Good grief…back to last January. Wish, Wash, Rinse, Repeat…
What's important is that the writer/source should not just be someone who was a direct devotee of the demigod or healer, especially not someone under the spell of the guru's charisma for several years.
The writer's belief in the guru's alleged miracles should not be due to his having been a member of his flock and having a personal attachment to him and being impacted by his charisma. I.e., this is a less reliable source than a direct witness who was not a devotee, or someone at the time in contact with direct witnesses but not himself a direct devotee impacted directly by the guru's personality.
And knowing the writer's name is of little importance, i.e., whether the writer is "anonymous" is trivial.
LOL, again as has been pointed out to you a multitude of times,
you have no idea if the writers of the Gospels were already devotees prior to writing them, that is just your wish.
You cannot demand that we have people not connected with the prophet JS for evidence, as all you have is assumed people who may have known your demigod.
The writers almost surely were not in direct contact with him. The crowds who gathered around Jesus were surely not literate. It almost surely began with ORAL REPORTS ONLY.
Again, this is just your WISH, not reality. You and I have no idea the background of those that wrote the Gospels. It almost surely began with MADE UP BULLSHIT. See how easy it is to say something completely unsubstantiated?
Paul admits he never met your demigod. I'd be quite content with comparing outside sources for both your demigod and for JS and his miracle, as you have none.
You're saying there are "outside sources" for the JS miracles? That's not clear. So far I think the most comprehensive presentation of the JS miracles is
http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith/Healings_and_miracles which seems to have only sources which were his direct disciples. What is an example of a source who was not one of his direct disciples?
I’m not trying to defend JS, so I don’t have to support JS against your silly MHORC (Mythical Hero Official Requirements Checklist). I’m comparing nothing against nothing. STRIKE
It is not difficult. Just spend 10% of the time, you do regurgitating the 739th variant of your vacuous claims, to googling the information. And you would find out that 1895 is simply a later publishing of 7 volumes, not the oldest copy of said documents. We actually have the LDS 1839-1843 originals available online as images.
The original manuscript was written between June 1839–24 Aug. 1843, which is available via scanned images here:
http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperS...56-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834
You need to dig out from those accounts the best example of a Joseph Smith miracle story and post it here. You don't want to do this because you know those accounts are laughable in comparison to the Jesus miracles in the gospel accounts. If you claim they are equally credible, then post one or two of them.
LOL…this has been presented to you several times on this thread, I’m not going to bother linking it yet again when you go for the LALALALAL I CAN’T HERE YOU AS IT DOESN’T FIT MY MHORC. Get a clue, FUCK your made up MHORC!
Anecdotes like these are very common among many religions. People within the church saying brother so-and-so healed someone, or they prayed and sister so-and-so recovered, and so on -- and meetings or a faith healing rally etc. These are all worshipers within the church family supporting each other and re-assuring each other that God is taking care of them, and so on.
All this is inspired from their belief in the Bible accounts, the Jesus miracles, which is a centuries-old tradition that inspires them and leads to these stories.
These are not analogous to the Jesus healing events, which came not from any religious tradition or anecdotes of the disciples, which kind are discounted by everyone who isn't a member of the religious group in question.
Sure they are analogous. The Jesus cult was constructed within the confines of the Roman Empire with Yahweh, Mithras, and Orisis floating around, with their followers with healing claims.
No, there are no healing miracle events within this environment, other than the following:
from Jewish scripture containing hundreds of miracles, 3 healings by Elisha and Elijah: 1 Kings 17:22, 2 Kings 4:34, 2 Kings 5:14); ……
LOL…try again.
http://www.voiceofhealing.info/02history/oldtestament.html
There are twelve occurrences of individual healings and three corporate healings recorded in the Old Testament.
JS was constructing his new religion to compete with Christianity, . . .
With the existing Christian denominations, yes. But entirely based on the earlier Christian scriptures and Christ belief.
. . . just as Paul and his chipmunks were constructing their new religion to compete with Judaism.
Sort of. Maybe there's an analogy of Paul to Joseph Smith. But no analogy to JS can explain where the Jesus miracle healing stories came from.
Wish, Wash, Rinse, Repeat…you keep telling yourself that. Again, I don’t need to play within your silly and fabricated MHORC.
Not amazingly, both groups most probably felt compelled to make their god-system competitive with the older one(s).
Again, a comparison of JS to Paul might make some sense in explaining how they proceeded to win more followers and spread their message. However, Paul did not originate the Jesus legend, but only created his own version of the Christ belief which already existed.
The proper comparison is that of Joseph Smith to Jesus, as both are reputed miracle-workers.
Wish, Wash, Rinse, Repeat…you keep telling yourself that. Again, I don’t need to play within your silly and fabricated MHORC. But quite funny on the “proper comparison" attempt…
Rather, the Jesus accounts are of people who came from outside the circle of his disciples and were healed and then left to tell others what had happened.
WTF? The Gospel accounts come from the circle of believers within this new Christ cult. There are NO outside accounts.
But the stories did not originate from the direct disciples of Jesus, …
Wish, Wash, Rinse, Repeat… You again are conflating the counter argument. I haven’t stated that the Gospels/stories came from direct disciples. I have stated that the Gopsels/stories
could have easily come from devotees of the cult. Whether 2 of the writers/story tellers were actually followers of the purported Jesus is an unknown. What you haven’t shown, and
can’t show, is any evidence that these stories came from interested bystanders.
There are at least two reasons why the Jesus miracle stories likely did not originate (as fictions) from his direct disciples:
1. The stories themselves, in the synoptic gospels, imply several times that the ones who first began spreading the stories were the onlookers, also the one healed in some cases, and these were never his direct disciples. It's very clear that the direct disciples, an "inner circle" of believers close to him, is a very small group compared to the "multitude" of onlookers or visitors present. And it is usually the latter who go out and tell the stories. In 1 or 2 cases the account says this explicitly, that it was non-disciples who spread the word. In most of the accounts it is implied that it was non-disciples, but not stated explicitly.
2. This does not apply to every miracle story, particularly not to the calming of the storm. But it applies to most of the healing stories. .
Wish, Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Again, you haven’t provided any evidence but your wish that it is so. Well you seem to think that the miracle stories "clearly" come from these curious onlookers. If the stories actually were "clearly" sourced from these curious onlookers, instead of "assumed by you" to have come from them, then they would clearly be independent sources. However, it has become clear that you have formed a rather unique and custom definition of the word "clear".
2. The public ministry of Jesus was too short for him to have become mythologized (in fictional accounts) in such a short time, and such mythologizing, or legend-building, is part of the pattern of miracle-worker cults, where the guru enjoys a long career, usually decades, in which he influences his direct disciples with his charisma and also amasses a wide reputation which brings him widespread publicity and notoriety.
Again, I don’t need to play within your silly and fabricated MHORC. The purported short time of public ministry comes only from the story tellers. Anyway, cults can spring up fast.
We need something from someone other than Joseph Smith himself. And we need something originating from someone other than his direct disciples.
ROTFLMAO So straight from the horse's mouth isn't any good, but anonymous gospels written by people within the Christ cult is good?
If the stories originated from direct disciples only, the credibility is much lower. You can't figure that out? You can't understand how the direct disciples, directly impacted by the guru's charisma, are less credible in their claims about the guru's miracle power?
Yeah, I can figure out that cult followers are heavily biased. Your problem is that you can’t actually show that your cult’s claims are any different, you just wish it was so. Additionally, anonymous isn’t necessarily better than known devotees IMPOV, especially when the anonymous writers could quite easily also be devotees. You can’t figure that out?
The problem is the very poor analogy of taking an example from the 19th century, when publishing is widespread, to compare it to the much different example from the 1st century AD, when virtually nothing was written or copied or published.
So you need to come up with a more appropriate comparison. You can't claim you've explained the Jesus miracle stories by making this comparison to a case where the conditions are so much different.
Actually, it is a great comparison, you just don’t like it. And I don’t need to come up with anything as I find your MHORC to be silly BS, and humans have created thousands of gods with special features.
In one case we know who wrote the documents, . . .
Again, there is nothing inferior about "anonymous" documents. This is a phony criterion contrived here only for rejecting the gospel accounts as a source, when this is never used in other cases to reject a document as a source.
Just because a document has a name attached to it does not mean it's more reliable. There are many problems with identifying the source and the author's credibility for the documents generally, even if there is a name attached. That name being attached does not resolve the problems, and the anonymity is at worst a very minor problem.
You can't name any document rejected as a historical source just because it's "anonymous."
You seem to like to pick at each point, as if it exists in a vacuum. I don’t reject a document
just because it’s anonymous. There is a large weave that I am looking at, and you are sniveling about one strand….
. . . in what years they were written, . . .
On this point you're just factually wrong. The gospel accounts and the Paul epistles are dated with equal accuracy to most other documents of the time. Very few can be precisely dated to within 20 years of when they were written.
Or again, you're contriving a guideline here for automatically excluding MOST documents prior to 1000, and thus MOST of our mainline history. It is very common to accept ancient documents as sources even though they cannot be dated precisely.
Sorry, but you are factually wrong. The point that is being discussed here are the Gospels, where people purportedly passed on stories about this Jesus guy they said they knew. Paul’s documents are pretty accurately dated, but he never met Jesus by his own words. Mark is closer to having some accuracy, but still there are lots of assumption even there. I’m not trying to critique the Gospels against all other ancient writing, I’m comparing it to the reality we know of JS and the Mormons.
In the other case, we can only assume that some of the writers knew their demigod, . . .
No, I think the general consensus is that the gospel writers and also Paul did not know Jesus directly, as most all sources for history back then did not know the historical figure they wrote about. Paul claimed some mystical contact with him, like others since then have claimed, but not the historical Jesus known by the direct disciples.
The assumption generally is that the later writers had information, from sources, oral reports, and even some written reports now lost, about the earlier events, going back to 30 AD. So the knowledge of Jesus was indirect, for the later gospel writers/editors. But most of their information, written and oral, likely originated from the earlier direct witnesses, including both direct disciples and non-disciples who were present.
Yes, that is the
assumption by Christian theologians….funny that is….
. . . but we really aren't positive as the first document came at least 3 decades after the end of the events, but the years are super fuzzy.
No more "fuzzy" than in the case of our mainline sources for normal historical events.
(The Paul epistles are separated by only 25 years or so.)
The dating of the epistles and gospel accounts is just as definite as for most other documents of the time which are accepted as sources for the events, i.e., the normal events which are routinely believed. It's normal for there to be doubts about the dating of documents which are sources for the period.
You are trying to defend The God, right? Not just an ordinary everyday normal god, right? Maybe you need a better cleanup hitter….
