Philosopher Stephen Law takes up the question whether or not the man Jesus ever existed, suggesting a further criterion for assessing historic claims: A great many hocus-pocus claims throw the mundane, humdrum claims into doubt.
Let’s return to Ted and Sarah. If they tell me a man called Bert paid them an unexpected visit in their home last night, I have every reason to believe them. But if they tell me that Bert flew around the room by flapping his arms before dying, coming back to life and turning their sofa into a donkey, well then not only I am not justified, solely on the basis of their testimony, that these amazing things happened, I can no longer be at all confident that any such person as Bert exists.
[ … ]
Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.
I admit that I’ve never considered that principle so formally, but it seems to me commonsensical; a great many extraordinary claims about a person or event do put the humdrum claims into doubt.
What is more, there is a sound basis for wondering whether or not the man Jesus ever existed; there is no — NO — contemporaneous evidence of it. Not even historians then living, and who hated Pilate, made any mention of Jesus’ crucifixion, for instance. Try to imagine the World Net Daily crowd overlooking President Obama merely saying something unkind about fundamentalism, and you see why that’s a problem.
Even so, what nobody denies is that there was a very strong Jesus Movement within 10- to 20-years of the best-estimates of the time of the crucifixion. That’s well short of convincing, and certainly not dispositive, but I think that fact has to be taken seriously.
There is a plausible explanation: Jesus was a small-time rural prophet/cult leader/miracle-monger who took his road show to the big city and failed spectacularly. Nobody was traumatized but his odd little band of followers, who then made a cottage industry out of making-up and selling stories about their abruptly-departed leader.
That works. That can be believed.