Fellow Christians, I have questions

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Only our survival in spite of strenuous efforts made throughout two millenia to eliminate the Jews. The fairy tales we tell ourselves have the constructive use of keeping us going.

The entire Bible is a book of tales, both testaments.

ruveyn

On the subject of magic:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA50dwXKJcc[/youtube]

balls of allah, this is exasperating.

if i said "geometry is math" you'd try to disagree! music is geometry!

i don't care to know how much of what you think other people perceive in your playing as "skill" is really "fill." it doesn't change what's actually going on.








but you don't care to know what's actually going on, do you?

you'd rather call it "illusion" without realizing you're admitting you don't know/care how it works. i'm fine with you choosing to remain ignorant, but i know you fancy yourself an instructor as well as a musician and it matters to me that generation after generation of humans are taught aspects of reality by the people who believe in quija boards.

but hey, if you'd rather stick with miracles, i should have known better than to engage.

so here, have something you should find a bit more agreeable with your worldview:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qM6F4APyWY[/youtube]

Waltur, what is your point.

By the way the standing wave patters are very pretty.

I love spherical harmonics.

ruveyn

Waltur: I think you're refusing to understand what I'm saying.

I know perfectly well what's going on behind vibrations of musical instruments. I know about harmonic coefficients and their role in sound production. I also know that not all harmonics are equally present in all vibrating strings. It's dependent upon some kind of "exciter" and where on the string the excitation occurs. Pluck a guitar string near the neck and you get a mellow tone (fewer harmonics), whereas near the bridge you get a brighter tone (more harmonics). There is also timbrel differentiations dependent on the nature of the exciter: A plectrum results in a decay, a friction device such as a bow results in a sustained tone. Resonant chambers will also emphasize harmonics which are dependent upon bore width, shape (conical or cylindrical), bore length, type of vibrating material. Depending upon the source of the exciter (air), the tone may be sustainable or not--for instance, if one is able to circular-breathe. Oh, and I happen to be a circular breather. There's no magic to it. But I've even attempted to teach a college prof how to do it, as well as my own students when I did that sort of thing, and I have YET to get someone to believe they can actually do it. Oddly enough, the thing that holds most people back from musical circular-breathing is the lack of faith that it is even POSSIBLE for them to do it.

So with my experience as a synthesist, I'm well aware of the content and nature of harmonic coefficients by which to imitate any given sound. But I also know that if I synthesize a flute timbre, even if I'm using physical modeling, the result is only the illusion of a flute, not the real thing, and no amount of realism can change that. The only way to get a flute sound is to either get a real flute (preferred) or, in a limited way, to use samples (limited in that samples are "set in stone" and there is no variation). But even the sample is not the flute itself, only a recording of it. So while I may employ mathematics based on what I know about sound, I am NOT creating "real" acoustic instruments, but rather synthesized imitations of them.

Sometimes those imitations are actually preferred. "Switched on Bach" is a lovely work using analog, subtractive synthesis, imitates baroque instruments while not directly "copying" them, and sounds incredible in the process. But "Switched" is not a live album. It is the result of numerous takes on an analogue tape machine without the use of digital sequencers and MIDI. The illusion is of an actual performance of electrified Baroque instruments.

What one actually HEARS musically has little to do with math, or as in your pretty pictures of liquid standing waves, but rather what they feel has been communicated in a subjective way. Standing waves, by contrast, have more to do with the acoustics of single tones. Anyone familiar with Those pictures have a lot to do with some interesting Fourier transforms. They don't, however, stand as any measure of musical effectiveness of Berlioz's imagery in Symphonie fantastique.

I care more about what's going on if the desired effect I'm going for depends on the underlying harmonic components. For instance, I know roughly the harmonic coefficient amplitudes and phases to create a triangle wave from 24 coefficients. But suppose I want to take the same triangle and add harmonic material to it to make it more like a metallic, bell sound (or something similar). I can add a second voice to the first triangle wave, reduce the fundamental to 0, add upper harmonics and detune them. The result won't sound out of tune, but rather as simply expected components of the resultant sound. The foreign harmonics, which have a certain amount of "wrongness" to them, will sound perfectly fine in the context of some metallic instrument. FM synthesizers, as one example, have made use of this effect to the point it's become cliched and given digital synthesizers an unnecessarily bad reputation for being "cold" sounding. My favorite digital synth uses FM and additive, is only 8-bit, and sounds GREAT--not "cold" or "digital" at all. It actually normalizes the coefficient with the highest amplitude, so turned down low enough you can actually hear the quantization noise and the pulse waves that result from it. Add some external filtering and you have a GREAT, versatile synth.

Your standing waves, on the other hand, are products of acoustic properties of a vibration conductor (water), the chamber in which the water is contained, and the steady or semi-steady tones produced to make those standing waves. While I can imagine the sound of 2D representations of pressure waves, something that is 3D and produces fractals is a little bit beyond my area. But I can tell you this: MOST musical artistic expressions do not have as a goal creating sustained standing waves that look pretty. Assuming those sounds are created with sinusoids, which is typical, then my guess is that the actual resultant sound would be quite annoying. Not to mention that the phase-cancelling effect at specific points in the room if someone were to actually do this would mean some people in the room wouldn't even be able to hear the sound at all.

Music, to me, is organized patterns of sound and silence. If there's nothing to hear, then there's no music. And there is always something to be heard. 4'33" is a prime demonstration of this fact. Math is more about measurement and labeling rather than more esoteric kinds of attributes. I get much more joy, and the majority of listeners will agree, out of listening to music rather than boring myself (and others) with mathematical sub-aural minutia.

And that IS reality. Musicians are illusionists by nature, creating one or more musical atmospheres and momentarily manipulating the minds and emotions of their listeners. Math is a descriptive language of musical components (among other things--math is a broad area) and can be useful for general guidelines for the synthesis of sound and the creative process. But that's where it ends. If music can't communicate, it isn't music.

my point is that i should have stopped trying to nail down jelly a long time ago.


angelrho: i've been looking forward to your replies to all of the responses your comments in the gay marriage / homosexuality thread elicited but... to be honest, it's just for the giggles your selective reasoning elicits.

when people like me (and, more appropriately, all the people who do it better than i do) demand that you think critically of your faith in magic, it's because your silliness affects everyone who shares a democracy with you.


also (mostly to see just how far down the rabbit hole you live): santa's not real.

I object to gay marriage/homosexuality on religious/moral grounds and I see the actions of a few radical activists as potentially politically destructive. That's all I care to say about the matter. You'll note that the first thing I said in that thread was that I should probably keep my opinions to myself. I should have gone with my first instinct. Getting into that was a mistake to begin with. I did the right thing and chose not to continue. Issues of religion I don't have a problem with. It's crossing over into politics where I get in trouble.

Apparently that sort of thing is common practice around here, so I find it interesting that, of all things, you're trying to poison the well by calling me out on something I said in another thread. I've been able to back certain people into a corner a time or two and, rather than face the issue or respond to a question, they'd just ignore me. And by pressing the issue further, I might have risked violating TOS. And that's not really what I think is best. Besides, what do I have to accomplish by aimlessly wandering into a thread that has the hidden intent of promoting a political agenda that I find offensive? Merely offending people who are entrenched in sinful/worldly behavior or indoctrinated to accept it? No, I'm not going to do it. That's for someone more POLITICALLY knowledgeable than I am.



Ruveyn: If the continued existence of the Jewish people is evidence of the Jewish tradition, then it is also evidence of some truth of it. Likewise, the evidence of WRITTEN history, which people are more inclined to believe over oral traditions (as a general observation), can normally and safely be accepted as true. And the way Biblical truth has played out in our lives throughout time and the continued experience of Christian believers serves as empirical evidence of the truth of it.

To be honest, I know bits and pieces of the Talmud, enough to know I'd have to quit my job and virtually abandon my family to study it thoroughly and debate it. I would probably enjoy a study of the Mishnah. So I have no idea what about the Talmud is myth/folklore and what is supposed to be the very words of Moses. It just seems hardly likely that something intended to guide your daily life would have been "just made up." Further, if certain truths are false, how can they work in a practical sense? In essence, we both have similar empirical evidence for what we believe and live out, and we have "practical" knowledge (skill, acquaintance). While I can't speak for your tradition, I can say that the New Testament is a historical document which details the origins of my faith. People saw what they saw, told others, and wrote it down. Contemporary histories are not really any different. I might as well deny that World War II ever happened, as well as the Holocaust, based on the lack of repeatable evidence. It's only a matter of time before the 1st and 2nd generations of WWII die out, and at that point we won't even have anecdotal evidence that it really happened. What then?

The New Testament is true, among other reasons, because those who were inspired to write it were close to the facts. Peer-reviewed journals are written appraisals of the facts, and not always facts the writer knows firsthand from experience--he might be citing other sources. You wouldn't dispute those articles on the basis that the articles weren't the facts themselves, i.e. the actual studies from which the author draws his conclusions, would you? And yet we accept such writings as useful if for no other reason than the author may open a whole new line of inquiry. The New Testament is a written presentation of eyewitness accounts, apostolic instruction (those who were instructed directly from Jesus and could maintain a continued influence over the early church), and encouragement from fellow believers and church leaders. As such, it "opens a new line of inquiry" into whether one may choose to believe Jesus was the promised Son of God. You can, for instance, reject the conclusions of a peer-reviewed article. But you can't change the facts themselves. Further, you run the risk of being mistaken in your own conclusions. Likewise, you can reject the message of the New Testament, but you can't change what happened.

Last edited by AngelRho on 26 Oct 2010, 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

That is, in itself, a fearsome thought. When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to verify the Holocaust, then it will more than likely be obfuscated as some random "mystery of history" rather than treated as an historical fact. The Muslims have long been attempting to deny the Holocaust, so once the people who were there have all passed away then their act of verbal negation would be too much easier. Hopefully history will never repeat itself in this matter, but if history is treated as fiction then what is to be done?

We will rely on artifacts and records as well as tales handed down in families. Just like we have always done.

Short of a time machine that is all we have to connect to the past.

ruveyn

Indeed. And hence why "empirical evidence" is not the end-all, be-all of confirmation and validity. Important? Yes. Necessary in science and many other areas of reality? Yes. Helpful even in matters of faith? Yes. I can't make claims about the Bible, for example, if there is no Bible, any more than you can live a lifestyle in accordance with the Talmud if there was never an oral tradition. It's just our examination of scripture has led to a dichotomy in the conclusions we've drawn in our interpretations of it.

The past is always destroyed by the langoliers.

Does the continued existence of people who believe the moon landings were faked equate to evidence that there is truth to it?

The continued existence of the Jewish people is evidence that a good story stands the test of time - especially when you convince an entire nation to believe it is factually true.

Not quite the same. Let's say that all of Europe, and Europe alone, were destroyed. The continued existence of the descendants of European colonists would lend credence to the possibility that European history might be true.

You forgot to mention Acts is centered around Peter and Paul. It begins with the divine command to preach the religion, and ends with the Paul preaching in Rome - the center of the known world. How is the destruction of the temple relevant, or even make sense to the narrative?

In Mark 13, it is the author - not Jesus - to clarify the prophecy refers to the temple. This suggests Mark was written after 70 AD. Given Luke uses Mark heavily, it is unlikely to be written to be written before 70 AD, even less so for the narrative to be the result of independent investigation. Indeed, Luke says from the beginning that the narrative describes what he believes, as opposed to incontrovertible facts.



That is conjecture. OK. How about this?



Is that not conjecture? And that is no more plausible than mine. Remember it is you who need to prove that food came out of thin air, and you failed. Why do I need to give any evidence?


Except you never proves that these witnesses EXIST. Exactly WHO the writer of the Gospels interviewed? What are their backgrounds? Exactly what did they saw?

The Talmud is handed down by tradition. Which does not establish the truth or factuality of its contents. Think of the Talmud as the family book of stories.

ruveyn

Binaryboi:

I'm not really convinced you know what you're talking about.

First, the destruction of the temple. The destruction of the temple is NOT relevant, nor does it make sense to the narrative. Why? BECAUSE IT DIDN'T HAPPEN BEFORE THE GOSPELS WERE WRITTEN!! !! !! !!

On the other hand, the Temple was CENTRAL to Jewish teaching, cultural tradition, and worship. EVERYTHING centered around temple worship. The destruction basically meant the end of a religion and the beginning of rabbinical Judaism. From what I understand about contemporary Judaism--and you'll have to ask ruveyn if he'll even discuss it, it seems he's the resident authority on it--modern-day Judaism is apparently nothing like the Yahweh worship of the ancient Israelites. They don't even seem to have actually worshipped Yahweh until the destruction of the first temple made believers out of them. And even what that remnant practiced was a revival of what Moses taught and was only practiced in its entirety for around 400 or 500 years.

The destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70 put an end to everything the Jews knew, lived, and loved. You don't really have a concept of having every object of your faith taken away. We enjoy a lot of freedom in the USA, so I imagine it might have been catastrophic in the same sense as it would be if Islamic extremists attacked Washington DC, destroyed the Constitution, and imposed Sharia law, Taliban-style. When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, they took a whole ideology and way of life with it, and keep in mind this was at the focus of every Judean's life. Destroying the Temple destroyed the religion itself, in effect.

In order to survive, the leading religious teachers met and codified the Repetition and the Completeness, which were the oral teachings discussed in the Temple. The Pharisees believed the Repetition was as much Law as the Torah, and they believed in the end-times resurrection of God's people. The Sadducees taught a rejection of the oral tradition, a strictly literal interpretation of the Torah (which meant LITERALLY a hand for a hand, an eye for an eye, rather than Pharisaic equivalency, establishing a financial burden for personal injury, and so on), and they denied the resurrection. In addition to the Mishnah and Gemara, the chief rabbis at the time EXTENSIVELY debated the Mishnah, Gemara, AND Torah and compiled these commentary works into the Talmud, of which there are a few different flavors. The most orthodox Jews, to my understanding, lean on the Babylonian Talmud, and it is a MASSIVE encyclopedic work. I'll leave it to ruveyn, if he chooses, to clarify or correct any mistakes I've made here. But the main point is that the religious focus had to shift from temple worship to Talmud study, along with substitutionary rituals to acknowledge that proper Yahweh worship is impossible, and so on. As such, it is NOT the religion practiced prior to, say, 500 B.C.

That's how cataclysmic the destruction of the Second Temple was. It completely rewrote the history of an entire nation and an entire religion.

Keep in mind that Christianity when it started out was perceived exclusively as a new Jewish sect. The religious leaders could not silence those who taught Jesus the Messiah, and they proved to be too much them. They had to recognize that THIS movement was not going away. They had dealt with similar religious movements and rebellions, killed their leaders, threatened the people with death, and that was always the end of it. Christian faith was so strong at this time that Jewish leaders were forced to consider that maybe THIS time, it's something God wants. Even some of them had come to faith in Christ. So they tolerated it. The Romans didn't care because it looked like just another group, like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, or the Zealots. Paul, following Jesus' example, took the gospel first to the Jews in the "Dispersion," typically Hellenistic Jews who had shared their faith with their Greek neighbors (Jews and Greeks met together in synagogues). When the Jews kicked the Christians out of the synagogues, they were forced to form their own churches, usually worshipping in homes. That's when the Romans began to take notice and began to perceive Christianity as a threat.

So Christianity as it was practiced in Jerusalem among the first Jewish Christians also had the Temple at its center. Christians didn't have the same religious ties to the Temple that the Jews did, though, so it didn't affect them the same way. But it still would have been temporarily disruptive to their religious life. Keep in mind that early debates among Christians at this time focused on whether Christians should be circumcised or not and the necessity of Temple sacrifice. These were highly controversial and hotly debated topics. And so because of the importance of the Temple, it's destruction would most certainly have been worthy of mention in the gospels and the epistles. It could not have been ignored.

But there is no word anywhere about the Temple's destruction other than Jesus' prophecy. And that is strong evidence for early dates of writing, generally accepted as anywhere from the late 50's up to A.D. 68 or 69. Textual clues within the gospels and epistles show that certain of those writings were already in circulation when certain others were written. And because the gospels were accepted as inspired by God, no future writer or editor would have wanted to add anything to them about the destruction of the Temple when it happened but rather would have preserved the texts as written. The original writers didn't include the destruction of the temple in their texts because it hadn't happened yet by the time of writing. So the Temple's destruction is relevant because of it's meaning and importance to the Jews and early Christians, too important to be ignored, and by such lack of mention in the New Testament it helps provide dates for when the gospels were written.

I don't know what you mean about Mark 13. Most of Mark 13 quotes Jesus: As He was going out of the temple complex, one of His disciples said to Him, "Teacher, look! What massive stones! What impressive buildings!" Jesus said to him, "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here on another that will not be thrown down!"

In the next few verses, the disciples ask Him when this prediction will come true. Jesus uses this as an opportunity to tell about end-time prophecy before answering the question directly in vs. 30: "I assure you: This generation will certainly not pass away until these things take place."

We all know what happened 40 years later. The tumultuous times early Jews and Christians experienced leading up to the destruction of the temple and the intensified persecution of Christians under Domitian painted a vivid picture of what the actual end would be like. And so "this generation" may also refer to the generation alive at the time of Jesus' return. Apparently you've read Mark13, so I won't go into those details.

Take note of what Jesus said about the destruction. The prophecy is simple and somewhat open and vague, leaving those left alive after Jesus' ministry to watch and wait for what would actually come about. The what-how-why are missing. A later writing would have taken into account such details.

So Mark had to be perhaps the earliest gospel in circulation among the earliest church congregations, certainly before Paul's imprisonment in A.D. 62. And that would have been about the time Luke was written. The epistles provide evidence that these people knew each other, and I've already discussed that elsewhere. You really can't, based on Biblical evidence, show any later dates for Acts and Luke than A.D. 62, and there would have been plenty of time even prior to that for Luke to have already done his homework.

Now, when you wrote "Luke says from the beginning that the narrative describes what he believes," you're deconstructing the text to favor your opinion. No text can be deconstructed without a challenge to its authority, and its a nonsensical way of approaching any textual meaning, anyway. I find it laughable when deconstructionist authors whine and complain about how their readers misinterpret their own text.

What Luke actually says is this, in vs. 1-2: Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us.

When he writes "events that have been fulfilled among us," it could also be translated "events that have been accomplished," referring to things that actually happened. Another possible translation is "events most surely believed." The context of "believed" here has nothing to do with blind faith or conjecture. It has to do with things assumed to be true based upon the testimony of those who actually witnessed those things. I might have, for example, watched the last presidential election news coverage on CNN and witnessed via broadcast the return of an election victory for Obama, but I could also choose not to believe it and say that CNN faked it all. So I can say that I don't believe it ever happened. But because I say it didn't happen, does that change the truth or the reality that it DID happen? You can't just wish something away and make it go away. When someone says "events most surely believed," they are saying that the "events" that are "most surely believed" are believed because that person has seen or experienced something, likely factual, that induces them to believe it. Do you, for example, believe the earth is round? Is the earth round BECAUSE you believe it, or is it round because it is, in reality, round independent of whether you believe it or not? What YOU are saying about Luke is that it couldn't possibly be true because Luke "believed" it. Saying that "believing" in something makes it false is absurd. Scientists "believe" what they observe and find to be true. So according to your reasoning all scientific effort is pointless because scientists believe it. Further, your argument is absurd because it is a statement of what you yourself believe, therefore it is self-refuting and false. You're suggesting, by extension, that "incontrovertible facts" aren't believable.

Regarding "food out of thin air": You're the one with the burden of proof, not me. Give me empirical evidence that food comes out of thin air. If you CAN, then it disproves supernatural intervention. The only other plausible explanation is only plausible if you believe cartoon physics. Anytime you need a blunt object, you need only reach into an inter-dimensional Hammerspace. And while that works in cartoon physics, it never works in the "real world." But if you can't prove that this happens in the real world, you have to confront the fact that eyewitnesses independently report the feeding of the 5,000 in Luke, John, Mark, and Matthew; and Mark and Matthew report an additional instance when 4,000 were fed. So Biblical evidence shows not only could Jesus do it once, but He actually COULD repeat the miracle when it was necessary. According to the scientific method, something has to be observed AND repeatable. So those who witnessed those particular miracles confirm what happened not unlike the way those who work with the scientific method verify their own work. Peer-reviewed journal articles expose this work to the scrutiny of others, maybe even those who are more experienced in the field. Since Jesus' work was out in the open, He exposed His own work to the scrutiny of religious skeptics. While many were more concerned with a political balance of power within their ceremonial positions and thus biased against Jesus from the outset, others carefully examined Jesus according to scripture and found Him to be true. Thus the Bible reports that there were those among the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish court system) who, on the basis of what they themselves witnessed and what was reported by witnesses, also came to believe in Jesus.

Thus I am able to establish what I believe based on facts. You, however, cannot show me empirical evidence that food appears out of thin air. Since witnesses attest to the fact that Jesus blessed the bread, broke it, and acted according to God's will (or "in God's name"), He supernaturally produced enough food to feed thousands. To be accurate, Jesus never would have taken credit for what He did. He attributed everything to acts of God the Father.

An illusionist would never do that. Illusionists are entertainers or con artists. The best ones can even expose themselves as fakes and yet STILL dazzle their audiences. The cons are the street-hustle shell game artists who succeed in lightening your pocket book. Jesus was neither an illusionist nor a scam artist. Jesus always gave credit to God for God's work through Him. It is this selfless emphasis on His teaching that is most remarkable about His teachings. A "good teacher" could not have made the claims about himself that Jesus did. So that makes Jesus either a lunatic or a liar. And since nothing in His character as described by those who knew Him, up close and personal, reveals anything of the character of either a lunatic or a liar, then Jesus HAD to be who He claimed to be. And given the nature and character of Jesus, He is worthy of emulation by those who believe in Him.

Now, like I said, I haven't failed in proving that food came out of thin air. I don't have to prove it. If Jesus placed His faith in the Father to provide according to the Father's will, and food was provided that wasn't already there and couldn't have just appeared out of Hammerspace, and if we know that food doesn't appear out of thin air, we may reasonably conclude that the Father really did provide food. That's not thin air. That's supernatural. That's an act of God. So if you can prove that, indeed, the food came from thin air, you might have a case. But remember, we need evidence here. And you have not provided the evidence. That means you are the one who has failed, not me. I repeat: Evidence please.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with your last few questions. Your grammar is unclear, and I risk falling into a trap by attempting to answer. So I'm just going to have to guess at what you meant.

First off, Matthew and John WERE disciples of Jesus (Matthew is also known as Levi, a tax collector). Matthew could easily have gotten his pre-calling information from earlier disciples. The actual calling appears in Chapter 9. One verse later, in vs. 10, we find: While He was reclining at the table in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came as guests to eat with Jesus and His disciples.

Coincidence? I think not. Matthew as a guilty sinner and new believer simply wanted to share his faith with his buddies.

Now, Luke tends to be much more detailed, as any good biographer would be. Luke 19 chronicles the visitation of Zacchaeus. One of Matthew's buddies? Or a friend-of-a-friend? Either way, Zacchaeus fits in among Matthew's extended network. I have to wonder if this visitation matches the account given in Matthew and adds the parable of the 10 minas, which makes sense given the audience. The Matthew account says, in 9:11--When the Parisees saw this, they asked His disciples, "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Luke 19:7 says--All who saw it began to complain, "He's gone to lodge with a sinful man!" Luke places Zacchaeus near Jerusalem in Jericho. Matthew places himself (Matthew) in "His own town" (9:1), and even Mark confirms this (2:13), and Mark 2:15-17 echoes the Matthew account. So obviously they were two separate instances, yet they followed a very similar pattern.

So Matthew/Levi of Capernaum likely had an inside track with Zacchaeus in Jericho by virtue of what they did for a living. And if Zacchaeus became a believer, he would also have shared the gospel with others, and this in one form or another would have made it up the chain to Luke. It very well could be that Luke met Zacchaeus in person--after all they both had close ties to Jerusalem. And thus we can conclude that more of Luke's accounts were narrated to him by the very people who experienced them. Luke's account of the demon-possessed man of the Gerasenes could be another example. Luke 8:39--"Go back to your home, and tell all that God has done for you." And off he went, proclaiming throughout the town all that Jesus had done for him.

The Legion exorcism of Luke 8 couldn't possibly have been an account of either Jesus or his disciples in an eyewitness context because the Gerasenes were afraid of Jesus and asked Him and His followers to go away. So it's plausible that Luke got this story from the Gerasenes and may have confirmed it by speaking to the actual man in question. The literary context in which Luke is written doesn't tell us that, nor does it necessarily explain where Luke got his continuity. Luke would have put the pieces together from familiarity with Mark, learning other details from other disciples close to Jesus, and, of course, finding and talking with the people themselves. Taken as a historical account (biography), what Luke does is not unusual in comparison with other skilled writers of the time, nor is it incompatible with present-day portrayals of historical figures.

I could keep going, but I might as well just type out and analyze the entire Bible. I'm not going to do that, at least not in one sitting. You can read the Bible for yourself and figure it out.

Taking your questions literally, I have no idea "exactly what did they saw." Typically we saw tree logs. It's very useful as a source of lumber for building and carpentry or firewood. Jesus was raised by a carpenter, so I imagine they sawed lots of things.

If you meant "Exactly what did they SEE?" then, like I said, just read the Bible. There you go.

I hope this has been helpful.