The religious doctrine of predestination.

Originally posted by whereu ↑

"I'm convinced the holocaust really happened. What about you? Do you put faith in the available evidence?"

Are you saying that the evidence for the holocaust is comparable to that for the claims made of Jesus as the promised Messiah?

The Germans were very much into recording details which was used in evidence against them. Thousands of people provided collaborative evidence from victims to perpetrators to liberators. The death camps with the means of execution were there for all to see. The information was recorded as the events took place. All this meant that the conditions of historic verifiable evidence were met.

There are practically no records of what Jesus did or said or what happened to him outside scripture with the exceptions of those Gospels that didn't make the cut to end up in the bible. And what we have in scripture often contains contradictory accounts. The information is the Gospels was recorded decades after the events. And to make matters worse some people, the Jews. who were present dispute the notion that Jesus is the Messiah with scriptural based reasoning. This is not the same approach of holocaust designers who use neither sound history nor sound reasoning to arrive at their conclusions.

So, I don't think that you can compare the authenticity of the holocaust account with the account that claims that Jesus is the Messiah.

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Are you saying that the evidence for the holocaust is comparable to that for the claims made of Jesus as the promised Messiah?
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Yes Whereu! There is abundant evidence for that. Take as another comparison the case of O J Simpson being tried for murder in the USA. It divided the nation in much the same way as did the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century. While the debate may linger as to his guilt or innocence what is beyond doubt is that the mans wife was murdered. How can we be certain if we were not present? We can because of the agreement reached by both the prosecution and his lawyers. Surely if there was a possibility she took her own life this would have been used as evidence to acquit O J. I don't know how many journalists were permitted to sit at the trial but only the most unreasonable would allege the case was misreported. Why would anyone bother?
There is a similar line of reasoning with regard to Jesus. There were around the same number of ones that reported on the events of Jesus ministry. They spoke of Jesus' miracles as having happened without any smoke and mirrors. No one including his detractors disputed that fact because of the sheer number of eye witnesses present when these things happened. Some tried to claim his miracles were done "by means of Beelzebub" - Matt 12:24. This is confirmed by early writings such as the Jewish Talmud making the same claims. So in the same way we can conclude O J Simpson's wife was murdered by someone, it is beyond contest that the eyewitnesses to events in the life of Jesus saw miracles take place. Those that reported these events as being from God were persecuted and in many cases killed. They could not be silenced! Those that opposed and eventually killed Jesus did so out of fear of losing their strangle hold of the people.
Who do you suppose was responsible for the power behind Jesus ministry? It is surely the same One responsible for the preaching work of Jesus' disciples that continues to this day. - Acts 1:8.