The Jesus miracle legend cannot be explained as culturally-based fiction, as other miracle legends can be.
The Jesus stories did not arise in a vacuum. They relied heavily on hundreds of years of Jewish tradition, which included miracle-working prophets.
Nothing arises in a vacuum. Everything that can be imagined relied heavily on hundreds or thousands of years of whatever tradition preceded it.
So you can SPECULATE that these stories relied on that, because these miracle claims took place within a culture in which something happened. However, there's virtually no resemblance between the Jesus miracles and those of the Jewish tradition. You could just as easily say they came from the Krishna/Hindu tradition, where there are miracles. So it's only speculation, connecting it to the geographical location. You could claim that no one can do anything unless they received the power to do it from the culture they lived in. And you can blandly apply that rule to everyone who ever did anything, and there's no way to prove it or disprove it.
This is a convenient way to dismiss anyone who ever did anything special or noteworthy, which stood out uniquely from anything else happening before them, and just say they must have inherited it from that cultural context.
And that's a legitimate speculation which cannot be disproved, since you have sheltered it from any possible disproof.
However, there is still a detachment of Jesus from the earlier culture which is not the case for millions of prophets and alleged miracle-workers that are offered as parallels to Jesus. So you have to eliminate all of those examples as parallels to Jesus.
So,
St. Genevieve,
St. Francis, actually
ALL the saints throughout the last 2000 years,
Joseph Smith, and ALL the
modern faith-healer evangelists -- also the Asclepius priests, and all the miracles done in the name of
Asclepius and
Mithras and other reputed healing gods in the ancient world -- all these are significantly different from the Jesus miracle legend, because all those reputed miracles were done in the name of an ancient miracle god who was prayed to and in whose name the miracle acts were performed, and without which the stories would not have been believed and passed on, because the believers for these miracle stories already existed for the new miracle claims of these cults.
Whereas the Jesus miracles were not done in the name of any such ancient miracle legend.
So, even though I cannot refute your sweeping claim that the Jesus miracle stories were done in the non-vacuum of that time, as ALL things imaginable were obviously done within some cultural context and not in a "vacuum," still, you have to eliminate from your list of parallels all these examples and others who performed their miracles in the name of an ancient miracle legend. Which leaves very few parallels remaining.
But, after eliminating all these, there are admittedly some left over which you could claim are like Jesus in the sense of not explicitly being based on an earlier miracle tradition they named as their source.
So you might claim
Apollonius of Tyana was detached from any previous miracle tradition he claimed as a source for his miracles. Perhaps
Mohammed, perhaps a few others. It cannot be said that ALL alleged miracle-workers or miracle cultleaders named an ancient miracle god as their source of power. Maybe a dozen or so did not.
But this attachment to an ancient miracle deity is obviously a necessary requirement for many/most of the acclaimed miracle-worker charismatics and cults over the centuries, and Jesus is one of a few exceptions to this rule.
So you can't use these as parallels to Jesus. You can't say that the saints or Joseph Smith are parallels to Jesus, as reported miracle-workers -- you have to eliminate all the pagan gods like Asclepius and others, because all those worshipers were practicing an ancient healing tradition going back hundreds or thousands of years, and so these do not fit the pattern of an instant miracle-working hero who appears from nowhere, as Jesus does (and some others who did not name an ancient healing god as their source). And you must eliminate from your list all the modern healing evangelists, all of whom identify Jesus as the source for their power.
Possibly the recent Hindu
Sai Baba is another case, though if he performed his alleged miracles in the name of Krishna, then he's also off the list.
So the no-instant-miracles or instant-miracle-workers rule does not necessarily violate the nothing-occurs-in-a-vacuum rule. Probably even the Big-Bang happened within some context of something which led up to it or caused it. You can't negate the uniqueness or special importance of something by just saying "nothing happens in a vacuum" and so explain it away as not having some significance that is being claimed.
Meaning of "Instant" miracles or "instant miracle-worker"
"Instant" means
- The miracle claims appeared in the written record a SHORT time after they allegedly happened, in more than only one source, unlike all other miracle traditions before 1500 AD, with virtually no exceptions. (Whereas today almost EVERYTHING appears in the written record in a short time as long as the promoter has $100 or so to spend on printing/copying.)
- They were not performed in the name of a much earlier miracle-worker or -tradition to which the miracle-worker attributed his power, such as the later Christian saints and Joseph Smith and all the modern faith-healers attribute their reported miracles to Jesus, or as the pagan worshipers and priests named Asclepius or Mithras etc. as the healing god or source for their claimed miracles.
- They were performed by someone who was NOT a famous celebrity in his lifetime having power and a long career and wide reputation or notoriety.
So we can easily explain the belief in the many later Christian saints and prophets and evangelists, how they acquired followers for their miracle claims, because they had instant followers around them, already believers in the miracle tradition being preached by this new guru, who only needed to add his charismatic talent to the belief the followers already had, claiming this same source they already believed in as the source of his power.
But what about a new miracle-worker who only just appeared, a few days or weeks ago. FORGET IT! There was no such thing! People did not believe such claims. You can't find any examples of it! Or rather, Jesus is the ONLY case of this. What other cases are there of this?
And there
are no such claims from "a few days or weeks" after the alleged events. The earliest claims are from a generation or more after the fact, . . .
My phrase "the ONLY case of this" was incorrect. He was the only case for whom there is a written account within 3-5 decades of the reported miracle events. We have no record of ORAL reports from earlier, obviously -- i.e., we can suppose there were, but don't know whether there were any or not.
"The earliest claims are from a generation or more after the fact, . . ." We don't know when the "earliest claims" occurred. It is the earliest SURVIVING DOCUMENTS which we know are 3-4 decades later. And for that there is no other example which appeared so early in writing after the reported events.
It is possible, as you're saying, that this written record, decades later, is the first mention whatever and that there was nothing reported earlier, such as only 1 year or 5 or 10 years.
However, there is good reason to believe that the miracle claims about Jesus existed from the beginning, around 30 AD. The
Rejection at Nazareth story is one which the later gospel writers/editors could not have created but must have been in their sources, because it says Jesus could not perform a miracle in Nazareth but that he did perform such acts in Capernaum. No gospel writer from 70 or 80 or 90 AD would have said something like this unless it was in the earlier source he relied on.
What is certain is that people did not believe claims of miracles performed just recently, a week or a month or a year ago by some new charlatan. Instant miracle claims were not believed by anyone (except maybe a half-dozen wackos, like today), but instead, ordinary people believed in ancient miracle legends only, and sometimes accepted new claims about ancient miracle-workers, but not some new charlatan who just popped up. In a few cases a new charismatic might succeed by claiming attachment to an ANCIENT miracle tradition, or ancient hero, in whose name he exercised power, and this could win some followers.
But there are virtually no cases of written accounts appearing in only a few decades after the alleged miracle events happened, as we have in the case of Jesus. The best explanation for this is that the events actually did happen, unlike other miracle claims, and so were believed because of the higher credibility and soon were written and eventually copied.
. . . and the earliest writings about Jesus (i.e. the Pauline epistles) contain no such claims.
Yes they do. They contain the resurrection of Jesus, which is the most important of the Jesus miracles. Paul omits everything else because he mentions nothing about Jesus prior to the night of his arrest.
There's nothing in the gospels connecting the Jesus miracles to Elijah or Elisha. They were not done in their name or in the name of any earlier prophet or deity or religion.
Now you're just being silly. Everything Jesus is cited in the gospels as doing, was done in the name of the Jewish god.
No, he never said his power came from Yahweh (although we can't know for sure what he said). Even if the word "God"/"theos" occurs, this doesn't necessarily mean Yahweh or the uniquely Jewish God. Again, you can always claim that this is where it must have come from, in the same sense that ANYTHING that exists has to come out of the culture in which it occurs.
But you could easily attribute the miracles of Jesus to Krishna or Ahura Mazda/Zoroaster or Jupiter or Apollo. He never said anything to preclude this, as an Asclepius-worshiper praying at a statue of Asclepius precluded any possibility that his source was Krishna or Yahweh. His "god" was Asclepius only and no others. But Jesus never said anything to preclude any god but Yahweh as the source for his power.
Obviously many Jewish writers in the 1st and 2nd centuries adopted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and attributed their Jewish sayings to him, or their interpretation of Jewish ideas, just as he would have been made a Krishna-like Avatar had he been in India instead of Galilee/Judea.
But we see nothing identifying his miracles as dependent on Jewish prophets or Yahweh. Some Jewish ideas are put into his mouth, but there are also some ANTI-Jewish ideas there too, such as rejection of some of the Jewish laws, or strict observance of them, also only negative comments about the animal sacrifices.
That different Jewish sects and mainliners and militants and other Jewish factions adopted him and put their words into his mouth is not evidence that he performed his acts in the name of their prophets or gods. There are also hellenistic NON-Jewish ideas put into his mouth, but this does not mean he performed his miracles in the name of hellenistic deities.
And, with the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, was done with the approval of those earlier prophets.
Just because these names are used by Jewish writers does not mean Jesus performed his miracles in the name of those prophets. Jesus never claimed Moses or Elijah or others as the source of his power. If he had done so, those same Jewish writers or gospel writers/editors would surely have said so explicitly. They would have quoted him saying, "In the name of Elijah, I command you to arise, take up your bed and walk!" Like Joseph Smith and St. Genevieve and others did their alleged miracles in the name of Jesus. This is what made them credible. Had Jesus used such language, the gospel writers and others would have quoted him saying it.
Most reported miracle-workers did perform their miracle acts in the name of some ancient miracle god which they claimed as their source, naming that deity when they performed their miracle acts. Jesus did not do this. There's no hint of it, whereas the later saints and evangelists up to the present always do their act in the name of Jesus, and this is a major factor in their ability to gain followers who claim they performed a miracle.
And this is also true of the miracle claims of the pagan worshipers who wrote their inscriptions at the temples and statues of Asclepius and other healing gods. The pagan priests claimed those ancient deities by name as the source of those miracles.
Moses and Elijah had nothing to do with the miracles of Jesus, because there was no Moses healing cult or Elijah healing cult in the 1st century AD which could be the basis for this new Jesus miracle cult, as the Jesus miracle legend was the basis for the St. Genevieve cult and the Joseph Smith cult and later Christian healing cults, and as Asclepius and other pagan deities were the basis for those healing cults where pagan worshipers prayed at statues and temples.
Jesus is also quoted as naming Abraham and David and Solomon and Jonah, and he quotes still others, and yet it was not in the name of any of these heroes/prophets/teachers that he performed his miracle acts. There was no cult worshiping any of these characters, as there were cults worshiping Asclepius and later cults worshiping Jesus and performing reported miracles in the names of the earlier recognized tradition.
All you can claim is that Jesus, or the miracle stories, must derive out from the culture he appeared in, at the time, because everything derives from the culture it appeared in. And this is the only logic to your claim of attaching Jesus to figures like Moses and Elijah or possibly to other earlier Jewish heroes who are named in the New Testament. That these names appear there does not show any connection to the Jesus miracles. Any seeming connection is really just the result of those Jews putting Jesus into the context of their earlier prophets and traditions.
If this was really any explanation for where the Jesus miracle stories came from, then we should see a very heavy emphasis on Elijah/Elisha, as opposed to the others, because the Elijah/Elisha stories are the only ones in the Hebrew tradition which have any resemblance to Jesus, because of the three healing stories in 1 and 2 Kings mixed in with the dozens of other miracle stories.
And yet Elijah/Elisha are given much less mention in the gospels than Moses and Abraham and David, all of whom did no miracle acts having any resemblance to the Jesus miracles. So if the Jesus miracles are really based on the Elijah/Elisha tradition, you have to explain why these prophets are given so much less attention in the gospels than Moses and Abraham and David.
I say again: the Jesus stories did not arise in a vacuum.
But this cliché can be used to dismiss ANYTHING as just being an outgrowth of the culture in which it appears. You need more than this platitude to explain how the Jesus miracle stories originated.
The miracle stories about the medieval saints or about Joseph Smith or about today's evangelists are obviously derived from the Jesus miracle tradition and could not have existed without that earlier tradition they're based upon -- explicitly based on it, by naming Jesus as their source. Nothing similar can be said about the Jesus miracle stories.
Note: Elisha was not present at the Transfiguration ... is it a coincidence that the name "Elisha" means "My God is salvation", while "Yeshua" (Jesus) translates as "He saves", or is Jesus being presented as the new Elisha?
If the Elisha legend had any significance to the Jesus miracles, this prophet should be mentioned frequently in the gospels, and yet his name appears only once. This prophet reportedly performed more miracles than Elijah, and yet he is virtually ignored by the NT writers. Elijah is mentioned several times, but if the miracles of Jesus are supposed to be based on these 2 prophets, it's Elisha who should be mentioned more, because he did more miracles than Elijah, including 2 of the 3 healing miracles.
You can play lots of games with the Hebrew names. Another interesting one is "Isaiah" which means "Yahweh is salvation" -- this would be a fitting name to supplement the shouts of the Israelites after Elijah brought down fire from Heaven to consume the altar ("Yahweh is God! Yahweh is God!"), in the contest with the prophets of Baal.
It's true that the fish-and-loaves episode shows a resemblance to Elisha's series of food and water miracles, feeding a population magically and saving them from drought and famine. But if Jesus is patterned on this, we should see an EXPANSION on this where Jesus performs it on a grander scale than Elisha did, and yet the fish-and-loaves is a much scaled-down story by comparison.
Elisha fed 100 people with 20 loaves of barley and some ears of corn, and had some (unspecified amount) left over. Jesus fed 5000 with 5 loaves and 2 fishes and had 12 baskets of food left over. How on earth is that "scaled-down"?
In comparison to all these Elijah/Elisha stories, the fish-and-loaves by itself is scaled-down, though it's grander than any one of those Elisha stories individually, as a one-to-one comparison. But taking all these stories together, the Elijah/Elisha legend is on a much grander scale.
First, there's only one such story in the synoptic gospels, or 2 (though these may be 2 versions of the same story), whereas Elisha performed several miracles of this type, and your comparison is only to one of those Elisha stories.
It's true that most of the Elijah/Elisha stories seem smaller as to the number of characters in the scene. The food/water/famine/drought miracle stories are mostly: 2 Kings 2:19-22, 4:1-7, 38-41, 42-44. And there's at least 2 more miracles of this kind, where only 1 or 2 victims are served: 1 Kings 17:1-6 (Elijah is fed by ravens), and 17:7-16. So stories of this kind are more typical of Elijah/Elisha than healing stories.
The total number who are fed or saved might be only a few hundred, in chapter 4. But the 2:19-22 story is about providing clean water to the entire town of Jericho for all time into the future. So this obviously served thousands who otherwise would have had to relocate to a different town, or even might have died because of the foul water. So this purifying-the-water miracle served a far greater number than only 9,000.
However, the extent of Elijah's power, or of Yahweh speaking through him, is shown in the following from 1 Kings 17:
1 Now Eli'jah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, "As the LORD the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word."
So Elijah wielded vastly greater power to dispose of people's lives than anything in the fish-and-loaves miracle. If he held the kind of power described in the above verse, he obviously impacted far more than only 5,000 (or 9,000) lives, over those many years when the land had no precipitation except as he (or Yahweh speaking through him) allowed it. This kind of power is on a much grander scale than feeding a multitude on one day only.
And Elijah made good on his prophecy above, in 18:41-46, when he brought rain, after killing the prophets of Baal, and this heavy storm must have impacted more than only 9,000 lives throughout the land. So this shows Elijah bringing on miracle power extending far beyond that of feeding a few thousand on one day only.
But equally important as the total number saved from famine or drought is the number killed by Yahweh who sent famine and pestilence and killed probably a much larger number, and also sent other disasters, such as on the battlefield. There's as many of these killing and maiming miracles in Elijah/Elisha as the food and water miracles to help victims. And by comparison, the healing miracles are negligible.
So if the Jesus miracles were patterned on those of Elijah/Elisha, we should see more of such miracles -- in some cases feeding a town or village or saving its water supply, and still more cases where a famine or drought is caused by Jesus, to punish someone, and cause sickness and blindness and starvation, or to strike dead those who are his enemies, like Elijah brought fire down from Heaven to consume King Ahaziah's company of 50 troops (2 Kings 1:12).
So if Jesus was another Elijah/Elisha, doing miracles like theirs, we should see him calling down fire from heaven to consume the Scribes and Pharisees or false prophets etc. (or calling two she-bears out of the woods to rip them apart (2 Kings 2:24)).
And not only that, but Jesus did it twice, the other time feeding 4000 with 7 loaves and a few small fish, with 7 baskets of food remaining.
You're ignoring the much greater number of Elijah/Elisha miracles noted above, which must have impacted tens of thousands of lives if they really happened as described. By comparison, the fish-and-loaves alone is small potatoes.
So if you believe his fame was spreading because of these passages, you have to also believe the miracle stories there which are the explanation for his fame. Without those there is no "fame" to be spreading.
No, I don't believe his fame was spreading. But the accounts you rely on as evidence claim it was, . . .
But this is just a quibble over what "fame" means and how far it traveled or how many heard the reports. There could easily have been these reports locally, over much of the local region, perhaps reaching across the Syrian border. Thousands could have heard the reports without there being any notice by Josephus or other historians.
We can compare this to John the Baptizer, who must have had some "fame," and yet there's no mention of him outside one paragraph in Josephus.
So it's reasonable to believe there was this limited "fame" in that local region, but not beyond. He had no power or influence or status recognized by anyone other than local peasants who went to him to be healed, and everything he did took place in less than three years. There was no other person in history, before modern times, who had so little power or influence or recognition during his lifetime and yet who got mythologized into a god or even got mentioned in the historical record at all.
This is what requires an explanation, and there is none so far. Or rather, the best explanation for this is that he really did perform the miracle acts, which explains it. Something so conspicuous would stand out and cause this response resulting in the writings and publishing of the events.
. . . while you cast him as a complete unknown.
Unknown to the historians who only recognized the existence of the rich and powerful, which he was not. But eventually there were writings about this which became published, even though he was unimportant to the current chroniclers and power-wielders in 30 AD.
In other words, your claims are contradicted by your "evidence".
No, he was known of locally, as some word did spread about him in the local region. Also, the gospel writers might have had an exaggerated perception of how far the reports of him had spread. My "evidence" -- gospel writings -- are not infallible and probably contain a degree of error, such as exaggeration. We need these writings to tell us the general picture of what happened, but this doesn't mean every detail they report is exactly correct.
No, the number 12 is very commonly used. You're right that this number could be artificial, but nothing about this makes the account less credible. It's true that such details might be supplied by the editor, filling in details he doesn't have, and certain special numbers (3, 7, 12, 40) are used a lot, but this in no way undermines the credibility of the story generally. It means details can be less reliable, but there's no need to get hung up on minor details.
Yes, the fact that "magic numbers" crop up often in the stories
does undermine the credibility of the story.
Not so often. But when they do, it's only regarding minor details. It does not undermine the credibility of the whole story generally. If you claim that, then you must assume that Caesar Augustus and Tiberias and Pontius Pilate did not exist. The general picture, the general facts overall are still just as credible.
The story fits into the historical context generally and is problematic only as to details. Of course you can reasonably doubt the miracle stories, but not because there are doubts about certain details like the exact age of the girl who was raised or how long the woman had suffered the hemorrhage. Picking away at details like this, even if there's doubt about it, does not lead logically to rejecting major parts of the general story.
You doubt the miracle stories anyway, as with all such stories, for reasons which have nothing to do with someone's exact age and other minor details. You can't dismiss the Trojan War story just because you find a detail in Homer you think is dubious, like someone's exact age. Obsessing on the exact number or other details is not the way to determine what happened back then.
As do the other obviously legendary elements, and the fact that many of the stories themselves are obviously legendary.
We can reasonably separate the fact from the fiction, or try with some success. The existence of some fiction elements is not evidence that the rest is fiction. There is always fact mixed with fiction in the writings, even the historical writings or sources which are relied on for determining the real historical events.
There's fact mixed with fiction in Herodotus and all the historians, and also the epic poets. We can judge the reliability of this or that claim. Some are dubious and others not.
The fact that one number is dubious, the exact age of one of the characters, is not any evidence for dismissing a major part of the account. If you want to dismiss the miracle stories, you are doing that because of your premise that no such events could have happened, not because you're suspicious of a certain obscure detail which might be dubious. You are pretending you found something that disproves the miracle claims. But you have found nothing. You're just trying to find confirmation for the premise which you already believe in religiously.
If you ignore all that and claim that there are true stories in amongst the legends, then all you are doing is cherry-picking.
That's what historians do -- why can't we? or anyone trying to learn the past events? You try to separate the fact from the fiction. You can call that "cherry-picking" if you want to. If you want to distinguish what events really happened vs. what is only fiction, you have to pick out this part which is credible and reject that other part.
Do you reject ALL the historical record because it contains some legend, or fiction, and it's "cherry-picking" to try to separate the fiction part from the fact part?
