Atheos
Veteran Member
Feel free to produce a single actual eyewitness testimony or artifact (that isn't as fake as the shroud of Turin) and I'll retract that statement.
How many of the millions of Jews who ever lived in ancient Judea are there artifacts for or eyewitness testimonies about? Almost none whatsoever, if there are even any at all. You are using an unreasonable standard of evidence that no one has any good reason to expect to be available in this case.
This is a fairly major shift of goalposts considering what I was responding to. Learner claimed that the difference between the Santa Claus myths and the Jesus myths is that there are "material (witnesses scriptural, archeology & artifacts etc.)" favoring the Jesus myth and there aren't any favoring the Santa Claus myth. I simply deny that assertion and offer anyone who wishes to do so the opportunity to correct my ignorance. It is extremely unlikely that anyone involved in the writing of these legends about Jesus the Magic Jew witnessed anything they wrote about. It is impossible to demonstrate with any reasonable certainty that they did. There is no archaeological evidence to debate. There are no artifacts to debate.
But to put the shoe on the other foot, how many of the millions of Jews who ever lived in ancient Judea actually healed blind and paralyzed people? How many of them were capable of altering the molecular structure of simple H2O and turning it into liquefied complex carbohydrates including alcohol? How many of them were capable of walking on storm-tossed water without sinking? How many of them were known for gathering hordes of followers and feeding them until they could eat no more from mere morsels of food and recovering bushels full of leftovers? How many of them could appear at will inside of locked rooms, then vanish right before the eyes of the beholders? How many of them could heal all manner of disease with a mere touch? How many of them could float off into the sky and disappear into the clouds unassisted? How many people's fame spread so far and wide that a centurion would send messengers from afar off to ask him to come and heal their dying daughter? How many people who were truly capable of performing such incredible feats managed to do so without ever creating even the smallest blip in the historical record?
My point is that there is not a single piece of evidence we have today that would necessarily be any different if Jesus was entirely fictional. Not one. Paul was in telepathic communication with some disembodied entity named Jesus in his earliest epistles. For at least another decade after he started writing his epistles there were no biographical details about Jesus anywhere. It is entirely possible for people to have filled in the biographical details over time sitting around campfires and spinning yarns until sometime in the year 75 or thereabouts a group of people living in Rome decided to collect some of the best anecdotes and organize them into a more structured story.
I don't think that's what happened, honestly I don't. But there's just not enough evidence to demonstrate that it isn't what happened.