On 1/10/2012 12:34 AM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 10/01/2012 04:36, Patrick Elliott a écrit :
>> and walking on water (or turning it into whine)
>
> I have explanation (or heresy) for that two, both due to bad translation
> (well, enhanced translation), and more:
>
> Laziness : walk on water; he took the road of water (he swam at worst,
> he might have know some spot where the river was not so deep) to get to
> the other side... whereas usual road on earth was longer.
>
Its also not an uncommon magic trick, involving a bit of prior 
preparation, but where, unless someone walked the exact same path, its 
not readily apparent there is a platform there.

> Turning water into whine: Assume you have a barrel of strong whine for
> twelve people, and usage is to never drink pure water (well, dirty water
> really), and the meal is going to have fifty people: dilute the whine
> with water, actually turning water into whine. A lighter lighter whine,
> but still whine.
>
No one seems to have drunk the whine, to make sure, so this also could 
have been a trick, since there *is* a method that can turn water that 
color, and give it a scent like whine. Its hard to say whether anyone 
would have been dumb enough to drink "miracle water", instead of just 
freaking over the effect. Even if they did, there are, as you say, ways 
of faking it.

> Multiplication of bread: well, the word for multiplication might have a
> translation-side for division (indeed), he did not create more bread, he
> split the bread amongst the people. There was X breads (big size) and
> when done, every people (N people, N>>  X) had bread, a part of bread.
> (like milk: 1 bottle of milk can serve many glasses of milk)
>
Or, it could just be made up gibberish, like his supposed birth. Or, the 
whole thing might have been, originally, a sort of scam by the Flavians, 
and one author has suggested, to convince the Jews that Titus was the 
"messiah" that they where waiting for, in their own book, and the stuff 
in the NT where just parodies of those events in his own campaign. One 
of the more interesting arguments the guy made was that "Mary" was 
sometimes used, during the wars, as a sort of semi-derogatory name for 
any Jewish women they ran across, to the blatant contradictions between 
the three versions of the resurrection can be explained as a series of 
linear events, in which all of the parties confuse each other for 
various spirits, phantasm, etc., after the first bunch, who spotted it 
open, actually confused which tomb they where looking at, and ran off 
hysterically claiming he had risen from the dead. This would make Mary's 
conflicting responses between them, and actions, that of "several" 
random women, not one single person, and there conclusions a kind of 
absurd circus, where they each played on the prior confused 
observations, of entirely different groups of people. A key factor, for 
example, being that, in one version, two people enter the tomb, and in 
another one, two seemingly "glowing figures" are seen crouched over the 
place the body was supposed to be, inside the same tomb. If you assume 
that things happened like this:

1. Woman one runs off to tell someone the tomb is empty.
2. Two people got to check, and another women observes them going in, 
and wanders off to tell people about it.
3. A bigger group, with yet another woman in it, who proclaims are 
seeing angels in there, upon spotting the two people, possibly hit jut 
right by early morning light, making the dust on and around them glow.

He claims that one key is that different words, in the original work, 
are used to describe "when" each of these happened too, and they could 
be interpreted to be, "before sun rise", "at sun rise (just as light is 
visible, but the sun isn't)", and, "as the early light".

No idea if this is accurate. But, I have a certain personal love of the 
idea that a large number of some of the bloody most ignorant people in 
the US are basing their whole world view, quite appropriately, on 
someone's satire.

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