jgoodguy

One could go to a Charismatic or other faith healing service and observe. My experience was that 'miracles' happened and at the end everyone went home and it was never mentioned other than in generalities and forgotten shortly.

Sheshbazzar

Oh yeah. the crap that I have heard 'testified' to over the years. One man was out hunting, and Jesus came, and sat down on a stump and had a long conversation with him. Or the guy that fell in the river and Jesus came down and pulled him out.
I have heard dozens of these types of stories first hand from the 'testifiers' I have known, and have read of hundreds more.
I remain skeptical.

Juststeve

Shesh:

And you are right to remain skeptical, but why? Because in the case of eyewitness testimony we are required to ask whether it is more likely that the things testified to occurred as testified, or that the witness is mistaken, deluded, drunk or lying. The assertion that a guy 2000 years dead saved me from drowning is so implausible that the other explanations win by default.

That is why I would reject walking on water or raising the dead even if we had eyewitness testimony. There is however nothing implausible about there being some guy named Jesus actually living in the first century C.E. or that he was a preacher, or that he gathered a following and was crucified. Things like that happened in that time and place.

Steve

aa5874

There is NOTHING implausible with the notion that Jesus was MYTH. The Greeks and Romans were worshiping MYTH Gods during the 1st century and were the same people who believed Jesus was the Son of God and the child of a Holy Ghost.

There were CHRISTIANS who worshiped a PHANTOM as the Son of a God when others were worshiping ZEUS.

You don't even understand that it is HIGHLY IMPLAUSIBLE that Jews would worshiped a man as a God or that a Jew was called the Messiah AFTER he was already dead.

Examine the Jesus story in gMark.

It would NOT have helped at all to claim Jesus was the Son of God because Jews considered such a claim as BLASPHEMY.

In gMark as soon as Jesus claimed he was the Son of the Blessed he was DEAD in less than 12 hrs.

It was NOT an Embellishment to call a Jewish man a God under Jewish Law. It was a Capital crime punishable by death.

It is CLEAR that the Jesus story is IMPLAUSIBLE and that there is NO credible evidence from antiquity to show that there were Jewish people who were called Christians that worshiped a KNOWN dead Jewish man as a God and called him the Messiah AFTER he died.

The Jesus cult of Christians is a 2nd century INVENTION since that is the time we have non-Christians like Celsus and Lucian that mention the stories about Jesus and when Christians discussed and debated the bodily nature of Jesus.

Doug Shaver

The inference is invalid for reasons having nothing to do with human nature.

GakuseiDon

That's more interesting then. I'm interested in how they thought in those times. Can you explain what you mean, or is there a particular author you had in mind?

My thoughts are that miraculous healings would have formed a backdrop to life of that time -- IOW the supernatural was part of the natural world -- so reactions to miracles would have been less surprise that they occurred and more suspicion of the source.

GakuseiDon

Yes, I'm not surprised. And my guess is it's because the miracles are a part of their everyday lives, and not because they thought the miracles didn't really happen.

Doug Shaver

I wasn't claiming anything about how they thought in those times. I was claiming something about what we can infer about what they thought from a religious propagandist's claim about what they thought.

Apparent faith healings might well have been commonplace, or at least widely perceived to be commonplace.

In some Christian sects, they still are. I used to be a member of one of those sects. I never witnessed an actual healing, but I heard plenty of testimonies about them. Funny thing about those testimonies. They were clearly intended to convince people that the healings really had occurred. But these testimonies were presented in church, i.e. to a group of people all of whom were supposed to be already convinced that miraculous healings were to be expected as a routine occurrence.

I should note that I attended a small church that rarely had visitors. There was no chance anybody was hoping to convert any skeptics with their testimony. Our services were normally attended only by people who were already believers. But the pastor was constantly reminding us, and we in the flock were constantly reminding one another, how important it was to keep on believing. And so any anecdote that seemed to support our beliefs got recycled a lot, and new anecdotes were always welcome. Nobody's reaction was ever "So what else is new?" Nobody's. Ever.

GakuseiDon

Fair enough.

jgoodguy

Miracles are part of the culture, next week there will be more miracles. They would defend the 'fact' that the miracles happened. OTOH there would be little or no investigation of the miracles in a tangible manner. Miracles such as speaking in tongues and prophecy would be confirmed by divine means.

My point was that in such a culture, which can be observed today, individual miracles are not especially notable. I can remember preachers speaking of the raising of the dead multiple times. If Jesus Christ was here today in the Charismatic culture, healing occasionally and raising dead occasionally, he would not be unique. Fake miracles can be created and spoken of more easily than real ones can be created. This deprecates the reputation of real miracles so that the real ones are lost in the mass of fake ones.

In brief, the skeptical claims that the miracles attributed to Christ just had to be reportable has a flaw. The NT miracles of Christ were not any more reportable than the average faith healer or magician.

Robert Prices makes the point, that early Christians would have to attribute miracles to Jesus to make him competitive with competing religions. A point also made by others.