Spud,
Agreed. So we don't know why there are no extant contemporaneous records, if there were any.
Yes. So when in Reply 49786 you said “
Someone (professor Davey?) mentioned not having contemporary accounts but only ones from a few centuries later. That's because the accounts would have been written on papyrus, which disintegrates” we are now agreed that you cannot know that to have be the case for the resurrection story.
I think that Matthew was completed after a period of one or two decades, evidenced by his comments regarding the field of blood being so-called "to this day" and the rumour spread among the Jews "to this day" that the disciples stole the body. But not after AD 70 (or a few years before) because he shows signs of writing while the temple was still standing and the Jews were still practicing their religion in Jerusalem.
Based on that internal evidence (assuming it wasn't fabricated) it seems the first records were made within the generation who witnessed the events.
Quite possibly – so plenty of time then for transmission errors, lapses in memory etc. Nor moreover does that change the fact that, at best, Matthew could only have recorded what a witness
thought he saw, which may or not be an accurate description of what actually happened. What the witness
didn’t see for example could well be a much more important component of a more accurate explanation.
Regarding embellishment of the story, there are indeed signs that Matthew has been edited. But there is no sign that the miracles have been edited in (except on two occasions, both of which are duplicates of very similar miracles where the original two are integral to the structure of the narrative. See Matthew 9:27-31 and 20:29-34; also 9:32-34 and 12:22-24). There are around 20 doublets like those just mentioned. A doublet consists of two similar sentences or paragraphs. With most of them, one of the pair is out of context, while the other fits its context. The out-of-context one is the one that has been edited in.
But none of which nullifies your core problem of establishing whether any actual miracles happened at all. A conjuring trick that was believed to be real could well have been recorded faithfully and accurately multiple times but would still be a conjuring trick regardless of what the witness thought it was. Think how closely the resurrection story mirrors the structure of a conjuring trick for example – the conjuror sets up the trick then pulls a curtain across so no-one can see the jiggery-pokery out of sight, which he then removes with a Ta-Daa!!! and the girl is “miraculously” out of the box. Similarly in the resurrection story the “curtain” is a big rock rolled in front of a tomb, and three days later…Ta-Daa!!! and there’s Jesus out of the tomb. Uncanny eh?
If a god had wanted to show a real miracle do you not think that rather than dress it in the paraphernalia of a conjuring trick, “He” could for example have had Jesus actually dead on the cross, unresponsive to being poked with spears etc and then… Ta-Daa!!! Jesus could have leapt from the cross without a mark on him? How much more convincing of an actual miracle would that have been!?
The point is that the miracles are integral to the structure of the narrative.
No doubt, as they are in lots of different religious narratives too but that you find to be unconvincing.
