Very likely a creation of advertising, actually. Cite..
I’m with John Mace. Looking for explanations of the miracles of Jesus is as pointless as measuring wind conditions on the Potomac to see if a sudden burst could get that dollar coin over it.
I have read about this some place. The story is that, first, it wasn’t your standard old US silver dollar (there being no US at the time), but was an Austrian Taller that was in common circulation in the American colonies because of trade with Spain and Mexico and the Caribbean Sugar Islands. At the time Austria and Spain shared the same royal house (the Hapsburgs) so Austrian money was not all that uncommon on the Spanish Main. Cut into eight hunks a Taller/Dollar made Pieces of Eight. It was a substantial coin of good weight and heft.
Second, it wasn’t the Potomac, it was the Rappahannock or the Rapidan near Frederiksberg, VA, Either of which is a considerably smaller stream than the Potomac. A strong athlete, and Washington was both strong and athletic, might well be able to sail a Taller (or Spanish Real) across one of the smaller rivers.
That of course has nothing to do with walking or water, turning water into wine, curing the sick, making the blind see or raising the dead, but it does suggest that maybe there is a factual basis for the stories about old George.
Another one, if maybe a little off-topic, is the bit about the Chi Rho (or check this link):
George Washington for Messiah!
(It’s good to see you, Spavined.
Kkrose, when I was eighteen a young minister told me that I did not have to take an “all or nothing at all” approach to the Bible. That was very freeing for me and probably one of the reasons why I remain a Christian. That was almost fifty years ago and he is still a friend.
I’m sorry that I don’t have definitive answers to your questions. But during my lifetime I have seen money seemingly appear out of thin air (or even "just words on a message board) when there have been times of need. I am always reminded of the original loaves and fishes. And I always think of it as a kind of miracle (though, of course, not an impossible and unexplainable feat!) when it happens.
There is actually good evidence that inaccurate reporting is the best explanation for miracles. Miracles consistently occur in times and places where accurate recording or reporting mechanisms are unavailable, and where qualified observers are absent. This points to either deliberate avoidance on the part of the miracle-inducing mechanism, or the fact that accurate observation and recording actually prevents miracles.
If the second explanation is true, then counterfactually the miracles are caused by the lack of good observation and recording. If the first explanation is true, there’s no point in looking for “natural causes” at all.
Jesus did not walk on water - he was reported as walking on water. This is a very important distinction. Don’t look for explanations as to how he was able to walk, look for explanations as to how it was reported.
A common fallacy with believers in the supernatural is to point to the credibility or number of witnesses, without realising that they are relying on reports about the witnesses, and that looking for actual recorded testimony may give a very different impression as to whether those witnesses ever existed.
Actually, crucifixion victims weren’t generally taken down at all until there wasn’t much left of the body – the display was intended to be part of the punishment and a warning to others.
Jesus made stone wedding soup.
None of the New Testament book of fairy stories was written until at least 50 years after the crucifixion. You can get radically different versions of events that happen today even with video evidnce like the plane crashing into the Pentagon, so a bunch of religious fanatics repeating a story where somebody pulled a loaf of bread out of his man-dress can over half a century easily become the feeding of the 5000. The chances of anything in the NT being grounded in reality are slim and none, and slim is out of town.
That is not accurate. For example, 1 Corinthians (which attests to the Resurrection) is generally considered to have been written at around AD 53 to 57, which places it within 25 years or so of the crucifixion. What’s more, 1 Corinthians 15 contains early creedal material that mentions the Resurrection, and it is almost unanimously considered to have predated Paul’s writings – possibly within 5-7 years, a very short period by standards of ancient history. Galatians and Philippians are also assigned very early dates, and while they do not mention the Resurrection explicitly, they do corroborate Paul’s conversion claim, as documented by both Luke and Paul himself.
As for the Gospels, liberal scholars will tend to date them at AD 70 or later, whereas more conservative scholars assign earlier dates. Even if we completely disregard the conservative estimates, the point remains that some liberal scholars will date them to within 50 years, and some will assign later dates. (One notable exception is John’s Gospel, which is generally agreed to have been authored after the other gospels.)
If you look at the Heaven’s Gate cult, I think you’ll see that you don’t necessarily need a few decades worth of time to convince your followers of particularly loony shit. If you can convince themselves to commit mass suicide, I think it easy enough to say that you can convince them to write down a couple of tall tales.
I agree, which is why I do not consider the dating of New Testament writings alone to be sufficient reason to believe the gospel accounts. In point of fact, I do believe that the gospels are basically reliable, especially when one considers other historical criteria (applying the standards used by secular historian C. Behan McCullagh, for example). However, I do not base this solely on the fact that some of these writings are quite early indeed.
Besides, please bear in mind that I was addressing Dick’s specific claim that all of these alleged “fairy tales” were written more than 50 years after the fact. That’s a gross exaggeration, and in the case of Paul’s writings, absolutely incorrect. (As an aside, while 50 years may seem like an abominable time gap to a layperson, by the standards of ancient historical analysis, it’s not inherently unreasonable. For example, the biographies of Alexander the Great were written centuries after his death, and yet they are considered to be fundamentally reliable. And lest you object, I’d like to remind everyone that I am NOT arguing that this automatically makes the New Testament accounts accurate, much less infallible. Rather, I’m simply pointing out that a 50-year gap may seem daunting to uninformed minds, but students of ancient history know better than to immediately dismiss an account on such a basis.)
My problem with the NT isn’t really the time of its writing. It’s the sneaking suspicion of bias in the reporting.
Since Paul was not an eyewitness to any of the events in the Gospels, this is a particularly bad example.
Actually, the recent biography of Alexander the Great I read spent a lot of time comparing the ancient biographies and evaluating them for accuracy. There were many feats and legends interpolated. Alexander was a player on the world stage, with people writing down his activities while they were happening, which does not appear to be true of Jesus. Even so, legends and feats crept into the biography.
The lack of documentation for Jesus is not surprising. No doubt they felt there would be plenty of time to record things during his life, and after his death no doubt many thought he would return imminently, making documentation unnecessary.
Probably the best evidence against the various miracles is that no one else makes any mention of them and among the people in the local vicinity, very few were actually converted. Most of Jesus’ followers ended up being gentiles who had never even met him.
If he had been performing real and spectacular miracles, you’d have plenty of unrelated people remarking on it, and you’d see large support for Jesus among the Jews. Instead, the impression you get of the Jews that were nearby is that they thought he was a wacky cult leader and dangerous figure.
A very large number of “alternative explanations” for events described in religious texts such as the Bible have been advanced over the centuries, and I’ve been one of those putting some of them out there.
But I’ve learned the error of my ways, and I suggest joining me in heeding skeptical theist Martin Gardner’s sage advice: Never try to offer alternative explanations for some event before the reality and accuracy of the accounts of that event have been reliably established.
My fellow skeptics have made some grievous mistakes in the past in that regard and have ended up too often looking like fools. The most infamous of these is probably the “swamp gas”-type alternative explanations for alleged UFO reports. It should not have been considered a surprise that the number one promulgator of such foolish alternative explanations, J. Allen Hynek, later turned into a credulous “believer”.
So why try to “explain” events for which we have no reliable evidence to tell us ever occurred?
The brilliant Enlightenment thinker David Hume had much to say “On Miracles” that you really, really should take into account even if you are a believer. One of his points can be fairly well summed up as arguing that it is far more plausible that an account of a miracle is inaccurate than that the violation of the laws of nature required by a miracle actually occurred as described.
In line with the principles briefly expounded upon in my previous post, it turns out there is no genuine evidence of any kind that Jesus ever existed. The issue is extremely complex and difficult, and a tremendous amount of highly detailed and esoteric knowledge is required to even begin to understand the arguments and counter-arguments, but once you spend a few years slogging through them, the answer is clear: None of the information that must exist if Jesus had been a real historical figure actually exists. Therefore, Jesus did not exist as a real, historical figure.
Paul’s genuine epistles are the very earliest documents in all of Christian history, pre-dating the Gospels by decades. Yet those epistles actually argue persuasively against the possibility of Jesus’ historical existence. In them, Paul speaks of Jesus/Christ only as a kind of supernatural figure whose “death and resurrection” took place in some mystical realm between earth and Heaven.
Paul insists that no one knew Jesus better than he did, and it is clear that Paul never knew him as a fellow human either (pay no attention to the congealed fictional nonsense of Acts, which was written far later if not last). Paul’s descriptions of the lives and events of those he refers to as “The Pillars” (the other “apostles” in Rome) indicates that they never knew Jesus as a historical human being either (though they, too, believed in Jesus The Christ), nor did they ever indicate they had any knowledge at all of any trial by Pilate or the Sanhedrin, did not know of any physical crucifixion site, and knew nothing of the mundane details that would be associated with a historical person.
So, since none of the earliest figures – again, pre-dating the writing of the Gospels – knew anything about a historical person named Jesus similar to the Gospel’s description, and the most reliable historian of the day, Josephus, knew nothing of him either, whomever wrote the Gospels were not producing reportage of any kind (as nearly all modern Christians believe), but was instead almost certainly crafting earnest religious and cultural lesson-fables that featured a kind of embodiment of their ideal as the hero.
I’m not saying Paul invented Jesus, though; I think it most likely that Jesus was invented by the Qumran community about 100 years earlier, and that the legend of Jesus grew and accumulated more historical-seeming attributes as the legend evolved. This is, as I interpret the evidence, the same legendary figure that the Gospel authors based their stories on, and it is this, more than any alleged human-sociological alternative explanation, that explains the clear inconsistencies in Jesus’ “biographical” details in the four different Gospels.
Now, I understand that what I’ve written is highly controversial, but ordinary counter-arguments based on biblical or historical citations simply will not pass muster given the extremely complex and intricate nature of the ahistoricist arguments and the historicist counter-arguments. And I don’t have the time to go into them in any real depth here (although I’ve debated the topic here at the SDMB in the past). Still, I’ll try to find the time to answer comments and criticisms in this thread in the coming days, but no promises…
Paul also refers repeatedly to people who DID know Jesus- like James (Jesus’ brother) and Peter. The letters indicate that his readers knew (or knew of) James and Peter.
Josephus did not personally witness much of what he wrote about either. It’s a safe bet that Caesar was not an eyewitness to much of what he wrote about the Gallic Wars, either.
This underscores the naive approach that so many laypeople take toward ancient history. They exclaim, “Aha! He did not personally witness this event! That makes him unreliable!” True historians know better than that, though. (Again, I recommend C. Behan McCullagh’s book, Justifying Historical Descriptions. It provides a more thorough explanation of the criteria that historians employ.)
Granted, but historians still consider them to be basically accurate. In other words, while they allow for certain errors, they do not discard them simply because the biographies were written centuries after the fact. They might discount certain events based on cumulative criteria, but the time lapse alone does not justify throwing them out.
Quite the contrary; during his life, there was little incentive to write about him – especially since about 90% of Palestinians were illiterate. It was not until his death and resurrection that the full impact of his ministry became evident.
Again, this underscores the naive approach that many laypeople adopt toward ancient historiography, especially with regard to Biblical times. They expect these societies to document events as thoroughly as we do in modern times, despite their relative illiteracy, the lack of rapid transportation, and the lack of mass communications. By the standards of ancient history, there is a surprising amount of documentation for the life of Jesus and his followers. Not all events are corroborated equally well – for example, there is much more evidence for the martyrdom of Peter than there is for the lives of Matthew or John the Baptist. Nevertheless, what we regard as a “lack of documentation” by modern standards is actually a relative abundance of documentation for ancient times – especially when you consider that printing presses had not been invented and ancient papyri tends to crumble away.
With all due respect, this is another example of how laypeople adopt a naive approach to historical analysis. I once interviewed a history professor on this topic. He said, “Historians expect there to be bias in practically all historical narratives. They take this into account, but they don’t dismiss a document as being unreliable simply because it appears to have some bias.”
People naturally tend to write about things that they have some interest in – especially a deep, personal interest. One wouldn’t dismiss a Jew’s account of events in Auschwitz, for example, simply because he’s likely to be biased. Nor do we dismiss what Caesar said about the Gallic Wars, even though he would obviously be a biased source.
In fact, when it comes to the miracles that Jesus supposedly performed, it would be practically impossible for an observer to remain unbiased! They would most likely laud him as a worker of wonders, or they would view him as a charlatan. I suppose that a few people might choose to view these events with complete detachment, but that is unlikely, and such people are not likely to write about the events in question.
My intent was to very very gently put forth the idea that when the tales of the fisher-of-men were being handed around orally for years before finally being committed to paper, the tellers of these fisher-stories had a strong bias to present the fisher they’d had in hand (but which got away) as being bigger and bigger with each retelling. It’s my considered belief that the gospels themselves are snapshots of this phenomenon in action, like different stages of the telephone game.
Or to put it another way, I think that the fact that the tales of Jesus weren’t meant has histories is an excellent first reason to be doubtful of their historical veracity at many levels. The people telling these stories were people with an agenda, and while I’m not personally convinced that Jesus is as much an invention as the easter bunny is, there are numerous examples where large portions of a character’s ‘history’ and definition emerged from agendas of various kinds, not from real facts or events.