Were the gospel accounts tampered with? Was there a secret plot to sneak in the miracle stories? Yes, that must be it.
Nevermind the 2 centuries the stories got to percolate before we ended up with any copies. We have strong evidence in a few cases showing that the followers of this new cult were not above amending the stories.
Overall the accounts were preserved accurately with no significant change. During copying some minor changes happen with no change of substance.
A greater time lapse than this is normal for accounts about the events of the period. For historians like Herodotus and Livy and Tacitus etc., the time lapse is far greater from the original writing and the date of the copies we have now, and the risk of changes during copying is just as great.
Overall the accounts were preserved accurately with no significant change. During copying some minor changes happen with no change of substance.
You have absolutely no way to show this to be true.
But if it were not true, someone would give an example of such a significant change or change of substance.
There's "absolutely no way to show" that there are no major changes in the writings of Tacitus or Suetonius or Livy or Polybius etc. interjected between the time of the original writing and the time of the physical copies or manuscripts which we now possess. You could suppose that all the ancient writings we have are distortions and collections of spurious matter injected into the record after the original writing, or that there was no original at all, but only the later forgeries. There's no way to show otherwise.
Are the writings of Tacitus that we have now really his original writings? We "have absolutely no way to show this to be true." They could be a collection of later forgeries added before the date of the current preserved manuscripts. There's no way to know they are not copies in which whole sections of the original were deleted and whole new sections added.
All we have are copies from several centuries later, long after the author wrote the text. Maybe none of the ancient texts we have were written by the writers they are attributed to, but rather all are forgeries written by later writers who claimed their writings were copies of the original writer. There is "absolutely no way to show" this isn't so.
What is it you're saying about the gospel account text that casts doubt on the reliability, anymore than the same also applies to any other writings of the period? Where there's a disruption in the literary style, like the ending of Mark, this is obvious, and it's accounted for. Are there some other examples of this that cause a problem? How does it undermine reliability?
What matters here are the accounts of the miracle events, suggesting Jesus had super-human power. And for these, there is no basis for any judgment that they were added later, as some kind of disruption in the text that must have been surreptitiously slipped in decades or centuries later, after the original writing.
The earliest source is the Q document, which is placed at about 50 AD and thought to originate from the actual disciples. In this there are two miracle events reported, and one passage that makes clear reference to the miracles of Jesus.
There's no rationale to lift these out from the original writing and claim it is some kind of amendment or distortion of the original that was sneaked in later when no one was watching.
Nevermind the 2 centuries the stories got to percolate before we ended up with any copies.
What happened in those 2 centuries that makes any difference? It doesn't change the fact that the "miracle" element was there at the early point, about 50 AD (and we don't know how much earlier), as attested by the Q source. Hysterical charges that the text got tampered with or corrupted or monkeyed with or distorted by new stories that "percolated" into it because "the followers of this new cult were not above amending the stories" etc. are pointless and irrelevant to the main point that these stories are a basic part of the original account, or the very earliest we have to tell us what actually happened at about 30 AD at the time of the actual events or the actual activity of this Christ person.
Regardless of some changes that probably happened in the copying process, not only in these writings but others as well. Some of these could be legitimate corrections in the text. Or if there are some later additions, like the virgin birth and nativity -- so what? That doesn't change the substance of this Jesus figure who performed the miracle healing acts as reported in the early sources.
We have strong evidence in a few cases showing that the followers of this new cult were not above amending the stories.
But what is an example of this? Yes, we have the addition of the Bethlehem stories, but this is easily explained as something to fill in the obvious gap existing before the public activity of Jesus at about 29 or 30 AD. This is probably the most obvious example of an amendment, or major addition to the account. What other example of "amending" is there? The reason no example is offered is that it's obvious that they are of so little significance.
One account of the empty tomb says the women went inside and were confronted by a messenger inside. Another says the messenger was just outside the tomb and the women did not go inside. Another says they went inside and there were two messengers there instead of only one.
Assuming something got amended here, what difference does it make? So what if there are minor changes of this kind? There are several minor discrepancies like this and they change nothing of substance. What is the point of demanding that all the accounts be exactly the same in every detail and that no minor change could ever happen?
You don't have actual access to the actual events that supposedly happened, and no way to compare it to later accounts.
You're right. Everything in Tacitus and Polybius etc. could all be fiction. We have no access to the original events to compare it to the later copies now in possession. All of ancient history could be a total collection of fairy tales with no truth to any of it. No Caesar, no Alexander the Great, no Trojan War, no Pericles, no pyramids, no nothing.
And no, those archaeological finds don't prove anything either -- We have no "actual access to the actual events that supposedly happened" to enable us to compare those archaeological finds to what really happened. So -- it must all be lies, invented by "the Establishment" to keep the masses under control. Those finds could have all been planted. It's no proof of actual events to which we have "no actual access."
You cannot possibly make this claim except as a bald-faced assertion with no historical value.
The claim: "Overall the accounts were preserved accurately with no significant change. During copying some minor changes happen with no change of substance."
This claim has just as much "historical value" as saying:
Or: Overall the writings of Homer and Livy and Josephus and Virgil and Tacitus were preserved accurately, with no significant change.
There's no way to prove that any of these, as we have them now, was never tampered with or might not even be complete fraudulent perversions of what the original author wrote. Why is someone driven to single out the gospel accounts, from among all the ancient writings, and imagine that there was a massive tampering done to them, secretly, insidiously, to promote a deception?
Responsible "reasons to reject Christianity" cannot be based on paranoid hallucinations that the N. T. gospel accounts are uniquely tainted or contaminated or corrupted by some secret 1st- or 2nd-century cabal conspiring to sneak in their hidden agenda unawares in order to perpetuate a gigantic hoax onto an unsuspecting world. One could also have such delusions about any other ancient writings. A simple inquiry as to what possible deranged motive could underlie such a conspiracy, or on the part of whom, or to what end, etc. should be sufficient to dispel these delusions. How would this cabal have become organized in the first place?
Why is there ONLY ONE such cabal that succeeded in foisting its Jesus-like "Passover Plot" conspiracy scenario onto the world? Do you believe there were several other cabals also operating, each one pushing its own version of a Jesus-like savior mythic hero scheme and that one of them overpowered the others in some kind of gang warfare battle between the different cabals, like the gang wars of the 1930s?
And that one of these cabals finally emerged victorious and then went around seizing all the manuscripts in existence and rewrote all of them to "percolate" its version of the truth into them and effectively anointing this Galilean to be the future god, secretly cleaning all the existing manuscripts, shredding all the documents that didn't fit in with their scheme? How did they manage to round up all the existing scrolls and perform this massive cleansing of all the existing record in order to ensure that only this one god from Galilee would prevail and all the others would be erased from the record with little or no trace? Why is there so little evidence of such a sectarian cleansing going on?
What were the other cabals, and how did the Jesus cabal succeed so thoroughly in wiping them all out? not in 300 AD, but in 50 AD?
Why is there so little indication of what surely was a rival John-the-Baptist cabal that was trying to make him the new miracle-working messiah? Why did the Jesus cabal allow the miracle birth of John the Baptist in Luke 1 to stand instead of expunging it from the record (or perhaps prevent it from being put there in the first place)? How did the Jesus cabal succeed so efficiently in wiping the record clean of all his miracles? And how did this Jesus cabal win the war against the JB cabal? Didn't JB have a longer history and a larger following in 30 AD? Why wouldn't "the Establishment" choose this character instead of the Jesus character who was less famous?
Even if it were possible to pull off such an enormous conspiracy, how could anyone gain a profit, or imagine gaining a profit, from going to all this trouble? Who profited from suppressing the JB cult and propping up the Jesus cult? Why wouldn't "the Establishment" profit more by just choosing the most popular hero figure of the time?
