@redhouse,
Sorry for the delayed response -- I was traveling over the holiday weekend.
"1) I believe that Jesus' miracles risk undermining his authority, because he becomes a figure we cannot emulate. If Jesus had limited his actions to that what is physically accessible to mortals, wouldn't he have become a more powerful role model?"
It's a very interesting point. Yes, He might have. But He was never primarily here as a role model. He was here to do what only He could, and for that, His authority and identity were vital.
"Mary therefore took a pounda of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denariib and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep itc for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”"
Had Jesus just been interested in being a role model, then of course Judas's point would have been unassailable; but in fact He was here to become a sacrifice and a king, and so Mary's actions were justifiable, and even laudable.
"2) Well, the story of the Creation comes to mind. I understand that the story is symbolic, I just ask myself why it wasn't written as a symbolic story? It seems like a pretty serious account of what happened at the beginning of mankind."
I would argue that it was. There's a huge amount of traditional middle-eastern numerology in the Creation account -- something that would have been clear to a contemporary reader, but not so much to a 19th century one. Even so, church fathers as far back as Augustine and before believed that Genesis 1 was not to be read as a literal history of the creation. I don't really think this qualifies as an a factual mistake about the universe.
@oscar,
"Are you seriously trying to tell me that some dude walked on water in the Bronze Age?"
Don't you think your arguments might seem more compelling if you didn't mistake Pax Romana and the Bronze Age? It's an error of 1200 years, after all....
I'll nevertheless briefly address your points, since it's easy.
"It's not arbitrary. It's physics. The miracles in the Bible are just as silly as the creation myth. They are Bronze Age fictions. Narratives for stuff that people didn't understand at the time."
The people of two thousand years ago understood exactly as well as we do that people can't walk on water, and that people don't rise from the dead. All of our understanding of physics has not augmented our realization of those facts at all -- it has always been completely clear.
That is precisely why it was recorded as an astonishing and noteworthy event when it happened.
You say that the people of the past "didn't understand" that these things were impossible. But they absolutely did realize that it was completely inconsistent with the regularities of the universe. And that's what we understand as well. Of course, we call those regularities "physics" now, a word coming down to us, roughly speaking, from the Greeks, but whatever you call it, it remains a study of the regularities of the world, and it was sufficiently advanced by AD 1 that people realized these things were not consistent with those regularities.
The thing is, no matter what you call the regularities (or "laws") that describe the behavior of nature, they can only describe those regularities -- not control whether the regularities have to keep applying, or say whether there will ever be exceptions.
So when you say,
"Taking some random stories from the Bronze Age and claiming they must be true even though they contradict the laws of physics (not to mention common sense), now that's a categorical mistake,"
what you must realize (apart from the fact that you have no idea what a category error is) is that the people who wrote down the "Bronze age" stories *already knew* that they contradicted the laws of physics (even though they knew very little about the details of those laws, compared to us).
"Miracles didn't demonstrate His authority because there were no miracles. There were made up stories about miracles sure, but no actual miracles. What's next? Are you gonna tell me the Tooth Fairy demonstrates her authority by changing teeth into coins now? "
RH's question was about why, assuming Jesus' life was as presented in the Gospels, it was as it was. Whether Jesus actually existed and performed the miracles are other questions -- important ones, but other ones. I find the evidence for Christ very strong, and the evidence for the tooth fairy very weak; but if I were to accept, or merely to posit, the existence of the tooth fairy, then I would find that her actions demonstrated her authority over teeth and pennies to be virtually plenary.
Anyway, you're right that people who don't believe in Jesus won't find His miracles a convincing display of His authority. They are there to display His authority to those who see that He is real, and also to those who were alive at the time and who saw them. They (among other things) succeeded quite spectacularly, to judge from the subsequent success of the Christian movement.
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Posting from your phone isn't that hard
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