed this new hero figure to the masses, you have not explained how the "good news" of this messiah figure became established and spread rapidly in the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Transient

Freetrader:
Maybe you could summarize your last 2 posts in less than 100 words and I might read it.
If the value of a post was determined by the length of it then you would be worth reading but sadly, for you, that is not the case.

DrZoidberg

It still doesn't explain it. The miracles attributed to Jesus were standard reported events for all kings and so called "heroes" of the time. If you use your logic we'd have to accept all those miracles as well, which makes Jesus a run-of-the-mill miraculous special person.

You could posit that those were false and only the ones that happened to Jesus were true... but you'd have trouble arguing for it.

freetrader

Diogenes the Cynic:

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

The spit story is worth noting. The Jesus miracle stories could be reflective of real events, but we don't have to take the details seriously. Of course, who knows what awkward techniques might have been used? what sordid details might be omitted so as not to dirty up the picture?

Hopefully Jesus did do cures without requiring such untidy methods as spitting in the mud and smearing the muddy slime into the eyes of the hapless victim. This kind of detail is the fictional element we can attribute to the writer without insisting therefore that the entire healing component of the Jesus picture is fiction.

A more rational explanation is that there is a basic core to the story that is true, which in this case is the basic healing act, to which the story-teller adds the fictional element to replace details which were easily forgotten and lost because no writer was present at the event to record them.


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

DrZoidberg

If you pay attention to the narrative elements of myths around celebrities at the time it should be pretty obvious. The Messiah is the king of the Jews. To make Jesus come across as a run-of-the-mill king, Jesus had to be attributed the standard type miracles normally associated with kings. If they hadn't nobody would have believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

I think it's a mistake to see this as lying, or even bending the truth. This comes from an oral tradition that had a very liberal/relativistic view of the truth. They may very well have consciously invented the miracles, while not thinking of it as dishonest. The way we see Truth today is a later invention. People didn't really distinguish between appearance and reality up until quite late. It was a luxury of the upper classes well into the 19'th century. It's a concept we find almost impossible to accept today, but which has historically been the case.

To the Christians writing the Bible, the idea that anybody would take it literally, they would have found absurd. The concept of literal interpretation of text didn't exist then.

edit: This information can be read in any scholarly book about ancient texts, no matter the subject. I recommend Bart Ehrman's books. Lost Christianties was fantastic.

Transient

Just think about the pathetic RCC (catholic church) and the lengths they will go to to get one of their pets into sainthood.
They are prepared to lie and bend the truth so that a miracle can be attributed to their pet person in order that they qualify for the stupid title "Saint".
Pathetic but that is what humans do best - lie.
And we are supposed to trust that that same organization was honest from the beginning and didn't invent part, most or all of the junk in the NT?
Give me a break mate.

I might just as well believe that Merlin did real magic.

bacht

A quibble: I think it's accepted that the Pharisees had their own interpretation of scripture which conflicted with the Sadducee "minimalist" perspective. For instance many of the miraculous elements like resurrection and angelology seem to be traceable to the Persian reading of the Tanakh. And the DSS writers expanded messianic/apocalyptic themes well beyond the Hebrew scriptural references.

The idea of a Greek translation of the Bible might've dismayed hardliners, I don't know if there's any record of such a protest.

gdeering

NO that's what we believe now - today! Amazing, and it only took two thousand years!

I have a question for you (actually this is question #2) - do you believe in God, or only Jesus? Granted I have not read all of your very ernest long needlessly-talking-around-a-subject posts, but I see don't see any talk about God, so maybe you only believe in Jesus? If you believe in God, please answer my question #1.

Yours in brevity,


Gregg