by jimwalton » Sun Aug 18, 2019 2:11 pm
> Creation wasn't witnessed by anyone, so that doesn't meet the rules of the question.
OK, if you say so. The question doesn't specify what was witnessed, but only what could be explained. But we can move on, as you wish.
> curing the blind ... it always amazes me that some people believe a story that has been passed down from 2000 years ago when they wouldn't believe the same story if it was told them by the person they trust the most today.
We dare not evaluate truth by the age of the account. Because it has been passed down is not a marker of fiction. True stories also get passed down, and we should not disregard them just because time passes.
> Virgin birth, well, come on, would you believe anyone who was pregnant and claimed to still be a virgin?
Nope, and that's the point. Since there was no assumption from prophecy of a virgin birth, Matthew and Luke had no bias to expect it. Secondly, Matthew and Luke (a doctor) knew biology well enough to know they were claiming something miraculous, not biologically believable. Matthew and Luke had nothing to gain by telling such a preposterous story unless it were true. They have no reason to concoct a story that would discredit their account. We need to consider the broader picture here.
1. Matthew was trying to present a case that Jesus was of the line of David. He even starts his book with “Jesus, son of David...” It hurt his case to claim that Joseph wasn’t involved in the conception. Jewish messianic expectation included Davidic descent, so no one was expecting a virginal conception. Matthew had nothing to gain from claiming it unless it were true.
2. Matthew would have absolutely no motive for inventing such a story. It only made his writing seem mythological. No convincing motive for contriving such a story has yet been suggested.
3. J. Gresham Machen states that traditional Jewish monotheism would have abhorred the notion of a story about God replacing a human male in the act of conception to be born in the flesh as a son of God. It is one thing to say that Jesus’s conception by the Holy Spirit could be harmonized by divine revelation with the transcendence of Almighty God, but it is quite a different matter to assert that a Jew, beginning with the transcendence of God, would ever have been able, without compulsion of fact, without the enlightenment of revelation, without the reality of history, to arrive at a virginal conception of the son of God.
4. Since Isaiah 7.14 (the prophecy referred to in Mt. 1.23) was not understood to predict a virginal conception, there was no reason for Matthew to invent it.
5. The only logical reason that Matthew and Luke would have included a virginal conception is if they were convinced that’s what actually happened. It goes against reason and the known biology, even at that time. (They didn’t understand what we know about gynecology, but they knew it took two to tango.)
6. The theology of Jesus’s sinlessness doesn’t require a virgin birth. The Bible is silent about exactly how sin passes from one generation to another through humanity. We are merely told that sin entered the world through Adam’s sin, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned (Romans 5.12). How sin and death pass to us we are not told. There was no reason to make up a virgin birth.
7. The virgin birth is never again mentioned in Scripture. If it were that important to our theology of Christ’s deity, Paul or the book of Hebrews would have mentioned it. Matthew’s point is not so much that Jesus is God because he was born of a virgin as much as that the birth of Jesus was the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God because He is the incarnated deity.
> As to Israel, well, honestly, given that my grandparents went through the Holocaust, and all the myriad other insane and horrific stuff we've been through, I would have preferred to not be the chosen people, thank you very much.
I understand the sentiment. It was also in "Fiddler on the Roof," where Tevye says, "I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?" But that sentiment, as legitimate as it might be, has no bearing on the fact that Israel is unique in its survival from antiquity.
Certain people have survived in the Near East. But where are the Assyrians (as Assyrians), Babylonians (as Babylonians), Edomites, Hittites, Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, Amalekites, etc? Their descendants are still with us, obviously, but not as a people group with a nation. The Jews are unique, and that was my point.
> Healing a man who had been lame for 38 years. ... yes, if it actually happened, but we see this kind of crap done by 'Christian healers' on TV all the time, and we know how it's done,
Now, "Christian healers" are the lame ones, and what they do is not to be confused with what Jesus did. You have no warrant to connect the two. What we have today are frauds and charlatans, but it's illegitimate and baseless to say that because TV healers are fake, therefore Jesus was also a fake. That's like saying that because Donald Trump is a bad president, therefore Abraham Lincoln was also.
Actually there have been scholarly studies done of miracles in the modern world, and they have not only merit but substantiation. I presume you have investigated these yourself. If not, it would seem you're guilty of bias in drawing a conclusion before making the investigation, on the presumption of an a priori presupposition of "such things are impossible."