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I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down
(or, as they case may be, nail up)who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
The thing is belief in supernatural healing seems to have been commonplace at that time. John 5, for example, tells the story of Jesus healing a man who wasn't fast enough to access the existing supernatural healing method available, namely, jumping into a pool first when the water moved. The passage makes no attempt to dispute that this other supernatural healing method, which seems to bear no relation to Christ or his mission at all, totally works. In fact, it's seemingly assumed the reader would accept such a thing as normal.
To the skeptical reader, the passage is kind of revealing: you have a pool surrounded by blind and lame people who have to race to jump in at a specific time to get healed, and... well, I suppose there's a sampling bias towards not being blind and lame among those who are capable of jumping in first. Does this not sound completely plausible as a mean-spirited prank the lads would play on the blind and lame? Just jump in the pool and start shouting "I'm healed! Wow! Man, if only you were faster, you could have made it in before me, tee-hee." Yet the text makes no explicit attempt to entertain such a reading: it just flatly asserts that no, there actually was supernatural power here, you just had to be really fast and jump in first, but it really did work! I'd love to read a theologian's explanation of why exactly an angel behaving in this extremely troll-ish way is... well, still allowed to be considered an angel lol.
My memory is that the disabled had people there to help them, and that particular guy was disadvantaged by being there on his own, so he had nobody to keep a space for him or tell him when the waters were disturbed or help him get into the pool:
Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.
Well, it doesn't say anyone else had help. Just that he would need help to get there first.
Anyway, it's a very odd story, because it sounds like something straight out of local folklore. As I mentioned in my first comment, it barely sounds like Christian theology at all, modulo the hardcoded fact that it's in the New Testament. It sounds more like a story from pagan mythology, where supernatural entities aren't cleanly divided into good and evil, and entities like djinn or fairies often just troll humans for fun. Like it's specifically the blind and lame that are mentioned, being summed by a signal they either cannot see or cannot respond to if they do see it. There's no way that's an accidental detail. And it's very difficult to perform the mental gymnastics for why a member of the traditional Christian angelic hierarchy would engage in trolling the disabled.
It would make a lot more sense if the text said, "But it turns out, this was a fool's hope, and jumping into a pool of water before someone else does not, in fact, heal illness. It wasn't until the man turned away from this false hope and toward Christ he was healed." But it definitely does not say that.
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This doesn't solve anything, there isn't even a majority religion just a plurality one of Christianity (and that's again dismissing the significant differences between various denominations all asserting to truly know God's will) so you are still most likely wrong even if there is a god of some sort.
Who is the last true prophet? Is it Mohammad? Christ? Joseph Smith? Malachi? Sun Myung Moon? Maybe L Ron Hubbard? Li Hongzhi of Falun Gong claims to be capable of miracles right now and he has millions and millions of followers. Tons of people vouch for the supernatural powers that Falun Gong brings them. Well there you go, a large number of people vouching that he is the newest spiritual leader and performs miracles in front of them. Many have even personally seen into the other dimensions themselves. I guess that is the true religion.
And why does it even have to be an Abrahamic one, the people who believe in stuff like Hinduism and Buddhism seem pretty confident too.
If we grab a random person off the planet and ask them, most likely they'd be wrong given that no religion is in the majority and therefore even the correct belief system is not believed by >50% of people. More people should be reflecting on themselves and wondering about that right?
"I believe in what I was told to believe as a kid because religion is culturally indoctrinated and I want to feel like a special part of a bigger whole" is a great explainer for why the large majority of people have to be wrong.
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Jesus was one of many holy miracle men. He isn't even unique among second-temple Jews (see Honi the circle drawer and Hanina ben Dosa). It was taken for granted back then that certain humans were uniquely empowered by God(s) to do cool shit.
See also: John the baptist, who the evangelists spent considerable time deprioritizing.
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I'm sorry, but trying to de-emphasis Jesus's special status by bringing up literally whos isn't doing you any favors. Like who are these people?
Second temple Jews who performed miracles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanina_ben_Dosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_HaMe%27agel
Obviously they did not manage to attain as much notoriety as the most famous person to ever live.
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That’s the whole point: that these men weren’t “literally whos” in their day. That people who knew them testified to their miraculous abilities with the same sincerity that Christ’s followers attributed to Him. One logical extrapolation being that we only take the claims about Christ’s miracles as seriously as we do today because of contingent factors that caused Christianity to be adopted and spread by European political elites, and not because of any especially unique or compelling evidence of Christ’s miracles specifically.
European elites who only became relevant millenia after Jesus's death? Also, Christianity was spread bottom up not top down in Europe.
Also, is it not the more logical and simpler explanation that the reason we know of Jesus and not the other guys is because Jesus's story was actuallly true? Why are undefined "contingent factors" a more valid explanation than just believing in the veracity of Jesus?
You’re claiming that Greece and Rome only became relevant millennia after Christ’s death? That would certainly be news to Christ and his followers.
Untrue. In most of Northern Europe, Christianity was spread at the point of the sword; Charlemagne, for example, fought a series of bloody wars against the pagan Saxons, who represented a genuine populist resistance against a foreign faith being spread by an expansionist power. Similarly, the pagans of the Baltic states were Christianized via a brutal crusade by much richer powers at the behest of Rome. Yes, there were plenty of sincere Christian conversions by individuals in Europe, but that was in no way sufficient to make it the majority religion.
How is this not an equally valid argument for the divinity of Mohammed, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith? If you disbelieve the veracity of their claims, despite the sincere and fervent testimony of their millions of modern adherents, why do you believe that the veracity of Jesus’ divinity is bolstered by his religion’s relative popularity and longevity?
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