@GeorgeCummins "Chat" can be a bit of a misnomer. You're welcome to respond as slowly and articulately as you wish. I simply wanted to take our discussion into chat b/c it wasn't an effort to improve the question. It was a tangent of a tangent: Firstly, whether the Bible could be judged for literal credibility or accuracy by non-natural sources. Secondly, whether other documentation could be deemed "credible" by some objective criteria other than corroboration.

And perhaps whether corroboration is even a meaningful criteria for credibility. As far as I know, corroborating evidence is the primary mark of credibility for historical documents.

@Chelonian Seriously? What do you think happened? You think these councils rewrote everything and translated "did not at all walk on water" as "walked on water?"

Remember that the Gospels, for instance, would have been well-known to a group of people with very high interest in maintaining authenticity for a variety of reasons (even aside from being good Christians -- a mixed, inauthentic message doesn't bring in converts as easily). And it's unlikely that a translator could make any noticeable changes without everyone in the room literally crapping their pants at once.

Raising folks from the dead is a good example of that. If none of that ever happened, you could very well sneak multiple accounts of it into the written Gospels and inter-community letters and expect everyone to just be like, "well I don't remember that happening ... but OK."

couldn't* very well

@svidgen No, I doubt anyone re-wrote everything, but I do suspect some people re-wrote some things. In fact, there is evidence for that occurring, apparently.

@svidgen "a mixed, inauthentic message doesn't bring in converts as easily". Well, there are mixed messages in the Bible, and it hasn't been a deal-breaker for the success of the Bible. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible

@svidgen What room? What others? Some of the scribes were probably working more independently. (And I admit, I am no expert on this, so take this with a grain of salt). Credibility also seems related, to me, in editorial decisions, and AIUI, the Bible was put together out of earlier texts, some included, some excluded, by a long process of editorial decisions. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@Chelonian The metaphoric room. The scriptures were produced in and out of a large community of folks who already knew what happened. They weren't the works of a minority, writing in a vacuum about things only a handful of people saw.

In any event, the point is that the amount of corroboration amongst the NT writings is significant. Very significant. There are more individual works that corroborate significant details of each other there than many other historical documents we take for granted.

You could cut out the points of real contention and still have very detailed accounts.

@svidgen How many folks are you thinking of? Was it more complex than the 8 or 9 authors of the NT?

@svidgen The problem for me is partly that I'm under the impression that the NT was written by the followers--and two of the brothers--of Jesus, and so, although they corroborate the main points of each other, it's not really an impartial group or a set of independent corroborators. And yes, I'm sure one can say this about many accounts in history, and I'm sure much of what we "take for granted" is just incorrect.

@Chelonian Jesus had contact with a lot of people. The gospels in particular appeared to have been highly circulated. That "things were added later" is pretty indisputable evidence of that: the Gospels as we know them were recompiled from a very large collection of documents with few variations.

If important details were falsified, the folks from the towns mentioned in the document (these weren't big places, mind you) would have noticed. You can't very get thousands of copies of a history book published and cited by college kids, for instance, if it doesn't corroborate with other history books -- or, like with the Gospels, if it clearly fabricated events that allegedly happend in the last 20 to 60 years.

@Chelonian The Gospels weren't likely written by the close followers themselves, but by scribes in the communities they ministered to. And the fact that there is some variation is arguably evidence that they didn't conspire to present a single story; but that they talked about the events largely how they remembered them.

That the 3 synoptics appear to have been based on a single "Q" document supports that, i think. Rather than rewrite everything, the individual writers included their own "corrections" based on their own memory (or their parents' memories or w/e).

@svidgen "You can't very get thousands of copies of a history book published and cited by college kids, for instance, if it doesn't corroborate with other history books". Sure you can. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

You and I have rather different levels of confidence in people's ability to be veridical, especially through thousands of years with a major agenda regarding the events in question.

I do wish we had a time machine and could settle this! :D

@Chelonian If there are considerable issues with history textbooks that fundamentally misrepresent the physical events, that could certainly be a good counterpoint. But, as I understand it, the "lies" in our history books are lies of motive and scale, primarily.

Perhaps some lies about small interactions. Not lies about whether, say, a whole battle took place.

The Biblical narratives we tend to take more at face-value deal primarily with very public events.