Here is her opening statement:
So there is an old saying, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It is not incumbent on me to disprove extraordinary claims of supernatural beings doing miraculous and magic activities. It is incumbent on the person making those claims to prove their contentions.
It is not incumbent on me to disprove extraordinary claims of natural beings doing very unnatural activities, like writing a novel and then mistaking it for history, or undergoing very unnatural activities, like being new to a message and then believing that message is what one remembered since years earlier, just because one was told it. And that is about the kind of contention Acharya was making about the Gospels, if one boil them down to essentials.
I'm now at 0:25 in this video which is so nostalgic, since refuting Acharya was something I enjoyed back when she was alive.
Are the New Testament gospels history? Where's the proof? | Acharya S | D.M. Murdock
Stellar House | 1.III.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsaRQDxmLqY
And here is a pearl leading up to 0:56:
I'm not claiming that for example the Greek son of god Hercules, whose life resembles that of Jesus Christ in many ways, is actually a real historical figure.
Once upon a time, the Catholic Saint Francis Xaver was asking whether the god of the Japanese, Bodda, was just a figment of imagination or a real historical figure. He concluded for the former, because they said Bodda had lived for 9000 years in many existences, both as god and as beast and as man, and since this is untrue about any man, he was not a historical figure. Most moderns would conclude for the contrary about Siddharta Gautama.
Now, that Catholic Saint, whom as a Catholic Saint some benighted Americans might have considered as "not a historical figure" started a fad.
Acharya was repeating this fad.
A Church Father had said about Hercules "he was not (a) god, but a strong man". I'll take that Church Father's view of Hercules over Acharya's any day of the week.
In claims about Hercules, some I can't accept, like visit to Netherworld bringing up Cerberus or visit to where Atlas was holding the sky on his shoulders.
However, 9000 years of incarnations in many shapes is also a claim I won't accept about the background to Siddharta Gautama.
I will believe one had to do ten great works (note that those I reject are numbers 11 and 12 and he can have added them himself while bragging) and the other imagined having found 4 noble truths and a noble 8 fold path.
I'm divided about what to do about Centaurs, and so was St. Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus about the one showing St. Anthony the way to St. Paul the First Hermit. Or he noted St. Anthony was in two minds about it.
The hydra of Lernaean marshes probably was a diabolical apparition, and I don't think Hercules was a Christian doing a legitimate exorcism.
At 2:05 it is clear that she thinks, identity of motifs is identical non-factuality of story. I don't. It could be identical factuality of both, contrasting factuality of both, plagiarism of true motif by false story (Hercules defeating Thanatos to get Alcestis back to life could be plagiarised from Elijah and Elisha doing real awakenings of dead people, and while they are later than Hercules - arguably during Judges - they are earlier than the Euripidean play Alcestis - also, the story is set in Thessaly, not in Hercules' homequarters), or even a mythological dream motif being answered by a real one (Bacchus turning water to wine - though our earliest source is after Christ! - could be something Christ was responding to in His real miracle at Cana).
2:20 to 3:04:
On the other hand, however, in order to convince themselves that, 2000 years ago, the God of the cosmos came to Earth, through the womb of a young virgin girls of a particular ethnicity, performed miracles like healing the blind, walking on water and raising the dead, transfiguring on a mount, calming a storm, being crucified himself obviously and then resurrecting himself and ascending into heaven, they require ... well, pretty much no proof, no evidence, other than the New Testament, a few books, a few hundred pages, that is all they require.
On the proof question, Lord of the Rings is over a thousand pages, and it doesn't convince me that Frodo Baggins carried a ring to Mount Doom. Collected corpus of Sherlock Holmes is also much larger than the four Gospels and references to their action in the rest of the New Testament, and I would still not claim that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson lived on Baker Street (other than when writing a now half written fan fiction novel about Susan Pevensie, at the start of The Magician's Nephew, London is identified as a city where Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson lived on Baker Street, so their reality is assumed in the London where Susan faces hearing of the train accident and so on : I excepted the Bastables, thinking Digory Kirke - writer of first six volumes and the one asking Lucy and Eustace questions about the Dawn Treader - could have mistakenly concluded for their existence, and he was none the worse a researcher for that on what he was rexsearching).
Now, the claims are not "extraordinary" in the sense of being utterly improbable.
If there is a God of the cosmos there is one. If he ignores Earth, regularly visits Earth in diverse avatars, or came once, he does one of these things, and we should not have a prior to factual evidence adherence to one of the alternatives about His ways.
Through the womb of a young virgin makes sense insofar as He had created Adam with no previous human, Eve with no previous woman, most of us with both a man and a woman, and now made the man who was Himself with no human actual father. That she should be of a particular ethnicity is more probable than that she should be of no ethnicity at all and She was indeed a daughter of Israel, of the house of David in the tribe of Judah and related to Cohen level Levites.
Some people think, just because the God of the cosmos has a very general overview, He somehow cannot have any particular attachments. About tantamount to claiming Deism, a "God of the cosmos" who ignores Earth.
That He should perform miracles is fairly obviously required if He wanted to identify Himself as the God of the Cosmos. Precisely because the claim "this man is the God of the cosmos" really is a very extraordinary claim about any man, and should not have been believed even about Him without extraordinary evidence.
And obviously, He arranged for the miracles to be believable to this day and up to Doomsday. Hence we are not stranded with a book fallen from heaven or hell or nowhere in particular, as with Tolkien and Doyle, we have some evidence about how the first public took the books. However, unlike the evidence about Tolkien fans and Sherlock cosplay, the evidence about people hearing the Gospel read from the pulpit indicates they believed it to be factual. Hence the importance of the Church.
The idea that Gospels could have been assembled in the time of Constantine, 280 years after the events, or more is like claiming there were Tolkien fans (not counting porcelaine and pianos) well in advance of JRRT publishing The Hobbit. It's about as absurd - taken another way - as claiming that while I recall events years ago, I was only created Last Thursday. And this extremely extraordinary claim about how Gospels came to be believed is something that Acharya wants us to swallow without providing evidence.
3:21 she dreams (dreamt, she knows better now) that standards for proving an authorship from 1:st C can be parallelled on those for proving most from 19th C.
No, we don't have autographs of Gospels (any more, I presume they disappeared during Iconoclast controversy in Constantinople), but neither do we for 1:st C BC author Julius Caesar. Our earliest papyrus fragments for a Gospel are much closer to traditionally purported authorships than that 10th C or 11th C manuscript from which we have Corpus Caesareum.
At 3:30 she ignores that Papias was well before end of 2:nd C.
In other words, they are not quoted verbatim anywhere before that.
In the scraps of the evidence available to us, and she was presuming on titles and authors being insufficient mentions without verbatim quotes.
Next she lies about historical record, mentioning them since Papias was before that.
Then she requires historical record outside the obviously meant as historical record in New Testament for existence of NT characters like St. Paul, and she seems to have mixed up some things about him:
4:11 to 4:14
where he's brought before Caesar, he's ... rampaging with hundreds of troops
Acts 26:32 states that St. Paul did appeal to Caesar, but nothing about his rampaging with hundreds of troops.
From 1:st C. we cannot expect a registrar's account of everyone who was appealing to Caesar and got tried by him. And the rampaging, who says it even happened? It's not a Biblical claim.
Tertullian claims to have had access (not sure whether directly or indirectly) to imperial records in which St. Paul's martyrdom is described.
See page 33 in
Acts of Paul: The Formation of a Pauline Corpus
By Glenn E. Snyder
https://books.google.fr/books?id=K9g3_FI3ruEC&dq=acts+of+saint+paul&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Most of the imperial records available then are lost now. Paul or no Paul.
4:42 she makes a blooper or a deceptive equivocation:
there's no information in writings of the day (contemporary writings)
OK, how much coherent narrative do you get about even Caligula in Pliny? And wasn't Naturalis historia published after Caligula died? And isn't it even so a long collection of essays on various topics, where Caligula occasionally gets thrown in because he was a somewhat extravagant character?
As she mentions early Christian martyrs, here is my reconstruction on how martyrologies came to be written:
Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Feet and Martyrologies
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2019/02/feet-and-martyrologies.html
And here is a taste on how dry it is:
11 Julii Quinto Idus Julii. Luna ... xiv. F
Romae sancti Pii Primi, Papae et Martyris; qui martyrio coronatus est in persecutione Marci Aurelii Antonini.
Bergomi sancti Joannis Episcopi, qui, ob tuendam catholicam fidem, ab Arianis occisus est.
Sidae, in Pamphylia, sancti Cindei Presbyteri, qui, sub Diocletiano Imperatore et Stratonico Praeside, post multa tormenta, injectus in ignem et nil laesus, demum in oratione reddidit spiritum.
Cordubae, in Hispania, sancti Abundii Presbyteri, qui, in persecutione Arabica, cum in Mahumetis sectam inveheretur, martyrio coronatus est.
Nicopoli, in Armenia, natalis sanctorum Martyrum Januarii et Pelagiae, qui, equuleo, ungulis et testarum fragmentis per dies quatuor cruciati, martyrium impleverunt.
In territorio Senonensi sancti Sidronii Martyris.
Iconii, in Lycaonia, sancti Marciani Martyris, qui, sub Perennio Praeside, per multa tormenta pervenit ad palmam.
Brixiae sanctorum Martyrum Savini et Cypriani.
In territorio Pictaviensi sancti Sabini Confessoris.
Et alibi aliorum plurimorum sanctorum Martyrum et Confessorum, atque sanctarum Virginum. R. Deo gratias.
Martyrologium Romanum : JULIUS
http://www.liturgialatina.org/martyrologium/17.htm
5:40 to 5:52
why would the Evangelicals - the Evangelists - leave out these various important parts from one Gospel to the next? You have one story in one Gospel and it's completely omitted in another.
Heard of being lazy or sloppy? Not writing Academic papers?
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