Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[Angrboda]

It seems that you have a couple of double standards here, which I don't think that you can justify.  ... The second one, is that you keep referencing the time in the past that this occurred.  If the claim was made in the present, would you track down, and gain this information.   My guess is that you probably wouldn't have to meet a scientist or the people making the claim.   I don't think that it is reasonable for them to have to meet everyone who is going to believe the claim

I can agree, that you need multiple independent corroboration, of evidence, in order to rule out mistakes or fraud. And different parts of evidence can be verification for each other. There may be evidence against to consider as well.  And I think that it makes a difference if the claim was public, or happened somewhere, where even the people of the time, could not verify. 

I don't want to step on your conversation here, but it appears that one of the reasons for concentrating on the era during which such testimony occurred is that we have reason to push the probability that the testimony is unreliable given the period in question. It's well know that magic and miraculous heros were not simply a fringe belief held by a few at the time of the bible testimony, but that such accounts were widely believed and skepticism towards them largely absent. That affects the credibility of such accounts in a way that similar modern accounts are not likewise impugned. In this era we have tales of Vespasian healing people and statues of Aesclepius doing likewise, and so on. If we are going to assign a high degree of credibility to the testimony in the bible then, in order to be consistent, we have to assign a high degree of credibility to these other accounts as well. Otherwise you've accepted that the testimonies in the bible don't have high credibility. So the alternative is to justify treating the testimony in the bible as highly credible while at the same time claiming that similar reports outside the bible are not highly credible. In my experience, people typically do this by resorting to special pleading or other illegitimate means. If you have a counter-argument for why we should hold the testimony in the bible as likely credible when our evidence from the period is that such testimony, in general, is not highly credible, I'd like to hear it.

For reference I'll cite a paper by Richard Carrier on the type of tales that regularly went unquestioned during this time period. I say "unquestioned" but that's not entirely accurate. The reality was that people didn't question the things that they believed or were taught by their particular group; regarding the remarkable claims of others and other groups, people had plenty of disbelief. A similar situation existed in India at this time, but with a twist. Different strands of Hinduism believed differing things, yet pluralism was more the norm, so Hindu scholars and theologians would write treatises acknowledging the multiple beliefs, but they always found some reason for putting their specific brand of Hinduism top in the pecking order. In India, as well as Greece, people's skepticism and disbelief was very selective, only applying to the things those other people believed. (And there's evidence that Christians were not above the mess at this time as we have testimony from critics of Christianity during this period about how much differing sects of Christians detested one another, presumably to the point that they hated fellow Christians more than non-Christians.)


Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels by Richard Carrier

We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context. Yet it is quite enlightening to examine them against the background of the time and place in which they were written, and my goal here is to help you do just that. There is abundant evidence that these were times replete with kooks and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them. Placed in this context, the gospels no longer seem to be so remarkable, and this leads us to an important fact: when the Gospels were written, skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority. Although the gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously.

If the people of that time were so gullible or credulous or superstitious, then we have to be very cautious when assessing the reliability of witnesses of Jesus. As Thomas Jefferson believed when he composed his own version of the gospels, Jesus may have been an entirely different person than the Gospels tell us, since the supernatural and other facts about him, even some of his parables or moral sayings, could easily have been added or exaggerated by unreliable witnesses or storytellers. Thus, this essay is not about whether Jesus was real or how much of what we are told about him is true. It is not even about Jesus. Rather, this essay is a warning and a standard, by which we can assess how likely or easily what we are told about Jesus may be false or exaggerated, and how little we can trust anyone who claims to be a witness of what he said and did. For if all of these other stories below could be told and believed, even by Christians themselves, it follows that the Gospels, being of entirely the same kind, can all too easily be inaccurate, tainted by the gullibility, credulity, or fondness for the spectacular which characterized most people of the time.