Sure, if I have a reliable source handy, that’s optimal. It doesn’t happen very often.
Even contemporary eyewitness accounts just aren’t all that reliable, and only become less so as they are edited and refined and told and retold. Of course, you’re right that an arbitrarily selected account from someone who wasn’t even a witness is even less reliable.
In any case, I haven’t read Elst’s book, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion about it in particular. That said, I certainly consider “Jesus was a schizophrenic narcissist” more likely than “Jesus was a demigod,” based on the relative frequencies of schizophrenic narcissists and demigods in the general population. The question is whether either theory is likely enough to be worth considering in the first place.
Sure, if I have a reliable source handy, that’s optimal.
It doesn’t happen very often.
Even contemporary eyewitness accounts just aren’t all that reliable, and only become less so as they are edited and refined and told and retold.
Of course, you’re right that an arbitrarily selected account from someone who wasn’t even a witness is even less reliable.
In any case, I haven’t read Elst’s book, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion about it in particular.
That said, I certainly consider “Jesus was a schizophrenic narcissist” more likely than “Jesus was a demigod,” based on the relative frequencies of schizophrenic narcissists and demigods in the general population.
The question is whether either theory is likely enough to be worth considering in the first place.