The evidence for the Jesus miracles is the same as the evidence for historical events generally: SOMEONE WROTE THAT IT HAPPENED.
I stand behind my assertion that the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is better than the evidence that your Jesus person existed.
Maybe you're right. Maybe Bigfoot did/does exist. But there are no claims that he performed any miracles or has superhuman power, other than maybe having some greater muscle power, which many animals have. What is the claim being made about Bigfoot?
There's nothing about Christ belief which insists that there are no other unusual events or unusual phenomena in the world. There's no need to disprove Bigfoot or other unusual phenomena.
It doesn't matter whether the evidence for Bigfoot is greater or less than the evidence for Jesus. There's good evidence that Jesus existed and performed miracle acts. But maybe there's also evidence for Bigfoot, in which case maybe he/it does exist.
Meanwhile you are seriously behind in dealing with the very real problems with your claims.
The "evidence" that Prometheus was chained to the side of a mountain for 1000 years, and that every day birds pecked a hole in his chest to feed on his liver which grew back each night so the torturous cycle could repeat itself is every bit as strong as the "evidence" that all the extraordinary feats attributed to and by Jesus is.
The earliest sources for Prometheus are the Greek epic poets, no earlier than 800 BC, and yet the Prometheus myth, i.e., the event in question, if it happened, goes back to the earliest humans, to when the "first woman" was added to the human race. We don't know the exact date of this, in human evolution, but it had to be
pretty damn early!! like a few million years or so in the past, even 100 million. We have some "evidence" of such events?
Whatever the storytellers believed, their understanding must have been that this was at least 1000 years earlier, and maybe 10,000 or 100,000 years back into prehistory.
And you think this kind of "evidence" is just as reliable as documents telling a particular event happening 30-70 years earlier in history, at a particular location? documents naming certain historical characters like Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate and Herod the Great and Caesar Augustus? You compare these sources with myths about the earliest humans,
before the creation of women!
You're saying Hesiod or Homer writing around 700 BC about events happening thousands/millions of years earlier is the same as 1st-century writers relating a 1st-century event a few decades earlier?
Again, applying this kind of logic, virtually ALL historical events have to be tossed out, or at least all history prior to modern times. Again your argument is to reject ALL historical documents or sources, not just the gospel accounts, and to discount ALL reported historical events. This goes into the "turn on, tune in, drop out" category of logic.
It comes to us courtesy of anonymous sources.
The sources for Prometheus are not dubious for being anonymous, but for being far too late, or too long after the alleged events, like millions of years too late.
But there are ANONYMOUS sources used for history and not rejected. One is the
Royal Frankish Annals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Frankish_Annals
Their authorship is unknown, . . . . The Annals are believed to have been composed in successive sections by different authors, and then compiled. The depth of knowledge regarding court affairs suggests that the annals were written by persons close to the king, and their initial reluctance to comment on Frankish defeats betrays an official design for use as Carolingian propaganda. Though the information contained within is heavily influenced by authorial intent in favor of the Franks, the annals remain a crucial source on the political and military history of the reign of Charlemagne.
Nothing in the wikipedia page says the writings are any less credible because they're from "anonymous" sources.
Sneering at documents because they are "anonymous" has nothing to do with historical credibility or reliability. The
Royal Frankish Annals are accepted as historical and credible, with the normal amount of critical doubt, and minus the miracle stories. They are obviously of vastly greater credibility for history than something like the poetry of Hesiod and Homer about the pagan gods. Yet by your logic they have no more credibility than the Prometheus myth -- even less, because the latter is from known authors, while the
Royal Frankish Annals are "anonymous" and thus less credible by your standards.
When will you get serious? You cannot equate the pagan gods with accounts about persons/events in history which are documented within decades after their time.
The tale of Prometheus is every bit as absurd as the tale of a magic Jew who cured blindness with spit and the tale of Santa Claus who visits millions of homes over a 48 hour period, drinking a glass of milk and eating cookies at each one. All are in print, all are anonymous, all are absurd.
Only to someone who imposes the dogmatic premise that miracle events can never happen, regardless of any evidence. Not everyone has to agree with this arbitrary premise. Yes, for all those who share your faith in this ideological premise, the miracles of Jesus cannot have happened, despite the evidence, because you arbitrarily rule out any miracles whatever with this premise which you impose.
But for those who do not start out with this dogmatic premise, it makes a difference whether there is evidence for a miracle claim. If there is evidence for it, then it's reasonable to believe it or consider it as a possibility, depending on how much evidence there is. It becomes a question of doubt or of possibility and probability.
But a myth like Prometheus is rejected for total lack of any evidence, and Santa is rejected in its modern form which obviously evolved over many centuries, which explains how the Santa miracle could develop and win some believers or promoters.
These myths are rejected not because of a dogmatic premise that there can be no miracles, but because there's no evidence for them, or the facts indicate how they could easily have emerged by means of the mythologizing process, and so such claims without any evidence are rejected as contrary to normal experience and as a product of myth-making or legend-building. Whereas claims for which there is evidence are not ruled out but are considered as possible depending upon the evidence.
It does not matter whether the story took written form 1 year after the story's alleged events happened, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years or 100, 500 or 1000 years.
Yes it does matter, as long as one leaves open the possibility of miracle events rather than ruling them out with the dogmatic premise that miracle events can never happen. If instead we leave open the possibility of such events, then many factors have to be taken into consideration to determine the possibility of it being true.
Your pronouncement here, that the story not reported until 1000 years later is just as credible as one reported 10 or 20 or 50 years later, makes no sense unless it's based on that dogmatic premise that ALL miracle claims are equally false regardless of any evidence. You are condemning ALL miracle stories when you say this, regardless of any evidence in some cases.
You have to understand that not everyone agrees with this arbitrary dogmatic premise. For those who don't, but who allow the possibility of miracle events as long as there is enough evidence, it does matter how long the time lapse is between when the miracle event allegedly happened and when the first report of it appeared. If that time span is short, the possibility that the miracle really happened is greater than if that time span is very long.
The time frame of the story is part of the story line just as much as the levitation acts, the mind-reading acts, the turning this into that acts, etc.
Whatever this means, it's true for all historical events. Isn't the time frame always "part of the story line" for any reported event? Isn't it appropriate to always ask when the event in question reportedly happened, and also what is the date of our source for it?
Nearly every "miracle" Jesus is claimed to have performed (and perhaps all of them for all I know) is a copycat story about him doing something some other Greek, Roman, Persian, Assyrian or Egyptian god had done earlier.
And yet you can't give ONE example of such an earlier hero who reportedly did the same miracle act. You give a parade of names like Perseus and Horus and others, and pretend they did some similar act, but you cannot cite the text or source for that pagan legend which shows the similarity or showing how it inspired the Jesus miracle claims. You only believe it because some Jesus-debunker guru you worship says it, and you believe anything he says without ever checking the sources for the Greek, Roman, etc. myth.
Any example you give has no more resemblance to the Jesus miracle acts than to any other superhuman figure, e.g., Superman or Siegfried or Paul Bunyan. There are thousands of later miracle heroes who all resemble the ancient pagan myths as much or more than Jesus in the gospel accounts does. Is the Jolly Green Giant also a "copycat" story based on the Greek/Roman myths?
The alleged life story of Jesus and the miracles attributed to him were so similar to ancient Roman myths that an early apologist (Justin Martyr) not only commented about how similar the story was . . .
No, he names no similarity between the Jesus miracles and the pagan myths.
He made comparison to the pagan myths and pointed out the difference, which is that the pagan myths were not real events, whereas the Jesus miracle acts were real events. You can find the word "similar" in the text, but he gives no example of any similarity. Nor can you name any similarity. Just naming the pagan deity and saying they're similar does not constitute a similarity.
You can name no similarity other than the simple claim that the pagan heroes were said to have some power, which is also said of Jesus in the gospel accounts. But the same could be said of Siegfried and all other hero legends. Just because a hero figure is said to have performed powerful deeds does not prove any connection to some other miracle hero who happened to appear earlier.
A figure which appears earlier is not automatically the source for some other figure who appears later. It can be proved in some cases that a later legend was derived from an earlier one, like the story of Sinbad the Sailor encountering a one-eyed giant is derived from Homer's story of Odysseus and the cyclops. This connection or dependency of the later story on the earlier one can be proved from the details of the story. But just because they are both hero figures does not make the later one a copy of the earlier.
You can show no causal connection or derivation of anything in the gospel accounts from anything in the pagan myths.
. . . but even attempted to offer the lame excuse that Satan knew before what Jesus would do . . .
No, Justin never says this. He never says Satan foresaw Jesus. Rather, he says "devils" knew the Hebrew messianic prophecies and responded to these prophecies by influencing people to believe these were fulfilled by pagan figures like Bacchus and Bellerophon and Perseus and Hercules. He calls these devils "Sons of Jupiter" who tried to confuse people about the prophecies to make them think these are the same as the legends of the "poets" (like Homer etc.).
But he never says these "devils" or "Sons of Jupiter" saw ahead to Jesus and tried to copy his acts, as if they had foreknowledge of Jesus. It was only Hebrew prophecy they knew, according to Justin, not Jesus or his miracle acts. The intention of these "devils" was to confuse people BEFORE Jesus, centuries earlier, to make them think those pagan heroes were the ones fulfilling these Hebrew prophecies.
. . . and created these tales in earlier times . . .
He doesn't say the demons "created" the tales, but rather that they influenced people to believe these tales were the fulfillment of the prophecies, or that the teachers of the tales were influenced by the demons. He says they promoted belief in the pagan myths but not that they "created" those myths.
You are over-reaching in your attempt to ridicule Justin. He only says these "demons" responded to the Hebrew prophecies, not that they had foreknowledge of anything about Jesus appearing in 30 AD. You need to read Justin more carefully. He may have been simplistic in his ideas about what these "demons" did, but he did not try to explain away some embarrassing similarity between the pagan miracles and those of Jesus. You're projecting your own theories onto Justin, beyond anything he said.
. . . in an attempt to undermine the Jesus story when it finally became the latest fad.
No, the "demons" were not reacting to the Jesus story in any way, according to Justin, but were responding directly to the messianic prophecies in Hebrew scripture. Everything in Justin's text on this is about the "demons" reacting to the Hebrew messianic prophecies to undermine them and deceive people about them.
He says the "demons" did not "understand" the prophecies and were "in error" about their meaning and tried to create their own artificial fulfillment of them. He never says they foresaw Christ coming or tried to create some kind of confusion about him or to make him look similar to the pagan myths.
Justin never said these "demons" had foreknowledge of Jesus, but only of the earlier Christ prophecies. Justin attributed no superhuman foreknowledge to these "demons" such that they could know anything of the future Christ other than the prophecies in Isaiah and other Hebrew scriptures. He describes these "demons" as knowing only these prophecies and misunderstanding them.
We can poke fun at Justin for his odd notions about demons or devils, but he did not say they made up miracle stories as forerunners to the Jesus miracles as if they saw these coming.
The earliest writings about Jesus say nothing about any time frame in which he lived, . . .
Yes they do. Paul wrote (1 Cor. 2):
6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
This is a statement that "the Lord of glory" (Jesus) was recently crucified. It was "the rulers of this age" who crucified him.
This term
archon, or "rulers" (
archoi), usually refers to a human earthly ruler (e.g., Pontius Pilate), but in the few cases where it refers to some cosmic entity, or evil spiritual powers, it still is a power directing its influences toward the behavior of earthly humans and always has its meaning in terms of causing an earthly human event.
So Paul had to be talking about an earthly event when he said these "rulers" crucified the Lord of glory.
Also, when he says in v. 6 "it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away," he clearly means earthly rulers.
And Paul says other things also which put Jesus into earth history, in recent time (recent to Paul), because of the obvious connection to other characters he names who were contemporary earthly humans.
The earliest writings about Jesus say nothing about any time frame in which he lived, anything he said, . . .
Wrong -- Paul does mention something Jesus said, at the "Lord's Supper" event, i.e., the words "This is my body, this is my blood" etc. Paul doesn't quote the teachings of Jesus, but he does quote something he said. So your phrase "anything he said" is false.
. . . anything he did or anything else that would indicate Jesus was an actual person who had recently lived.
What Paul said does indicate clearly that Jesus was an actual person who had recently lived.
In addition to saying Jesus was crucified by "the rulers of this age," he also says Jesus was "handed over" the same night as the above "Lord's Supper" event, and he reports the appearances after the resurrection and names people who saw Jesus, and he identifies these as persons he personally met.
How could these appearances not be a recent event if it was something witnessed by persons Paul had contact with? Didn't Paul live "recently"? If so, then didn't anyone he met also live "recently"? And if they saw Jesus after the resurrection, doesn't this have to be a "recent" event?
For at least 20 years everything written about Jesus made no claim that he was an actual historical person.
There's no way to know that, because any such writings did not survive, as is the case for virtually all historical figures 2000 years ago. I.e., there's nothing written about them within 20 years that survived.
But if you mean Paul, you're wrong, because he did make it clear that Jesus was historical.
The very fact that these claims did not start appearing until decades after the events allegedly took place make it much more likely that these claims are the result of myth building than reports of actual events.
Once again, you are condemning virtually ALL historical events as myth. Virtually all the events of history from 2000 years ago, or even 1000 years ago, came from reports which did not start appearing "until decades after the events allegedly took place."
Why can't you figure out that what you are doing is imposing a standard for history onto the gospel accounts which you do NOT apply to any other documents? You can always create a phony arbitrary standard to impose onto some source you don't like, because you don't like its content, and then condemn this source as myth based upon this phony standard you're imposing.
But others are not required to accept your arbitrary standard for excluding something you don't like. Rather, the normal thinking is to treat the gospel writings with the same critical judgment that is applied to all other writings, and not to apply a special contrived criterion to the gospel accounts alone because you're desperately seeking a way to exclude them as a source for the events of the period.
If Jesus had lived and performed all these incredibly extraordinary activities one would expect secular reports and evidence of such activities to be commonplace.
There's hardly any "secular" reports for anything. Virtually all the historical sources contain references to "the gods" and other religious elements.
This happened in a very short time span, probably less than 3 years, and within a limited geographical region. There was no connection to anyone of influence, anyone holding political power, other than the short episode when he was condemned to death, which might have happened within one hour. There were many thousands condemned to death for whom there is no record whatever of any kind.
The vast majority of "extraordinary activities" were never recorded in any form. Virtually all the historical record is about people of high status, the top 1/100 of 1%, the rich and powerful. Those outside this elite group are 99% excluded from the historical record.
Jesus and his disciples somehow got included in a small part of the mainline historical record, even though they had no connection to the rich and powerful. How he got included at all -- being mentioned in Tacitus and Suetonius and Josephus -- is difficult to explain.
Not one piece of such evidence exists.
Again, there is virtually no "secular" evidence for anything. All the sources for the historical events mention something connected to "the gods" or the pagan myths and generally express some agreement with those beliefs.
There are easily millions of events reported in limited sources, one source only, and excluded from all others, and yet they are accepted as historical based on that one source only. And calling some sources "secular" is meaningless, because there was no such thing.
Produce any piece of evidence or a contemporary historian writing about events of that time that references this individual and you've got a case. Until then you've got nothing.
Virtually all our evidence about historical figures comes from NON-contemporary historians. Very important historical persons were not written about until generally 50-100 years after they lived.
We do have reference to Jesus in Josephus and Tacitus and Suetonius less than 100 years after the events. Such early reference to a non-political person with no power or status is highly unusual.
Inasmuch as the stories of Jesus contain nothing new, . . .
At least one thing new -- there is no earlier account of any miracle healer who arrives in town and is met by multitudes who come to be healed or bring the sick to him.
And yet, this is what would happen if a reputed healer arrived in town and was widely believed to be a genuine healer. There should be other stories of such healers if any existed who had widespread credibility as someone with such power.
. . . but instead are copycat versions of previous myths about other gods, . . .
You can't name any connection to those previous myths. You're just repeating what your Jesus-debunker crusader guru preached at you. There are no earlier writings containing those previous myths that have any similarity to the Jesus stories. As always, you can't give any text source for this but can only repeat the modern cliché that those "previous myths" exist.
. . . their "rapid" (if one considers 30-50 years "rapid") coalescing into written form . . .
This appearance in writing in 30-50 years is unusual for historical events at that time, which usually did not appear in writing that soon. And for miracle stories, the time gap until the first written accounts was usually centuries, and from about 100 AD onward the time gap became shorter in a few cases, but not less than 100 years. So this was "rapid" by comparison to any other examples of events appearing soon in the written record.
Proceeding into the Middle Ages there might be some cases where a written account appears in 50 years or less after the reported miracle event, but there's always one source only, and the general pattern of a long time gap (100+ years) holds true until after the invention of printing and widespread publishing.
The fast spread of a miracle cult became possible as a result of the Jesus tradition which laid the groundwork for stories about "saints" who reportedly did miracles and who enjoyed a long public career which helped make the mythologizing process possible.
. . . (similar to the then extant written forms many of the myths from which they were plagiarized) . . .
There's no shortage of now "extant" writings containing the myths which existed. Of course you can always prove your theory by saying the evidence for it was destroyed by some evil demon or evil Pope or evil Darth Vader who went around shredding all the evidence that would otherwise prove your theory.
But in the real world, again, you cannot name one example of a Jesus miracle which was "plagiarized" from the earlier myths, or name one earlier myth, and quote the text, showing what the "stories of Jesus" were "plagiarized" from.
You cannot cite the text of that earlier myth from the millions of earlier stories that are extant. All you can do is repeat back the rhetoric of your Jesus-debunker mythicist guru crusader without providing any evidence of your own or offering anything other than just the words of that crusader which you have memorized by rote and nothing else.
Your dependency on your gurus is even worse than the dependency of a Christian worshiper in the pew who slurps up every word of the preacher without question or critical thinking. At least the preacher is judged by whether his teaching conforms to the scripture which is cited as the source, and so the guru-preacher is sometimes questioned, whereas you only quote modern Jesus-debunker critics, without ever citing anything outside their sermons or anything dating back to the time period of these events.
. . . is itself not extraordinary. In fact it's no more extraordinary than the fact that it took humans hundreds of thousands of years of technological progress to create the first barely flight-worthy airplane, then only took about 30 more years to create super-sonic fighter jets.
But this fact (about technology change) fits into a pattern. You could name hundreds/thousands of similar technology advances, so no one case of this stands out as peculiar.
But also, it's appropriate to ask why there is not the same pattern seen equally in ALL areas of technology/science. E.g., in space exploration something has slowed down the progress from all expectations of 50 years ago, while in computers the pace curved upward beyond expectation.
So there's a pattern, but the pattern is broken in some cases. When one case doesn't follow a pattern that is clearly seen in other cases, there has to be an explanation. It is "extraordinary" when one case stands out going contrary to a pattern that is followed in most cases.
There is a clear pattern that holds true for all cases of miracle claims. The pattern is more obvious if we go back centuries ago before modern publishing. This is explained: in modern times widespread publishing explains why the pattern is partly broken and a miracle cult can spread faster and be published earlier and more widely than a similar miracle cult 1000 years ago.
Going back centuries there is no case of a miracle legend which was published in a short time -- with only this one exception. So here is a pattern that is broken in one case only. There must be an explanation for this. It is "extraordinary" when one case only breaks a pattern and there is no explanation.
That Jesus was not an established celebrity is also an anomaly which breaks the normal pattern in all cases of miracle hero legends, where the one mythologized was always a widely-known public figure during his lifetime, in all cases where we can identify the original historical figure.
Why is there no other known case of a miracle hero legend in which the original historical figure was not a famous public figure of status during his lifetime? This contradicts a regular pattern. It IS "extraordinary" if no one can explain why this pattern is broken in this one case only. Just as it would be "extraordinary" if no one could explain why there is a sudden steep upward progress pattern in most cases of science research which is broken in one branch of science, i.e., one which goes against the pattern.
So, what is the pattern, and is the pattern ever broken? And if it's broken in one case only, why is there this one exception only rather than several exceptions?
The anonymous documents GMatt, GLuke and GJohn are much more parsimoniously explained by cultural differences accruing over geography and time than to be treated as independent corroboration of miraculous activities, none of which any of the writers of any of these documents claim to have witnessed.
Most historical events we know of from that time are from writers who did not witness the events they reported.
How do "cultural differences" explain anything here? The documents relate the same general events despite the differences among them. Some "cultural differences" might explain why they present the story differently, or even give conflicting versions of the same event(s), but the basic events are there, attested to by all these accounts. This is "corroboration" of the events generally, whereas the minor differences can be attributed to inaccuracies or misperceptions from the writers or their sources.
The writers of these documents never identified themselves, . . .
Again, "anonymous" sources are not rejected. The
Royal Frankish Annals are anonymous and are accepted as sources for the history of the Franks. One can apply the same critical standards to the gospel accounts as are applied to other historical sources, including the
Royal Frankish Annals. That a source is "anonymous" does not mean it lacks credibility or is rejected as a source. That you continually pounce on this "anonymous" source argument shows you are having trouble giving any legitimate reason to discount the gospel accounts as sources.
. . . never claimed to be witnesses and never claimed to have talked to anyone who was a witness of any of the things they wrote about.
Right, like the vast majority of historians and sources for history, for anything more than 1000 years ago. This is the normal pattern for all sources for history of those times. The historical events you believe happened 1000+ years ago are from writers who never witnessed the events or claimed to have talked to anyone who was a witness to the events. Again you misapply false criteria to the gospel accounts, imposing special standards onto them which you do not apply to all the other sources. All your sources for history fail to meet these standards.
They constitute about the worst possible form of evidence as they provide us with agenda-filled claims . . .
Virtually ALL sources for history more than 1000 years ago are agenda-filled. Herodotus, Livy, Cicero, Tacitus, Caesar -- all were biased and agenda-filled, and most based in religious traditions.
. . . about extraordinary events . . .
We demand extra evidence for miracle events. One source only is not enough. And we need something closer to the time when the events allegedly happened. We have this extra evidence in the case of the Jesus miracles. We have much more evidence than is necessary for ordinary events. There are millions of historical facts which are routinely accepted on less evidence than we have for the Jesus miracle events.
. . . for which there is absolutely no evidence that any of it ever happened.
We have more evidence that these events happened than we have for many events which we routinely accept. Virtually all the evidence for history is from documents which say the events happened. That's virtually all our history is based upon. If you reject the written claim that it happened as insufficient, then you have to reject virtually ALL of our known history.
Attempting to use themselves as corroboration of themselves remains circular . . .
So then ALL historical events never happened by that logic. They are ALL based on written documents saying the events happened. All historical sources have to be rejected for any "corroboration" because they are all circular just as the gospel accounts are.
. . . no matter how many times you claim that they are independent corroboration. They aren't.
They are the same "corroboration" as we have for virtually ALL historical events. Obviously there is more evidence for many major events. However, for minor events, or less-known or less-documented events, there is typically less corroboration, or fewer sources, than we have for the Jesus events. And yet those events are accepted as established history, despite having less evidence or "corroboration" than we have for the Jesus events.
Finally, quit attempting to read my mind. Your attempts to do so belie little else besides that you have no idea who I am, and that you have no clue as to why I am now skeptical about the veracity of these documents. I have never attempted to accuse you of dogmatically refusing to consider alternative explanations to the ideas you have presented and I'll thank you to start extending me the same courtesy.
So then you do allow the possibility that some miracle events may have happened if there is evidence for them. So those miracle claims for which there is some evidence are not to be equated with other miracle claims, like the pagan myths, for which there is no evidence.
So, e.g., you agree then that the Jesus miracle events are a possibility, or they might have happened, since we have evidence for them. And so they cannot be dismissed as being equivalent to the pagan myth miracles for which there is no evidence. Because you do not dogmatically reject all miracle claims per se, but allow each to be considered on the evidence in each individual case.
To me it sounded like you were equating them, which would require the dogmatic premise that ALL miracle stories per se must be rejected equally as false, and all equated with each other as impossible, regardless of any evidence in some individual cases.
in your rebuttal.
