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Also the point of Jesus healing people. He even said that His healings were given as proof He could forgive sins on the cosmic ledgers.
In McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict, the author flatly states that if we discount all Christian traditions and writings, we’d still find it historically attested that a Judaean man was known in the region as a miraculous healer, was executed by the state, and his thousands of disciples were convinced to the point of martyrdom that he rose from the dead and promised them likewise.
Like it or not, things God does non-deterministically are anecdotes and outliers, not to be included in the How Things Work “general revelation” dataset.
Not that high of a bar. It’d cover half the charismatic Christian spinoffs which ran afoul of the law. That’s just in America; go back before the Reformation and I bet you could find all sorts of martyrs.
The American cults have historical attestation in a culture of free press and newspapers, in a country with continuity of government, which has never been invaded. That’s the low bar.
The skeptics were also immediate (within the lifetime of the “prophets”) and covered each sketchy detail of e.g. Joseph Smith’s story.
Precisely. If you had Roman levels of communications and records, we’d have much less material on Smith. Self-proclaimed prophet flees across country, murdered by a mob. Followers remain dedicated enough build a city in the desert.
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We also find it historically attested that a man in the 1800s has declared that he talked to an angel, wrote a new holy book and convinced millions of disciples to take what is, in plain terms, a blatant heresy of the dominant religion seriously.
Thankfully, USA is not ancient Rome, so the Mormons weren't yet widely tested for their capacity for martyrdom. Yet this is a modern example of how easy it is to become a prophet and found a religion. Extrapolate it from 200 years ago to 2000, with corredpondingly spottier reporting, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth doesn't look that out of place.
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