Best evidence for a historical Joshua ben Joseph

[DBT]

It's not so much that the evidence is wrong, but that the evidence, if it could be called that, is not sufficient to prove the proposition.

 

[Tammuz]

I think a historical Jesus (Yeshua) who in some way pissed off the Romans and was then crucified is the simplest answer.

Yeshua was a common name, the area had lots of Messiah claimants, and it was a politically unstable area, with lots of revolts against the Romans.

Assuming a historical Jesus makes the most sense. Nothing is added or explained by adopting the mythicist position.

 

[Lion IRC]

Yep. And even as an atheist, you dont need to accept a miraculous explanation for the bare bones fact claims about Jesus' life.

Empty tomb? Resurrection or swoon theory.

Feeding the 500? Actual miracle or symbolic 'spiritual' nourishment.

Either way, you STILL start with a historical Jesus.

 

[DBT]

We don't really know what happened. The information is not reliable enough. Probability tells is that something supernatural or miraculous most likely did not happen.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

We don't really know what happened. The information is not reliable enough. Probability tells is that something supernatural or miraculous most likely did not happen.

The character of Superman was inspired by Stan Lee's reading an account of a person lifting a 3000 lb vehicle from someone trapped underneath. Of course, no one lifted 3000 pounds, the vehicle never left the ground, the wheels never even left the ground. But a person did find unusual strength when confronted with a dire situation and managed to apply several hundred pounds of force, enough to possibly have saved a person's life.

Therefore Superman is a historical person.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Stan Lee?? Superman???
I think it was Ayn Rand. I strongly doubt it was Stan. (Old-time DC fan from 1963-1966, approx.)

 

[Keith&Co.]

The character of Superman was inspired by Stan Lee's reading an account of a person lifting a 3000 lb vehicle from someone trapped underneath.

.....the Hulk, maybe? That sounds like the pilot for Bill Bixby's series.

 

[Tammuz]

Yep. And even as an atheist, you dont need to accept a miraculous explanation for the bare bones fact claims about Jesus' life.

Empty tomb? Resurrection or swoon theory.

Feeding the 500? Actual miracle or symbolic 'spiritual' nourishment.

Either way, you STILL start with a historical Jesus.

I don't see any reason for why one needs to explain the alleged miracles attributed to Jesus. They are legends, pure and simple. Unless there is some historical corroboration that they happened other than the Gospels, there is nothing to explain.

 

[atrib]

Yep. And even as an atheist, you dont need to accept a miraculous explanation for the bare bones fact claims about Jesus' life.

Empty tomb? Resurrection or swoon theory.

Feeding the 500? Actual miracle or symbolic 'spiritual' nourishment.

Either way, you STILL start with a historical Jesus.

What about Hanuman and his heroic efforts to save Lakshmana's life? He uprooted a mountain and brought it to the battlefield where Lakshmana lay wounded, so the physician could use a magic herb to heal the wounds.

Actual miracle, or symbolic mythology. Either way, you STILL start with a historical flying monkey with superhuman strength.

 

[Swammerdami]

Obviously almost all the intelligent answers have already been given multiple times in this or in other threads. But I want to participate too!

First, what does "historic Jesus" even mean? Was there a preacher/healer/zealot from Nazareth (not Bethlehem) who was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate? Yes; Definitely! Did he turn water into wine or resurrect the dead? I strongly doubt it! I assume the dispute is whether the crucifee from Nazareth existed, not over the miracles.

Occam's Razor screams out Yes! If some cabal decided to invent a Messiah, why invent a fake one, when there were plenty of zealots, preachers, healers and would-be Messiahs to choose from? Making up a fictional character would lead to exposure since the stories of Jesus were circulating widely within a decade of his death. If Jesus were fictional, many 1st-century people (e.g. Josephus) would have known or suspected so, yet as far as is known, such an allegation was never made.

The idea that the Gospels were all prepared many decades after the Crucifixion is a red herring. The Q-source from which Matthew and Luke borrow is dated to about 50 AD. Paul was also writing about Jesus by about that date, and by then there was already a schism between at least two branches of Christianity. Again, with so many zealots and preachers to choose from, why squabble over a fiction?

Jesus' character is less clear. Reza Aslan considers him a zealot. For others, he was a preacher; but it was his power as a healer that gets special attention in the Gospels. I think it quite likely that Jesus was a potent and charismatic hypnotist. Susceptibility to hypnosis was more common in those days; and many illnesses were psychosomatic. (Although most such embellishments in the Gospels were probably fictional, having water-drinkers believe they're drinking wine is a trick which can be done on stage today by an expert hypnotist!)

William Harwood (Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus) argues that the recording of Josh being baptized by John the Baptist in the Gospels casts such doubt on Jesus' claim to being the Messiah (why would the real Messiah need baptism by another, imposter Messiah?) that it was only included in the Gospel because the fact of his baptism by JtB was so well-known as to be irrefutable.

Yes. There are several stories in the Gospels which make little sense for a fictional narrative, but might appear simply because they were true. The "prophet without honor ... in his own country" is another example. And, as those familiar with the foibles of eyewitness testimony know, discrepancies between the Gospels may reduce the chance that the stories were contrived.

That can be a persuasive argument for those who:

1. Haven’t read much fiction.
2. Have never known a good liar.

I'll let the late Clive Staples Lewis, Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, answer this:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like.... Either [the Gospels are] reportage, or else some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic, narrative.

 

[Tharmas]

You've certainly dug up an old post of mine - it took me a while to locate it (it turns out it's post #3 in this thread).

So, another false dichotomy from C.S. Lewis (or should his famous trilemma be called a false trichotomy?). I'm not impressed. Ancient novelists had quite a grasp of techniques of fiction, and many scholars, including Christian apologists, have given Mark credit for creating a new and even unique genre of literature, but one thing is clear: it is not history in any modern or classical sense of the word. Someone else on this thread, or maybe it was another thread, I can't remember, posted this scholarly study of ancient historical writings with a cogent explanation of why the Gospels aren't history.

Meanwhile I'll stand by my original critique of the "embarrassment" criterion, which for those who can't remember it from three or four months ago, reads in its entirety:

Ah yes, the embarrassment argument: they wouldn’t have written this and embarrassed their hero if it weren’t true. That can be a persuasive argument for those who:

1. Haven’t read much fiction.
2. Have never known a good liar.
3. Have never been to an AA meeting to hear drunks try to outdo each other with their stories of how dissolute they had been.
4. Have never been to a (Christian) religious service where the preacher claimed to be a great sinner.

But if JtB was a real character (and I don’t know any major arguments against that) and had a real following, what better way to establish your hero’s credentials than to have than to have him encounter JtB and then, lo and behold, JtB endorses your hero as the real deal, greater than himself? Then a miracle happens and seals the deal. Must be true.
So my conclusion is, the argument fails because it is no more plausible than its counter argument. It doesn’t prove anything one way of the other.

As for the embarrassment criterion in general, Paul (I preach Christ crucified) made it the central pillar of his theology. If it didn't sell tickets Christianity would have closed on opening night.

As for the discrepancies between the Gospels, your argument might hold water if they were minor, inconsequential items, but in fact they are major, glaring discrepancies involving the facts of the supposed resurrection, and subsequent appearances, of Jesus, which are the whole point of the Gospels.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

You've certainly dug up an old post of mine - it took me a while to locate it (it turns out it's post #3 in this thread).

So, another false dichotomy from C.S. Lewis (or should his famous trilemma be called a false trichotomy?). I'm not impressed. Ancient novelists had quite a grasp of techniques of fiction, and many scholars, including Christian apologists, have given Mark credit for creating a new and even unique genre of literature, but one thing is clear: it is not history in any modern or classical sense of the word. Someone else on this thread, or maybe it was another thread, I can't remember, posted this scholarly study of ancient historical writings with a cogent explanation of why the Gospels aren't history.

Meanwhile I'll stand by my original critique of the "embarrassment" criterion, which for those who can't remember it from three or four months ago, reads in its entirety:

Ah yes, the embarrassment argument: they wouldn’t have written this and embarrassed their hero if it weren’t true. That can be a persuasive argument for those who:

1. Haven’t read much fiction.
2. Have never known a good liar.
3. Have never been to an AA meeting to hear drunks try to outdo each other with their stories of how dissolute they had been.
4. Have never been to a (Christian) religious service where the preacher claimed to be a great sinner.

But if JtB was a real character (and I don’t know any major arguments against that) and had a real following, what better way to establish your hero’s credentials than to have than to have him encounter JtB and then, lo and behold, JtB endorses your hero as the real deal, greater than himself? Then a miracle happens and seals the deal. Must be true.
So my conclusion is, the argument fails because it is no more plausible than its counter argument. It doesn’t prove anything one way of the other.

As for the embarrassment criterion in general, Paul (I preach Christ crucified) made it the central pillar of his theology. If it didn't sell tickets Christianity would have closed on opening night.

As for the discrepancies between the Gospels, your argument might hold water if they were minor, inconsequential items, but in fact they are major, glaring discrepancies involving the facts of the supposed resurrection, and subsequent appearances, of Jesus, which are the whole point of the Gospels.

The geographical errors and discrepancies alone make it sound like someone was retelling a story they heard. All the alleged "best evidence" that the gospel protagonist is "historical" makes much more sense and a much stronger case when considering that the character is fictional.

But we then take an obvious fiction complete with magical events and standard plot, wrap it in religious significance in an attempt to give it historical legitimacy, then try to rationalize that emotional attraction by further inventing stories about how it is real. Rationally speaking it should be quite obvious that the gospel protagonist is another fictional, inspired, literary character. But hold the presses, we've found the very boat Jesus preached from. I'm certain we'll eventually find his foreskin too, and the grail with its super powers.

Does anyone else watch netflix?

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

The nagging evidence that Jesus did the miracle acts --

And the never-ending search for ways to discount the evidence goes on:

Which means what remains (the historical Jesus, assuming one actually existed) bore little, if any resemblance to the legend fabricated through decades of story-telling.

This could be said of ANY historical figure (more than 1000 years ago), even regular non-miracle historical characters, for whom our evidence (from historians) typically is that of the later "story-telling" over many decades and generations and even centuries in some cases. Those for whom we have contemporary evidence, from the time they lived rather than decades of later story-telling, are the rare exception.

So this "decades of story-telling" feature of the Jesus legend accounts/Gospels does not make them different (less reliable) than our normal sources for history, i.e., it doesn't make the historical character in question more fictional, unless you mean that 90% of our ancient historical figures are fabricated fictions, and so most of our ancient history characters are legend (fiction?), to which the real historical characters, assuming they existed, bore little resemblance.

. . . what remains . . . bore little, if any resemblance to the legend fabricated through decades of story-telling.

In some ways, I can understand what you mean, but in others I don't. For sure (imo) supposed 'miracles' would almost certainly be either totally fake or at best (in some cases of healing) their efficacy exaggerated or misplaced.

One can make that judgment, but it's prejudgment not based on any evidence.

Typically there is evidence that a "supernatural" claim from ancient times is fictional, or rather, the sources for them can be recognized as unreliable, or there is lack of evidence or serious sources. E.g., the miracle claims about Apollonius of Tyana (debunkers' favorite example) are based entirely on one source only, and this more than 100 years later than the alleged events. And the miracles of the ancient gods Zeus or Apollo or Hercules, etc., are based on nothing near to when those characters lived, if they did exist in history.

But in the case of the historical Jesus there is real evidence, similar to that for normal historical events, but such as is lacking in all the other ancient miracle legends. Such lack of evidence is a primary reason to reject "supernatural" claims, rather than just that something reported contains a "supernatural" element per se. It's reasonable to believe the report if it's corroborated, i.e., there are extra sources saying it rather than only one, so there's not the usual lack of evidence as in the examples of all other miracle legends (lacking evidence). So for the historical Jesus case the only flaw in the accounts (making them less credible) is the "supernatural" element per se which is to automatically be rejected, ideologically, as a premise rather than as a conclusion drawn from the evidence.

So relegating the Jesus miracles to the "fake" category is based not on the evidence, but on prejudice. Whereas relegating the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana or of Hercules or Apollo etc. to the "fake" category is based on the lack of evidence for those miracle legends.

Ditto for the supposed size of the audiences, and indeed the proportion of an audience who 'were amazed'.

There's no way to know what these numbers were. But what's more important is to explain WHY THERE WAS any audience. And the only evidence we have says that it was the miracle acts which attracted them. All the evidence shows that the miracle acts did happen, as real events, and there is no evidence, such as other written accounts, which contradicts this.

If those miracle acts did not happen, then we have no explanation why there was any audience, or why anyone was amazed, or why he reportedly had any following, or why we have written accounts from the time attributing the miracle acts to him and pronouncing him as "Son of God" or as "messiah" or "savior" etc. Why do such accounts exist only in this one case and in no other cases? If they are "fake" or fabricated, why did so many fabricators converge only on this one person to create "fake" miracles for, all from near the time of the event, and not evolving over several centuries like in all the other cases of miracle legends?

But stories about miracles would say nothing much about whether a magic man likely existed or not to perform them, given that such people were apparently not uncommon back then.

What other "such people"? What are some examples, if they were common?

What does "such people were apparently not uncommon back then" mean? There are no other cases of reported miracle-workers and their miracle acts. There are some miracle legends of one kind or another, but nothing for which there is any serious evidence reporting the alleged miracle, like we have in this one case only from about 30 AD. Debunkers pretend "such people" were not uncommon but can't ever give examples reported in any written record. The only miracle legends popularly believed were those of the ancient deities, not reports about recent historical persons healing the sick, or getting killed and then rising back to life. If this was not "uncommon," then what are some other cases of it? Where are the accounts reporting them?

. . . given that such people were apparently not uncommon back then.

What does "back then" mean? Belief in miracles was more uncommon in the 1st century AD than ever before, and also more uncommon than at any time later. This period, up to the time of the historical Jesus (200/300 BC up to 50/100 AD), was the most devoid of miracle beliefs (or of "such people" reportedly doing miracles) than any other period in all history before and after. Virtually all the ancient miracle beliefs you can name (other than Jesus in the Gospels) are those of traditions dated either before or after this period, assuming "back then" means the time of Jesus and just before, and the time of the accounts reporting him. This is before 100 AD, going back to 100 or 200 or 300 BC. Isn't that what "back then" means? Where are there "such people" during that period?

Possibly by 250-300 BC you could find something, very little, of miracle claims. Then another century or 2 back and there are possible examples, but even then "such people" are virtually non-existent. From 300 BC and earlier you can claim there were some miracles reported at the Asclepius temple, done mainly by Asclepius priests, as the closest examples of "such people," and yet they're so unimportant that we don't have their names, because all they did was perform the prescribed rituals, and a few miracles are reported in the inscriptions. Other than that, who are the "such people" who were not uncommon back then?

And when I grew up in Ireland, nearly every village had its local faith healer.

Who no doubt did much chanting and meditating and anointing with oil. And in a Tibetan village the faith-healer no doubt would grunt Ommmmmmmm, Ommmmmmm several times in a deep voice.

But where are the published reports of the miraculous recoveries? of instant healing of blindness or leprosy? No one ever wrote about them? If anyone did, why did no one take them seriously and publish them? Maybe all the "local faith healer" ever did was perform rituals.

Of course everyone knows there are imagined miracles and answers to prayer, every day, attributed to whatever gods people have names for, and for the last 2000 years it's usually Jesus they attribute them to. But it's never recorded or published because virtually no one really believes it.

Why do we have only this one case in 30 AD which stands out, of healings reported by different writers, all about one healer in one place during a short period (1-3 years) whose accounts were taken so seriously that they were copied and recopied so the "good news" of this singular event would spread beyond that time and region? -- i.e. "singular" in the sense that there are no other cases like this recorded anywhere. --- What? there are other cases? where? What's anything comparable? What's the closest to this? It's not good enough to just say there are others. If there are others, then you can name one and quote the source reporting their miracle acts.


No shortage of FHINOs (faith healer in name only)

Those local village faith-healers are all business-as-usual operators widespread in every society and common to all historical periods. This is about practitioners claiming to have power, but not published reports of actual healing miracles witnessed by onlookers such as we have in the written record of Jesus in about 30 AD (i.e., onlookers and victims healed who were mostly non-disciples).

All the "village faith-healer" practitioners performed their rituals in their established worshiping places in the name of an ancient healer deity -- 90% of them in the name of Jesus (after 100 AD) -- doing their rituals according to the prescriptions of their ancient religious traditions, as already recognized and practiced by the worshipers expecting a miracle.

Of course there's widespread demand for services to the sick, in all towns and villages, and practitioner-merchants who meet the demand of those desiring incantations and rituals and symbols offered to the deities, begging them for deliverance from affliction. And in some exceptional cases where someone recovers from their illness, this is attributed to the magic powers and intervention of their god(s) answering prayers.

Such religious practice is normal activity in all cultures, and no one writes anything about it, reporting it as "good news" or anything special or new or different than what had happened 10 or 100 or 1000 years earlier. Whereas what we see reported in the Gospel accounts was something different than the usual religious traditions/customs/rituals. Even though no real healing events are reported, we see the customary practices and rituals now and then, indicating a demand for sympathy or symbolism and recognition of a victim's suffering. E.g.,

John 5:2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Hebrew called Beth-za'tha, which has five porticoes. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed. 4 * [No text] 5 One man was there, who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him and knew that he had been lying there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be healed?" 7 The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is troubled, and while I am going another steps down before me." 8 Jesus said to him, "Rise, take up your pallet, and walk." 9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his pallet and walked. Now that day was the sabbath.

(Verse 4 of the text is omitted in most versions today because it's probably a much later insertion into the original John text.)

In this scene there are several worshipers, including this one complaining that he can't get into the pool quick enough to benefit from the magic. These worshipers think there's a certain technique for getting a miracle cure. But there is no cure reported here, from the ritual in the pool. All we have is a scene of worshipers hoping to get cured, like those going to the "local faith-healer" in the village. Just because the rituals exist at the temple and the "faith-healer" is open for business doesn't mean anyone is really getting cured, such as we see people getting cured by Jesus in the Gospel accounts.

This passage tells us of a custom or practice believed to cause healing at this pool in Jerusalem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Bethesda The location in Jerusalem has been confirmed and excavated, and the evidence is that it sometimes had connection to Jewish tradition, but later probably became associated with the pagan gods Asclepius or Fortuna or Serapis.

So here's a case similar to the "local faith-healer" known about generally but not taken so seriously that any claimed healings were published and reported as "good news" for people to hear, because these were just superstitious worshipers doing their usual healing rituals regularly, and occasionally they might recover from their cold and claim it was a miracle from the gods. Everyone knew it was only superstition, and no doubt they sometimes said "God bless you" to the worshipers and assured them that God or the gods would answer their prayers, as is familiar, in all cultures.

This John text relating the healing by Jesus of one of the worshipers is probably a mixture of fact and fiction, as to the details, but it's mostly confirmed by findings as a true description of the religious activity happening there, and where at least this one miracle healing may have really happened, though John conflicts with the Synoptics on the chronology of Jesus in Jerusalem.

What it describes is a normal everyday superstitious event going on, known generally but not taken seriously as real cases of people being cured, as claimed in the superstitions. If these had been taken seriously, there'd be published reports of the healing miracles there, such as we have in the Gospel accounts, which report real cases taken seriously and therefore reported in written accounts.

The Gospel accounts describe something which was not common or being done every day by the local faith-healers, for whom there are no accounts reporting anything unusual. Such as:

Mark 2 -- 11 "I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home." 12 And he rose, and immediately took up the pallet and went out before them all; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, "We never saw anything like this!"

There would not be a written record like this describing an event witnessed by many observers (who were mostly not his disciples) if Jesus was just another ordinary local faith-healer doing the usual religious rites for the worshipers. In this case there was something different, such that witnesses reportedly said "We never saw anything like this" before. So this has nothing to do with the normal religious practices, such as the regular rituals at the pool in Jerusalem, or the usual everyday dime-a-dozen local faith-healers familiar to all, who are mostly ignored because they do nothing other than the usual catering to local superstition (though there are some herbal cures or folk medicines and treatments which may produce limited medical benefits in some cases).

So we need more than just the local "village faith-healer" to find anything resembling what we see Jesus doing in the Gospel accounts.

I dare say magic men (and women) of one sort or another still exist today or have done in very recent times in almost every country, not least India and Africa, and indeed notably in the USA, where as far as I know televangelism has routinely involved many types of such performance (including, I believe, curing severe paralysis, advanced cancer, and even raising people from the dead) and has had large, even huge, audiences.

This also has no resemblance to anything we see Jesus doing in the Gospel accounts. It's true that fantastic feats are done with the wonders of modern (media) technology, but it's mainly the fake that they're good at, not producing real cures or other miracles. ". . . how something so fake could look so real. With that kind of technology, you could convince people of almost anything." (Capricorn One) Was it with such technology as this that Jesus performed his miracle cures? Where did that technology come from, back in 30 AD?

And in 2000 years from now, when videos of these productions will still be available, it will be explained how these extravaganzas were produced and marketed to millions of consumers and how the mass promotionalism grew as a science and publishing industries profited from the large investments poured into these productions.

But there's no explanation how such technology and mass production and publishing happened in 30 AD to produce the "gospel" or good news miracle events we see reported in the 1st-century written record. You can speculate that "somehow" they pulled it off, like modern technology can do it. Whatever happened back then cannot be explained by analogy to today's science and telecommunications and productions technology -- except that SOMEHOW they must have done it, which is not an explanation. They had to convince all those different writers, whose beliefs were not the same, to report this same miracle-worker person -- somehow got them all to drink the same Kool-aid, and ONLY THIS Kool-aid, and there was no other Kool-aid than this one which anyone was drinking, because there are no other accounts anywhere of any such miracle-worker.

In the case of modern technology which can fake it, there is plenty of reason to doubt the miracle claims made, based on evidence of the miracle technology which can depict something superhuman rather than the miracle healings actually happening. There are plenty of reports of the fraudulent nature of the media productions, or plenty of evidence contradicting the claims being made. And in the ancient world also, and especially in the 1st and 2nd centuries, we have some reports of hoaxes and frauds which took place.

But nothing in written accounts from the time contradicting the Jesus miracle acts as actual events.


CREDIBILITY = positive evidence : negative evidence
(ratio, or positive evidence divided by negative)

To be believable, the evidence for it cannot be contradicted by other evidence exposing it as delusional or fraudulent, as the Jesus reported miracle acts are not contradicted by any other evidence from the time, though cases exist of ancient miracle hoaxes where there is evidence contradicting the claims, i.e., evidence from that time. So for all claimed miracle events we must ask if these are accompanied by any contradicting evidence from the time, as part of the total information about the reported events. Where there is such contrary evidence, then this must be added to the total information as something subtracting from the credibility of the claims.

For modern examples, like televangelism and published revival crusades etc., there are contradicting reports which undermine the credibility, so that in some cases there is more evidence contradicting the claimed miracles than there is testimony affirming them. The existence of such negative evidence undercuts the claims and makes them less probable. For all claims, from any period, we have to compare the negative evidence to the positive evidence, in all the written record from the time. But in the case of the historical Jesus, there is no negative evidence from that time contradicting the claimed miracle events.

So it's a ratio, or formula comparing the positive evidence to the negative evidence. Where there's a lot more evidence (like today's YouTube, etc.), but the positive evidence is offset by negative evidence contradicting the miracle claim, then that extra positive evidence might be cancelled or offset by the negative evidence, such as we see in modern times with the wonders of modern technology which produces illusions.


Best evidence against Jesus the miracle-worker

But, maybe there is one piece of negative evidence, and so it's appropriate to mention this again, since it stands alone as the one piece of negative evidence which undermines the Gospel accounts of Jesus the miracle-worker, or rather, which undermines one of the reported miracles (but only this one). And this is the multiplying the fish-and-loaves story, which too conspicuously resembles the story of the prophet Elisha (II Kings 4:42-44) doing a similar act. The strong similarity has to cause a skeptic to wonder if this one Jesus miracle might be a copycat story, derived from earlier legend rather than from events of the 1st century. It's problematic to just say the similarity to the earlier story is only a coincidence.

If there was more of such evidence as this, such as 4 or 5 more examples of the same, it would undermine the credibility of Jesus miracles in the Gospels. However, this one alone stands out conspicuously as the only example of a Jesus miracle which has an antecedent in earlier literature, or earlier tradition. Except for this one case, there is no Jesus miracle act which resembles any earlier miracle legend -- which really is amazing -- showing that the 1st-century writers had virtually no need to borrow from any earlier tradition in order to establish their portrayal of Jesus the miracle-worker.

They did not need earlier legends to draw upon. Apparently they had several miracle reports from the 1st century, unrelated to anything earlier, and so it's these events of their own time they relied on, while only using ancient scripture to try to interpret the Jesus miracles, but without needing to borrow ancient miracle stories, because the ones they had from their own time were more than enough and more noteworthy and more credible than the ancient legends. And the truth is that without the real events of their own time, there would have been no Jesus miracle-worker story at all, to which to add anything, because this story itself was produced by these actual events, without which there would never have been any Jesus miracle-worker story to begin with.

The reported miracle claim has to have a starting point. Something real had to be there to get it started in the first place. Only after identifying what that starting point was can you then proceed to speculate about what extra content might have been added to it later, such as fiction to amplify the original story.

As far as I can see, the main thing that's highly implausible is that such miracles worked, and . . .

According to the evidence we have they did work and were witnessed, and there's no claim anywhere (from the time) that they really did not happen, such as we do have in some other cases of reported miracle claims contradicted by writers exposing them as fraudulent.

In fact, before 200 AD there are virtually no miracle-worker claims except those reported as hoaxes, in the only reports we have of reported miracle-workers. Possibly the report by Josephus of Eleazar the Exorcist would be a non-hoax exception, i.e., reported by the source as genuine. His other examples, of "messiah" pretenders, are all hoaxes in his report. And in the 2nd century AD miracle hoaxes are reported by Apuleius and Lucian of Samosata. These are cases of reported miracle-workers who are known to us mainly by writers reporting them as frauds.

Prior to 200 AD virtually every case of a reputed miracle-worker reported near to the time they lived (rather than centuries later) is reported by the source as a hoax, with Jesus being the only exception. I.e., exception to the pattern that it was common to report an ancient miracle legend as genuine (e.g., Zeus, Apollo), but not recent miracle-workers (e.g., Jesus in 30 AD), who are usually reported only as hoaxes.

. . . the main thing that's highly implausible is that such miracles worked, and . . .

The reported miracle acts can be judged as "implausible" based on the premise that no such thing is possible, which premise is not evidence, but only prejudgment that miracle events must be impossible, inherently, by their nature, regardless of evidence that they actually did happen. So, the actual evidence saying that they did happen is dismissed, while the judgment that they must not have happened is based only on the ideological premise or prejudgment which rules them out regardless of the evidence -- or, you could say, based on the fact that most/all other cases of miracle claims were debunked by negative evidence, meaning we must be suspicious also in this (Jesus) case, and so this one also should be ruled out as unlikely even though there is evidence in this one case, unlike the others which lack evidence or are refuted by the evidence.

. . . implausible is that such miracles worked, and possibly also that 'many people' attended and were convinced enough by them to become devotees of the particular magic man in question.

The evidence is that many did attend and became convinced. But again, this can be ruled out by the prejudgment that it simply could not have happened, Damn it! regardless of the evidence. The evidence can be rejected as somehow false, based on the premise that it just could not happen, based on commitment to the ideology that such things must be impossible and that anything claiming such things happened has to be false, regardless of any facts indicating that it did happen.

Even Acts, arguably that most biased and unreliable of partisan sources, only has, it seems, around a modest 250 people initially mourning the loss of the writer (of Acts) own supposed hero, so if he existed, he probably didn't have that many followers . . .

There's no such 250 number. The most important number is the 500 witnesses who saw Jesus soon after the Resurrection, mentioned by Paul (I Cor. 15:6). And there are other numbers here and there, impossible to verify in any way, probably rough estimates, not very reliable, but still indicating that he did something very unusual which no one can explain, and there were witnesses -- a few, some, or many.

. . . he probably didn't have that many followers up until his death. Compare that to 30 thousand (according to Josephus) who were followers of the (nowadays almost unheard of) 'Egyptian Prophet' going about Judea in or around 52 CE . . .

Although we can't be sure how many years this character spent accumulating his followers, his cause was a widespread political revolt going on for at least 50 years which had millions of dissident sympathizers who regrouped behind different leaders as these came on the scene and then disappeared to be replaced by others.

None of this has anything to do with explaining who the Jesus person was, whose public life was only 1-3 years and who had no political base or army of fired-up militants seeking a leader to replace the last one who got snuffed out.

The pertinent question has to be what attracted the "followers," regardless what the number of them was. All the evidence is that it was the miracle acts which attracted them, not a political crusade or revolution. But some anti-Roman rebels also joined his followers, who were a mixture of different characters, which is easily explained if he actually did perform the miracle acts but otherwise cannot be explained, because it's not normal for differing/conflicting groups or individuals to rally around one leader. Rather, each dissident group would rally around its own special chosen leader without combining with other conflicting groups, such as we see conflicting factions gathering around Jesus.

. . . (that number might well be an exaggeration, perhaps for different reasons). If the man we now know as Jesus (which would almost certainly not have been his real name) existed, I think we would be talking about a very minor figure, even in geographically local terms, during his lifetime.

That's an argument for the Resurrection as a real historical event. Because it answers what happened, after he was killed, to explain why his following increased rather than decreased. Had the Resurrection not happened, the interest in him would have died and eventually he'd be only a footnote in history, because up to his death his total following might have been relatively small, compared to some others, including John the Baptizer and James the Just. But then something different happened to distinguish him from these and others. What was it?

From the evidence there is only one answer: he performed miracle acts and all the others did not. The record of those miracle acts was preserved, in oral and written accounts, and convinced others later, so that the number of believers kept increasing rather than decreasing as in all the other cases where a charismatic prophet or rabbi lost his attraction after his death put an end to his charisma and there was nothing left to attract any new followers. The case of Jesus is different because of the reports of actual miracle deeds he performed, from the earliest time, recorded in writing in multiple accounts and copied and recopied, and this evidence from the time of the events gradually brought in more and more believers.

You can pound and hammer Jesus into the normal class of miracle-worker legends designed to administer regularly to the superstitious demand for rituals, but this requires dismissing the facts of the written record from the time, whereas all the other possible miracle-worker legends -- for which there is no evidence -- can be explained by placing them into this normal "village faith-healer" category. It's only the one case of Jesus in 30 AD which cannot be explained this way.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

How do we distinguish the HISTORICAL from the NON-HISTORICAL? Why are "miracles" automatically ruled out?

Answer: Don't ask questions or be skeptical. Just submit to the dogma that miracle events cannot ever happen, despite any evidence. Who are we to doubt the authority of our 21st-century professional Jesus-debunker scholar pundits who have decreed in their papal bulls that the Jesus miracle acts could not have happened?

It isn't really a question of historicity as much as one of inspiration.

On what would you base that?

I base it on the undeniable fact that all and every author that has ever composed a literary thought has done so from personal experience.

It's not clear what "personal experience" means here. If it means to directly witness an event that the author writes about, then virtually all our ancient history is not based on that, because it's rare that our sources tell us anything the author witnessed himself. But if it means anything an author writes, including fantasy, then it's sort of a tautology, saying all writings are personal experiences, real or imagined, in the mind or imagination of the author, like brain waves, recorded on paper for transmission to later readers. And so "personal experience" is just another word for the content or subject matter written down, whatever it might be from the author's mind. It's better to reject this meaning, and take "personal experience" as meaning direct witness, empirically, not fantasy, where the writer is contemporary and present to the event and is reporting what he directly witnessed.

The first authors to write about dragons, however, did not experience actual dragons, just as the authors who wrote about magical miracles did not experience actual magic.

I.e., did not witness this directly.

Which authors? For this to make any sense it has to refer to writings which have survived to our time, and thus the writings we still have today from the ancient authors. Of course most of the ancient writings did not survive, and you could speculate what those lost writings contained in them, about something the author did or did not directly experience. And it matters if the author was a contemporary to the events and actually witnessed them directly.

And for 99% of the "historical" information we have (for ancient history), we depend on writings about events the authors did NOT personally experience, regardless whether it's about dragons or about the normal events.

There are no historical dragons, only inspiration for such tales, just as there is no historical Jesus, merely an author's inspiration.

You could say that about 99% of all historical facts we know, from the ancient sources. All we have are "tales" from authors saying something happened, or only "inspiration" for them, and not actual testimony from a direct witness to the reported events.

To make any sense out of this, let's assume that "personal experience" means direct witness to the events, not just anything in the writer's mind or imagination. And we cannot pretend to know whether an event really did or did not happen, just because we have theories about what's possible. Rather, we can look at what the writings say, and whether the author in question claims to have really witnessed it himself directly, or is only reporting something from earlier which he claims to know about INdirectly.

Jesus is an inspired literary character like a dragon or Pegasus.

The meaning, if it's not incoherent babble, might be this: For the "miracle" events, or unlikely superhuman events, we never have an author who actually saw it himself, but rather, all we have are writings telling of something this author did not witness himself. Whereas for the NORMAL events, or non-miracle non-superhuman events, we have IN A FEW CASES some reports from a contemporary historian who actually did witness the reported events.

In other words, there are a few authors, like Thucydides and Xenophon, who wrote of something they actually did witness themselves, directly, and so those kinds of events are more believable than the "miracle" or superhuman events which the authors telling them never did witness directly.

There is a small bit of plausibility to this. However, the official historical record includes ALL the reported events, not just what the writer experienced himself, because otherwise we'd eliminate 99% of ancient history. And documents which contain miracle claims are not omitted as evidence.


contemporary vs. direct witness testimony

Also, the apostle Paul did relate events, e.g., the Resurrection, to which he was contemporary, though not a direct witness. So "personal experience" or direct witness has to mean more than just being contemporary to the events, but also to have actually seen it happen -- in this case, to have directly seen the death of Jesus and then a few days later to have seen him alive, or to have seen the empty tomb. For these we have no direct testimony in our accounts, but only indirect reports of it in Paul and the Gospel accounts.

By this strict distinction between contemporary and direct witness we have to put historians like Thucydides partly in the NON-direct-witness category, because he did not witness many of those scenes himself, but only reported what was happening at the time, as he heard about it.

So the (historical vs non-historical) theory proposed here is that "miracle" events are reported never by the actual witnesses to them, but only by someone who didn't witness it directly, whereas real historical events are, IN A FEW CASES only, reported by direct witnesses (because 99% of these events also are reported only indirectly by someone who did not witness it himself).

That's the best we can make out of this dichotomy between "historical" and "inspiration" types of reported events, where one category is for the unreal or non-historical claims, and the other for the real historical events, or what really happened, not based on some kind of pure imagination or inspiration without any "personal experience" from real witnesses.

Based on this, you could claim that Julius Caesar (and some others) must have been real because there is some direct witness testimony to a few of them, though very little, like less than 1% of what we have. Virtually all our knowledge of him and others is from much later writers not even close to their time. So if the counter-argument is: But then neither is there an historical Julius Caesar, only inspiration for such tales, because Caesar is an inspired literary character like a dragon or Pegasus; there is no tangible historical Caesar today any more than there is a tangible historical Jesus; there's only literature, or the written record relating an author's inspiration. --- that counterargument could be rejected based on the fact that there is a tiny tiny bit of actual writing from his time, from someone who saw him directly, to put him in the real or historical category, based on writers who witnessed him directly, vs. the unreal category.


Is direct-witness testimony really more reliable than indirect (later report)?

But this dichotomy does not reliably distinguish real from unreal, because it's possible for direct testimony accounts to be mistaken, so that the later INdirect reports of what happened might be more accurate, in some cases. The DIRECT witness reports add extra value (e.g., Cicero commenting on Caesar assassination), but this is no guarantee that the reported events must be accurate (accurately reported by the contemporary writer). ALL the evidence has value, direct and later indirect testimony, and what really matters is how much total evidence there is. And the "later" category gets weaker as the time gap increases between the actual events and the later report of it in the writings.

Also, it cannot be said that there are NO "miracle" reports from writers claiming to have witnessed it directly. Actually there are some cases of a writer claiming to have witnessed a miracle, in our surviving sources, so that there's little or no difference between the "historical" and the "non-historical" ("real" vs. "unreal" stories) based on the writer's claim to have directly witnessed it.

Before 100 AD only: Also, we have to eliminate anything after 100 AD, where we see an explosion of new miracle stories, because these appear to be copycat stories based on the earlier miracle acts of Jesus which became famous in later centuries after the Gospels had widely circulated. E.g., St. Augustine reports dozens of miracles of his own time, and claims to have directly witnessed them himself. But there's nothing like this in anything prior to 100 AD.

There's at least one "miracle" event reported by an author who claims to have seen it himself, and no doubt there are some other cases also, though not many, and there's always ambiguity in such cases, and difficulty identifying what the author really experienced:


Did Josephus directly witness a "miracle"?

Sort of. We know for sure that he claimed to have seen an exorcist cast out demons (Antiquities bk 8 ch 2.5). He didn't claim to see the victim recover, but he saw the "magic" of a container of water being knocked over by the demon when it exited the victim's body. This has to go into the category of "magic" or "superhuman" or "supernatural" or "miracle" (psychic power?) because the physical object was knocked over somehow, by an invisible force of some kind, which the exorcist claimed was the demon leaving the victim. Josephus claims to have seen it himself and that it proves the special "power" and wisdom of Solomon who was "beloved of God" and was the teacher who inspired this exorcist.

But no doubt there are also a few other claims of some "miracle" being witnessed directly by some author who is our source for the event. So it's not true that ALL "miracle" claims are of something never seen directly by the writer reporting it to us. Probably 99.8% of miracle claims are of something not witnessed by the writer. But the direct-witness claim is not how we know whether those events were real. Rather, we know such reported events are so rare that we have to be skeptical of them, and usually there is little or no evidence, unlike the case of Jesus in the Gospels, for which we have 4 (5) sources from the time saying that it happened. For this exorcism reported by Josephus there is only this one source, which makes it suspicious, but also there could be an explanation, such as magic trickery, but also we can't rule out the possibility of some kind of psychic power the exorcist had to cause the object to tip over. There's no proof that it's impossible.

That "miracles" are "non-historical" or can't really happen might be based on the simple premise that no miracle event can ever happen, regardless of any evidence or record that such an event did happen. But there is nothing in science or logic or reasoning which requires that no miracle event could ever happen. Rather, reason requires that there has to be extra evidence for anything irregular or contrary to normal experience. What's required for "miracle" claims is extra skepticism, higher degree of doubt, and more critical treatment of those claims, and disbelief if there's not the needed evidence, such as we do have in the case of the historical Jesus, for whose miracle acts we have 4 (5) sources near to the time of the events, unlike for miracle legends generally in the ancient world.

Unlike other miracle claims in antiquity, our knowledge of the miracle-worker Jesus in 30 AD is like our knowledge of other historical figures, based on written accounts near the time those persons lived and did something, witnessed by people and recorded by those who learned of it from the oral and written reports about it. And, since there are miracle claims contained in the accounts for this case, which is irregular or unusual, it's necessary to have extra evidence, such as extra sources reporting it. The 4 (5) sources we have for the Jesus miracle acts are extra evidence, much beyond what is required for regular historical events. Usually only one source is required for a reported historical event to be credible, as long as it's not contradicted in other sources. Whereas for miracle claims we need more than the usual amount of evidence.

Do you think horses have wings and fly? If not, why not?

Because there is no written account of it from any source near to the time it allegedly happened. We don't have any information of such a thing, from written accounts when such horses flew or had wings. If we had 4 or 5 written accounts from some period all saying there was a flying horse 50 or 100 years earlier, not contradicted by other sources, saying this was seen by many witnesses, generally agreeing where this happened and some other details, then it would be credible, or a possible unusual event. It's for lack of any such evidence that such claims as this are not acceptable.

It's not just that the story contains the miracle or supernatural element that it's not credible. That makes the story more doubtful, but does not rule it out as impossible. Rather, it means we're required to be more skeptical, but a true skeptic still keeps an "open mind" while seeking extra sources and considering all the evidence, rather than just condemning it all on impulse.

Should we search for the historical Pegasus?

Yes, if the claim is made seriously it should be considered. None should be ruled out dogmatically. Some highly unusual events may have happened. Since the Age of Reason we have developed a discipline to QUESTION EVERYTHING, which also means to RULE OUT NOTHING, but rather, keep searching for more answers, consider all the evidence, and keep doubting and be ready to revise our former doctrines to accommodate new evidence, regarding ALL serious claims, and even be ready to go back and reconsider the earlier beliefs, either to reconfirm them or correct them.

Everything should be subject to re-examination, no matter how sacred.

But is Pegasus being claimed seriously by someone? If so, tell us when and where this horse existed (if it existed), so we know where to look. You need to cite the written accounts reporting the event, so we know what is being claimed about it. If all you have is an ancient legend circulating and not reported in any source from when the event happened, and it's contrary to known experience, then we have to assume it's only a myth which evolved over many centuries or thousands of years rather than being a real event in history.

There is no historical Pegasus same as there is no historical Jesus, namely . . .

No, we have written accounts to document the historical Jesus just as we have written accounts to document Julius Caesar. But we have no written accounts documenting the historical Pegasus. Just because there's a poem about something thousands of years earlier doesn't mean we have any record of it, or evidence attesting to it.

. . . namely because horses do not have wings and fly and . . .

But how do you know that? You can't just pronounce that it isn't so. Just pronouncing something as not so doesn't make it not so. That's not a "because" -- to just say it's not so. I.e., you can't say "it's not so because it's not so." When you say "because" it has to be followed by a REASON, not just a repeat of what you claim isn't so, or just a repeat of your dogma.

. . . horses do not have wings and because magic isn't real either.

The only reason we know horses don't have wings is that there are no reported cases of it in the written record. If there was a known case, documented in written accounts from the time it was witnessed, then it could not be said that no horse ever had wings. It becomes credible at some point when the evidence increases enough and makes it more likely, or probable. And also "magic" might be real in some cases, if there is evidence, and depending on what "magic" means.

What we do have without question, however, is human credulity when it comes to comforting, . . .

But fanatic DISbelief is also credulity. It's "credulity" to believe someone else's belief is false if their belief is not really false, or if there's evidence for their belief. Your own belief that someone else's belief is false is your own false belief if that one's belief is true, i.e., it's your own credulity or belief in something unreal, if that person's belief is actually a true belief.

In the 1st century AD there was LESS belief in miracle claims than ever before, and also less than anytime since then. Thus there was not any special "credulity" or believing something not real, in that time period. At some point you have to look at the evidence, or the facts of history, instead of just making abstract pronouncements about what has to be the truth.

. . . credulity when it comes to comforting, imaginary tales.

That the tale is comforting does not make it less credible, or unreal. It's possible for something to really happen and also to be comforting. If it's "comforting," that provides a possible motive, or psychological explanation for the belief. But the believer's motive alone is not enough to debunk the belief if there's evidence that the belief is true. There is also a false comfort one gains by condemning someone else's belief as false or imaginary. The disbeliever gaining comfort at judging incorrectly someone else's true belief is just as credulous as a believer whose belief is untrue.

You are using circular logic to claim a belief is false by only psychologizing that the believer is credulous. Calling it "credulity" is just a tautology -- assuming the belief is false to prove that the believer is credulous, and that the believer is credulous to prove that the belief is false, but having no evidence that either is the case, and just falling back on your abstract conclusion to be used as your premise to prove your conclusion (that the belief is false).

You have to demonstrate that the belief is incorrect, inaccurate, contrary to evidence or logic, not just that it's comforting or that the believer is credulous or wants it to be true. If you cannot debunk the belief with evidence, or show that it lacks the required evidence, you've not refuted the belief, regardless what you claim abstractly about the psychology of the believer.


copycat stories as evidence

There's probably wishful thinking in many cases of supernatural claims, or "credulity," but there are not normally multiple written accounts confirming or agreeing that a particular person did miracles which were witnessed by many observers but which did not really happen. There are miracle claims that are fiction, which we can determine by investigating them, especially fitting a pattern of miracle stories which have increased since the 1st century, as part of a pattern of copycat stories which has evolved using the Jesus miracles as a model, so that (copycat) dubious miracle claims have increased since that time.

This pattern of copycat miracle claims is obvious in the evolving culture over the last 2000 years. But there was no such pattern of copycat miracle claims prior to 100 AD -- claims of miracles which did not really happen but were borrowed from earlier legends -- which could explain what caused the Jesus miracle stories. So there was not the pattern of credulity, i.e., a believing something not real, in the period when the Jesus miracle-worker story emerged. It's popular to claim there was such credulity, but you can't find it in the culture or the literature before 100 AD. Only after, when there was an explosion of new miracle stories.

(Once again it's appropriate to name the one possible exception copycat story, the fish-and-loaves story, resembling the earlier Elisha story (II Kings 4:42-44), which stands alone as the only example of a Jesus miracle act resembling an earlier miracle legend. -- "the exception which makes the rule")

Actually there is good evidence that the trend of "copycat story" miracle claims began at some point in the late 1st century, after the Jesus miracle-worker story was established and was circulating. The Jesus miracle episode of 30 AD was not caused by the copycat story trend, but rather seems to be the cause of this trend, which began late in the 1st century. So that's where the psychologizing argument has a place, not to refute earlier miracle claims when there was no such trend, but to explain why the later stories popped up all over and became popular, unlike earlier when such stories were not popularly believed and you can't find any evidence of them (in the 1st century and earlier).

Life isn't easy, people love their woo.

Yes, both believers and DISbelievers and debunkers love their "woo" -- so does this refute whatever they claim? Does this mean anything people loved must not have really happened? The question is whether it happened. You can't say something must not have happened if people loved it, because the only real events have to be ones they hate. Really? The only real events in history have to be ones which no one loved?

Why didn't they "love their woo" only from 100 AD and later? You don't see this kind of "woo" earlier.

The "woo" doesn't negate the evidence, or the written accounts documenting the events. The written record is there, as a fact of history, in documents which have been discovered scientifically. There is nothing in the facts to contradict the Jesus miracles, but only evidence that these are real historical events. That someone gets a charge from it or wants it to be true is not an argument that it isn't true, or false. You cannot disprove something simply by claiming it has an appeal or that someone wants it to be true. You must also produce some evidence that it's not true. The evidence is that the "woo" was not happening earlier, but was triggered by something which happened in the 1st century. If it's only "woo" and nothing more, why did it happen only in the 1st century and not before?

If a scientific discovery or other event takes place which would be beneficial and make people happy (a "woo" event), that is not an argument that the discovery is fiction. To refute it requires more than simply saying it makes someone feel good and so has to be fake.

The phrase "historical Jesus" is as much woo as is "Historical Pegasus."

You can say that as long as your premise is that facts and evidence don't matter, as long as you mean all ancient history can be thrown out, all the written record, all the ancient writings, because all history is "woo" and fiction from authors.

Where is the record, the written accounts, from the time of Pegasus, reporting the events and the witnesses who saw it? It's not the woo, but the evidence which makes the "historical Jesus" true, just as for our mainline historical facts, which are known from the written evidence of the time. If you reject that evidence, the historical record, then you must also reject all historical events or historical characters.

For a proper analogy to the historical Jesus, you need to find an analogy taken from real historical accounts rather than from ancient legend. There was no ancient Jesus legend in the 1st century, but rather, only reports of events happening in about 30 AD. If the only analogy you can find -- the only other "woo" -- is ancient legend without any historical record from the time of the reported event, then you are adding further confirmation for the historical Jesus as historical fact, because you are demonstrating that this one miracle episode is the only one for which there is serious evidence, therefore making it unique and distinguishing it from the others which are derived from ancient legend only. If not, then choose for your analogy a miracle example for which there is historical evidence, or written record from the time it reportedly happened, attesting to the miracle claim. The Pegasus example doesn't meet this requirement, because there's no written record reporting it near to when it happened.

People like it because it sounds good to them, confirms a bias, so they latch on.

Like debunkers making up falsehoods to refute the miracles of Jesus.

By that reasoning, every claim that "sounds good" to someone must be false, because it sounds good. So every report of anything good has to be fake news, or woo, and all news has to be bad in order to be true, or has to sound bad to everyone.

You can't just fall back on this psychologizing without any evidence. A belief is not refuted simply because it might be something optimistic, or a fulfillment of a wish. That doesn't refute it. You need more than just your psychoanalysis of the believer in order to debunk the belief. You have to deal with the content of the belief, the evidence, the claims made and the testimony or reports saying it's true. You don't refute the belief by deprogramming and badgering the believers into feeling guilty about having a bad motive for believing. The motive or psychological preference of the believer is not any kind of evidence against the belief. In a court of law you don't prove the accused one's innocence by showing that someone would feel good if this defendant is convicted. You have to address the facts of the case, not the feelings of someone who wants the facts to be one way or the other.

It's an actual religious belief for them, as real as transubstantiation.

Just as the belief that the miracle events are fiction is an actual religious belief, or DISbelief, regardless of the evidence. The disbeliever-fanatic is committed religiously to nullifying the Jesus miracles, whatever it takes, to erasing this from the historical record, to blotting out these events from history, because blotting them out "sounds good" and gives the disbeliever peace, confirming the disbeliever's bias. It gives the debunker-crusader consolation and comfort and exuberation to equate the Jesus miracles to Pegasus and other legends known to be fiction, providing to the debunker a kind of feel-good self-authentication and wish-fulfillment, independent of any evidence or facts about the historical Jesus.

This wish-fulfillment and feel-goodism doesn't prove or disprove your disbelief anymore than the believer's wish-fulfillment proves or refutes belief in the Jesus miracles. It's only the facts or the evidence which can tell us what the truth is, not anyone's feelings or wishful thinking about what the truth ought to be, or what would "sound good" or "confirm" one's bias or truth-crusader-fantasy or need for recognition or self-fulfillment.

The facts are that we have 4 (5) sources reporting the Jesus miracle acts -- written accounts from the time of the reported events -- which is far more evidence than necessary for normal historical events, and far more than for any miracle claims about Pegasus and other legends of the gods or heroes.

It's understandable that a person lacking sufficient knowledge and experience will believe such tales, . . .

No it's not understandable, because no one did believe such tales or was seeking such tales to believe -- in any other examples you can show from this historical period. Who is the "person lacking sufficient knowledge" here, and believing something?

Who believed such tales? It's not true that such persons in the 1st century believed such tales. There are no examples of it. How can it be "understandable" that uneducated persons believed "such tales" when it's not true that they did believe any, from all the evidence? They did? WHO? Who are we saying believed "such tales"?

The Jesus believers were uneducated, mostly, but there's nothing about such uneducated people to indicate that they tended to believe in any "such tales" of miracles which didn't happen. There were no other miracle beliefs, about miracle-workers, or "tales" of miracles being done by someone, in the 1st century, or 100-200 years earlier. All the evidence is that any such beliefs, such miracle claims, reported miracle acts, etc. were NOT believed, though being claimed by someone. Any such cases were widely rejected as hoaxes, with no one believing the charlatans had any power. There were probably some "messiah" charlatans, but no evidence that anyone believed their miracle claims (except maybe a half-dozen crackpots), or reported such things done by them, even if they gained some followers. Because even if there's evidence they had followers (such as an anti-Roman militant leader), there's no report that the followers believed any of the miracle claims.

. . . will believe such tales, like the child writing letters to Santa.

How about Herodotus or Josephus telling "tales" about events which happened? What's the difference?

You have to get beyond the abstract disconnect from the historical facts about the Jesus miracle-worker and the earliest believers. There was NO ONE, even ignorant or uneducated, in the 1st century, who reportedly believed miracle stories resembling (even slightly) what we see in the Gospel accounts. There were no claims about any miracle-workers believed by the poor ignorant peasants. You can't find them. If you go farther back to 300 BC and earlier, there's possibly an increased miracle element to be detected, and yet there was no belief in any miracle-worker historical figure, but only in the ancient deities, like Zeus, and the healing god Asclepius, etc. Not historical persons of the time, but only ancient legends of someone centuries (even thousands of years) earlier. There were no "such tales" of a historical figure miracle-worker people believed in.

You can't speak of "such tales" as though they existed and people believed them when there's no evidence of any "such tales" or of anyone believing them.

So it's NOT "understandable that a person [uneducated] will believe such tales." They did not believe such tales. You can't find any case of the ignorant masses of that time believing "such tales" of miracles being done by someone. The only belief was in the ancient deities, not in any reported miracle-working historical persons of the time, such as Jesus is a reported historical figure of about 30 AD.

But millions of children writing millions of letters to Santa does not make their man at the North Pole historical.

And therefore Julius Caesar is not historical because Santa is not historical, and so no reported historical figure ever was historical, because the only evidence for any historical figure is no better than that of children writing letters to Santa at the North Pole.

Why is nothing said here of why those children should not believe in Santa, or should outgrow such belief? By this reasoning they would continue believing in Santa into adulthood and old age, because there's no criterion here about what to believe and what to disbelieve. Rather, there's only the doctrine imposed onto those children that they must not believe in Santa, because the catechism dictates it, without giving them any reason or evidence how we know Santa doesn't exist.

You can't condemn a belief as false, or non-historical, if you're not willing to explain the difference between what is historical and what is not. You have to provide a criterion to separate the factual from the fictional, allowing that some reported events were real, instead of giving a criterion which equates all reported events in the written record to that of kids writing letters to Santa.

There is no "historical Santa," a fact every child with a normal functioning brain eventually learns.

Learns how? How are children to know from this what is "historical" and what is not? The only guideline for credibility here is to insult them as abnormal and dysfunctional for holding the banned belief, and that's the criterion for what's true and what's fiction. But that's not the criterion for what is fact and what is fiction. The child needs more than a threat of being branded abnormal for believing the banned belief, or not accepting the list of taboo vs. true beliefs handed down by the authorities dictating which ones are true and which ones fiction.

That's just a dogma to impose onto all children, without giving them any reason, but just insisting that they must accept this dogma, the nonexistence of Santa, simply because your doctrine dictates this and other doctrines to them, in the imposed list, without giving them any reason or facts or evidence. And accusing them of being dysfunctional and abnormal unless they accept this doctrine, like a religion imposes its doctrine and labels anyone as evil or as a misfit who does not submit to the doctrine.

But that's not the real truth to be learned by the child -- simply that Santa is fiction. No, the truth is the process of critical thinking, seeking evidence, and examining and questioning the evidence, the written record, such as the 1st-century written accounts about Jesus the miracle-worker. The truth is not simply dictating to the learning child the list of the true doctrines vs. the list of fictions, such as dictating that Santa or other character is fiction. What is learned is the process of reasoning and considering evidence for disbelieving in Santa, not just a convention which bans it, or dictates certain doctrines to be banned and others sanctioned as wholesome, and imposing this list of approved and banned beliefs, to be memorized as the criterion for truth vs. fiction.

A bona fide bishop bringing gifts at the Winter Solstice does not make a child's North Pole Santa historical because "historical" means real.

But what does "real" mean if you throw the written record out the window?

Tossing out the written record makes Julius Caesar not "real" because this makes all evidence for anything historical to be no better than the evidence for Santa. This eliminates ANY examples of the "real" -- leaving no criterion for what is "real" or "historical" vs. what is in the Santa category. This doesn't tell us, or those children writing the letters, what the difference is between the "real" and the unreal. If you won't acknowledge any "real" examples, which can be verified, then you are effectively saying ALL examples are unreal and are non-historical, and you exclude the critical thinking and skepticism we really need in order to identify what is real in contrast to what is unreal.

But as soon as you finally recognize that there are also "real" examples, of real historical events, you'll have to acknowledge that the historical Jesus, including the miracle acts, is in the "real" category (or possibly real, depending on the extent of the evidence), or in the credible category, supported by evidence in the historical record, which Santa is not.

Our imaginations are certainly real, and therefore historical, which is why I say Jesus is an inspired character based on an author's experience, just like a child's Santa.

And just like a historian's Caesar, also an inspired character based on an author's "experience" (imagination?). Until you say what the difference is between Caesar and Santa, you're saying they're both non-historical, for the same reason. We have no proof of Caesar being real without those written accounts, from a historian's experience, relying on the tales of the time which say this character existed and did certain things.

You can argue that there's more evidence for certain major historical characters than for others, but there are MILLIONS of less known historical characters for whom there is some evidence but much less than for the historical Jesus, and yet who are recognized as historical based on that much less evidence.

You can't just impose onto the child your dogma about who is historical and who is not. You have to point out how there is EVIDENCE in some cases, attesting to the existence of this or that character, and yet a LACK of evidence in other cases, showing the nonexistence because there are no credible sources, or insufficient sources, attesting to that character's life or deeds.


evidence, facts, historical (written) record = Jesus did miracles.
social convention decreed by debunker-pundits = miracle-workers excluded.

When you finally get serious and explain the need for evidence, or for sources, or a written record from the time, and compare the sources to verify or refute the claims, and assess the credibility of each, separating fact from fiction -- then you find in the end that we have strong evidence for the historical Jesus, including the miracle acts, while such evidence is lacking for other miracle claims, or miracle claims generally. Assessment of the evidence requires more than just your spontaneous impulse about what is "real" vs. what is only "woo" or "inspiration" or "literary" or other metaphysical category.

To be legitimate/scientific, your dichotomy of "real" vs "magic" has to take account of the evidence, or the historical documentation, requiring critical questioning of the claims made and the details, and comparison to all the other documents, to verify the credible part, or determine discrepancies and expose the non-credible part.

The Jesus miracle acts in the Gospels come out as more credible if we follow such a critical process as this. Whereas the opposite conclusion -- they are imaginary tales -- is arrived at by ignoring the critical process and disregarding the evidence to distinguish the historical from the non-historical (real vs. unreal), like the analogy to Santa disregards the need for evidence and puts Santa and Caesar in the same category, and leaving it to social convention alone to put one in the "historical" or "real" category and the other in the "unreal" category, which "every child with a normal functioning brain eventually learns" by having the convention pounded into their brain.

And so that's how Jesus becomes learned as non-historical, as an inspired character based on an author's imagination -- and so relegated to the non-historical or unreal category -- this is learned by being pounded into our brain as a social convention, which "every child with a normal functioning brain eventually learns" by being programmed properly if we just keep hammering away at it long enough. It could be argued that some of our "history" and other "truth" really is acquired this way, as the accepted standard, so that in place of evidence we prescribe a catechism dictating points of doctrine, for separating real from unreal. So it's in that sense that Jesus the miracle-worker gets assigned to the non-historical category, through artificial programming of children to disbelieve the evidence, since miracle claims are unwholesome for them to believe even in a case when they're true.

But the evidence -- the objective neutral facts based on what is discovered empirically -- puts him in the historical or real category, as part of the historical record. And the part about the miracle acts explains why he drew attention, if they happened, while if they did not happen we have no explanation what made him so important that someone would put him into the historical record by leaving written accounts about him or copying such written accounts from others.

 

[DBT]

It boils down to the fact that we no evidence to support the Jesus miracles as described in the Gospels. We only have what anonymous authors tell us, based not on what they themselves witnessed, but what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material.

 

[atrib]

It boils down to the fact that we no evidence to support the Jesus miracles as described in the Gospels. We only have what anonymous authors tell us, based not on what they themselves witnessed, but what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material.

Please don't encourage this poster to contaminate yet another thread with this style of brainless preaching.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

We have better evidence for the Jesus miracles than for most ancient history events.

Who programmed you to imagine that this evidence does not exist? You don't know where historical facts come from? How many times must this be repeated?

It boils down to the fact that we have no evidence to support the Jesus miracles as described in the Gospels.

We have the same kind of evidence for this as we have for most other ancient history events.

We only have what anonymous authors tell us, based not . . .

Our main source for the Resurrection is the Apostle Paul, not anonymous.

But as to the Gospel accounts (anonymous), you can't name any other example of anonymous writings being rejected as sources for historical events. You probably can't name one anonymous source you yourself reject (unless it's for a different reason than their being anonymous). This is an arbitrary standard you apply to these writings only, out of prejudice.

Two standard sources for history which are anonymous (or mostly anonymous) are the Suda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda , a very extensive source for medieval/Byzantine history, and the Frankish Annals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Frankish_Annals .

Both of these extensive collections contain many recognized historical facts not verified anywhere else. Also both collections contain some miracle stories along with the normal events. The source is not rejected even though some of the content is dubious. Rather, these sources are trusted in general, as sources for history, probably containing the normal degree of error and propaganda as other writings, and not downgraded for being anonymous.

. . . based not on what they themselves witnessed, but what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material.

In other words, normal historical accounts telling the events similarly to 99% of our known historical record not witnessed by the writers themselves, who report "what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material" about events which happened 50-100 years earlier.

So our sources for the Jesus miracles are closer to the events and more numerous than the sources we have for most of the ancient history events we know.

 

[DBT]

Paul was not an eyewitness to the resurrection. He never knew Jesus the man. Apparently Paul was not even aware of some of the events told about Jesus in the later Gospel accounts, as if they were later embellishments.

 

[Lion IRC]

It boils down to the fact that we no evidence to support the Jesus miracles as described in the Gospels. We only have what anonymous authors tell us, based not on what they themselves witnessed, but what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material.

Please don't encourage this poster to contaminate yet another thread with this style of brainless preaching.

Contaminate? Brainless?

Is ad hominem argument the best you got?.

I like reading Lumpenproletariat's posts.
If you don't - then don't effing read them!

And why don't you back off with the efforts to muzzle and discourage free speech between other forum members.

Heres a hint - "Forum" "Free thought"

 

[atrib]

It boils down to the fact that we no evidence to support the Jesus miracles as described in the Gospels. We only have what anonymous authors tell us, based not on what they themselves witnessed, but what they heard told or what they copied from earlier material.

Please don't encourage this poster to contaminate yet another thread with this style of brainless preaching.

Contaminate? Brainless?

Is ad hominem argument the best you got?.

I like reading Lumpenproletariat's posts.
If you don't - then don't effing read them!

And why don't you back off with the efforts to muzzle and discourage free speech between other forum members.

Heres a hint - "Forum" "Free thought"

You should take your own advice. If you don't like what I have to say, then don't fucking read my posts.