Why did Jesus refuse to perform miracles on demand?*

Great Debates
101

Your Christian apologist web sites never get any more convincing.

Educated people understand that Christian mythology is rife with pre-Christian, pagan motifs. All the apologist whining, and equivocating and special pleading in the world isn’t going to change that.

The slaughter of the innocents in Matthew is a rip off from the infant Moses story in Exodus which is a rip off from the Egyptian Sargon myth. The Madonna and Child imagery in Christianity is a rip off of Isis and Horus. Dying and resurrecting gods are commonplace as both agricultural and astrological metaphors. Human virgins got boned by gods and knocked up with demi-god bastards all the time. Nothing in Christianity was mythologically original (or ethically either, for that matter). It was just one more mystery cult that was fortunate enough got the backing of a king (who wantted to pacify his mother who was a fantical convert) and so acquired acquired the military and political ability to eradicate competing cults. If Constantine had chosen Sol Invicus instead (which was mythologically close to the same thing), you be making all kinds of arguments as to how Sol Invictus was totally original and unique and had no relationship at all to any other mythological motifs from 2000 years ago.

102

Cite, please.

103

This fits well with my model, that Jesus was a charismatic healer using some form of hypnosis. It’s no surprise that he would lack hypnotic authority over those who knew him as a youngster.

BTW, Mark chapter 10 also contained a verse demonstrating estrangement between Jesus and his relatives, which verse was excised by the 2nd century AD to leave only
“46 And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho …” (Why mention Jericho, only to leave it?)

(The otherwise inexplicable mentions of Jesus’ failure to win over his home town is strong evidence in favor of Gospel’s fundamental truth.)

104

It looks like you tried to link to something, but I’m not getting a link, so I’ll have to guess that by “fundamental truth,” you mean that the Gospels were at least based on someone who actually lived.

I agree with that. IMO the most convincing evidence is the conflicting stories of Jesus’s birth and infancy. Matthew and Luke tell two different stories that rarely intersect, and explicitly contradict each other (and common sense, and secular history) in order to explain why the Messiah’s home town was Nazareth, rather than Bethlehem. They would not have had to fabricate these explanations if they made Jesus up out of thin air, so there must have been a real Jesus who was known to be from Nazareth.

105

I somehow get the feeling that you would not admit that the Gospels borrowed anything from pagan culture unless there was a Greek myth about a man named Jesus Christ, who was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph.

106

I used to italicize text I wanted to emphasize, but my comments were inevitably misconstrued anyway, so I’ve resorted to brutal underlining of my conclusion clause. :smiley: (I don’t know if this is considered more or less amateurish than ALL CAPS.)

107

Well why don’t you put your feeling to the test. Provide me with a proper citation to a credible source documenting any copying from pagan mythology in the gospels and I’ll have a look. So far you’ve given one citation to an audio course by Bart Ehrman concerning Apollonius; I responded by explaining that myths of Apollonius came long after the gospels were written and have no meaningful similarities to anything in the gospels. Recall what I said earlier in the thread:

Diogenes is obviously going to go his usual route of repeating himself endlessly while refusing to provide any cites. You, however, are welcome to provide citations for your claims if you want to convince me.

108

Osiris predates Jesus. Dionysus predates Jesus. Mithras predates Jesus. Appolonius was allegedely a contempory and left at least some attributed first hand writings, as did one of his disciples, which is more than can be said for Jesus and his disciples. Vespasian healed a blind man with spit before anyone had ever heard of the Gospel of Mark. Your requests for cites are fatuous since your usual strateegy is find some elemnt that’s different and then claim that means there can’t be a connection. This is fallacious because we aren’t talking about point by point plagiarism, but the incorporatation of common mythological themes which were already prevalent. You don’t think the water into wine story is historically true, do you? Or that Yahweh knocked up a virgin, or that Jesus came back to life or any of these other obviously muyt6hical elements. Clearly they didn’t come from history, which leaves no alternative but that they came (as basic common sense would dictate) from the common stock of mythological motifs prevalent in the cities in which this new Jewish sect was spreading.

109

Your posts make it clear that you are not willing to be convinced, and I certainly don’t care enough to take the time to try.

There is nothing about the message of Christianity that necessitates a murder attempt by Herod, and in fact Matthew’s story about it directly contradicts the account of Luke, which explicitly says that Mary and Joseph went to Jerusalem six weeks after Jesus was born, presented him publicly, had various holy people proclaim him as the Messiah, and then went home to Nazareth without further incident, returning to Jerusalem every year.

This directly contradicts Matthew’s account of the flight to Egypt, cowering there until Herod died, and even then being afraid to go anywhere near Jerusalem, because Herod’s successor still ruled.

So it was pretty clearly made up to explain why Mary and Joseph moved to Nazareth, since there is nothing in Matthew that indicates they lived anywhere but Bethlehem before Jesus was born. What inspired Matthew to make up such a fantastic story, that not even the other Gospel writers, let alone secular historians, accept?

Any open-minded person would agree that the stories of Moses, Hercules, Oedipus, and other heroes who were menaced shortly after birth by an evil ruler had to have some influence. You reject that, apparently because Herod did not send snakes to kill Jesus.

You are like the birthers who believe both contradictory accounts of Jesus’s birth, based on anonymous accounts, but refuse to accept official documentation about Obama. You simply believe what you have been conditioned to believe, and are immune to reason and evidence that doesn’t accord with those beliefs.

That is not meant as an insult, by the way. I know many, many very intelligent Christians. It’s just a testimony to the power of indoctrination and mental compartmentalization.

110

The question is not whether Osiris predates Jesus, but whether your claim that “the body of Osiris was eaten as bread” is true. You’ve made this claim in at least one previous thread where you were unable to provide a cite for it. I’m now asking you once again to provide a cite for it.

The question is not whether Dionysus predates Jesus, but whether there is actually an incident of Dionysus turning water into wine. I’ve asked you for a cite. I’ve already given a cite for the fact that most scholars have rejected the notion of the water to wine miracle being copied from Dionysus myths in post #99. Do you have any reason why I should trust your word over that of the scholarly community? Do you have, for instance, a cite? Or are you just going to attack my cite while refusing to provide one of your own.

Nope. Recall what I posted in the earlier thread that I’ve already linked to:

“Concerning Mithras, it’s first necessary to distinguish the Mithras cult in the Roman Empire from the earlier religion in the eastern Persia; they share little besides the name. According to Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, the earliest evidence of the Roman Mithras cult dates to between 90 and 100 A.D., with it only becoming widespread in the second century. Hence, even for those who try to late-date the Gospels, there’s not much chance of them copying from Mithras. If copying occurred, it flowed the other way. The specific connections often cited are outright false or greatly exaggerated, however, so it’s unlikely that there was any relationship at all.”

Cite, please. Do you have any actual evidence of documents predating the writing of the gospels and refering to Apollonius? And do you have any reason to believe that there are meaningful similarities between the gospels and the story of Apollonius?

Cite, please.

I’m asking you to document that the themes in question actually were prevalent prior to the founding of Christianity. You seem to have a lot of insults for anybody who says they weren’t but a grand total of zero cites documenting that they were. It’s also worth noting that claims of “common mythological themes” are vague and you could ‘prove’ that anything was copied from anything if you’re willing to stretch far enough. When my mother was a baby her family had to flee their home in East Germany for fear of the communist government. Does that mean that my mother’s childhood history was copied from Moses, Hercules, and Oedipus?

111

It is.

This is untrue. I cited it before.

It’s not an “incident,” it’s the entire point of Dionysus. It’s the phenomonon of the grape vine personified.
I’ve asked you for a cite.
[/quote]

You’ve gotten them before.

I said “alleged,” just like the Gospels are alleged. Yes, there are writings alleged to have been written by Appolonius and a diary alleged to have been written by one of his disciples.

Already cited in the OP.

The Vespasian healing story is from Tacitus.

I named several. I’ve cited them in detail before. I know it’s a waste of time to do it again.

You ahve historical coroborration for the Holocaust. There was no slaughter of children in bethlehem by Herod. Matthew’s story also contains a number of other elements which are easily and unequivocally identifiable as fiction (like angels and virgin births, for instance).

112

Okay, this is in response to a request for a cite that Osiris’ body was eaten as bread. You say that you’ve cited it before. The only instance that I can find is in this thread, so let’s have a look at that. First of all we note that while you are constantly complaining about the fact that other people’s cites aren’t academically rigorous, you yourself linked to Wikipedia, which obviously isn’t academically rigorous. Now let’s look at what Wikipedia actually says on the matter; here’s the article. The paragraph that you quoted is the one labeled “Wheat and clay rituals”. That paragraph gives us two sources: E. A. Wallis Budge and Martin A. Larson. Budge was a scholar of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. A lot of junk was written in the nineteenth century of the topic of Christian origins that isn’t taken seriously today. Larson was a militant atheist who devoted much of his life to attacking Christians; he was also a conspiracy nut who believed that the Federal Reserve and Jewish bankers were secretly running the world; he had no credentials in ancient history or religious studies, and his works are also out of date. The fact that Wikipedia would post something based on those sources rather than getting information from recent, reliable sources is a prime example of why I don’t trust Wikipedia. Since you often make demands that sources should be peer-reviewed, recent, and written by people with expertise in the field, let me turn your demands around and use them against you. Can you back up the claim that “the body of Osiris was eaten as bread” with any source that meets the standards you demand from other people?

113

This is why I don’t like bother with your battles of attrition over cites. No matter how many cites you’re shown, all you do is snivel and equivocate about them and mak ead hominem attacks about the sources, but for the record, you’re misrpresenting the sources. They are not Budge and Larsen, but Plutarch and inscriptions on Egyptian temples. Your ad hominems are a fallcious waste of time.

Incidentally, even Bruce Metzger admitted that Osiris rose on the third day after he was murdered, though he (as a Christian) didn’t like to use the word, “resurrection.”

114

I’ve gotten cites about Dionysus turning water into wine before? Would you mind telling me exactly when and where this happened? I just searched and couldn’t find any threads mentioning Dionysus in the past few years other than this one. Or if you can’t do that, just answer this: I were to look up Dionysus/Bacchus in any mainstream source on Greek mythology such as Hamilton or Graves, would I find any mention of the character turning water into wine? If not, are you willing to answer the question that I asked before: “Do you have any reason why I should trust your word over that of the scholarly community?”

115

If I show you a cite that Dionysus changed water into wine, what are you going to say? Are you then going to admit that the Dionyseian myth predated the Christian one? If not, then what’s the point of asking for it?

116

If you can show me a reliable cite saying that there was a myth of Dionysus changing water into wine and that this myth definitely existed prior to the writing of the gospels, then I will believe that a myth of Dionysus turning water into wine existed prior to the writing of Dionysus. Please note the word “reliable”. The sources that you cite (on the rare occasion when you try to defend your claims at all) are usually Wikipedia, infidels.org, or others of that nature. All of those have the property of being posted on the internet, but no reason to give them any more credibility than that. I’ve said in post #112 what sort of cite I’m looking for. I’m looking for the sort that you always demand from others but can never provide yourself.

117

Like John Oliver says: “You cannot impress your friends!”

118

Okay, so according to you, both Plutarch and inscriptions on Egyptians temples are sources for the claim that “the body of Osiris was eaten as bread”. Please tell me exactly where in the works of Plutarch it says that the body of Osiris was eaten as bread and exactly where on an Egyptian Temple it says that the body of Osiris was eaten as bread.

119

The OP doesn’t mention Apollonius. Try harder.

120

The sense of sin. Even in Judaism, the religion that sets aside a special annual High Holy Day just for dealing with feelings of guilt, there is but a pale shadow of the Christian concept of sin.

But I have my doubts as to whether that really was part of Christianity, the way we understand it, before St. Augustine. Not even St. Paul is that much of a guilt-tripper.