The Great Awakening

Reefs: That's exactly the issue, IMO. What do we really know? As legend has it, these events happened more than 2000 years ago. The first gospels had been written several decades after the events they meant to report on.

Let's assume you witnessed an earthquake 20 years ago, together with let's say 10 others. It was a memorable and life changing event, so you are all going to remember it forever. After 20 years, you decide to write your memoirs and there's a chapter about this earthquake, of course. After that many years, how accurate will your description be? Will you get all the details right or will you just focus on the main points? And will your story be exactly the same as you told it a day after the event or will it have changed slightly over the years, leaving out some minor details that now seem irrelevant, and bringing other details more into focus?

Let's add the other 10 people to the mix. And they also decide to write it down. Some start doing this as late as 50-60 years after the event. Let's also assume your stories are all widely circulated and become very popular. But some become more popular than the others. Because you've all witnessed the exact same event, but you were all different when it happened, you were at a different location, your minds were occupied with different things, you were at different stages in your lives, you all have different personalities and so on, so your accounts will appeal to different kinds of people.

Let's further assume that people create event discussion groups and that each group favors one of the dozen available accounts. Sooner or later, people will notice differences in these stories, especially in your story, because you were the first one who wrote it down, you still remember the most details, even though you've smoothed out your story a bit over the years. But since the others wrote down their recollection of the event several decades later, they all forgot most of the minor details and so their stories are a lot more similar. And some actually didn't write it down themselves, they let their grandchildren write it down so they could pass it on to their grandchildren.

Now let's also assume that long after all of you eyewitnesses and grandchildren of eyewitness died, someone does some research on the event and starts looking into as many accounts as he can find in order to reconstruct what actually happened. So out of these dozens of accounts, he picks out the parts of the story that all seem to more or less agree on and leaves out most oddities. And he gives credit to only those accounts he copied the most from, let's say 5-6. And unlike the unedited collection of personal accounts that differ widely in style and clarity, the edited version is very well written thru-out and especially logically coherent. After this synopsis gets published, it gets raving reviews. People love it. It becomes the standard book on the event, because finally, someone was able to explain the event in a simple and coherent way and it still was based entirely on original sources only, the actual words of those who witnessed the event with their own eyes.

Fast forward 2000 years. And let's assume that famous collection has grown into a thick book and went thru different editions and translations and is well-known and accepted as the most truthful account of the event all over the world. Let's also assume that instead of English, everybody speaks Lingua Moderna now. And English, the language you used for your memoirs, isn't spoken anymore by anyone. In fact, no one has really spoken English in more than a thousand years. But, luckily, there still exist a couple of really old texts that survived in English and an older version of Lingua Moderna that some really smart contemporary linguists used in order to reconstruct the basics of the English language, so that they can decipher your memoirs now and at least get the gist of it (or what is left of it, because only 2 out of your formerly 50 pages survived intact). Nevertheless, the finer points of your language still remain, and probably will always remain, a mystery to those linguists. But they managed to publish your memoirs in Lingua Moderna and since they are unaware that your recollection was 50 pages instead of just the 2 pages they have in their museum, scholars of great renown have long accepted this modern translation as the most complete and best possible version.

Suddenly another couple of pages from your memoirs mysteriously show up and get translated. It is the sensation of the century, because your account depicts some details of the event that haven't been told by the other official accounts. Now here comes someone who has studied all the different translations of the event in Lingua Moderna and says, that account of the event from Zazeniac is likely fake, because it deviates too much from the other accounts. In fact, renowned historians all believe, he says, that Zazeniac didn't even witness the event, he likely lived 200 years later, because he uses some words that the others don't even use. So Zazeniac's account should be disregarded.

Now, how can these people, 2000 years after the event, ever be sure and prove it that Zazeniac's account is either real or fake? Or that the other accounts are realer or fakier?