Was Jesus only one of several mythic miracle folk-heroes? Who were the others? What's the evidence?
From the title of the below quote:
“Are we going to have to offer a reward to anyone who can turn up a Jesus-like miracle-worker competitor with Christ?”
This does seem to be your fantasy issue…
The fantasy is the claim that there were several reputed messiahs or god-hero figures running around, other than Jesus and just as noteworthy for doing miracles as he was. No one can give any serious examples of these other reported miracle-workers for whom there is any evidence.
Paul does virtually no narrative or biographical matter on Jesus. Most of the Christian writers neglected the miracles of Jesus even though they knew of them. This is a pattern outside the gospel accounts. Nevertheless, the writers knew of the miracle events and gave rare mention to them. The sayings are always given far more prominence, from the 1st century up to the present. Paul follows that pattern. It doesn't mean he was unaware of the miracle accounts.
So now you “know” what anonymous writers knew about 2,000 years ago, . . .
No, not anonymous. Known writers from around 100 AD and onward, over many centuries.
Like St. Augustine, who obviously knew of the Jesus miracle stories but says virtually nothing about them. Nothing in his famous work
Confessions, while in his other lengthy work
City of God he only mentions the "raising of Lazarus" without saying that this was a miracle act, obviously because he assumed the reader knew this.
Yet St. Augustine mentioned miracles and prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures many times, and provided a long list of miracles he claimed to have personal knowledge of, so he was a strong believer in miracles and proofs of the Bible and of Christ's divinity, but without ever using the miracles of Jesus for proof.
The point of this is to answer the argument that Paul never mentions the miracles of Jesus, as if this somehow means he did not know of them. The truth is that ALL the Christian writers avoid mentioning the miracles of Jesus -- a few of them say absolutely nothing about them, and yet they obviously knew of these stories in the gospel accounts and believed them.
. . . even though they didn’t write about it . . .
But not 100% silence, for most of them. Like St. Augustine's casual reference to the "raising of Lazarus" and some other rare mentions. Most of the famous Christian writers, like Tertullian and Irenaeus and Cyprian and others do at some point finally mention the Jesus miracle acts, but one has to search for it.
Justin Martyr wrote a very long polemical treatise,
Trypho, by far his lengthiest work, in which he mentions the miracles of Jesus once only, while in this same work he mentions the Hebrew prophecies and miracles many times, also the virgin birth constantly. His purpose was to prove that Jesus is the messiah or savior, but he relied on the prophecies and virtually anything but the miracles of Jesus to make his case.
So we know all the Christian writers knew of the miracles of Jesus, even though they almost never mentioned them.
Wow….tis funny. None’s citation of John 20:30-32 is telling.
Why can't you explain what you find important about this passage? The writer believed his account, or his claims about the Jesus miracles, and wanted others to know of it. Nothing in this particular text casts any doubt on the credibility.
Atheos addressed your drivel about 30 years being such a short period for stories of “miracles” to occur, with Joseph Smith’s miraculous healings of people.
The low number of sources for those makes them doubtful, plus it's not clear what the date is for those accounts.
Yeah, the number of JS miracle sources is as bad as your claimed 4 Jesus-miracle sources…
What we know for sure is that the JS stories all originated from his direct disciples. And all of them are
copy-cat stories patterned on the Jesus miracles in the gospel accounts, which JS and all his disciples believed and which provided the basis for their new movement.
The JS miracle stories are mostly incoherent. Usually it's not clear what the "miracle" is other than some disciples being enraptured or maybe having a vision or a wondrous feeling. No one has seen fit to present any examples of them, or the few posted were embarrassingly silly.
If they were credible accounts, someone would provide a serious example, quoting the earliest source for it, instead of just giving links. The links provided give extremely lengthy passages in which the reader must search and search at length for the actual miracle story, because there is so much extraneous matter cluttering up most of the space.
However, in the few cases where a real miracle, such as a healing, is reported,
the origin of the story is always one of Smith's direct disciples, and the one healed also is one of his direct disciples. While it's clear that the Jesus miracle healing acts were first reported by onlookers who told others, not by disciples of Jesus, and also it's clear that the ones healed were non-disciples. This is clear from reading the text of the story, just as it's clear from the original JS stories that the source of these were all direct disciples of the Prophet.
It's easy to explain miracle healing stories about a guru if those who report it and those healed are always direct disciples of the guru. It's clear that those persons were inspired by the guru's charisma and were ready to believe in his power and to imagine that a miracle took place. We see this commonly among gurus and preachers of all kinds.
Because of modern publishing it's easy to find modern miracle claims and cases of some contemporary testimonies, published in multiple sources etc., whereas 2000 years ago they would never have been published and the guru would have been forgotten with no trace in the existing record.
To seriously give an example of a case comparable to Jesus, you have to go back
before modern printing/publishing to a healer or miracle-worker who was published in multiple accounts within 100 years after the miracle events allegedly happened.
Also, you need to give an example of a miracle-worker who was not obviously part of an
already-established miracle tradition and whose miracle events are not copy-cat stories based on the earlier tradition. (The closest antecedent to the Jesus miracle healings is the three
Elijah/Elisha healing stories from centuries earlier. But there were no later Elijah/Elisha healing cults or any practice of duplicating these miracles or healing in their name, and there's no attribution of the Jesus healing acts to these earlier prophets, nor any indication that there'd be any popular response to someone claiming to heal in the name of those prophets.)
If Joseph Smith is to be compared to the Jesus case, you should be able to find someone other than his direct disciples who published accounts, earlier than 1900 or so, attesting to his miracle acts. This would help to establish some credibility. If there are no such accounts, it indicates that there's probably nothing there to be taken seriously.
It starts to become more credible when writers not directly influenced by the guru know of the claims and take them seriously and publish their own version of what happened and present the miracles as fact, or as events which really happened.
the dates for the JS miracle claims is better nailed down than when your fables were written down.
Perhaps. They are also better nailed down than when the "fables" of Tacitus and Polybius and Josephus were written down. Most writings from 2000 years ago cannot be dated precisely. But that doesn't mean the events did not happen.
Why are you forced to use only a
modern case to make your comparison to the Jesus miracle stories? Why is there no documented case of a miracle-worker prior to 1500 AD?
But even if those stories are true, it doesn't contradict anything about the miracles of Jesus being true. It's possible that Joseph Smith might have had some limited power to heal, but the more likely explanation would be the usual mythologizing that occurs with a preacher who is recognized as a public figure, plus his devotees imagine it was divine intervention when they recovered as they would have anyway.
But if there's good evidence that he performed healings, there's nothing wrong with that. There's no imperative to prove that no one ever performed any healings other than Jesus. There's a good case to be made that Rasputin the mad monk had the power to heal a child, without any medical training, and this is attested by the historical record and multiple witnesses, not just a story from one of his devotees.
So if someone can perform miracle healings, and not believe in Jesus, the tri-headed god, then such miracles are not necessarily signs of said god.
What "someone" are you talking about? Rasputin? All he could do was heal that one child, so he's not very important.
But the healing acts of Jesus, being so many, and including even acts of raising the dead back to life, are "signs" of a life-giving power he possessed, which is important. What credible evidence is there of anyone else having such power? There doesn't seem to be any other case comparable to this. But "if someone can perform" the same acts or show equivalent power to that which Jesus demonstrated, then perhaps that would mean that we have a SECOND superhuman savior figure who could offer us eternal life. Is there another such person? Who?
This really doesn’t do your argument much good at all.
I'm sure your "tri-headed god" argument does far better and will win far more converts to your flock of devotees.
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