Again . . . and again . . . Where are all those other Jesus-like miracle-workers who are supposed to be a dime-a-dozen?
What made Jesus stand out? Why aren't there several other similar messiah figures?
The question to answer is: Why does Jesus stand out among all the many possible preaching messiah prophet figures during this period of history?
If he does not stand out, then there should be other similar messiah figures or hero figures who were made into gods during this time. Who would they be? Not just the 1st century -- how about from 500 BC to 1500 AD. Who is a comparable reported historical figure who displayed superhuman power and who was worshiped as a god?
How did such a singular figure arise out from everyone else if he had no unusual power? What distinguished him to cause so many to make him into a god?
The myth/legend grew with the telling and repeating of a story.
What myth? What was the myth at the beginning? Why aren't there other similar myths about other god/hero/savior figures? Why couldn't other myths/legends also grow from being repeated? Why only this one?
Whatever kernel of truth lies at the heart of it, the existence of the man, the character of the man, etc, is hard to determine.
Why is it so easy to determine in the case of Gautama and Simon Magus and others, but hard to determine in this case? One reasonable answer is that he actually did perform the miracle acts attributed to him in the legends.
You mean apart from the literally hundreds of hero god saviors that existed before the Jesus myth was invented? Perseus, Hercules, Osiris, Horus, ect.
If these figures are real historical persons, they lived at least 1000 years earlier than any written source we have about them. And the legends about them accumulated over a period of 500 years or more.
So they are not comparable to the Jesus person whose reputation became established in less than 50 years after his death and for whom we have sources within that time frame. The earliest sources are even as little as 20 years later.
The Paul epistles attest to the resurrection of Jesus, and these are mostly from the 50s AD. Also there is the Q document, which both Matthew and Luke used, which is from about 50 AD, and it narrates two of the Jesus miracle events plus also has one passage which refers to a number of the events without narrating them.
There is nothing like this documenting the miracles of Perseus or Hercules or Osiris or Horus. Where are the other examples of historical persons for whom we have any credible evidence or sources relating the miracle acts they did, such as we have in the case of Jesus? Why is it that this one alone is the only one for whom there is any credible evidence?
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Then why aren't there several of these Jesus myths? Why aren't there other characters, other names, in other places, where the same story unfolds and we would have several of them instead of only this one?
There are. Your lack of knowledge about the various non-canonical gospels is your problem, not mine.
But those sources give us the same Christ figure again, not someone else. You're supposed to give us examples of
different hero myths similar to the Jesus one. Is there any other hero messiah figure in the non-canonical gospels than the Christ figure, or Jesus the Galilean? That's what you need to show. So again, where are the other Jesus-like myths?
I'd recommend googling "Early Christian Writings" and reading up so you don't look so ill-informed about the subject matter at hand.
Those will all give the Jesus Christ figure again. I know that Simon Magus is contained in some of those writings. But here again the miracle stories don't come until centuries
AFTER the character actually lived. There is nothing relating his miracles in the 1st-century references to him. They come only 2 centuries later. You need to give us an example of a mythic hero miracle-worker for whom there is evidence near to the time he lived, not 2 centuries later.
So again, where are the Jesus-like mythical heros who are supposed to be a dime-a-dozen?
Additionally it would be helpful for you to be aware of the magnitude of hero-gods that inspired the legend of "Jesus the Magic Jew."
Why don't you give an example of these? They are persons in history for whom we have sources near their time reporting on the miracle acts they did? Why are you claiming these Jesus-like myth heros are all over the place but can't give one example?
The similarity between the Jesus myths and the Egyptian / Roman / Greek myths that inspired them was so striking that people who actually knew about the similarities (such as early christian apologist Justin Martyr) offered insane rationalizations such as "The devil got people to make these stories up hundreds of years before Jesus was born so folks would think Jesus was just another "me-too" hero god."
And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.
Justin Martyr - First Apology Chapter 21
Those "gods" were not real people, or those that were historical persons lived many centuries before any sources we have about them. Where are the actual historical persons who were mythologized into miracle-working gods within 50 years of the time when they lived?
That some of the pagan myths attached themselves to the Jesus figure leaves unanswered the question:
WHY did these myths get attached to him?
Why did the pagans want to attach their myths or symbols to Jesus? There had to be something there, an object or entity, that they identified as desirable to attach their symbols to. What was that object and why did they choose this as something to attach their symbols to?
Unless you have a better answer, it is that
He already had a unique unprecedented reputation as a miracle-worker and so they switched or expanded their myths/symbols to him, because his already-existing reputation then gave stronger credibility to those myths/symbols, and they were more credible being attached to him than to the previous "gods" to which they had been attached earlier.
There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- in the Jesus myths that requires that any of it happened in order for it to have been written down as it appears today.
Yes there is something that requires that it happened: If they didn't happen, then they are fictions which emerged
TOO EARLY after him for them to be a result of normal mythologizing. None of the other persons who were mythologized into dieties had this happen to them within such a short time after they lived, including getting published in documents within 50 years, or even as soon as 20 years.
So in the case of Jesus the normal mythologizing process is not the explanation for the miracle stories. So you have to find an explanation that is unprecedented, so that something totally unique happened in this case. What is it that happened? The best answer is that in this case the miracle acts really did take place. It is not reasonable to suggest that in this one case only a mythologizing process took place that never happened in any other case before or after.
There is no historical evidence that any of it happened, no artifacts, nothing.
There is more evidence, from documents, for these events than there is for many historical events that we assume did happen.
There are many events that are not documented until centuries later and for which there is only one source. But in this case we have events documented within 50 years and earlier, and we have multiple sources. So the evidence for this is greater than it is for many historical facts that we take for granted.
Meanwhile we do have ample evidence of hoaxes being perpetrated by various people for whatever purpose.
We need examples. Each case has to be examined. Usually there's only one source for them. Isn't there usually evidence of a hoax? Or in some cases, maybe something really did happen. Unless you give an example, it's not possible to draw a conclusion, or compare them to the Jesus case.
I mentioned alien abduction stories as an example, one which you dismissed even though the examples are very similar to "eyewitness testimony" you appear to believe about equally unlikely events from completely anonymous people.
Not all alien abduction stories should be dismissed. Each one should be investigated. In some cases something unusual probably did happen. I might judge tentatively that such a story is fiction, but no strong conclusion should be drawn until it is investigated. It's better to say we don't know than to automatically reject any such story regardless of the evidence.
You keep asking "why Jesus and not someone else?" I might as well ask "Why Microsoft and not Digital Research?" We could get into endless debates over whatever happened that allowed one competitor to succeed where another disappeared into complete oblivion, . . .
That's not analogous. There are several successful companies, or legendary hero companies that have emerged. For an analogy to the Jesus legend, you have to show that one stands out uniquely apart from all the others. If there was only one giant mega-corporation that stood out far beyond all the others, with none of the others even close, and if this uniqueness continued on for centuries, then we'd have an analogy to the Jesus legend and one could ask for an explanation. And it might even be proper to consider if it's not some kind of miracle that this one company alone stands out so uniquely.
. . . but what's the point? It remains true that Digital Research once existed as the Goliath to Bill Gates' David. Did it take a god's intervention to make Microsoft successful and dissolve their once vast pool of competitors? No.
There needs to be a reason why one succeeds or wins out above the others. You can probably find those reasons.
And there needs to be a reason why one hero-legend figure is the only one who gets deified into a miracle-worker in such a short time, while all the others require generations or even centuries for this mythologizing process to take place. And why for this one we have several sources near to the event, while for the others there is usually only one source. And also, why this one had the shortest public career of all the hero legend figures and yet still has been mythologized more than all the others.
And what makes this point more extreme is that there is not any other hero legend figure who even ranks a close 2nd to this Christ figure in this regard. There is not any other one who comes close, in terms of the degree of mythologizing that took place, who is identified in writings where the evidence is given to indicate the power he possessed, and whose public life was anywhere near as short so as to reduce the time during which he could develop his reputation and create the necessary public image wherefrom the later mythologizing could take root and grow.
There needs to be an explanation for this extreme uniqueness, if it is not that he actually did perform those miracle acts, because these actual events in history in the period of about 29-30 AD would totally explain this uniqueness, i.e., how he got mythologized in spite of having so short a time period in which to establish his public image.
And it did not take any sort of divine intervention to make one religion more appealing than another either.
Correct, we would probably still have "Christianity" as the dominant religion, in some variant form, even if no Galilean Jesus figure had been available to be adopted as the center god figure for it. And one religion would prevail over the others. And we might be able to identify some factors that helped this one or that one gain more followers and be more successful. No appeal to divine favor to this one or that would be necessary.
But when something strangely unique happens, there needs to be an explanation. Something had to make the Galilean Jesus figure stand out so singularly. And rather than just saying "God intervened" to do it, all we need to do is look at what happened, or what the people who mythologized him actually saw or witnessed, and we have the explanation right there, easy to recognize. He performed acts of power that in themselves proved he had a life-giving source or was in contact with such a source, and this power could be accessed and put to the benefit of humans.
So we have the phenomenological explanation based on particular events that happened, or particular acts that he did, and we don't need any theological or metaphysical or cosmological explanations. We can simply recognize those acts and a power that caused them and not know the further explanation of them. Or each "theologian" or "cosmologist" is free to speculate on the nature of that power. And surely a hundred theologies or cosmologies have become attached to the Christ figure to try to use him as their vehicle, and maybe some of them offer some truth, and probably most of them are pretty far off base.
Why is it that the Mormons are now the fastest growing non-catholic christian denomination? Is it because God is with them? Is the spread of Islam, second only to Catholicism as an organized religion, evidence that Allah is real and approves of that religion? What, exactly, is your point in pursuing this line of argument?
There's probably a reason in each case why this religion succeeded more than that one. Or why anything happens, why this thing succeeded and another failed. It's good to ask why, or seek the reason or cause. And saying "God did it" is hardly an answer. But there does have to be an answer. And even if "we don't know" is the best we can do, it is also appropriate to consider all the possible answers other than "we don't know" and ask which of these possibilities is most likely.
And of all the explanations for the Jesus hero phenomenon, the best one, other than "we don't know," is that he must have actually performed those miracle healing acts, because this solves the mystery of how he got mythologized even though he failed to meet the requirements a hero figure always has to meet in order to become transformed from a normal human into a god.
You ask "What miracles did Joseph Smith perform?"
Wikipedia is your friend. Once again your ignorance of the subject matter you are discussing is your own problem, not that of those with whom you are having the discussion.
You aren't going to name one miracle he did?
I've already noted earlier that I found there are some anecdotes that he performed some healings. These are surely more of relevance than some mere dead tablets sitting on a table and just looking "awesome" or at best glowing a bit?
Where is the act of power? The healing acts are much better examples of something to cite.
And I have said, and I'll repeat it, no matter how many times it is necessary, to make the point: It is fine if J. Smith did in fact actually do something to make someone recover from an illness. If it can be proved that he did something, just as it is proved that Rasputin the mad monk did something to cause an apparent dying child to recover, then that "miracle" should be recognized for what it is. And Smith did something good if he caused that person to recover.
However, we all know that most such healings would have happened anyway, and it's just a coincidence that it happened on this occasion and failed to happen in the dozen other cases when the same healing technique was tried. So we have to look at the whole collection of anecdotes or reports and try to figure out if there is a real pattern or only a few coincidences and a relatively low batting average.
The people in 30 AD who witnessed the Jesus miracle acts were not stupid, even though we pretend that everyone living 100 (500) years ago and earlier were simpletons who imagined whatever they wished for. But they knew the difference between a real pattern of healings, with a high batting average, or 1.000, and a pattern of hits and misses and a low batting average of only .100 or .200.
A very high average, or even 1.000, definitely would astound them, just as it would astound us, and anyone who ever achieved that or close to it would be mythologized immediately and be taken seriously and would quickly attain to a record of his acts that would begin to spread through word of mouth and then through written documents.
So, we should look at the Smith reported miracles, and any other reported cases of this, and anyone who wants to present the case that he had a high batting average should do so. It doesn't look to me like anyone seriously wants to present that case. Most ordinary preachers accumulate a few anecdotes from among their "flock" of folks who recovered more quickly, or rarely even immediately, after being prayed for. The Smith examples seem to fall into this pattern, with of course only the "hits" getting any notice and the "misses" being ignored.
If Smith really had a high batting average, we would have a better record of his successes at this.
There is no shame in being ignorant, but there is great shame in choosing to remain ignorant when information that would avoid such embarrassing gaffes is so readily available. So I ask you again, upon what criteria should one accept the testimony of anonymous people making these claims in the bible and reject the claims made by actual, named individuals who swore and even signed documentation attesting to the miracles of Smith?
No, those tablets sitting on a table are not a "miracle" or act of power. I'm sure I could put some odd-looking tablets on a table, make them look strange or reflect light in some way, and then get 1000 witnesses to look at them and attest that they are there.
No, sorry, that is not a "miracle" -- just because something is sitting there and looks interesting.
As to the healing acts of J. Smith, which would be something to take more seriously, I don't think these are any more than the kind of occasional anecdote that worshippers experience and relate to their pastor, and are offset by all the "misses" that far outnumber the "hits."
However, once again, if there is good evidence that Joseph Smith or anyone else really did heal someone, I would have no problem believing it. Go ahead and give the examples and show us any indication that it wasn't just that occasional "hit" among a much larger number of "misses."
In reality, you think the Joseph Smith "miracles" are silly and not worth paying any attention to. And since that's obviously what you think, why do you expect me to take them seriously? They are not in the same category as the Jesus miracles recorded in the gospel accounts. We have good reason to believe that Jesus had a high batting average, if not 1.000.
Do you hope that by doing this somehow the process of repeating these baseless assertions will convince someone they're true?
I'm becoming more convinced that they're true by the repeated failure of anyone to give an explanation as to why this Jesus person became mythologized so greatly despite failing to meet the requirements that all myth heros must meet in order to become mythologized.
And by some of the pathetic comparisons, like to Joseph Smith and to Horus and Perseus and Apollonius and the others. Such poor comparisons, which all fall hopelessly flat, only serve to confirm that the Jesus case is astoundingly unique and still unexplained.