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2020: Year of Conspiracies, Real and Imagined (Unpopular Opinions Contained Herein)
The word “unprecedented” is going to need to be replaced, don’t you think? At this point, it’s pretty much worn its welcome out with me. I could really stand to do with some good, old-fashioned precedent rather than the continuous string of horrors this year has served up.
But stressful times can have the effect of separating the wheat from the chaff, and this year is no exception. We’ve seen considerably greater quantities of chaff (such that my hide is chafed)this year, especially with regard to the emergence of bogey-men in the form of conspiracy theories. This may be unpopular, but this series (for which @westernchauvinist gets partial credit) is about airing your unpopular opinions in a sort of… annual vanity bonfire. And I’m burning with the desire to make myself unpopular.
Today I have unpopular opinions concerning three conspiracies: One true, one false, and one that is… possible. Let’s get this one out of the way right now:
Donald Trump lost the election fair and square.
Don’t give me your sad-sack, shop-worn-from-2004, Randi-Rhodes-wannabe conspiracy theories about Diebold – excuse me… Dominion – Voting machines and software stealing the election from Donald Trump. They didn’t. You have zero credible evidence for a vast conspiracy involving thousands of individuals spread across entire states, in multiple counties and municipalities who are all so clever and smart that they somehow changed only the votes of 5,000,000 or so Americans such that Trump lost… but large numbers of Republicans nonetheless won.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t individual instances of voter fraud that crop up where a cagey daughter of a dowager votes for their aged parent in the manner they perceive to be all that is good and right. Or random precinct captains who engage in hinky business at the margins in an attempt to put a thumb, toe, or elbow on the scale. These things happen. They are unjust and when uncovered need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However: none of that occurred in sufficient quantity as to swing the election in favor of Joe Biden, and there’s no logical necessity that all such marginal fraud was pointing in the same direction, either. An elaborate conspiracy isn’t required to explain the President’s failure to expand his coalition beyond his fervid base. Watching the President tell people to inject disinfectant in response to the ongoing pandemic might have had some bearing upon their decision to not vote for him. Or was that a joke? I can never keep up with how many moves ahead of the game he is today and his many japes.
If you examine the results of the election, you’ll notice that in many places, the President ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidate in that state, and there are many places (like Maine) where he ran significantly behind which should tell you that people were plenty willing to split their tickets. Not at historically high levels, but at statistically believable ones which sometimes even favored the President. Nowhere is this more evident than a state like Georgia, where David Perdue received 49.73% of the total vote, compared to Trump’s 49.26%. In the Senate Special Election, Republicans received 49.37% of the vote in total, slightly ahead of the President.
This is not evidence of a fell conspiracy to turf Trump out. It’s evidence of the fact that the more suburban a State’s electorate was, the less popular the President was compared to down-ballot Republicans. The more rural the state? The President tended to pace ahead of those same Republicans.
This is a bad conspiracy theory that needs to die. The President lost. Republicans didn’t, however. Perhaps there’s a message there we can build on?
But if that’s a fake conspiracy, are there real ones to worry about? What if I told you…
There exists an international cabal of pederasts consisting of people placed at the highest levels of well-respected and powerful organizations who have for decades perpetrated their crimes under the nose of law enforcement officials and within the very framework of the legal system itself.
You’re probably thinking right now: “I know what he’s talking about! Buell is joining QAnon!”
Sorry to disappoint. The truth is considerably worse than that fake conspiracy twaddle. Unfortunately, this conspiracy turns out to be all too real, is extremely horrifying, and centers on none other than… the Catholic Church.
What’s even more amazing? They admitted the conspiracy was real. Don’t believe me? Read the report, issued on November 10, here. When I say “reading this document is unbelievable” I literally mean that it beggars the imagination. How something like this could happen in a modern, civilized society is truly beyond my capacity… until you consider that some conspiracies are true.
At the center of this web of lies (to the extent that this abomination has a “center”) are no fewer than five Popes, 4,000 priests, (that we know of) multiple Archbishops and a bunch of Cardinals, who acted in concert (either wittingly or no) over the course of five decades to protect and promote through its ranks, men like George Pell. Also, the subject of this report: one Theodore McCarrick, the Jeffrey Epstein of the Catholic Church, who rose from the rank of Monsignor all the way up to Cardinal whilst furling about himself a systematic and illegal conspiracy, involving thousands of victims across dozens of nations whose lives will never be the same.
If the Executive Summary is insufficient to turn one’s stomach, I recommend fast-forwarding to page 39 where what I can only describe as “textbook grooming behavior by a serial pederast in a position of trust” is detailed. Keep in mind: this behavior was known about and alleged by witnesses as far back as the ’70s yet routinely swept under the rug, principally because of McCarrick’s close ties to large, influential, and rich Catholic families. McCarrick was repeatedly described as intelligent, affable, and hard-working, but also as an important and influential fundraiser, so the possibility of him being a criminal of this nature — plying children with alcohol and brazenly molesting them in their homes and on overnight excursions or abusing fellow priests — was, shall we say, outside of the Overton Window?
What is striking about this is just how closely the experience of “Mother 1” described in the report was replicated in parishes across the country… almost as if many of these abuser priests shared knowledge of their illicit activities and covered up for one another in some sort of conspiracy of silence that only really began to come to light in 2002 and beyond.
If you’re a fan of irony, consider the contrast between this situation and the “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s and ’90s which saw a sort of mass hysteria over “ritual sexual abuse” supposedly carried out by secretive covens of Satanists. The accusations were lurid; thousands of innocents were allegedly slaughtered in the course of carrying out these ghastly rites, with the accusations culminating in the false prosecution and ruination of the owners and workers at the McMartin Preschool before the panic was, thankfully, extinguished. Imagine, if you will, the delight of priestly perpetrators of such non-ritual yet very real abuse as they watched this drama play out on television and just how convenient it was for them that the energy wasted on this fruitless exercise spurred on by overzealous Church Ladies (today we might call them “Karens”) likely had the effect of discrediting potential accusations against them. They probably laughed and laughed at the bizarre confluence of events in which the media in concert with their vocation ended up burying even deeper the stain of their evil.
I mentioned that the conspiracy involved the legal system itself, because of course it had to. The perpetrators – no doubt under the watchful eye and assistance of various authorities in the legal system whom they had cleverly coopted and befriended – devised a system of binding Non-Disclosure Agreements to go along with payments to victims doled out by the Diocese in which the abuses took place, forming a legal “hall of mirrors” from which the light of their perfidy could not escape.
In 2017, I eulogized my Grandmother on this very website. It was painful to contemplate her loss, but I was forced after reading the bulk of this report to think again about my Grandmother, who always gave the “widow’s mite” to her local parish. To be frank, I’m glad she’s gone if only because it would make me sick to think of her horror and shame at seeing what that mite, given for years, had a hand in perpetrating.
This conspiracy was allowed to exist and grow to monstrous proportions precisely because people wanted to believe the best. Not the worst. Just make sure that the power of belief doesn’t overpower your rational faculties.
I’m sorry to be so maudlin, so I’m going to end with something I’ve touched on before which is a bit more fun…
It’s very likely that secret agencies of the US Government possess definitive knowledge that non-human intelligences are in control of vehicles that routinely violate our airspace and harass our military fighter jets.
Maybe this opinion isn’t unpopular anymore, yet there it is. No matter how weird 2020 has been, one of its more striking scenes had to be when the admission by the government that UFOs are real was met with a sort of yawn from the general public.
The CIA clearly thinks something is up — this is a link to their listing of declassified UFO photographs, which is nothing particularly explosive, given that they’re low resolution, grainy photocopies of the originals.
I promised a conspiracy, but isn’t this one sort of “out of the bag” at this point? It would be hard to keep something this titanic secret for long even if you a) read in as few people as possible, b) enacted strict compartmentalization of information, and c) outsourced many of the secret parts to private-sector vendors who can control their workforces with strict NDAs… there’s that word again. And to the extent that these procedures seem to have been followed, it has nonetheless broken down.
We already know about the existence AATIP program from the 2017 NYT revelations featuring Lue Elizondo and Harry Reid, but what we don’t know is whether there were antecedent programs. We also know, for instance, that the government has claimed (rather obliquely) to be in possession of “meta materials” possibly from a crashed UAV (unidentified aerial vehicle) and that Navy pilots and vessels have unequivocally recorded encounters with UAPs in several spectra, including visible light, infrared and radar; vehicles which exhibit flight characteristics impossible to square with currently understood notions of aeronautical engineering. So where’s the conspiracy?
It should go without saying that possession of such technology would place its owner in the position of having a type of strategic superiority in geopolitical matters unlike anything we’ve seen in world history… so you’d better believe that somebody at the Pentagon is interested in looking into this, and with a secret budget of over $50 billion, a couple million dollars here or there falling in between the military’s couch cushions ending up funding these highly compartmentalized research programs doesn’t seem incredible.
I know, this isn’t much of a “conspiracy.” But that’s the best I can currently come up with given the evidence we have in hand.
For my part, I want to remain as agnostic about this question as possible. If somebody asked me: “do you believe in UFOs?” my response would likely be that my beliefs about this or any topic have nothing to do with it. The facts as I apprehend them are:
Craft displaying extreme flight capabilities have been reported and recorded by highly credible witnesses for decades;
World governments give contradictory answers about these phenomena, which means there’s probably little cooperation;
No private individual seems to have credible, physical evidence of one of these craft in their possession;
There is no direct evidence that the source of these craft is extraterrestrial and not merely a highly advanced US R&D project:
There is precious little evidence that these “craft” are even “craft” at all and not an exotic weather phenomenon we cannot explain;
The government knows about these phenomena and understands that it is something real but is trying to gain a better understanding before going off half-cocked and possibly causing a major panic, and lastly;
There seem to be national security implications from studying these UAP which prevent the government from candidly admitting what they are.
But there is some good news: If it is true that these craft are actually controlled by non-human intelligences it seems unlikely they’re all that interested in us. And who could blame them? Are we all that interested in the comings and goings of ants? Obviously not. Ants are lucky if, upon being sighted in my lawn, they are not immediately exterminated with extreme prejudice… and the difference in intelligence and technological know-how between ants and us and a race of beings capable of interstellar travel has to be about as great, if not greater.
To advanced intelligences, we’re probably not that interesting, and that’s an underappreciated blessing.
Bring on the unpopularity.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
And what’s wrong with that answer?
[Sigh.]
HW, it’s like you don’t even read what you write–or what I write. I’ve bolded it above. Please try to consider the actual topic of my remarks.
Yes, there’s plenty more besides getting out of hell. And not just those earthly benefits you’ve heard from those folks.
What else? It would need a new post, and history suggests I couldn’t explain it to you anyway. Wright might be able to.
Yes.
But it is monolithic–or darn close–on rather a lot of things pertaining to those topics.
Jesus is fully G-d, fully human, and one person; he’s the Messiah; he died for our sins and was raised to life on the third day–monolithic.
The Bible is the authoritative Word of G-d–monolithic, not counting Karl Barth.
I am familiar with all of these arguments. I get it.
No you don’t.
You are familiar, I’ll grant. You don’t, however, get it.
Paul wasn’t a direct witness to either the passion or the resurrection. Why would I?
How is Paul remotely like a newspaper reporter describing the Gettysburg Address?
He’s a direct witness to the Resurrection. Or to the resurrected Messiah at any rate. But then–no witness ever claimed to have been in the tomb the moment it happened.
[Sigh.]
He is like them in certain respects, and unlike them in others. But I never even compared them.
I compared his testimony to theirs. Their testimonies are also like in some respects, and unlike in others.
I said plainly enough what similarity I had in mind, multiple times. Do you need me to repeat myself?
Bunkum. Plenty of things are “part of the historical record” by this standard which are nonsense then. I reject this assertion out of hand and reiterate: Unless you have those witness’s testimonies claiming their presence adds no additional credibility to the account. For that matter, why not claim that 10,000 people saw it then? Wouldn’t that be more rather than less credible?
I’m appealing to a much larger set of facts than you apparently are: the body of human knowledge in which we can have more or less complete confidence. Our confidence in the reliability of facts can range from “none” (things like Scientology) all the way up to metaphysical certainty (the Sun rises from our perspective in the East every day.) Your standard wouldn’t cut the mustard for any scientific or legal endeavor, yet you propose that we must have metaphysical certainty about the divinity of Jesus on the basis of documents which barely pass muster in a game of telephone.
There is a serious mismatch between the expectation and the evidence which is supposed to inspire that expectation. Surely you see this, yes?
They do not. We have no physical proofs of the NT. What are they, precisely?
Probably none which we can rely upon with anything like certainty. Testimony alone can inform us about the possibility that events happened in the past and we may provisionally accept that the purported event occurred given no contradictory evidence or obvious logical contradictions occurred. But by the same token, testimony claiming the opposite ought to negate such provisional knowledge.
Such provisional knowledge is tissue-thin and capable of being annihilated by a mere gust of contradictory physical proof, or even an offsetting testimony of equal quality.
Not that we can rely upon with anything like certainty. If tomorrow we were to uncover a genuine document from a contemporary of Plato who told us that Plato had made Socrates and his trial up, this would be a serious problem for the theory that Socrates existed, wouldn’t it?
This is the nature of testimonial-only knowledge. It is the worst and weakest sort of information possible about purported historical events.
It is not a mistake. It is the appropriate null hypothesis. The null hypothesis of “no miracles” can be falsified by appropriate proofs of the same. You are coming at this from an upside down position, philosophically. Popper would be shocked.
This is not correct. The laws of physics are not intuitive and most people have no idea what they are, so they are ill-prepared to determine if such laws have been broken given that they don’t even know what they are. This becomes especially true at the scale of the very small, where quantum theory governs interactions… interactions which are completely counterintuitive to our everyday experience.
I don’t know why this would matter, but sure. Here you go. “Mad” Mike Hughes claimed that the Earth was flat and sought to prove that by flying to the “edge” of the planet.
Your language is very vague here. One could argue that Nazis made claims about the superiority of some races over others and were willing to die for those claims.
At that level of generality, people dying for their claims happens a lot. One could argue that an American soldier who believes America is a great country and dies on the battlefield died for his claim that America is a great country is an example of someone who died for their claims.
It’s not clear how a Christian who gets killed by an authority figure demonstrates that Jesus rose from the dead. It might go part of the way towards convincing us that this Christian sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead because he was told Jesus rose from the dead by his friends or perhaps because he believed he personally saw the risen Jesus.
Lots of people have claimed to have heard the voice of Allah and have been willing to die based on what they believe Allah told them. Is this evidence that Islam is true? Nope. It’s just evidence of the religious imagination of human beings, a psychological tic.
People can be mistaken in their beliefs and can be willing to die for those mistaken beliefs.
Nope. Suicide bombers are not known for having heard the “voice of Allah”. They are known for being marginalized then subsequently recruited and trained by grifters who teach them that things will only get better if they off themselves and take a few infidels with them.
Mostly they recruit the mentally challenged.
Perhaps they are “not known for” having heard the voice of Allah, but it is possible that some would claim to have heard the voice of Allah and were mistaken, yet were willing to die for their beliefs.
The Nazis had mistaken beliefs about racial superiority and racial purity. They were willing to die for their beliefs. But their mistaken beliefs remain mistaken, despite the sacrifices they made for those beliefs.
Human beings have vivid imaginations. That explains the huge variety of religions human beings have subscribed to over the past several thousand years.
A Muslim apologist could argue, “If Islam isn’t true, why did Islam spread so rapidly?” The response would be, “Islam spread by military force, not genuine conversion.”
But a Muslim apologist could respond to that by saying, “But if Islam isn’t true, why were so many people willing to take up the sword for Islam?”
If one realizes that human beings are often mistaken in their deepest felt beliefs, the emergence of religions is not evidence that their claims are correct.
Paul says he saw Jesus. But he might have been mistaken. Yet Paul might have been willing to suffer and die for his mistaken beliefs.
If one looks at every Christian source from the first 500 years of Christianity one can not find very persuasive evidence that any of the 12 original disciples died for their belief in Jesus’s resurrection. Any mention of any details regarding the manner in which any of the 12 original disciples died are in later accounts far removed from the actual events. Even if it could be proved historically that some of the earliest disciples were martyred, we would still be unable to look into their minds and know that they died specifically for their belief in Jesus’s resurrection.
Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob in 1844 in Nauvoo, Illinois. Latter Day Saints believe he was martyred for his unwavering conviction that God revealed himself through the golden tablets that Smith had discovered in 1830. Many non-Mormons believe he was killed because he was a criminal. If the facts are so readily disputed for a relatively recent and well-documented event like Joseph Smith’s death, how can we say with any confidence how or why Jesus’s 12 original disciples perished, let alone what was in their minds when they died?
The apologist argument “Who would die for a lie” oversimplifies the questions involved in analyzing the data we have and what conclusions we can reasonably draw from that data.
People’s motivations are often unique to that person. Look at the woman who was shot in the Capitol yesterday. She died (presumably) while pursuing or pressing for her particular beliefs regarding the President’s supposedly stolen reelection.
It’s so tragic that people’s lives can be hijacked by such pernicious lies.
If we accept the premise that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, a premise I accept, the Christian counter-argument to your example of the woman shot in the Capitol yesterday would be that that woman was not in a position to know that the election was stolen. Thus, she died for a lie, but it was not a lie she intentionally created on her own. Rather it was a lie that she heard and believed was true.
The Christian apologist would argue that some number of early Christians were in a position to know that Jesus did or did not rise from the dead and were willing to die for the belief that Jesus rose from the dead.
But they dismiss the possibility that one person generated the idea that Jesus rose from the dead while other people believed this idea and it was the latter who died.
No miracles is the null hypothesis, and it can be falsified by experience. That is precisely my view, and has been all this time.
I did not say that one should not have as a default setting the view that there are no miracles.
I said that one should not presume that miracles are impossible or fanciful and on that assumption evaluate evidence from human experience of a miracle. The evidence should be evaluated on its own relative strength according to whatever kind of evidence it is; and if it’s good enough, we conclude there were miracles.
Is your point that the laws of physics are not easy to know? I agree, and never said otherwise.
Or is your point that the laws of physics are still not known? Well, they are not known at their deepest level, sure. But that’s not relevant. We know enough about the laws of physics to know that, as long as they are not miraculously suspended (and as long as medical technology no better than what we currently have is available), those who have been dead for 2 or 3 days do not live again.
It is written down that they are witnesses. Their having witnessed it is part of the historical record.
If a cop takes notes while interviewing witnesses, is their testimony not part of the record because they themselves did not write it down?
Every claim in the NT which is open to being tested by the available physical evidence receives only confirmation from it. These claims include various geographical claims pertaining to the Mediterranean and to various places in Judea and Jerusalem specifically; claims about various biblical characters who are known by other means or whose tombs have been found; etc., etc. It’s not all mundane stuff; even the Resurrection is consistent with the available archaeological evidence. A non-empty tomb of Jesus would, of course, be the most spectacular falsification of a religious claim imaginable.
Yes, they can. [Sigh.] That is why my language was not vague. You just didn’t read it properly.
Are you aware of any historical event whose witnesses died precisely because they testified to that event having taken place?
You didn’t answer the question. Any number of people have died for their beliefs that there was no bus approaching the crosswalk, for their quirky geological views, etc.
The question I asked is: Do you know of any historical event the witnesses to which died precisely because they claimed to have seen that event take place?
Socrates died for his philosophical views, and martyrs of various faiths died for their religious beliefs. But which historical event has among its witnesses those who died precisely because they testified–against their own interests and to the point of death–that they had seen it?
I know of one such event, and multiple such witnesses.
It is clear that such a fact by itself demonstrates nothing of the sort, as I have said before. As you say, it only indicates that he believes it.
But when he also is an eyewitness to the events themselves, those facts together are some real evidence.
Yes.
A possibility for which there is no evidence. The historical evidence we do have is that the eyewitnesses of the original events were among the martyrs (John being, evidently, one exception).
I’ve never studied this particular issue in any kind of detail. It’s not hard to find first-generation records. Luke himself covers the martyrdom of one of the Jameses, Clement of Rome mentions the martyrdom of Paul and Peter. Ignatius of Antioch references the martyrdom of Paul.
By that reasoning, we also don’t know that Socrates died because of his philosophy.
By doing our best to look at the facts.
If you reduce the argument to a line like that, of course it’s oversimplified. But why would a witness to the events go to his death for his testimony concerning those events if his testimony were not true? That issue is sufficiently complex, with a sufficiently simple answer–it probably is a reliable testimony.
Provisional and non-certain knowledge? Hey, that’s a pretty good answer! I’m more optimistic about historical knowledge, but I can agree with the designation of uncertain, provisional knowledge!
On the contrary, I am happy to appeal to every known fact, and very well may if I ever write that whole book. As I’ve said, I am here dealing with roughly only half (maybe a bit more than half) of the central lines of evidence from a much larger analysis.
On this particular line of evidence, I only appeal to the relevant premises. Is there something else I should be doing? (It certainly appears that I’ve used more premises than you have so far.)
We have (provisional and non-certain knowledge) of Socrates based on some pretty good historical evidence–quite enough to believe it.
We have in the Resurrection an extraordinary claim which has even better evidence–better evidence, in fact, than any event from the ancient world I have ever heard of.
This appears to be exactly the sort of match one should be looking for. I believe it, and I happen to think it’s knowledge. What’s the problem?
(Of course, there is a lot more consider; based on this alone, said knowledge is entirely provisional and non-certain. And there’s the practical angle to consider, where I like William James’ approach, etc., etc. If we could ever understand each other on these basics, then, of course, I’d be happy to talk about more of the bigger picture.)
In the New Testament there is no author who provides a first person account of Jesus rising from the dead a few days after his crucifixion.
What you have is anonymous writings by people writing mostly in the 3rd person and these writings generally do not mention from where they obtained their information.
It seems as though you are overstating the evidence by a huge amount here.
None of the 12 original disciples wrote anything. Mary Magdalene never wrote anything. Paul wrote letters. But Paul was not one of the original disciples and Paul came to Christianity after the the movement already got started.
The evidence is built on sand.
Except for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
[Sigh.]
Luke writes to Theophilus who knows who he is, he mentions that he investigated things carefully which can only mean interviewing the witnesses, and John mentions himself as an eyewitness.
Maybe I could recall more, but would you even care?
Perhaps the more important point is that whatever skeptical standard informs your view here is not a correct standard. Books by Plato and Aristotle do not identify their authors either; we rightly accept the authorship traditions, which have been reliably handed down. (From time to time the attribution by some people of some book to someone turns out to have been mistaken; that’s because human knowledge tends to be fallible; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.)
Except for Matthew, John, and Peter.
Yet he also is an eyewitness, along with James the brother of Jesus whose writings also survive, and the ancient letter is not a fictional genre. How you get “sand” from a few basic facts about that century is a mystery to me.
Paul is an eyewitness to a different alleged event than Jesus rising from the dead a few days after he was crucified. If Paul suffered form a delusion, then it means nothing.
The gospels are anonymously written. 1st Peter and 2nd Peter were forgeries.
You don’t have any first person accounts of Jesus rising from the dead two days after he died. None.
You have hearsay evidence. It’s weak evidence.
No one said Paul saw the event on the day of. Technically, no one ever said anyone saw the event on the day of, except presumably Yeshua himself and the angels. Paul is a witness to the resurrected Messiah, like the other witnesses.
Yes, every testimony stemming from delusion means nothing. So?
[Sigh.] John and Luke, at least, are not anonymous. Your statement about 1st and 2nd Peter might make an interesting conclusion, but you should give a premise for it. And, again, whatever skeptical standard informs your view here is not a correct standard. Books by Plato and Aristotle . . . [etc., etc.; see above].
John and Luke are anonymously written. 1st Peter and 2nd Peter are considered forgeries by many New Testament scholars.
You can dismiss the opinions of those scholars if you want. But that’s just your opinion.
@saintaugustine
If I accepted your premises, that 1st Peter and 2nd Peter were written by Peter and John/Luke were written by John/Luke, that might, in my mind, increase the probability that Jesus rose from the dead. But not by much.
A more probable explanation, in my opinion, would be a naturalistic explanation, that those people were delusional. Delusional people are much more common than resurrections.
Also, all of the “alleged contradictions” convince me that the gospel writers had a very tenuous relationship with the truth. They had vivid imaginations. But as for insight into what actually happened, the gospel writers do not appear to be reliable.
Around 150-160 CE, Justin quotes the gospels as “Memoirs of the Apostles. Justin does not call them Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. This is in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire and the seat of what was probably the largest, most influential church at that time.
It wasn’t until Irenaeus, writing his five volume work “Against the Heresies,” when we have a record of a church leader quoting a gospel and calling it by the names Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. That was in 185 CE.
In the eyes of most New Testament scholars, the gospels were anonymously written.
The cop in your hypothetical isn’t credulously accepting testimony about physically impossible happenings without strong corroboration.
Particularly since they stationed a Roman guard there and sealed it up, just so he couldn’t be spirited away.
Many is such a nonsense word.
Most do not consider it so.