Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Jehanne]

We have photographs of Abraham Lincoln. We have documents written and signed by him. We have speeches written by him. We have contemporary accounts of his public appearances. We have not one jot or tittle of anything remotely similar for any godman character.

Still silence on Cato the Elder, Socrates, and Alexander the Great? We have less evidence that any of these existed than for Jesus of Nazareth. If the issue is simply one of having sufficient and reasonably accurate accounts about people from the ancient world, then Jesus of Nazareth stands out as one of the more extensively documented.

Now admittedly, no miraculous claims are being made with respect to these other historical figures. So what? The point SteveII, RoadRunner79, and I are making is that  skeptics have abandoned objectivity by ruling out the possibility of supernatural events in advance. In fact, they say that the mere mention of miraculous events in the accounts is proof that the accounts of miracles are false. That move is a basic logical fallacy called "Begging the Question."

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical person, but if you look at the earliest sources (Q, Mark and Paul's authentic letters), the following are also historical truths:

1)  Jesus did not regard himself as being "God".  That idea came latter; Jesus saw the end of the World (and, hence, the end of Rome) as happening during his lifetime, likely, through an Angelic Being ("the Son of Man") who would come from Heaven (Jesus, like all those around him, believed the Earth to be flat with Heaven above it) to liberate the Chosen People from the hands of the evil Romans.

2)  Jesus did not perform any miracles during his lifetime.  The two earliest sources, Q & Paul, simply make no mention of any of Jesus' miracles, and such is probably due to the fact that those stories about Jesus had not yet been written down.  Paul, a contemporary of Jesus, regarded Jesus as a human being who was bestowed with divinity only after his death, not before, and so, for Paul, Jesus was incapable of performing any miracles, as he was just a man who became divine, a son of God.

3)  After his death, Jesus' resurrection was believed to be phantasmal, not corporeal.  Paul shows no interest in Jesus' burial nor does he have any interest in the reanimation of Jesus' corpse.  For Paul, Jesus appears to him more or less as a ghost, a phantasmal being who had left his earthly body.  The stories of Jesus' corporeal resurrection from the dead are later additions to the story of Jesus.