The God of Convenience

[Mudhammam]

This is the same kind of archaeological evidence we have for Jesus. We have the remains of the temple where Jesus is said to have taught, but that doesn't prove his existence or even that he taught there, but puts him in a real setting.

What temple is that? Even if that is the case, that isn't the "same type of evidence." The Academy wasn't an obscure facility where some no-name preacher may have taught. It was a major institution for education where countless well-established names learned and is very well known throughout the ancient world. Strange that Plato's name would be linked to its founding, and no other authors would dispute that fact, if it was untrue. We're not talking about an obscure cult started in the backwaters of Palestine as in the case of Christianity. On the other hand, apparently nobody knew of a Jesus of Nazareth until long after he died, in a century in which many more contemporary works survive. And don't forget, unlike Plato, whose existence is not inherently improbable (whereas 90% of what is recorded about Jesus is), Jesus supposedly performed numerous earth-shaking (quite literally) miracles during his "public" ministry.

But once again, I don't need to prove that Plato was a philosopher who taught at the Academy and left dozens of works. For one, we have his own words, and it makes no difference if his writings were compiled by others (for which it would be on the person making that claim to offer evidence), because their importance is untouched by such a possibility.

If we had the original manuscripts of Paul's letters, and could date them to the time of Paul's life, then we would be more likely to assume that they were actually written by the apostle Paul, rather than someone claiming to be him. The same for the gospels. The more the originals are copied and the further in time they are from the originals, the more chance there is of mistakes in copying or intentional changes. You've got a period of about 1,300 years from from the original writings of any manuscripts from Plato and less than 100 years for the oldest manuscript from the new testament.

I could write a book and you could read it next week. I could say that I own an intergalactic spaceship and a rainbow-colored Chimera named Hilary Clinton. It wouldn't make any of my claims more probable, even if I placed my Chimera in known locations. That's your Jesus. If I wrote, however, that I went to Kroger, then the bank, and stopped at my girlfriend's house for cake, that would be a boring book, but it would be trivial to the point that whether or not my details were completely accurate, it would have no effect on the probability that I did something like that. For the most part, that's Plato.