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No the claptrap is what you have just asserted: that history does not affirm Christ's miracles.

Ah, excellent. I eagerly await your historical sources of proof for walking on water, loaves and fishes, etc.... Please do not utilize self-referential documents, since that would defeat the purpose. Further, please explain with this evidence the extraordinarily close parallels between the biblical accounts and those of Buddhism that predate them by 500 years.

What rationalists do when they claim this is to reason backwards. Since they believe miracles can't happen, they come to the conclusion the Gospels must lack historical validity.

Who is making that claim here? I am asserting nothing either for or against the possibility of miracles. What I stated is that there is no historical evidence for them.

But this contradicts the rules of the historical methods used for determining the historicity of other ancient documents. The Gospels clearly deserve to be judged like these, not according to rules especially devised to deal specifically with them.

You are conflating the Gospels with teh miracles attributed to Christ.

The evidence would be the record of witnesses. That is precisely what the Gospels claim to be. None of the original manuscripts are extant, but there have been catalogued over 4000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments. No single work in antiquity is supported by as much manuscript evidence. So we begin here. The Gospels as we have them are essentially the same texts that were in existence in the early Church.

But even while the Gospels were being used as early as the second century, there began to appear false Gospels, some of which are extant today. Their existence sheds light on the authenticity of the four Gospels. Their presence made it imperative for Christians to find a basis for distinguishing the true from the false. It very quickly emerged in the second century that four names--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-- were the men whose writings were considered authentic by early Christians. This is verified by a fragment uncovered in 1740 and by the Ante-Nicene writers, including Origen, one of the most learned of the men of that period (the second and third centuries.) Scores of other writers and manuscripts from around that time support these four writers as having authored the only authentic Gospels.

So the next question is whether these writers were trustworthy witnesses. If you apply the same criterion to the Gospels which would be applied to any other profane document, we can draw certain affirmative conclusions. We derive this by studying and analyzing the ancient writings of those who were qualified to know, the Ante-Nicene writers. For example, one manuscript fragment says this: "Mark became Peter's interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered." Another says of Luke that he "related in his own Gospel the accurate account of the things of which he had himself firmly learned the truth from his profitable association with Paul and his conversation with the other Apostles."

But are they truthful? What if, as some critics maintain, the Gospels are a fraud, written to deceive and to permit the proponents of a new religion to live comfortably without working? The fact is there is absolutely nothing in any ancient text or in the Gospels themselves to indicate this. All the weight of the evidence is to the contrary--far from living comfortably, Christ's followers were persecuted, alienated, executed. Most were hard workers--and worked at their occupations even while they evangelized.

One of the most compelling arguments, in fact, for the authenticity and veracity of the Gospels is to read them without bias. No one who reads the narrative of the man born blind, for instance, can deny that it has an authentic ring. If it were fiction it would mean that psychological realism had been invented by the Gospel writers long before the nineteenth century. Yet nowhere in the ancient world was fictional realism ever practiced. There can only be one explanation for the realism--the Gospels are truthful narrations which simply report what happened.