Isn’t the credibility and reliability of the accounts we have of Jesus’ teachings and miracles enhanced by the fact that in them He is before groups of people rather than just one person?
To elaborate: The accounts we have of Jesus’ teaching and miracles almost always involve Him being before groups, often very large groups. Making up a false narrative that involves a lot of people makes it much easier to discredit the story (since any of the purported witnesses could step forward) and harder to confirm it (since more than the teller of the tale would be involved, and there has to be a plausible venue, etc.). Yet if you want a message to be spread and taken seriously, you would want to announce it to more than one person.
Thus, if someone in the first century wanted to make up a story in which the Son of God appears and gives mankind moral instructions or does something miraculous, the simplest and safest way to do this would be for the story to involve the Son being with the author and no one else. The author would not want the story to involve the Son being before even a group of a dozen, let alone hundreds or even thousands of people, in a wide variety of places. Yet that is what we have in the Gospels — and so that is evidence that the Gospels are not made up. (We also have a variety of genres in the New Testament — biography (the Gospels), narrative history (Acts), letters (to many different people), and future prophecy (Revelation) — as well as a variety of authors, again increasing overall credibility.)
And the fact that we know of no instance in which someone stepped forward to refute in any way these appearances by Jesus is, of course, more evidence of their historicity.
This, by the way, fits in with the immediately preceding post on “Another — and Big — ‘Undesigned Coincidence,'” does it not? For starters, in order even to have most “undesigned coincidences” there need to be accounts of an event from more than one source. And the more sources there are and the more actual events there are, the more likely it will be that there will be mutual support of them — if, of course, they are indeed true.
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It is also true that Paul had some individual encounters with Jesus. But in them he was not receiving brand new moral instructions for other people to live by. Rather, he was getting individualized commands — e.g., to stop persecuting Christians (on the road to Damascus) or to take or not take some action (Acts 22, 23). Mohammed, on the other hand, got the entire Koran one-on-one from the angel Gabriel.
It is true as well that the Old Testament prophets had an audience of one with God. But the messages they received from Him and related to the others were almost always more reminding than instructing. That is, they did not announce a new set of rules that God had handed them; rather, they warned their fellow Israelites that they were not following the rules that God had already made clear. Again, this is certainly not true of the purported prophet Mohammed.
The one exception to this in the Old Testament is, of course, the laws given to Moses. But, if we look at the rest of the Torah, there would not be much doubt that there could be other witnesses and support that Moses actually was talking with God, given the physical evidence of, for example, the tablets and manna and pillars of fire and cloud. And Jesus reaffirmed the validity of the law and the prophets by His own citation of them. One might also point to the book of Revelation as a New Testament exception to my multiple-audience point, but this is another instance of a one-on-one encounter not really resulting any any new moral injunctions, and as future prophecy the accuracy vel non of the Bible’s last book will be demonstrated by events.