Refutation of the refutation of the refutation of Jesus

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...asking if those ‘impossible’ acts [of Jesus] really took place:

It would have been difficult to elicit an answer to this type of question from an ancient Jew. To him, the natural and supernatural spheres, the visible and invisible, were one and inseparable and equally real, both manifesting in their different ways the divine will. But the supernatural and invisible realm was hard to describe. Abstract argument was no use; this extra-logical, extra-historical dimension could be expressed only figuratively, by means of metaphor and imagery. For what had to be conveyed was not mere statistics but a higher, more elusive sort of truth: dry literalness was of no avail when people’s imaginations had to be kindled. And these considerations were particularly relevant to Palestine, ‘where words have never been regarded as necessarily a reflection of fact’, but possess a life and vigour of their own. It was a world in which stories were used as freely as we use metaphors—a world in which possibility or impossibility, prosaic truth or untruth often seem to be beside the point. C. J. Ball writes,

...The rabbi embodies his lesson in a story, whether parable or allegory or seeming historical narrative; and the last thing he and his disciples would think of is to ask whether the selected persons, events and circumstances which so vividly suggest the doctrine are in themselves real or fictitious.
The doctrine is everything; the mode of presentation has no independent value. To make the story the first consideration, and the doctrine it was intended to convey an afterthought as we, with our dry Western literalness, are predisposed to do, is to reverse the Jewish order of thinking, and to do unconscious injustice to the authors of many edifying narratives of antiquity.

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