aa5874

But, it could have been the Phantom, the God-like Ghost-like Human apparition that supposedly did the miracles. The Phantom was believed to be in Judea during the days of Tiberius and apparently looked like human or the God/man called Jesus.

Marcion's Jesus,the Phantom, far exceded your critera. He was God before he came to Capernaum and so also was Jesus the God/man, the Creator, a God before he supposedly did a single miracle on earth.

Marcion's Jesus and the NT's God/man were considered powerful.


It was already known or believed that God had a son before the Son supposedly came and did miracles.

But your statement is just absurd.

When a person of no repute does something heroic then they will become heroes and then people may write or talk about them.

Again, another absurd and illogical statement. What was the status of Simon Magus before he did his first supposed magic trick?

It is with out doubt that a nobody can become somebody.

It MAY HAVE already been believed that God had a son before it was claimed Jesus did miracles on earth. The Son of God was believed to be powerful or the Creator who miraculously created the world.



Well, Jesus was believed to be the Son of God the Creator. Even in the NT, Jesus was believed to have existed as a God before he did a single miracle.

Doug Shaver

Yes. Widespread belief in someone doing miracles requires two conditions.

1. Somebody tells a story about a person who does miracles.

2. Lots of people believe the story.

freetrader

August 8, 2009 #6049508 / #171
aa5874


"extant source of antiquity"? The word "extant" usually refers to the original manuscripts, from the authors directly, rather than the dozens or hundreds of later copies of them produced over many centuries. We have virtually no "extant" manuscripts of anything from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. There are no extant manuscripts of Tacitus or Josephus or Livy or Virgil and so on. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls are not really "extant" manuscripts from the original authors, but are mostly copies of earlier lost manuscripts.

If "extant" is applied also to copies of earlier manuscripts, then what documents are NOT extant? As long as a copy exists, then the document or source is "extant" -- so even a 20th-century-printed bible is an "extant" copy of the original bible texts. The word "extant" used here is an example of pretending to say something when actually nothing is said.

The NT documents are virtual proof that Jesus was a reputed healer. You can give no good reason to disregard these documents as evidence, such as saying they are not an "extant source" and other such jargon which means nothing. If you throw out the gospel accounts as evidence, you must also throw out all recognized historians of the period and disregard most known history.

Perhaps Tacitus is more reliable than the Bible accounts, meaning the latter are treated with more skeptcism, just as Virgil's life of Aeneas, as historical fact, is treated with greater skepticism.

However, Virgil's account is evidence for the life of Aeneas and Homer's account is evidence for events of the Trojan War, despite the need for skepticism about the exact details. Actually, the gospel accounts are stronger evidence for its reported events than the writings of Homer or Virgil, having more corroboration than these and being closer in time to its reported events.

There is good reason to believe writers like Homer and Virgil were telling actual historical facts (along with the fiction) even when what they report comes only from them and is otherwise totally uncorroborated. And that reason is that there was ORAL TRADITION which they knew but which is lost to us today.

Oral tradition is a fact of the ancient world, far beyond what we understand today as oral tradition, in the age of printing and telecommunications and recording where committing it all to memory is no longer necessary. It is a virtual certainty that Homer and Virgil had access to facts of earlier centuries, from oral tradition, that helped them piece together their accounts. And the same is true for the NT writers, whose accounts are separated by less than 100 years, perhaps only 50 years, from the time of the reputed events.

The dogma that the gospel accounts are not legitimate evidence is based only on a bias which singles out only these documents, among the thousands from the period, as singularly unreliable as evidence for the events. Those who banish the NT writings to the unfit-as-evidence category cannot name one other document from the period which belongs in that category.

It is not legitimate to invent a special category only for one group of documents you don't like and say they have to be discounted because they are in that special category you created only for them. No, you have to give a reason why these particular documents do not count as evidence other than just that they belong in a reject category created only for them.


On the contrary, the New Testament writers are among the most well-known writers of all time. The Bible, which contains the accounts of Jesus the miracle-worker, is by far the most widely-read and -published and -quoted book ever, so what kind of mindlessness is it to say no well-known writer ever wrote about him?

In the first century of course they were not well-known. The only well-known writers in the 1st century AD were from centuries earlier, like Herodotus and Homer. No 1st-century writer was "well-known" in the 1st century. All the famous ones did not become well-known until centuries after their time.

But by 1000 AD, Paul and the gospel writers were more well-known, and are more well-known today, than Josephus or Tacitus or Suetonius or Livy and so on. Probably even by 500 AD.

The reason Jesus is overlooked by historians like the above is that he was not important in politics and had virtually no power or influence or high position or status in the 1st century, and unlike Simon Magus and other celebrities, his career was too short for him to amass a large following during his life, and it took decades for his reputation to spread widely.

What do the above historians have in common that separates them from the gospel writers? The answer is that they were all rich and had contact to those holding political power.

Writers who are wealthy and connected to those in high positions of power are just as likely as anyone else to be biased and unreliable in their factual account of events. They are propagandists and slanted toward one interest group or another. They are usually patriotic nationalists who take sides in the wars they report and also are promoting an ideology.

The standard historians report many singular events that are totally unreported (uncorroborated) by other sources, and yet we believe them routinely even for those one-source events. In the case of the Jesus miracle events, we have four independent sources (five for the resurrection event) which are closer in proximity to the reported events than the sources for most of our historical information from the general period.

freetrader

August 8, 2009 #6049669 / #173
spamandham

You mean any document 2000 years old is unreliable as evidence for anything? or anything that old can only be a comic book?

Why are these documents not legitimate evidence for the events they report? They are not irrefutable proof, but they are evidence, just as Homer is evidence for the Trojan War.


Because we rely on sources like these for most of our knowledge of history. The only reason to reject them is that one doesn't like the events they report or has an ideological bias against the subject matter.

(By "reliable" I don't mean they are absolute proof, or that they give us certainty, or that the reputed events must be included in history books as part of our "knowledge" of history. They are just an additional part of the historical record which includes many items that are in the uncertain category, for which there is evidence, but not proof.)

It is reasonable to be more skeptical, because of the miracle stories. But that doesn't mean these written accounts from the period are not legitimate evidence for the reputed events, just as other documents containing accounts of events are evidence. And this evidence is made stronger by the fact that there are four (five) sources for the events, rather than only one (as in the case of Apollonius of Tyana).

Even the one account for Apollonius is evidence that he too performed miracles, but it is weaker evidence because there is no corroboration as there is in the case of the Jesus miracles.

freetrader

August 9, 2009 #6050096 / #175
aa5874


To the Greeks and Romans in 30-35 AD he was a complete nobody, i.e., he was a nobody to them at the time that he lived. His reputation as a healer was restricted to Galilee and Judaea at that time. It's speculative how widespread his local reputation was, but it was definitely limited to that region until many years later.

By the time of Paul he must have had an increasing reputation among Greeks which provided Paul with a market for his risen Christ theology.


But only in Galilee and Judaea at first. It probably wasn't thousands until into the 40s, and the NT texts you refer to were not written until 70 AD and later. At the time of his execution he was still a nobody except among a limited local following. No one like that, ever before or since, was then mythologized into a miracle-worker or a deity.


This was written perhaps around 90-100 AD. In any case, there were probably a few local direct followers who called him "Christ" or "Messiah." This was not enough for a person to then become mythologized into a miracle-worker or deity long after his death. Any charismatic figure might gain a dozen or so devotees who call him by such titles. It takes more than this to become made into a widely-recognized deity figure.

Simon Magus became mythologized after a career of 20+ years of impressing audiences with his magic and charisma. Jesus did not have any such time period in which to accumulate disciples, and yet he became mythologized far beyond Simon Magus or others.


This really makes my point. This was the origin of his increasing reputation, not any mythologizing process. His fame spread because of his healing miracles. If you do not believe he really did any healing miracles, then you also should not believe this text which claims his fame as a healer spread far into Syria.

If he did not really do any healing miracles, then he would have had no fame, especially in such a short time span (1-2 years), and so at the time he was eliminated he would still have been a nobody.

To use a text like the above to prove that he was famous is only to concede to my point that he was becoming famous as a healer, and this could be due only to the fact that he actually did perform such healings, because nothing else can explain how his fame would spread.

If you're trying to disprove the miracle stories, you would do better to reject such texts as the above as fictional accounts invented 50 years later by the gospel writers falsely claiming he was famous long before he really was.

My point is that his reputation was limited at first to this general region, possibly including Syria, beyond which he was a nobody, and yet 20 years later Greeks and Romans were fertile ground for Paul's preaching about his resurrection -- you can't cite any other example of someone being widely mythologized so soon and being adopted as a god by an alien culture.

The only plausible explanation is that he really did perform the miracle acts and this inspired his followers to spread the word about him, and his fame spread far out beyond that region in the following years.


Yes, but the fame of Jesus at the time he lived was limited to Galilee and Judaea and some bordering regions. It was within this region only that he aroused the attention of Herod and other establishment figures during his short career.


But most Jews did not consider Jesus to be a Messiah, and to Greeks and Romans a Jewish Messiah was a nobody, or was a figure that meant nothing to them. Also, if Jesus did no miracle acts, then he was a nobody who would have no appeal to Jews or Greeks or Romans and would have been totally forgotten, and we today would know nothing of him.

Those who say Jesus did no miracle acts such as described in the gospel accounts need to explain what happened to cause him to be mythologized into the miracle-working deity figure we find in those accounts. I.e., they need to explain how a nobody figure can become mythologized into a god.

Steven Carr

The evidence about the miracles of Jesus is extremely persuasive,provided only that you are open to reasoned argument.

See http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm for documented evidence about the miracles of Jesus.

Steven Carr

Paul writes about the miracle signs that were needed before Jews would believe.

1 Corinthians 1
Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Jews demanding miraculous signs? What sort of Jesus did they think Christianity was in the business of supplying?

Doug Shaver

No, that is not what "extant" refers to. Not usually, not sometimes, not ever. "Extant" means "surviving" i.e. "still in existence."

The word for a manuscript produced by the original author, as opposed to a copy thereof, is "autograph."

freetrader

August 9, 2009 #6050222 / #176
PhilosopherJay


Behind the sarcasm, there is a serious argument attempted here, by analogy. The uniqueness of Jesus, or what separates him from all other reputed miracle-workers, is that within his life he had no wide reputation or status or recognition; while the uniqueness of Spiderman is that he's the only superhero who was bitten by a radioactive spider.

By the logic of this analogy, not being bitten by a radioactive spider is a causal factor in someone being mythologized into a superhero. By not being bitten by such a spider, one gains a special advantage, one is made special and gains a following of admirers who adore the not-bitten one and might desire to make him into a superhero and recruit others to revere him, BY VIRTUE OF HIS NOT BEING SO BITTEN.

So there is a greatly-increased likelihood of one becoming a reputed hero and having superhuman feats attributed to him if he is not bitten by a radioactive spider, and someone who actually is bitten by such a spider has much less chance of becoming made into a superhero, because receiving such a bite greatly decreases his opportunity and his appeal and the occasion to become mythologized into such a hero.

So if a person gains a reputation as a superhero but was bitten by a radioactive spider, the best explanation how he gained that superhero reputation has to be that he really did perform superhuman heroic acts, because the usual explanation for such a reputation, mythologizing, is ruled out, since that happens only to people who are NOT bitten by such a spider.

If this is the argument, then this can be analogous to the argument that Jesus is unique among reputed miracle-workers because he had such a short career and was a nobody or a non-celebrity with no status or widespread recognition by the time of his death, thus reducing or eliminating the chance of becoming mythologized into a superhuman.

All other reputed miracle-workers without exception had a long illustrious career and status and widespread recognition during their life. This characteristic was an essential element in the process of their becoming mythologized and promoted to miracle-worker status.

Now the only exceptions to this, if any, are rare cases of someone who actually did possess some power to perform miracle acts, and the reason they gained a reputation for this is that they actually did perform such deeds which were remembered and recorded.

At least one example of this was Rasputin the Mad Monk, who had power to heal a hemophiliac child -- his reputation came from the fact that he actually was able to stop the child's bleeding, which baffled all the doctors who had treated the child without success.

Although Rasputin gained a wide reputation, this was a result of his having this healing power and not mythologizing. His notoriety came as a result of his having this unusual ability, as opposed to most reputed healers, who really had no such power but acquired the reputation for it as a result of already having gained status and recognition and acquiring a large number of admirers over many years, which led to them becoming mythologized.

This pattern is always there with any reputed miracle-worker. Even when the hero has no such power at all, still the legends develop and become attached to the hero because of the many admirers who want to believe he has power. Often the hero's charisma has a strong impact, but to gain the reputation for superhuman powers always takes many years of accumulating admirers by performing admirable acts and giving speeches that impress audiences.

Without first gaining such recognition and impressing people and winning admirers over many years, or acquiring political power or vast wealth or influence, one does not have the prerequisite conditions necessary to become mythologized into a miracle-worker or hero with superhuman powers. Widespread recognition or status is a necessary causal factor which leads to such a mythologizing process in cases where the reputed figure had no such powers in fact and the reputation was fictional.

You cannot name an example of such a reputed miracle-worker (with a fictional reputation) who did not first have widespread recognition and status or high position of influence in the culture. This is an unusual condition, extremely rare, met only by a tiny percentage of the population, and all reputed miracle-workers came from this small minority class of the population.

But in the Spiderman analogy the fact of never having been bitten by a radioactive spider is not a prerequisite condition to one becoming mythologized into a superhero, making this a false analogy. This is not a rare condition (not being bitten by a radioactive spider), but a common one, shared by virtually everyone.

To explain how a few rare individuals with no superhuman powers become mythologized into superheroes, you have to point to something unusual about such individuals, or something uncommon which gives them an advantage over the vast majority who do not have that distinction.

To compare Spiderman to the historical Jesus, who was different than all other reputed miracle healers, it's not enough to claim that other reputed heroes like Superman and Batman and Captain Marvel became mythologized into superhumans because they were never bitten by a radioactive spider, or that because they were never bitten by such a spider they had some advantage over all others which helped them to thus become mythologized, and that therefore Spiderman is unique among all superheroes because he is the first one ever to overcome this disadvantage and become a reputed hero despite having been bitten by such a spider.

There is a causal connection between condition (1) -- having fame or wide recognition as a highly-regarded figure of status, and condition (2) -- becoming reputed as a miracle-worker hero. Condition (1) often leads to condition (2), so there is a significant percentage of the former (those having fame) who become the latter (mythologized into a miracle-worker). And condition (2) occurs ONLY if condition (1) is met, i.e., no one becomes mythologized into a miracle-worker without first acquiring wide recognition and celebrity status.

But there is no causal connection between the condition of not being bitten by a radioactive spider and the condition of becoming reputed as a superhero. The percentage of the former (those not bitten) who then become reputed superheroes is no greater than that of the general population who become reputed superheroes, i.e., not being bitten by a radioactive spider does not increase one's chance of becoming mythologized into a superhero.

Obviously this analogy fails to address the uniqueness of the historical Jesus, and failure to find any analogy that really does fit only highlights further the point that this one historical figure truly stands out uniquely among all reputed miracle healers in history as by far the most convincing example for which there is no explanation except that he must really have performed the acts attributed to him, because if there was any other comparable case, surely someone would have produced one by now, considering the hysterical examples being offered in a desperate attempt to find such a comparison.


This is an irrefutable argument by analogy. The bottom line (dispensing with the analogizing and sarcasm) is: written records are no evidence for anything that ever happened in the past, and so there is no reliable historical record at all about any past events.

So yes, based on that premise, we have no evidence for the miracle acts of Jesus. This is a one-size-fits-all refutation of any claim about any historical event.

Thus, there is no reason to believe that something happened just because someone wrote it down -- the accounts could have been written down without the reported events needing to have really happened, and so nothing that is recorded in written accounts ever really happened, or the fact of its being recorded is no reason to believe it ever happened.

Yes, on this logic you can refute the claim that the historical Jesus performed miracle acts.

freetrader

August 9, 2009 #6050230 / #177
Toto


OK, so in other words, if the gospel accounts had never been written, then today we would have the correct account of his life, which was that he was a famous celebrity in the period around 30 AD, with his fame spreading across the Roman Empire, and "Jesus Christ" was a household name in Rome, probably a topic of controversy, the l'ordre du jour, in the Senate and constantly on the mind of Tiberius Caesar, and there was widespread recognition of this and numerous documents of the period attesting to this fact.

But, according to Toto, because the gospel writers made up the fiction that he was a humble nobody and conned everyone into believing it, the real Jesus -- the famous celebrity -- got lost, all the evidence documenting his life was destroyed, to make the record conform to what the gospel writers dictated (that he was a nobody) and all the knowledge of him which was so widespread at the time is now totally obscured from the historical record.

And this fact debunks my claim that he was not widely known at that time, when he was executed, but was a celebrity like Vespasian or Apollonius of Tyana or Simon Magus, with widespread recognition, and so fits the pattern of all other reputed miracle-workers.

It is interesting what hysterical extremes some posters here have to resort to in order to prove that Jesus did not perform miracle acts.


Yes, if you start out with the dogmatic premise that the healing acts ipso facto absolutely could not have occurred. Except for this dogma, the most reasonable explanation by far is that those acts did happen.

How did the gospel writers get together and decide to invent this story? Did they sit around the coffee table and argue over the details of the story? Each of them gives a different version of the story, with inconsistencies not possible if they had collaborated. And yet there's enough agreement that it's unthinkable they could have each invented their own version independently of the others, because then we'd have 4 totally separate stories.

Do you imagine they collaborated on the discrepancies in their accounts? Did one of them say, "How about putting some discrepancies in our different accounts. How about if you put in your account that there were TWO demoniacs there, while in my account it's only one, so our accounts will differ slightly, and the Bible critics in the 19th century will be baffled"?

Those gospel writers were sneaky little rascals.


What is implied is that you cannot dismiss the miracle stories about Jesus by comparing him to those other examples of reputed miracle-workers. We can explain those other cases as examples of mythologizing, which occurs in the case of famous celebrities who amassed a widespread following of admirers over a long career of being exposed and acquiring their reputation. This did not happen in the case of Jesus, so the miracle stories attached to him are not a case of mythologizing -- you cannot show that unknown figures become mythologized into miracle-workers.

Whatever mythologizing took place in the case of Jesus had to have taken place AFTER his reputation as a miracle-worker became known, because before this he did not have any reputation to which the miracle stories could become attached, as happened in the case of Vespasian and Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana and others.


No, an indication that it was all made up would be a basic similarity to all the other examples of reputed miracle-workers, where the pattern is the same as in those cases. That the case of Jesus does not fit the pattern of the other cases indicates that in his case the reported events are likely true and that the account is not fictitious as it is in the other cases.

Why is it that all the other reputed miracle workers that can be cited are examples of celebrities who had a widespread reputation during their life, which obviously can explain how they became mythologized, while the example of Jesus is the only one where this was not the case?

Even if you imagine the gospel writers were being sneaky and said "Let's have a unique miracle-worker -- let's invent a nobody figure who had no reputation or long career" etc., you still have to explain how these plotters came to collaborate and coordinate their stories, even to the point of deliberately injecting minor discrepancies into their separate accounts. This is not plausible.


No, there's no way to explain how this could happen. Who invented this character? You can't say the gospel writers invented him, because Paul was already preaching the risen Christ figure before the gospel accounts were written. So you have to say Paul is really the one who invented this character.

But then, where did the miracle healing acts come from? If the gospel writers invented those, why did they choose Paul's risen Christ as the figure to attach them to? For this to make sense, you have to assume that the gospel writers considered Paul to be a clown of some sort, and as a prank, they chose his risen Christ figure as their object and attached the miracle stories, as a gag.

Paul's messiah figure so far was a total flop -- no one was buying it, because it was nothing but a hallucination by Paul, and he was making a fool out of himself trying to sell this unrecognized alien hero figure to Greeks who had no interest in his hallucinations and just laughed him off the stage every time.

"Get a load of that wacko Paul," the gospel writers must have thought. "Hell, we don't have anything better to do -- let's add some flesh and bones to his Messiah delusion. Let's give his risen Christ figure some historical background -- we'll say he came out of Galilee and did miracles and went to Jerusalem --" etc., and then maybe they disputed over some details and went their separate ways to each produce their own account.

And what brought the gospel writers together in this caper? It had to have been a gag, rather than something serious, because the serious elements in the gospel accounts are too much in conflict for us to identify any unifying factor. The final writers/editors must have thought their content was a jumble of silly nonsense which they put together as a gag.

Was the writer of John part of this plot? If not, why did he plug into it instead of inventing his own separate Christ figure? How did his Christ come to be so similar to that of the other three if he had nothing to do with them? And yet, if he was in on the plot, why are there such discrepancies? What was their purpose for injecting these discrepancies? Why, e.g., does John totally omit Mary's name when he puts the mother of Jesus into his account? Did the plotters plan this? Did one say, "How about leaving out the name of his mother in your version"? This makes no sense. The idea that they plotted this and invented the Jesus fiction cannot be taken seriously.

On the other hand, if they were not making it up but were each piecing together an account of the original Jesus from whatever sources they had, then the confusion is easily explained -- they included items they did not understand or identify with but which they believed was credible or really traced back to the historical figure himself, rather than a fictitious character they were inventing. And, of course, there was no collaboration between the gospel writers, but each one wrote his own account independently, using whatever source was available.

So either they were motivated by a capricious whim to foist a gag and threw together this hodge-podge of hocum which they jokingly drew out from sources they considered wacko, plus added some creativity of their own, or they were motivated by a desire to piece together an account which was true to the original events, back around 30 AD, and did some picking and choosing to fashion their individual account to reflect their own interpretation or worldview.

In the latter case, which obviously is more realistic, there had to already be a tradition about Jesus, spreading among Greeks and Romans by word of mouth, which provided an audience or market for the gospel accounts, which would have served no purpose if the Jesus character was a totally unknown alien figure to be invented by an evangelist and drawn out of a hat from nowhere, in which case it would have been rejected out of hand by the Greeks and Romans and the evangelist run out of town on a rail.