"Repeating" -- The only evidence against the MIRACLES OF JESUS is the dogmatic premise that miracles cannot happen.
Otherwise, all the evidence indicates that these events did happen.
We have equal or more evidence for the Jesus miracles than we have for most historical facts from that period.
Nonsense. The Biblical stories are works of fiction, a combination . . .
No, they are works containing both fact and fiction, like virtually ALL the ancient writings, including the historical writings.
. . . a combination of existing mythology that predates the Bible, and . . .
You can't name anything in the Jesus miracle stories which is based on earlier mythology.
Or rather, I'll give you the only one Jesus miracle story which might be derived from earlier legend. The multiplying of the fish and loaves might be taken from an earlier Elisha miracle story (II Kings 4:42-44) which resembles it. The resemblance may be too great to only be a coincidence. So it's reasonable to suspect something fictional about the later Jesus story, as possibly caused by this earlier version of Elisha multiplying loaves to feed a large group.
But there is no other example showing a connection of a Jesus miracle act to any earlier mythology. All you can claim is that there are earlier miracle stories of various kinds. You could just as well claim that stories about Daniel Boone or George Washington are based on earlier mythology. You could claim the voyage of Christopher Columbus was based on Moses going into the wilderness to reach the Promised Land. There are more similarities between these two stories than there is between Jesus and earlier stories.
. . . and stories based on divine revelation/inspiration, as some Christians claim.
Herodotus was inspired to write his histories. Many writers might have benefited from "divine revelation" or "inspiration" in one way or another. This doesn't mean there were no facts in their writings.
The biblical writings contain both fact and fiction, as ALL the ancient writings do.
They say John the Baptist preached and baptized people in the Jordan River and that he was beheaded by Herod Antipas. This is a historical fact, confirmed by Josephus. But they also say Herod did this to him because a girl did a dance which pleased him and requested the head of John the Baptist and that except for this he would not have beheaded him, which is almost certainly fiction, being inconsistent with the story by Josephus.
We can examine the writings to separate the fact from the fiction. Not just with the biblical writings, but also the writings we depend upon for our mainline historical facts. All of them contain fact and fiction.
It is impossible for the authors of the Bible to have gained knowledge of many of the events described in the book, so they must have made it up. That is the only reasonable conclusion.
The same is true of virtually all the writings we depend upon for history. Herodotus and Livy and others surely give us some fiction about events they had no possible knowledge of. So they or someone else made up some of those events. But that does not negate the factual part they describe for us. It is not reasonable to conclude that all they wrote must be fiction.
You are free to tell us why the Bible stories should be considered credible.
The Jesus miracle acts are credible just like much of our mainline history is credible, for which we have less evidence than we have for the Jesus miracle acts. We believe the historical facts even in cases where the evidence is so little, and similarly we can believe the accounts of the Jesus miracle acts, for which there is evidence. But meanwhile, some of the Bible stories are probably fiction, just like ALL the ancient sources contain some fiction, including the historical writings.
How did the author come by these stories, i.e what is their source?
Popular rumors, oral reports, like most of our mainline history. In some cases there were earlier writings which no longer exist, as with much of our mainline history, and we trust the later writers who passed it on to us. There's plenty of doubt about the sources for our mainline history record, but that doesn't mean the reported events are fiction.
What kind of fact checking did the author employ to check the veracity of the stories?
We can conjecture about that, just as we can conjecture about the fact checking of mainline history writers. In some cases they name earlier sources, but usually they do not. And even when they name an earlier source we have no way to fact-check that earlier source. If you suspect the writer's credibility, you must equally suspect the credibility of any source he cites. So citing an earlier source proves nothing, other than the writer's skill at identifying himself with someone earlier who had status. Establishing status is the main motive for citing sources.
How can we fact-check these stories? And so on.
Often we cannot, as with the mainline history writers. But in some cases there are ways to verify claims. E.g., we can verify some facts by comparing to Josephus, who does confirm some of the Gospel reports, about Herod Antipas and others.
And when we "fact-check" the stories, we find both verification for some of them and also inconsistencies for others. So it becomes clear that there is both fact and fiction, as we should expect with any of the ancient writings. That some stories are found less credible does not negate the others which are factual.
You are free to tell us why the Bible stories should be considered credible. . . . But you are not going to do that because you have nothing.
Some Bible stories are credible and some are not. The Jesus miracle stories are credible because we have more evidence for them than we have for many (most) ancient historical facts which we accept as credible. The written accounts of the events are virtually the only evidence we have for the events. We have 4 (5) sources for the Jesus miracle acts, and these sources are dated 25-70 years later than the events, which is better evidence than we have for many (most) of the facts from our ancient history record.
You're giving no reason why this is not sufficient evidence to believe it. But if you start out with the premise that every miracle claim has to be false, regardless of any evidence, then you can reasonably reject such claims, based on that ideological premise. But nothing in science or logic imposes that ideology on us as a premise.
You are going to ignore all posts that ask for clarifications and details, and keep . . .
I have responded to some posts by giving clarifications and details. How much more vast WALLS OF TEXT do you demand?
Let me review very briefly, with the following WALL OF TEXT, some clarifications and details I gave in responding to some posts.
"detail" -- NO EARLIER RESURRECTION STORIES
I gave many examples to show that the Jesus miracle stories are NOT based on earlier legends or stories in the literature, as was alleged. E.g., there are no earlier resurrection stories you can cite which resemble the Jesus Resurrection. The claim that the death of
Romulus was some kind of antecedent to the Jesus Resurrection is totally false -- there is no similarity whatever. There was no reported Romulus resurrection. It is wacko nonsense to claim that anything in the literature shows a resurrection of Romulus. There's nothing reporting his death. No one saw his death or witnessed anything about him being buried or anything about what happened to his body. No writer reported that he came back to life. There is one account saying someone claimed to have encountered him after his disappearance, but the writer of this account does not report this encounter as factual, but only as a claim one person made.
Whereas the Gospel resurrection accounts, and the apostle Paul, all report
as fact that Jesus was killed, that he was buried (and the Gospels report that his empty tomb was discovered), and that he was seen alive later. There is nothing like this in any of the ancient literature. A goofy story in
Herodotus is sometimes cited as some kind of antecedent to the Jesus Resurrection, because the character (Zalmoxis) had disappeared for 3 years and then came out from hiding. That is ludicrous and hilarious to cite as having any resemblance to the Jesus Resurrection.
"detail" -- Earlier ASCENSION STORIES alleged by Justin Martyr
And the Christian writer Justin Martyr is cited as giving examples of earlier events, mostly from mythology, which supposedly point to the later Jesus events, such as the Ascension into the sky. But I showed how Justin was simply wrong in these examples. There is NO earlier ascension story in pagan mythology, despite Justin's error saying there were some such cases. He totally distorts those earlier stories to add an ascension into heaven, which was not really in the earlier story. I pointed out these distortions by Justin, plus I explained WHY Justin made these mistakes, because he had a point to make in his "Apology" where he made these false comparisons of Jesus to some earlier pagan myths.
"detail" -- Miracle fictions are based on already-accepted popular religious tradition.
I also showed, in earlier posts, how all the reported faith-healers or healing miracle legends have been based on belief in an ancient healing deity, such as Asclepius, or belief in an ancient teaching authority who prescribed the healing procedure to follow, and that without this already-existing tradition there would be no popular belief in a current miracle-worker claim. E.g., not only all the Asclepius healings were done in the name of an ancient healing legend, but also the Vespasian healing story was attributed to the ancient deity Serapis, according to our accounts of this. And the Apollonius of Tyana miracles were each done in the name of a pagan hero/god, such as Hercules, identified by the author for each case. And the one Josephus exorcism story was based on belief in the rituals prescribed by Solomon, who is praised by Josephus as having Divine Authority.
But by contrast there is no particular ancient miracle deity named in the Jesus miracle stories. Though there is the
"clarification" that sometimes "God" or "the Lord" is named in a Jesus miracle story, but this is a minority of the cases, and this is not a specific ancient miracle legend or ancient deity being cited, such as Serapis or Hercules or Asclepius are specific ancient miracle deities.
Are these not examples of DETAILS and CLARIFICATIONS to show that there is a difference between the miracles of Jesus and other reported ancient miracle claims? And notice how much extra WALL OF TEXT above was required in order to review briefly a few examples of this. Do you demand additional miles of TEXT WALLS in order to adequately provide details and clarifications? How many WALLS OF TEXT have you devoted to giving similar details and clarifications, when you claim the "Bible stories" are based on "mythology that predates the Bible"?
Your "mythology that predates the Bible" claim is mostly irrelevant anyway, because my claim is not about the "Bible stories" generally, but only about the reported Jesus miracle acts. These are all that is relevant to our topic here.
In fact, I even gave an example of how a miracle story in the
Book of Acts (9:36-41) is likely fiction, because it shows a healing event very similar to one of the Jesus healing acts, and the resemblance is so strong that it's likely just a copycat story, showing Peter raising a dead girl just as the description of Jesus in the Gospels doing this. My claim is that the Jesus story is likely true, because there is no way to explain where this healing story could have come from, because there is NOTHING like this in the ancient literature, whereas the story in
Acts can easily be explained as an expansion on the earlier reported Jesus healing event.
So I have acknowledged a likely fiction element in the Bible stories of miracles, from
Acts, while showing how the Jesus miracle healing stories have no fiction element in them, being dissimilar to anything previous. Is that not giving "details" and "clarifications" in response to the claims, by you and others, that the Jesus miracles are somehow based on earlier legends? I've shown, with these examples, that they are not, because nothing earlier can be found which explains where these stories came from. These Jesus healing stories pop up in the 1st century AD without any possible explanation from the earlier traditions, leading up to them, from Hebrew legends or Greek or Roman legends, or any other previous miracle traditions.
Healings as a genre of miracle legends
"clarification" -- And I noted the example of
3 healing stories of Elijah/Elisha, which are totally dissimilar to Jesus in the Gospels, except that one can call these "healing" miracles, of which there are a few examples in the ancient literature, like there are other kinds of miracle legends. Just because there are a few cases of "healing" stories scattered over many centuries does not explain the sudden explosion of the Jesus healing miracle stories in the 1st century AD and the huge flood of such stories beginning right after. The existence of an earlier story per se does not explain the origin of a later story. Rather, there has to be some unique detail in the stories connecting them, not likely coincidence, or some connection, like proximity of the two, showing that the earlier might have caused the later. I.e., not just that a miracle healing allegedly happened.
E.g., if one claims the Elijah/Elisha healing stories caused the later Jesus stories, it would be necessary to show some popularity of the Elijah/Elisha stories in the 1st century AD when the Jesus stories appeared, providing the background for the appearance of new miracles in 30-100 AD. But there's nothing of these two prophets in the early 1st century. They had no cult following of any kind after 600 BC when the stories first appeared, as there was a cult of Asclepius and other ancient deities. Elijah and Elisha disappear into oblivion, in Jewish tradition, and nothing is heard of them until the late 1st century, in response to the New Testament, which finally mentions them. Except for the New Testament there is virtually no mention of them in any Jewish literature.
See how much TEXT WALL is necessary to point out these "details" and "clarifications"? How is this not a presentation of "details" and "clarifications" like you are demanding? If this is not what you want, then what's an example of "details" and "clarifications" that you want, when you whine, "You are going to ignore all posts that ask for clarifications and details . . ."? How much more TEXT WALL will be required in order to satisfy your demand for even greater "details" and "clarifications" than the ones I've already provided many times?
. . . and keep repeating your absurd and untrue claim.
When a claim is supported by all the evidence, why should it not be repeated? I've even charitably provided to you the one fact which might cast doubt on my claim (that the Jesus miracle acts really did happen), as the exception to the rule. We have the sources, like we have for other historical events (but not for other ancient miracle legends) -- a written record attesting to the events, similar to the evidence for standard historical events.
And we have nothing in the written record showing anything prior to the New Testament which could explain what caused the Jesus healing miracles (as fiction), such as we have in the case of all other miracle legends which can be explained as fiction caused by mythologizing and popular folk tradition. We have specific events in history, known to be true, which place Jesus at a particular place and time, and we know when our sources are dated, which are mostly closer than is the case for many (most) of our standard historical events of 2000 years ago.
"repeating" -- The 1st century AD shows an abrupt change in miracle stories.
Prior to the Jesus event of about 30 AD we have no miracle stories in the record showing any pattern leading up to a climax of miracle stories for this period, while after this, from 90 or 100 AD and later there is an explosion of miracle stories which cannot be explained. Again and again we see a pattern to indicate that something totally unique happened in 30-100 AD to cause an outburst of miracle stories from this point onward into the future. What caused this if not the appearance of this one who actually did perform such acts, as the record shows, during the period just before this great change in the beliefs, when suddenly such stories became popular and began filling the literature?
What response can there be to your "absurd" and "untrue" outbursts other than to repeat again this body of evidence to which you are not responding? Are you challenging specifically any of the facts I've outlined above? Are you unable to name one fact contradicting the above, or are you only able to continue your spontaneous outbursts based on your single dogmatic premise that no miracle claims can ever be true, despite the evidence? So I have no choice but to continue repeating the same evidence as before, to which you continue to retort the same outbursts.
