lpetrich

The early theologian Origen is best-known for his having followed Matthew 19:12; he had made himself a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.

But at least according to Bertrand Russell in A History of Western Philosophy, he had the apologetic argument that if one believes stories like those of Romulus and Remus, the siege of Troy, and so forth, why believe those and not those of the Bible?

I note this because the common skeptic position is essentially a form of inverse Origenism; if one considers the accounts of Romulus and Remus, the siege of Troy, etc. essentially fictional, then why not consider similar things in the Bible fictional?

Thus, if one rejects the story that the founder of Rome was the son of a god and a virgin, why not also reject the story that Jesus Christ had been the son of a god and a virgin? And if one rejects the accounts of divine intervention in human history in the accounts of the siege of Troy, why not reject similar accounts of divine intervention in the Bible?

Also, if one rejects the stories of Romulus, Hercules, Apollonius of Tyana, etc. rising up into heaven, when why not also reject the story of Jesus Christ rising up into heaven?

This does not mean that the Bible does not contain any real history. Continuing this analogy, the Roman historian Livy's description of Romulus and Remus and their career is not held to make the rest of his work on early Rome totally unreliable; in fact, he's widely considered fairly reliable apart from such stories as the Romulus and Remus one.

I think that David Hume's miracle criterion is a reasonable one: would that miracle's not happening be an even bigger miracle?

And David Hume noted that the miracles described in many ancient histories don't seem to happen anymore -- and he lived in the 18th century. One nice bit of evidence for that is the Vatican's criteria for recognizing a saint: what miracles had he/she worked? In the Middle Ages, miracle-working by saints was very common; here's Richard Carrier's abbreviated account, from the "Modern Library" section of this site ("Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection"):

In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years previous. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprung from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin. Yet do we believe any of it? Not really. And we shouldn't.

Yet when the Vatican looks for miracles to attribute to saints who lived over this past century, it has to scrape the bottom of the barrel, because all it can find is a few recoveries from disease. Where is one with the capabilities of St. Genevieve?

In fact, where is anyone living today with well-documented miracle-working capaibilities similar to St. Genevieve's?

And if one rejects the miracles worked by St. Genevieve, why not also reject the miracles of the Bible?

Somehow, I expect Amos to come up with some flaky allegorical interpretation of St. Genevieve's career...

Kosh

No... wait...stop... doh. You had to ask. This
should be interesting....

<a href="http://www.mcn.org/1/Miracles/" target="_blank">http://www.mcn.org/1/Miracles/</a>



(And let's not forget the MetaCrock has a Miralce page...)

[ February 17, 2002: Message edited by: Kosh ]</p>

lpetrich

Very cute pages -- but not quite a present-day St. Genevieve.