This is Harry Potter:
7 Things We Learn About Harry Potter AFTER the Books
Harry Potter Theory | 3 Dec. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhFoaBaVZ0o
This is Spiderman:
Marvel Animation’s Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man | Official Trailer | Disney+
Marvel Entertainment | 29 Dec. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3J2JRQg040
This is Matthew 14:
Jesus Walks On Water and Saves Peter (Matthew 14)
The Chosen | 3 Dec. 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WWi65gb14
Some would say:
Harry Potter had powers we usually do not see, fiction. Spiderman had powers we usually do not see, fiction. Jesus had powers we usually do not see, fiction.
Well, the powers of the Neanderthal man are usually not seen either:
The Superhuman Strength and Power of Neanderthal Man
Highly Compelling | 10 Aug 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxsaF3Sfbis
So, no, not the sign of any of this being fiction.
What about this then?
The strength of the Neanderthal man is lost, because specific genes are lost and especially their combination is lost. However, given those genes, that strength was a perfectly natural result. However ...
Harry Potter had powers not explicable by the properties of matter, Spiderman had powers not explicable by the properties of matter, Jesus had powers not explicable by the properties of matter, fiction all three of them ...
Except, we are actually reasoning here, sth which matter has not been shown to be able to do. Mind as such has powers not reducible to the properties of matter.
Even worse, Spiderman, known to be fiction, is at least supposed to have his powers from genes taken over by a spider. We basically know it wouldn't work, but it takes some specialised knowledge. And Sherlock Holmes has no special powers that wouldn't work naturally, and he's still fiction.
What about this?
Hogwarts isn't on the map, Harry Potter is fiction.
Fair enough, but New York City and Lake Genesareth are both on the map.
OK, let's add a level.
Daily Bugle isn't a NYC daily paper, is not an institution. Fiction.
The Church Jesus founded is an institution. It's called the Catholic Church. I have answered elsewhere the idea that the Catholic Church as we know it from history isn't the original Christian Church, there is not much to back that up, especially not in a fair reading of what the Bible says about institutional and other sacred rules. Or how we are saved, a k a soteriology. If there were such a real case, one would be able to deduce the original Church had been lost, and would wonder if it hadn't been a myth itself. But there is no such real case.
You can't go to the Daily Bugle and ask if a Peter Parker worked there. You can go to a Catholic priest and ask if Jesus founded the Church.
No other way to detect Jesus' miracles as fiction?
I'm afraid not, dear Antichristians, and saying "I'm afraid" is actually being polite to you over the top. Let's take a few examples of other criteria.
Harry Potter contains a child targetted by a tyrant, who escapes. It is fiction.
Spiderman contains a man keeping part of his identity a well guarded secret. It is fiction.
Jesus is both targetted by a tyrant, Herod the Great, and kept His identity as God a secret up to His public ministry, and even then gave very broad and unmistakable hints, but didn't actually say it in so many words. As it is both motifs, it is fiction.
No. Rowling had read the Gospels. Stan Lee pretty certainly had read them. Fiction draws on the real world. Interesting things do happen in the real world, that is the most ultimate source of fiction. Most novels just repackage real events in non-real sequences, or real events and characters in non-real pairings and names. Since fiction also draws on fiction, most novels have a somewhat more convoluted relation to reality than that, but nevertheless, they have one.
There is actually another point, where Jesus also differs from Harry Potter and Peter Parker.
Harry Potter is a novel series from 1997 to 2007. It has many fans, who eagerly asked Rowling what the next book would contain, or when the next book would come. The fan community is not saying they have actually met Harry Potter or seriously pretending that Rowling did.
Spiderman is a comic strip from 1962 up to the present. It has many fans who pretend not to notice that if Peter Parker was in his twenties in 1962, he would be in his eighties now. Or that he's regularly getting into more drama and much less boring stuff (at least that we are told of) than policemen on patrol. It's a bit like from Five on a Treasure Island to Five Are Together Again there are a bit too many holidays from school for them to be still going to school and needing a place for vacations. Very sure signs of fiction, and a clearly unrealistic trait. In my own fan fiction, I have tried to get around this by giving the French names and places a separate existence and saying they are schoolboys and schoolgirls when Julian, Dick, Ann and George have all ceased to be so. Fans included boys and sometimes probably girls as well eagerly waiting for next week's or month's issue of Spiderman. Unlike annual issues of adventure stories, this is a very conspicuous lack of the doldrums that real lives have. So, fiction.
Jesus has a kind of fans too. But they aren't waiting for the latest issue of "Boatrides near Kapharnaum" to tell sth new about Jesus every week or month or year. They don't behave as if it was fiction. They behave like fans of Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln who simply want to understand better what actually happened, according to the best reading and re-reading and re-re-reading possible of the fairly scarce source material, which absolutely doesn't equal either Harry Potter or Spiderman in volume. He has a lifespan, and a death. Everything from age 12 to age 30 is an unrecorded doldrum, like you'd expect from real lives. Whether he lived to 33, or as some Greeks have said, to 40, the conversations and miracles and speeches and conflicts from the Baptism to the Crucifixion are credible as to how He had time to do all of it. In fact, so scarce is the Gospel material, 95 % of those years are doldrums.
There are better ways to determine if something is fiction or could be fact (until proven wrong for other reasons, as a lie, as a bad guess, as some other mistake), than asking if there is some supernatural stuff and from there conclude it is fiction. The reception of readers from the start is one of them.
There are by now also readers (and Stan Lee if not Rowling would be one of them, at least potentially and for the first time) who do take the Gospels as fiction. But they come after a large crowd of readers from prvious centuries who took it as fact. People have calculated the place where he was when Nisan began, that Nisan when He was crucified. Well before people like Tolkien started giving this kind of attention to fictions. I'd like to know it too. Here is a conversation that recently resurfaced on that topic, or rather, a related one, where one theory of mine hinged on Jesus being further West than the Temple on the first New Moon of Nisan:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: 13th or 14th Nisan, the Last Supper?
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/05/13th-or-14th-nisan-last-supper.html
So, the guys who take the Gospels as fiction, not fraud or truth but just fiction, are now a thing, but they are a thing because of a movement of scepticism. If the Gospels are true, lots of things, both to believe and to carry out, follow. Some of the consequences have been seen as "over the top" and some have ended up with saying "well, what if it's just fiction, so we don't really need to bother?"
However, the opposite movement, people starting out taking it as fun and healthy fiction, and then imagining for some reason it was fact, is less easy to explain. The fact that this is supposed to have happened leading to Pagan mythologies doesn't mean it can be explained. And as I don't hold that the "hero legend" parts of Pagan mythologies are fictions, just misunderstood as to the place in the universe of the supernatural, I am not likely to explain this happening even to a Pagan myth. If Hercules existed and the devil had some influence both on his own mind as well as bodily powers (though he could have had more Neanderthal heritage than most) and if he lived among Pagans who worshipped false gods, I think it's very natural if people around him came to say "he's the son of Zeus" and after he died (if not before) came to worship him as a god. So I don't need to explain how a fiction character came to be regarded very seriously as ancestor of Spartan Kings. Some people just take for granted he was fiction, and just take for granted it happened, and well, they point to that as a supposed parallel. Not one that I would grant.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Genevieve
3.I.2025
PS, it is 133 years since Tolkien was born. He also made the point that fiction is based on reality, so similarities are to be expected./HGL
Lutetiae Parisiorum sanctae Genovefae Virginis, quae, a beato Germano, Antisiodorensi Episcopo, Christo dicata, admirandis virtutibus et miraculis claruit.
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