Interbane wrote: This is the way memory works, the way the world works. It isn't a conspiracy or a theory. If the authors of the bible waited 30 years to write things down, it is impossible that even a decent amount of the story did not change. What's even more alarming is that the stories have obviously been harmonized. Not only is the chinese telephone game of memory bad enough, but then the stories have a process of deliberate selection applied to them.

I'm going to provide a link on biblical reliability by Craig Blomberg. He points out that the first century Hebrews had a tradition linked with the scriptures of practiced memorisation, and one individual was famed for his ability to memorise and recite the entire Hebrew bible.
The chinese telephone game is not an appropriate analogy.It wasn't one person whispering to one other person etc. Jesus chose twelve apostles who were with him continually for three years and he had many other disciples who followed him and heard his teachings and witnessed what he did. So it not relying on just one person's memory.

The gospels don't give descriptions of people's faces but record things Jesus did and said. Luke for instance consulted many different witnesses in compiling his account.
We also find in scripture a concern with meaning in words and sentences and not verbatim stenographic recording, so things may be phrased differently and incidents included or not included.
The writers do have a theological purpose in how they arrange the material which was a common practice at the time and not at all strange to them.
We tend to remember important and significant things in our lives and not what we had for breakfast six months ago. The accounts are clearly supernatural and momentous in their understanding that Jesus was the promised Jewish messiah.
There's also the supernatural aspect of the holy spirit in all this, though of course this would not be accepted on naturalist grounds.
Harmonisations which tend to be minor, show up because of the diverse manuscript sources and streams and as I've said centralised harmonisation and editing is simply not possible since copies spread throughout the world at that time.

Here's Blomberg's article. http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible. ... 8589952775

geo wrote:What is relevant is that miracles have never been documented in all of human history except as a manifestation of belief or hallucination. Many religions feature miracles and/or divine intervention. Whether or not Christianity was inspired by a real person or a figment of someone’s imagination is not relevant to whether the beliefs of miracles are true.

Hi Geo,
It's hardly surprising that miracles are linked with religious belief in a supernatural God. Atheists don't tend to request anything from God since they don't believe in God. So what does it prove that believers in a supernatural God claim that he has worked miracles?
There are accounts of miraculous events which people testify to have seen. Carrier's statement is extreme as if he has omniscient knowledge of all events in history at all times.
I know of accounts of a Chinese pastor in the 1800's who prayed for healings for people who were instantly healed. This was Pastor Hsi a confucian scholar who had been an opium addict. This was quietly done and not in a trumpeted way.His biography was written by a presbyterian woman a Mrs Taylor who was not given to sensationalism and concerned with truth and not lying.Simply saying bias ignores the ethical standards many Christian's do aspire to.
I grant there is a sickly world of fraudulent televangelists and greedy fraudsters out there too.
I personally know a guy who was a chronic heroin addict who was instantaneously healed without any withdrawal symptoms when he turned to Jesus for help.
Miracles are not common but neither are they as rare as some sceptics believe either.

Carrier's mythicism is central to his understanding of history. He can't let go of it since he rejects the gospels on the basis of it. Like I said he debated the resurrection of Jesus with Lane Craig. I'm not avoiding his argument. It's just not as good as you think it is. Here's the debate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akd6qzFYzX8
P.s I don't believe the Joseph Smith story or the angel jibrail story of Islam.

The chinese telephone game is not an appropriate analogy.It wasn't one person whispering to one other person etc

I was referring to how the human mind works with experiential memories. It is like chinese telephone game. Did you read the link I posted, and have you read recent articles regarding memory? I'm pressed for time now, but can find some for you if you wish. When it is a memory of experience(rather than memorizing from a book), our memories are refreshed everytime we recall them, but with slight additions or deletions. This is not at all like a monk memorizing a book. Which is impressive, of course.

But then, even you admit that many of the details are potentially fabricated, which is the point I was going for. The authors would remember the important events, not the menial dialogue or interactions. Yet they include dialogue and menial events.

Beyond that, you believe their supernatural claims. I wasn't even referring to those. They are of course impossible to justify. What has so convinced you? A miracle healing of a heroin addict? Can you even prove to yourself that it was a miracle, rather than simply deciding that it was? Did you not know at the time that the argument from ignorance was a fallacy?

Hi Interbane,
I'm not saying things in the gospels were potentially fabricated. Sometimes if there was a short account in one gospel a copyist might add to it from a longer account. In the cases of a copyist's deliberate attempted alteration,this stands out like a sore thumb since there are so many different streams and copies unlike that one, and like each other.I'm saying it was not possible for this to be accepted. You need to look at textual criticism to understand the whole story of the transmission of the scriptures.It's a big subject.
I've given reasons why these events would have been memorable to the witnesses and the telephone whispers analogy is not appropriate.It is a supernatural religion and the apostles were promised the aid of the holy spirit.
I know the guy who was healed instantaneously of his heroin addiction and based on his character I have no reason to doubt his account of healing.You can't live in the real world with such extreme scepticism or we wouldn't believe anyone about anything. But we don't actually live this way.
Some people are credible witnesses and all the more so when they suffer and die for their testimony to what they witnessed.

Flann 5 wrote: You can't live in the real world with such extreme scepticism or we wouldn't believe anyone about anything. But we don't actually live this way.
Some people are credible witnesses and all the more so when they suffer and die for their testimony to what they witnessed.

But you don't actually live with the lack of skepticism that you have towards the Bible.

If someone claimed to be an eyewitness to something that goes against everything known about science, and it had nothing to do with Christianity, your default position would be disbelief, as it should be. Those eyewitnesses would automatically be noncredible, and it would take an extraordinary amount of evidence to convince you otherwise. Why don't you believe the mythology of every other religion? The answer is: why would you? You know the evidence is not good enough without even investigating it. Even though another God might torment you forever, you don't lose a moment's sleep over it.

If miracles go against everything that science tells us, what numerical probability would you assign to a miracle that was claimed to have occurred by, say, a hundred eyewitnesses?
In principle you should be able to assign a precise numerical probability, correct?

I'm just going to respond to a few points made by different people here. First of all Geo's extract from Carrier comparing Caesar crossing the Rubicon evidence with Jesus resurrection evidence.
Carrier simply rejects out of hand the gospels accounts, which tell of the resurrection of Jesus; as later fiction based on his mythicism and euhemerisation theory.To do this he further rejects the documentary evidence about who wrote the gospels and when. In other words he rejects historical evidence in favour of an untenable pet theory.
He explains away secular historical evidence based on his claims of interpolations and suchlike. Even then he is forced to accept Josephus' reference to James the brother of Jesus as authentic. He tries to get around this by claiming James was a spiritual and not physical brother of Jesus, but this is completely untenable as has been shown here already. This alone punctures his non historical Jesus thesis.
Yet there is good reason to accept that Jesus is referenced in secular historical and other sources and the majority of scholars disagree with Carrier's interpretation of the evidence and think Jesus did exist historically. Here's an example of the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. http://www.thedevineevidence.com/jesus_history.html
Just to reiterate here's a critique of the mythicist claims, the kind of basis he rejects the gospel records on.
http://www.is-there-a-god.info/belief/pagangods.shtml
His hallucinations theory builds on this shaky foundation, when he accepts Paul's writings as authentic and asserts that all the examples Paul gives of Jesus appearing to people after his death must be hallucinatory visions. But Paul's references to these events in some cases are found in the gospels such as when Jesus appeared to the apostles,ate fish and invited Thomas to touch the wound marks in his body. Not hallucinatory vision.But Carrier has already dismissed these accounts and forges ahead with his cargo cults hallucinations thesis.

Dexter wrote:Why don't you believe the mythology of every other religion?

You are assuming here Dexter that Christianity is a mythology, which is just what I am showing is not the case.I have some knowledge of other religions and have good reasons beyond supernatural claims for not believing them. My belief in Christianity is based on many different factors not just the miraculous, but I have good reasons to believe that too which I have already indicated.

Interbane claims the gospel writers could not have accurately remembered the events and sayings of Jesus. Do you then reject as fiction all memoirs and autobiographies where often people remember things even from childhood in detail? Carrier's account in "Sense and goodness" of his childhood and teen years and experiences are also fiction if that is the case.Do you believe the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte existed historically? Are these accounts not ridiculously improbable?

I know the guy who was healed instantaneously of his heroin addiction and based on his character I have no reason to doubt his account of healing.You can't live in the real world with such extreme scepticism or we wouldn't believe anyone about anything. But we don't actually live this way.

I absolutely do live in the real world with this extreme skepticism, and it was born from finding out that the majority of what I believed all across the board was false. I believed in so many false things, from wives tales to youthful superstitions to urban myths to the tall tales of friends. Yet even with this extreme skepticism, I believe many of the things people tell me, even if I sometimes understand that they may be embellishing. I also believe that the only proper way skepticism can apply to sorting through other people's knowledge is proper process, what Carrier calls method.

You believe a heroin addict based on his character. Boy we've had different lives. In the car while on the trip to the emergency room, the panic attack/withdrawals I was having from a certain chemical were like torture. At one point in the short ten minute ride, I told my wife what I'd been doing. All of the symptoms vanished instantaneously. In hindsight, I understand that it was the weight of guilt that I had let go of, the guilt from hiding what I was doing. Guilt can have such an effect, when you finally get rid of it. I'm sure the sanctification of an ideal, of a god, would have a similar effect.

But you believe the ordeal was supernatural. No skepticism whatsoever. Not even a hint that a natural cause could be in play. I suppose you see such supernatural possibilities all around you. You refuse to dig deeper into what the actual natural cause could be, and settle for a supernatural conclusion. Skepticism is a virtue, if truth is an ideal. Only by being skeptical do you have a chance of admonishing your own beliefs. No conclusion you'd come to would be immune. You'd find that over time, many of your golden cow beliefs would turn out false, and the layer of supernatural superstition would fall away from your view of the world.

I'm not saying things in the gospels were potentially fabricated. Sometimes if there was a short account in one gospel a copyist might add to it from a longer account.

Referring to the original writings, not the copies, you are dealing with the documentation of experiential memory after decades have passed. You're saying that you're not skeptical of the claim that each and every line of dialogue was exact after sitting for 3 decades in a man's brain? They weren't monks with textbooks, able to re-read the lines over and over to commit them to memory. These were experiential memories, exceptionally fragile and prone to decay and alteration. Not only that, but particular lines of dialogue would be nothing but fuzz. You'd have the incidentals, as you mentioned(which is also why I assumed you understood my point). My point being, it is impossible for a man to remember every line of dialogue from a year's worth of experiences. Some of that must be fabricated or misremembered. To believe otherwise is to possess no skepticism at all. In other words, having faith.

Just some general comments:

I can't see any legitimate historical scholar treating Jesus' resurrection as an actual resurrection. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised to see this book discussion going in this direction. The story of a man-god born of a virgin resurrected from the dead are all motifs that have been used before in other religions. I'm sorry, but we've truly gone down the rabbit hole when we start to take such magical thinking seriously.

If you believe in Jesus' resurrection, logic and reason mean nothing. Carrier of all people should know that.

Carrier must be a gift to the Fundamentalist community because he takes the resurrection seriously enough to actually debate it. He’s far too wrapped up in Creationist beliefs to be a credible scholar himself. He's the exact opposite of a True Believer biblical "scholar" whose only interest really is to rationalize his personal beliefs. Carrier uses his scholarly pursuits only to further his own anti-religion ideology instead of the plain pursuit of truth.

This is exactly why serious scholars and scientists don't debate creationists. Because Creationists have already decided the Bible is true and all evidence that contradicts this will be rejected out of hand. As such, Carrier is only giving Creationists a platform.

What’s next, guys? Shall we start debating the age of the earth or how Noah got all those animals aboard the boat or why God put all those dinosaur bones in the ground? I mean, seriously?

Hi Interbane.
You've had some extreme experiences in your life.
I know of other instances not explicable by natural causes.I just picked out that guy as he was the one who was talking to me about the gospel years ago.I wasn't interested at all. He had been a hopeless case and the doctor had told him he would be dead within six months.
It's not natural to be instantaneously healed with no withdrawal symptoms at all with such severe heroin addiction.And it happened when he prayed to Jesus for help.He wasn't religious at the time and wasn't sure if God existed. It was the"if you really are there and can help me" kind of prayer.
On a personal note and at risk of being psychoanalysed,I was put in institutional care at the age of seven in a place run by Catholic nuns who I found very humane really.At ten I was transferred to an industrial school run by Catholic brothers and priests.It was Dickensian and harsh. When I was let out of there at sixteen, I rejected religion and belief in God and when I met that guy in my early twenties was in no frame of mind to listen to anyone advocating any religion.
So that's my background. Sometimes I think people have the impression it's just something I always believed.

There are accounts of miraculous healings such as Pastor Hsi who I mentioned but he's not the only one. I agree things need to be weighed and assessed but I think they can be.
I linked rather a lengthy article related to hallucinations on the other thread. He mentions that it was quite usual in Israel at that time for disciples of Rabbi's to take notes.In the final analysis Christianity is a supernatural religion and they were promised the aid of the holy spirit in bringing things to their remembrance.