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Michael's avatar

This is why I waited. It saves me much time. I now know I can avoid a lot of the things that I would have had to rant about and can stick to my main areas of research. I think I can get this written a lot sooner than I said.

So still expect intense snark on your claims about the Delay of the Parousia. But I will mostly stick to the spooky philosophy. Expect a reply from me in May (I’m not doing anything until finals week is over)

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Non-Natural Fact Dispenser's avatar

"So on the hypothesis that the argument from prophecy fails, I'd expect there to be many other passages from ancient literature that sound like they're about Jesus. About 7% of ancient writings from before 200 that have survived are from the Bible, so we'd expect the Bible to contain ~7% of the passages that sound most like they're about Jesus. In fact, it seems the Bible contains all the most impressive passages that sound like they're about Jesus!"

I think there is reason to expect that the rate would be higher than 7%, even if Christianity is false. Namely, even if they're in large part false, one would expect Christian texts to contain recurring themes and ideas or concepts. This is the case, because

a - there is a selection effect of what is written down. If the author knows about famous passages in their holy texts, they will make an effort to record any future observations lining up with these passages. This would extend even to actions those in the tradition might take, which would then be recorded (someone could purposely fulfill a prophecy, for instance).

b - other sources of correlation between passages in a specific tradition. The authors come from similar geographical areas. Have shared cultures. Have similar beliefs. Etc. If only one culture was obsessed with apples, it wouldn't be surprising if all of the fulfilled prophecies about apples are in that culture's texts.

It's unclear how much higher this should make the expected rate than 7%. It would depend on a lot of features of the Christian/Jewish tradition at the time of writing, and also the other ancient texts, and the specificity of the prophecies themselves.

However, I suspect it's easy to underrate the extent of subtle correlations of this kind.

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