So my question still is: how did the existence of supernatural evolve from something purely natural?
That, in itself is a presupposition, and a presupposition that turns all your other arguments into circular reasoning. You are presuming your conclusion by asking the question. Here's a thought: what if the events surrounding the life of Jesus actually were supernatural?
By the time the story is written down and recopied the transmission is subject to "pious fraud" whereby a perfectly honest persom with no malice aforethought tries to "correct" something and make it more understandable. Scribes did this constantly. The "clarification" makes the new copy changed. Any change is aberration. Aberration is counterfeit. With no originals we cannot possible weed out the layers of centuries of pious fraud by unintentional "helpers".
Well, then, by that standard, we should completely abandon the study of history, since absolutely nothing that has been written down in the past can be relied upon. Most people that I've heard make such an argument would never think of applying it to Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon or Hitler. THOSE histories are assumed to be accurate. Yet the same process you describe would have taken place in all eras of recorded history. It's only the history surrounding Jesus that people want to bring into question. And that goes back to the presupposition I pointed out a minute ago.
And, by the way, the science of textual criticism has gone a great distance of the way toward determining exactly what was written down in the original autographs of the New Testament. Even Bart Ehrman's work attests to this, if you examine his data apart from the conclusions he draws, which seem clearly agenda-driven. So while we don't actually have the originals, we do know with about 99% certainty what was in them, and the 1% does not affect any major doctrine of Christianity.
The apostles didn't understand a thing Jesus said or taught! That is continuously obvious.
No, that is obviously absurd. There were certainly things they didn't understand, but to say they "didn't understand a thing" is hyperbolic at best. John was present at the crucufixion. Do you really believe that he didn't understand what was happening. Do you think the apostles sat through the Sermon on the Mount and learned nothing at all? Have you ever been in a teaching situation where your student fully understood EVERY SINGLE THING you taught him/her?
What was written came AFTER. The were NOT present for the events in question. Take the garden of Gethsemane, for one instance. They were ASLEEP. Every one of them. Who was listening and copying down Jesus prayer to his father?? Nobody. Nobody at all. It is a fictional construction of a writer and nothing more.
You've cherry-picked a few events that would have had to be filled in either by eyewitness testimony (the apostles, for example, may not have been present when Pilate spoke to Christ, but certainly others must have been from whom they could have heard what was said) or, as the Bible writers would have us believe, by inspiration. But the apostles were present for most of the events recorded about Jesus' life, and they were certainly present at the post-resurrection appearances. The oral tradition that so concerns you was written down within the lifetimes of the apostles and their contemporaries, who could certainly have pointed out any embellishments. Paul at one point stated that there were 500 witnesses to the resurrection, some of whom had died, but most were still alive - in other words, 'go ask them'! It would be pretty hard to get a consistent story out of 500 witnesses if the story had no truth to it.
We have copies allright. Copies that differ. The difference can be traced to alterations in text by "helpful" translators who thought they already KNEW what the text was TRYING to say. They "clarified" it and passed it on. Families of manuscripts contain telltale clues.
Exactly. And that's why we can be virtually certain about the content of the original text. Scholarly studies of the differing manuscripts and comparisons among them show where the alterations occurred, and point us to the wording of the original. And I might point out that these differences are, for the most part, very minor - spelling errors, alternate wordings of the same idea, things like that. One text might say "Jesus Christ" while another says "Christ Jesus," and a third might say "the Lord Jesus Christ" - in the latter case, the word "Lord" would likely have been a scribal insertion, and in the first two, there is no difference in meaning. Only a very few variants actually affect the meaning of the text. There are no manuscripts out there in which Jesus was a Buddhist flute-player who lived in a tree house and wore a cape.
We are obviously not going to get anywhere with this discussion, because you have presumed your conclusion before you started. Your scenario that the Bible texts were not preserved because they were seen as of no value, yet were copied because they were "useful" is self-contradictory. Either the texts were seen as valuable by their original audience - the ones who held the autographs in their hands and read them - or they were not. If they were worth copying, they were certainly worth preserving in the original. Remember, these were documents that claimed to be inspired, to have their origin with God. Surely the original readers understood that and would have preserved them, if they believed the claim. If not, one would think they would have destroyed or suppressed them, as the Romans and Jews tried to do. But someone valued them enough to make thousands of copies and to distribute them widely. However, persecution and the ravages of time did not allow the originals to survive. That's why we don't have them.
Your illustrations about a 1965 Mustang or Elvis memorabilia don't really work, imho. We live in a time of mass communication now. Everybody knows who Elvis was (and everybody knew who he was when he was still performing). People in France, South Africa, and Japan all know who Elvis was, because of mass communication. The only way people in Spain, for example, would have know who Jesus was would be if someone traveled there, through great effort, to tell them about Jesus. That is the way the Gospel spread to the world. Numerous people within the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus personally, within the lifetimes of those who could call out any falsehoods or embellishments, believed the message enough to devote their lives to spreading it, and to die for it if necessary, as many tens of thousands did.
