One question for Christians

[Zone]

It never claims to be.

If it did we would then accept it as historical?

The general criteria according to whom? I am not aware of any such criteria used by historians.

Historians accept the siege of Troy as historical but they don't accept the Greek gods being there.

We do not reject the historicity of the Iliad because of it’s supernatural events. It’s not a very well attested document (earliest manuscripts date to 500 years after the original was written) and it is not written as historical narrative like the New Testament is.

We accept the general events of the Iliad seeing as archaeology backs it up but they don't accept the gods being there. This just the general academic standard applied to everything. A modern example would be the Roswell incident, there was a historical incident, there was a government cover up and weren't any aliens. The aliens just got added in there. Anything like that, it's gone.

You’re confusing mechanism with agency, God may have used a volcano to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; however, I doubt it was a volcano that turned Lot’s wife into salt.

She would have been caught in the pyrocalstic flow and turn/encased into a pumice or something. But this is the problem you think there are supernatural beings who historically cause volcanoes to happen and turn people into salt. To get the real history you must extract all supernatural elements. There's no other way to do this, if there's anything funny going on look for a natural or mythological source.

Why are you assuming naturalism when you read scripture? I see no necessity for that assumption.

The standard you apply to all other religious texts, the Quran, Hadiths, Vedas, the Norse Eddas the Book of Mormon etc must also apply equally to the Old and New Testament. You can't make exceptions it has to be 100% right through.

Secondly, I am not aware of any Roman leader being described as having supernatural powers by the New Testament.

It's not in the Bible but you use the same historical analysis on those claims as you do anything else. And that gives you the pure reality there.

It is not reasonable to assume that the writers of the New Testament who personally knew Jesus and his family would ascribe feats to him that he never accomplished all the time knowing it would get them persecuted and killed by the Jewish leadership or Romans.

None of the writers of the New Testament ever knew Jesus personally neither did their sources they got their information from. It's like a game of Chinese whispers.

What’s the motive?

Someone had an interesting experience, probably not supernatural we'll assume it wasn't a waking dream/hallucination of Jesus after his death or something. And this was verbally spread initially and the people it was spread to made it slightly more interesting, and then it was spread some more and the story got more and more interesting and supernatural until it was recorded down. The people involved likely all believed it was real much like the people involved in the Roswell Incident.

If I knew that my friend didn’t have supernatural powers, and if I knew that if I told people he did they would stone me I am certainly not going to tell anyone he had supernatural powers let alone write it down in a signed letter. Let’s be reasonable here.

You can only be reasonable by eliminating all traces of the supernatural from any historical account. That way you get something closer to the original events, see for instance the King Arthur movie. It's still not that historical but closer to the real history we can assume, no Merlin or magic swords involved. Jesus does tend to get nuked when you apply this golden standard to him as does much of the Bible in general. A more philosophical religion with supernatural elements that didn't take place historically in the physical world tends to survive the process better.