Why are Swinburne's arguments for expecting an incarnate God "utterly ludicrous"? The idea that it would be fitting for God to suffer alongside his creatures (given that he allows us to suffer for a good purpose) doesn't strike me as crazy. More broadly, the idea of God living a life of suffering seems to be quite philosophically fruitful (see e.g. the use to which Marilyn Adams put it). And if God is going to become incarnate to live a life of suffering, first-century Palestine seems like a pretty good place to do it (consider e.g. the strongly monotheistic Jewish culture being brutally oppressed by the Roman government, thus affording lots of opportunities for courageous opposition).
I also think (following e.g. Herbert McCabe) that the Incarnation is plausibly necessary in order for God to love us as equals, and so it's almost certain that a morally perfect God would become incarnate. But that relies on more controversial assumptions.
Also, it isn't clear why the fact that Jesus' life was only described in later (sometimes contradictory) books is relevant. The alleged unreliability of the gospels only matters insofar as it leads one to doubt the relevant historical facts (i.e. the basics of Christ's ministry and teaching, his crucifixion, the tomb, and the appearances). Once we've *agreed* on those facts (which, as you note, most historians do), Gospel reliability ceases to matter with respect to the resurrection argument.
I mostly agree, but this is the type of article that won't and shouldn't convince anyone who isn't already basically convinced. Your strongest argument, the one about bible verses would be strong if you bothered to quote a single one of them in context to prove your point and not just replaced that critical part with a random dig.
For example: Matthew writes that baby Jesus' escape and then return from Egypt satisfied the prophecy in Hosea:
"And was there (Egypt) until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. (Matthew 2:15)
The verse cited reads:
"When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images." (Hosea 1:11).
Since Jesus is alleged to have never sinned, and since sacrifice to Baalim is on the peak of biblical sins, this cannot be a prophecy of Jesus.
- That's what an actual argument as opposed to mere sneering looks like. You can do the sneering after you win an argument (sure we all have the right to have a little fun), but not before.
Is crossing the Rubicon that odd? Popular general decides to take political power is something we see a lot in history. What happened with Jesus, we don't see so much of. Arguably only Muhammed and Sidharta have had similar impacts on world history, yet even they didn't claim to rise from the dead or be the incarnation of God.
Saying that God "decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention" doesn't seem to be giving the Christian explanation a fair shake: the Christian view is that God intervenes in the world all the time, and is deliberately shaping the outcomes of events to align with a larger plan (ie, the concept of Providence).
to your second paragraph, this is kind of equivocating around what needs to be explained, no? god's presence in the world in his capacity as the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover when i throw a baseball at least seems qualitatively distinct from his presence in the world as a specific guy at a specific time engaging in behavior that is, at least in some sense, metaphysically of a kind with the behavior exhibited by the rest of us caused causes, that he maintained at the same time over and above (or if this language is metaphysically-laden in some objectionable way, in addition to) his universal role in making anything/everything happen.
Yes, but the Christian "theory" posits that God does both the uncaused cause stuff, and regularly does direct purposeful interventions with a particular outcome in mind. The theory does not posit that God only does the uncaused cause stuff, but one time made an exception for the Jesus thing.
I don't think it's very accurate to call Jesus' moral teaching vacuous, that stuff basically deleted pagan morality, to this day a lot of our taken-for-granted moral intuitions come from Jesus and were not there in the ancient world before him. There are even historians who consider the abolition of slavery to become unlikelier in the absence of Christianity, as abolitionism was a distinctly Christian movement, and let's face it, none other than Aristotle defended slavery: abolition was not going to come from them, or any people that descended from the pagan worldview.
You also need to consider that it superficially looks silly to think God would manifest in this particular way, but you can't argue with the results: Jesus influenced world history for over a 2,000 years and counting. There are very, very few people who accomplished something like that, even Buddha and Muhammad fall short, and as Jesus teaches, "by their fruits ye shall know them", is the real metric for distinguishing legitimate spiritual authorities from fakes, that's the correct measurement, not a philosophical analysis.
Though of course, judging Jesus' fruits we find Crusades and the slaughter of 'heretics' among them, so it's a pretty complicated picture, but I still think it's one mostly favorable to Jesus.
Abolition of slavery is a good thing, but some elements in Christian ethics have been pushed so far that now you have people arguing in favor of abolish prisons as whole (after they achieved to abolish death penalty)...
To be fair, first century Roman Palestine was a great spot to appear. Much earlier and Christianity wouldn't have benefitted from expansive Roman trade networks. Much later and the empire's decline and eventual split would have strangled Christianity's growth. Appearing near the peak of the largest empire of the day is a pretty good sweet spot.
Do you have any concept of, say, what the cursing of the fig tree and the denunciation of hand-washing mean, or are you pulling these out of context in order to sneer at their seemingly odd surface appearance without understanding the nature of the argument presented by the gospels?
Jesus isn't condemning ritual purity; he's condemning the Pharisees for *obsessing* about ritual purity whilst neglecting genuine righteousness. As he says, "Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness" (Luke 11:39).
Jesus was not condemning ritual purity, he was entering the theological debate on the nature of righteousness & divine law (and therefore the nature of God), as well as on religious authority. He explicitly commands all of his disciples to maintain ritual purity according to the written law.
It absolutely does not say any such thing in the passage; furthermore, Jesus' disciples followed Mosaic dietary restrictions until well after his death- see Acts 10.
I think there are a couple of week points here, some of which have been pointed out by others (e.g., the handwashing point just doesn't seem to me to have force at all, for reasons others have given). But one other odd thing, it seems to me, is that you're basically comparing the entire Christian picture to what we might call the "local" naturalistic explanation. The Christian explanation for the historical facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead; you don't need the Trinity, Incarnation, etc. for that, even if God raising Jesus from the dead provides evidence for these things through some further bit of reasoning. It feels a bit like rejecting the naturalistic explanation of the minimal facts on the ground that a naturalistic explanation of the resurrection requires a life-permitting universe, which is very unlikely on naturalism--except that the naturalistic explanation actually does require a life-permitting universe, whereas a supernatural explanation doesn't require the Trinity, etc.
I think it's reasonable to look at the different broad explanations. If you think that Jesus was resurrected, for that to be plausible, you have to think a lot of other things that are implausible. I think the difference between the life-permitting universe case and this one is that to accept the naturalistic explanation of the resurrection, it wouldn't make sense to, because of that specifically, onboard lots of other assumptions, while accepting the supernatural explanation of the resurrection makes various improbable things quite likely.
Sure, one can reject Jesus's accession, the Trinity, the idea that bread and wine are the literal blood and body of Christ (a truly stupid belief!), et cetera and still believe in Jesus's resurrection, but what specifically would be the motivation here? I mean, if Jesus's accession story into Heaven was made up, why couldn't the Resurrection have been as well? I don't necessarily mean *consciously* made up, but rather the result of people's delusions which they came to view as accepted fact.
It’s also important to realize what we would expect to see under non Christianity—namely, over the course of thousands of years it doesn’t seem extremely improbable that something like the Jesus story would happen. If all of history was the Jesus story, I admit that that would be much greater evidence. Additionally, there seems to be a sort of asymmetry between god explanations and naturalistic ones. Namely, you can point to certain improbable events and say that that is unlikely on atheism but there are no particular events (besides maybe evil - though I disagree with that this actually is not what we would expect on god, even a benevolent one) where we would say that this is unlikely on god. I think it would make sense if when we explained more phenomena (for example, evolution being true but really for any advancement in science that explains some phenomena we didn’t understand before) lowers the probability of god because we previously didn’t have an explanation for something that didn’t require a god to explain it and now we do.
In my opinion, this post is not persuasive, as you sweepingly accept many background assumptions without justifying them, or even explicating them in sufficient detail. In what follows, I string my critiques, some passing, others crucial to the outlined central flaw. For some, I offer responses, and for others, I am simply satisfied to point them out as unjustified.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon is not comparable with a man rising from the dead.
> God, possessing three persons as part of one being, something of such doubtful coherence that some of its proponents have jettisoned believing in the law of non-contradiction to make sense of the doctrine
The assumption in this context is that the bare phenomenon of Jesus's resurrection is dependent on Christians' having a coherent theological framework. But this is clearly not true. It is entirely conceivable that Jesus was resurrected for some unknown reason X. This would be a potentially good counter to the claim that *the Christian religion* (defined by the broad restrictions of perennial orthodoxy) is a good explanation of the facts. But you make a further unjustified jump: Christianity is incoherent, therefore naturalism best explains the facts at hand. But as I argue, the matter is not so simple.
> decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention in the world to become incarnate in first-century roman Palestine
Christians would deny that God does not intervene in the world. This assumption needs ample support.
> cursing a fig-tree, denouncing hand-washing, giving ambiguous teachings about hell
You do not explain why any of these would lessen the credence of the Christian explanation. If I had to guess, you would take God's omnibenevolence to prevent him from cursing any living being, encourage hygienic practices for the same reason, and not teach unambiguously about hell for the same reason also. This can be paired with arguments for the absurdity of certain models of hell.
> aligning with a genocidal God described in the old-testament
The unjustified assumption seems to me this: "No one is morally justified in aligning with a deity to whom obviously immoral things have been ascribed." But this principle is a weak and dubious one. Simply being ascribed immoral acts does not make one untouchable as association goes, for otherwise one could never align with a falsely accused person. Some Church Fathers also respond in this vein: they deny that the God of the Old Testament really ever did commit any atrocities ascribed to him in it.
> his moral teachings remained ambiguous and vacuous, the types of things one would expect from one of his time
As far as the societal impact of Jesus's teaching from 1st century AD up to the present day goes, it cannot plausibly be denied. This is further supported by his many controversies with competing Jewish teachers of his time. Radical love which Jesus preaches was especially foreign to pagans and this is why their conversions were sometimes dramatic, as they stepped into a completely different moral world. So I do not see what you mean by "ambiguous" and "vacuous" here.
> he contributed no particularly novel scientific contributions, never seeing fit to mention, for instance, the germ theory of disease
The unjustified assumption here seems to be: "God would make some scientific contributions, were he among us." If you try to ground this in God's omnibenevolence, this just becomes a general argument from evil, and more specifically, God's permission of moral and natural evil, which is not specific to Christianity at all.
> his deeds were recorded in a series of deeply contradictory books written many decades after the facts they describe, providing fairly unimpressive historical testimony relative to what he could have provided, that show clear evidence of later embellishment.
The assumption here is: " If God produced a text about himself, this text would have the form of a list of propositions, and God would perfectly preserve it." It is easy to see just how complex your assumptions can be, and therefore, how easy it is to attack them from various angles, which I do not explore here.
To evaluate your other claims, one would require substantial knowledge from various fields, such as New and Old Testament textual criticism, which I do not have, so I keep silent.
These are my thoughts for now. God bless you. You are in my prayers.
I think part of the incoherence in the views you are outlining comes from the fact that they seem to involve a very different concept of God than the one that is the subject of doctrines such as the Trinity or the Incarnation as traditionally understood.
Do they really need to believe something that odd happened? I mean even the earliest written gospels are believed to date from something like 100 years after those events and just look at mormon beliefs. In a much more modern era when we have essentially disproof of some of the claims of translation 100 years after those events what survives is highly credulous religious texts.
And that's just one group. In general religious beliefs are transmitted by the believers so it's not at all weird they tend to be fairly credulous.
The current historical consensus view is that the gospel of Mark was likely written between 66 and 70 AD, which would put it only 30ish years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke are dated to around 90 AD, and John to around 100 AD. None of them are believed to be 100 years after the fact, which would be around 130 AD.
That's just the gospels of course. The Pauline epistles are dated between 48 AD for the earliest (Galatians) and 70 AD for the latest, with many dated in between. All of those are well within the living memory of the events of Jesus's life. As for the other New Testament books, the latest one is believed to be Second Peter, which is dated to 110 AD.
And the Gospel of Mark is notable for not calling Jesus divine or including a miraculous birth. Stories around the Roman world of miraculous teachers or of miracles (heck even in our world) aren't very uncommon.
Besides, while Joseph Smith was literally alive people believed the crap about the translated golden tablets despite strong evidence to the contrary. Go through 50 years especially back then and the only people who have incentive to keep the accounts alive are believers.
Literally the first sentence of Mark: "The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God". Mark also includes the voice from the heavens declaring "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (1:11), demons crying out to Jesus "You are the Son of God" (3:11), a particular demon asking Jesus "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?" (5:6-7), another voice from the skies saying "This is my beloved Son; listen to him" (9:7), and finally at his trail when asked "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" Jesus replies "I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven" (14:61-64).
Which is all a moot point, because the epistles are even earlier and also teach about a Christ who is divine and rose from the dead (if you want receipts on that I can provide them, but there is quite a pile to choose from).
Claiming to be the son of God, and God explicitly claiming that you are His son in the text, are certainly claims to divinity. And they match the claims of divinity made in the epistles, which were even more contemporary than Mark.
I won't bother repeating the arguments but just go read the Wikipedia page. It is anything but clear what that claim means and if you look back to the Hebrew bible the same term is used to refer to fully human individuals with a special relationship with god.
I would be more interested to hear how well you think the facts around the reported resurrection fit Christianity versus how well it fits the next best explanation. What Bases factor would you say it has? Or with claimed prophetic fulfillment? Is the Christian record no more impressive than other religions who claim some preexisting text predicted their founder/prophet? Or is it unusually good?
Why are Swinburne's arguments for expecting an incarnate God "utterly ludicrous"? The idea that it would be fitting for God to suffer alongside his creatures (given that he allows us to suffer for a good purpose) doesn't strike me as crazy. More broadly, the idea of God living a life of suffering seems to be quite philosophically fruitful (see e.g. the use to which Marilyn Adams put it). And if God is going to become incarnate to live a life of suffering, first-century Palestine seems like a pretty good place to do it (consider e.g. the strongly monotheistic Jewish culture being brutally oppressed by the Roman government, thus affording lots of opportunities for courageous opposition).
I also think (following e.g. Herbert McCabe) that the Incarnation is plausibly necessary in order for God to love us as equals, and so it's almost certain that a morally perfect God would become incarnate. But that relies on more controversial assumptions.
Also, it isn't clear why the fact that Jesus' life was only described in later (sometimes contradictory) books is relevant. The alleged unreliability of the gospels only matters insofar as it leads one to doubt the relevant historical facts (i.e. the basics of Christ's ministry and teaching, his crucifixion, the tomb, and the appearances). Once we've *agreed* on those facts (which, as you note, most historians do), Gospel reliability ceases to matter with respect to the resurrection argument.
I mostly agree, but this is the type of article that won't and shouldn't convince anyone who isn't already basically convinced. Your strongest argument, the one about bible verses would be strong if you bothered to quote a single one of them in context to prove your point and not just replaced that critical part with a random dig.
For example: Matthew writes that baby Jesus' escape and then return from Egypt satisfied the prophecy in Hosea:
"And was there (Egypt) until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. (Matthew 2:15)
The verse cited reads:
"When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images." (Hosea 1:11).
Since Jesus is alleged to have never sinned, and since sacrifice to Baalim is on the peak of biblical sins, this cannot be a prophecy of Jesus.
- That's what an actual argument as opposed to mere sneering looks like. You can do the sneering after you win an argument (sure we all have the right to have a little fun), but not before.
Is crossing the Rubicon that odd? Popular general decides to take political power is something we see a lot in history. What happened with Jesus, we don't see so much of. Arguably only Muhammed and Sidharta have had similar impacts on world history, yet even they didn't claim to rise from the dead or be the incarnation of God.
Saying that God "decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention" doesn't seem to be giving the Christian explanation a fair shake: the Christian view is that God intervenes in the world all the time, and is deliberately shaping the outcomes of events to align with a larger plan (ie, the concept of Providence).
to your second paragraph, this is kind of equivocating around what needs to be explained, no? god's presence in the world in his capacity as the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover when i throw a baseball at least seems qualitatively distinct from his presence in the world as a specific guy at a specific time engaging in behavior that is, at least in some sense, metaphysically of a kind with the behavior exhibited by the rest of us caused causes, that he maintained at the same time over and above (or if this language is metaphysically-laden in some objectionable way, in addition to) his universal role in making anything/everything happen.
Yes, but the Christian "theory" posits that God does both the uncaused cause stuff, and regularly does direct purposeful interventions with a particular outcome in mind. The theory does not posit that God only does the uncaused cause stuff, but one time made an exception for the Jesus thing.
I don't think it's very accurate to call Jesus' moral teaching vacuous, that stuff basically deleted pagan morality, to this day a lot of our taken-for-granted moral intuitions come from Jesus and were not there in the ancient world before him. There are even historians who consider the abolition of slavery to become unlikelier in the absence of Christianity, as abolitionism was a distinctly Christian movement, and let's face it, none other than Aristotle defended slavery: abolition was not going to come from them, or any people that descended from the pagan worldview.
You also need to consider that it superficially looks silly to think God would manifest in this particular way, but you can't argue with the results: Jesus influenced world history for over a 2,000 years and counting. There are very, very few people who accomplished something like that, even Buddha and Muhammad fall short, and as Jesus teaches, "by their fruits ye shall know them", is the real metric for distinguishing legitimate spiritual authorities from fakes, that's the correct measurement, not a philosophical analysis.
Though of course, judging Jesus' fruits we find Crusades and the slaughter of 'heretics' among them, so it's a pretty complicated picture, but I still think it's one mostly favorable to Jesus.
Did I ever bring up perennialism with you? The view that the different religions are the same God speaking in different languages. Maybe you think that violates the law of non-contradiction, but this pic is what I think of that law: https://i0.wp.com/maryfrancesflood.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/truth-and-perspective.jpg?resize=700%2C525&ssl=1
Abolition of slavery is a good thing, but some elements in Christian ethics have been pushed so far that now you have people arguing in favor of abolish prisons as whole (after they achieved to abolish death penalty)...
To be fair, first century Roman Palestine was a great spot to appear. Much earlier and Christianity wouldn't have benefitted from expansive Roman trade networks. Much later and the empire's decline and eventual split would have strangled Christianity's growth. Appearing near the peak of the largest empire of the day is a pretty good sweet spot.
Everyone literate read the same language too: Greek. Great time for spreading information via text.
Do you have any concept of, say, what the cursing of the fig tree and the denunciation of hand-washing mean, or are you pulling these out of context in order to sneer at their seemingly odd surface appearance without understanding the nature of the argument presented by the gospels?
With the handwashing, for instance, the idea is that Jesus was condemning ritual purity. Still a weird thing to go to bat for.
Okay, so no, then.
How is that explanation wrong?
Jesus isn't condemning ritual purity; he's condemning the Pharisees for *obsessing* about ritual purity whilst neglecting genuine righteousness. As he says, "Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness" (Luke 11:39).
Jesus was not condemning ritual purity, he was entering the theological debate on the nature of righteousness & divine law (and therefore the nature of God), as well as on religious authority. He explicitly commands all of his disciples to maintain ritual purity according to the written law.
The text directly says that Jesus's purpose there is in rendering all foods pure.
It absolutely does not say any such thing in the passage; furthermore, Jesus' disciples followed Mosaic dietary restrictions until well after his death- see Acts 10.
I think there are a couple of week points here, some of which have been pointed out by others (e.g., the handwashing point just doesn't seem to me to have force at all, for reasons others have given). But one other odd thing, it seems to me, is that you're basically comparing the entire Christian picture to what we might call the "local" naturalistic explanation. The Christian explanation for the historical facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead; you don't need the Trinity, Incarnation, etc. for that, even if God raising Jesus from the dead provides evidence for these things through some further bit of reasoning. It feels a bit like rejecting the naturalistic explanation of the minimal facts on the ground that a naturalistic explanation of the resurrection requires a life-permitting universe, which is very unlikely on naturalism--except that the naturalistic explanation actually does require a life-permitting universe, whereas a supernatural explanation doesn't require the Trinity, etc.
I think it's reasonable to look at the different broad explanations. If you think that Jesus was resurrected, for that to be plausible, you have to think a lot of other things that are implausible. I think the difference between the life-permitting universe case and this one is that to accept the naturalistic explanation of the resurrection, it wouldn't make sense to, because of that specifically, onboard lots of other assumptions, while accepting the supernatural explanation of the resurrection makes various improbable things quite likely.
Sure, one can reject Jesus's accession, the Trinity, the idea that bread and wine are the literal blood and body of Christ (a truly stupid belief!), et cetera and still believe in Jesus's resurrection, but what specifically would be the motivation here? I mean, if Jesus's accession story into Heaven was made up, why couldn't the Resurrection have been as well? I don't necessarily mean *consciously* made up, but rather the result of people's delusions which they came to view as accepted fact.
It’s also important to realize what we would expect to see under non Christianity—namely, over the course of thousands of years it doesn’t seem extremely improbable that something like the Jesus story would happen. If all of history was the Jesus story, I admit that that would be much greater evidence. Additionally, there seems to be a sort of asymmetry between god explanations and naturalistic ones. Namely, you can point to certain improbable events and say that that is unlikely on atheism but there are no particular events (besides maybe evil - though I disagree with that this actually is not what we would expect on god, even a benevolent one) where we would say that this is unlikely on god. I think it would make sense if when we explained more phenomena (for example, evolution being true but really for any advancement in science that explains some phenomena we didn’t understand before) lowers the probability of god because we previously didn’t have an explanation for something that didn’t require a god to explain it and now we do.
In my opinion, this post is not persuasive, as you sweepingly accept many background assumptions without justifying them, or even explicating them in sufficient detail. In what follows, I string my critiques, some passing, others crucial to the outlined central flaw. For some, I offer responses, and for others, I am simply satisfied to point them out as unjustified.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon is not comparable with a man rising from the dead.
> God, possessing three persons as part of one being, something of such doubtful coherence that some of its proponents have jettisoned believing in the law of non-contradiction to make sense of the doctrine
The assumption in this context is that the bare phenomenon of Jesus's resurrection is dependent on Christians' having a coherent theological framework. But this is clearly not true. It is entirely conceivable that Jesus was resurrected for some unknown reason X. This would be a potentially good counter to the claim that *the Christian religion* (defined by the broad restrictions of perennial orthodoxy) is a good explanation of the facts. But you make a further unjustified jump: Christianity is incoherent, therefore naturalism best explains the facts at hand. But as I argue, the matter is not so simple.
> decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention in the world to become incarnate in first-century roman Palestine
Christians would deny that God does not intervene in the world. This assumption needs ample support.
> cursing a fig-tree, denouncing hand-washing, giving ambiguous teachings about hell
You do not explain why any of these would lessen the credence of the Christian explanation. If I had to guess, you would take God's omnibenevolence to prevent him from cursing any living being, encourage hygienic practices for the same reason, and not teach unambiguously about hell for the same reason also. This can be paired with arguments for the absurdity of certain models of hell.
> aligning with a genocidal God described in the old-testament
The unjustified assumption seems to me this: "No one is morally justified in aligning with a deity to whom obviously immoral things have been ascribed." But this principle is a weak and dubious one. Simply being ascribed immoral acts does not make one untouchable as association goes, for otherwise one could never align with a falsely accused person. Some Church Fathers also respond in this vein: they deny that the God of the Old Testament really ever did commit any atrocities ascribed to him in it.
> his moral teachings remained ambiguous and vacuous, the types of things one would expect from one of his time
As far as the societal impact of Jesus's teaching from 1st century AD up to the present day goes, it cannot plausibly be denied. This is further supported by his many controversies with competing Jewish teachers of his time. Radical love which Jesus preaches was especially foreign to pagans and this is why their conversions were sometimes dramatic, as they stepped into a completely different moral world. So I do not see what you mean by "ambiguous" and "vacuous" here.
> he contributed no particularly novel scientific contributions, never seeing fit to mention, for instance, the germ theory of disease
The unjustified assumption here seems to be: "God would make some scientific contributions, were he among us." If you try to ground this in God's omnibenevolence, this just becomes a general argument from evil, and more specifically, God's permission of moral and natural evil, which is not specific to Christianity at all.
> his deeds were recorded in a series of deeply contradictory books written many decades after the facts they describe, providing fairly unimpressive historical testimony relative to what he could have provided, that show clear evidence of later embellishment.
The assumption here is: " If God produced a text about himself, this text would have the form of a list of propositions, and God would perfectly preserve it." It is easy to see just how complex your assumptions can be, and therefore, how easy it is to attack them from various angles, which I do not explore here.
To evaluate your other claims, one would require substantial knowledge from various fields, such as New and Old Testament textual criticism, which I do not have, so I keep silent.
These are my thoughts for now. God bless you. You are in my prayers.
I think part of the incoherence in the views you are outlining comes from the fact that they seem to involve a very different concept of God than the one that is the subject of doctrines such as the Trinity or the Incarnation as traditionally understood.
Do they really need to believe something that odd happened? I mean even the earliest written gospels are believed to date from something like 100 years after those events and just look at mormon beliefs. In a much more modern era when we have essentially disproof of some of the claims of translation 100 years after those events what survives is highly credulous religious texts.
And that's just one group. In general religious beliefs are transmitted by the believers so it's not at all weird they tend to be fairly credulous.
The current historical consensus view is that the gospel of Mark was likely written between 66 and 70 AD, which would put it only 30ish years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke are dated to around 90 AD, and John to around 100 AD. None of them are believed to be 100 years after the fact, which would be around 130 AD.
That's just the gospels of course. The Pauline epistles are dated between 48 AD for the earliest (Galatians) and 70 AD for the latest, with many dated in between. All of those are well within the living memory of the events of Jesus's life. As for the other New Testament books, the latest one is believed to be Second Peter, which is dated to 110 AD.
And the Gospel of Mark is notable for not calling Jesus divine or including a miraculous birth. Stories around the Roman world of miraculous teachers or of miracles (heck even in our world) aren't very uncommon.
Besides, while Joseph Smith was literally alive people believed the crap about the translated golden tablets despite strong evidence to the contrary. Go through 50 years especially back then and the only people who have incentive to keep the accounts alive are believers.
Literally the first sentence of Mark: "The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God". Mark also includes the voice from the heavens declaring "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (1:11), demons crying out to Jesus "You are the Son of God" (3:11), a particular demon asking Jesus "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?" (5:6-7), another voice from the skies saying "This is my beloved Son; listen to him" (9:7), and finally at his trail when asked "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" Jesus replies "I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven" (14:61-64).
Which is all a moot point, because the epistles are even earlier and also teach about a Christ who is divine and rose from the dead (if you want receipts on that I can provide them, but there is quite a pile to choose from).
Messiah and son of god isn't the same as being divine. Your applying later understanding to infer that.
Claiming to be the son of God, and God explicitly claiming that you are His son in the text, are certainly claims to divinity. And they match the claims of divinity made in the epistles, which were even more contemporary than Mark.
I won't bother repeating the arguments but just go read the Wikipedia page. It is anything but clear what that claim means and if you look back to the Hebrew bible the same term is used to refer to fully human individuals with a special relationship with god.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_God?wprov=sfti1
I would be more interested to hear how well you think the facts around the reported resurrection fit Christianity versus how well it fits the next best explanation. What Bases factor would you say it has? Or with claimed prophetic fulfillment? Is the Christian record no more impressive than other religions who claim some preexisting text predicted their founder/prophet? Or is it unusually good?