Tegularius wrote: ↑June 11th, 2022, 11:14 pm
What you mention as evidence are all hearsay accounts which would be immediately dismissed in any court of law which still requires actual evidence to denote an event as factual. Eyewitness accounts from 2000 years ago when eyewitnesses to miracles were not in the least unusual and not likely to be stringently questioned can no-longer be ratified as evidence by any criteria currently applied.
If the bible were regarded as fiction written by many with a few facts interspersed, there is little reason to question its veracity; if conversely (or should I say perversely) considered as god-given fact contravening all definitions of what amounts to being factual, it becomes a miscellaneous mess of contradictions, non-sequiturs and ahistorical perspectives.
Nevertheless, people still see what they want to see presuming that to be evidence. We're not so different from the old-timers.
Alrighty, then. By this standard, we should toss all the history books out the window. For all we know, Alexander the Great was never at the battles of Issus or Guagamela. The reports that he was are mere "hearsay"!
Hearsay evidence is often accepted in court. The main reaon it is not accepted is that better evidence is available: the sworn testimony of the person who made the original statement. If that person is dead (as is the case for most histories, including the Bible) what he told someone else is often accepted. Suppose a dying Jacob, riddled with .38 caliber bullets, told the police, "It was Count Lucanor who shot me! He couldn't abide losing a debate. He pulled out his pearl-handled pistol, and shot me 4 times." Then Jacob died. His accusation would be admitted in court, as well it should be.
Some of the Bible is "written as fiction". The story of Jonah (2 pages long and well worth reading, just because it's so funny) is clearly a "fable". The psalms are written as poems. Much of the rest of the bible purports to be history. That doesn't mean we must believe it (most of us don't), but it's still "evidence". As I said earlier, there's modern evidence that Sasquatches roam the hills of my home state of Oregon. There are footprints; there are photographs and movies; there are eye witness accounts. I still don't believe it -- but I would not claim there is "no evidence".
Did Julius Caesar say, "Et to, Brute!" when he was supposedly assassinated in the Senate. I don't know and you don't know. But there's evidence (whether convincing or not) that he did. There's also evidence that Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (albeit not in that language)." IN fact the evidence for the Sermon on the Mount is practically identical to the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Both are recounted in the Gospels (I'm no Biblical scholar, so the chain of authority on which the gospels were written is hazy to me). Is it fair to believe one and not the other? Of course. We may require better evidence before believing supernatural or incredible events than we do for mundane events. Nonetheless, the "evidence" for both of them is identical.