Ancient Sources and Christian Evidence

[Latro]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

This is another canard. There’s no evidence at all that under the first few sporadic Roman persecutions that recanting their beliefs would have saved them at all. Nero’s reasons, for instance, had nothing to do with their beliefs. He went after them solely as a scapegoat after the fire.

Weell…, there is a theory that it was indeed the Christians that set fire to Rome.
I don’t think this idea to be too far fetched, this is an apocalyptic faith afterall.
Early Christians believed this Apocalypse to be imminent.
Certainly, in modern America , fundamentalists seem to engage in some pretty self-destructive behaviour, trying to usher in the rapture.

[Meatros]

@Calculon

First, it is simply false that there is no evidence that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in the resurrection.

The only evidence there is, is the account of Paul and that doesn’t necessarily support a physical resurrection, nor a historical life of Jesus.

@Calculon

You should be aware that a wide range of scholars believe that while the gospels and early Christian writings themselves in their current form can be dated in the range of around 60-80AD, many of them contain sources that are much earlier than the full work.

The Gospels can be dated to 65 ADish (Mark, at least). The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. Mark isn’t even necessarily supposed to be historical.

The Gospels amount to third hand anonymous accounts - according to scholars.

@Calculon

The resurrection is mentioned in these, and so it appears likely that a belief in the resurrection was part of the belief of the earliest Christians.

The nature of the resurrection is suspect - however this misses the point - the gospels are no more credible than ‘my mother’s brother’s sister’s cousin had a friend who encountered bigfoot’.

So, while I suppose you could say the Gospels are ‘evidence’ of some sort, you could not say it was good or credible evidence. The entire point of this thread is how absolutely crappy the Gospel evidence is compared to other ancient sources - Vespasian in particular.

@Calculon

One example (amoung others) of this kind of thing is in Paul’s formula of what was passed on to him in 1 Corinthians 15. Because this is writted in very non-Pauline phaseology many scholars believe that Paul is quoting earlier teaching that he had heard, possibly on his first trip to Jerusalem. If this was the case then the saying would be dated to within a few years after the resurrection of Jesus.

Even this isn’t certain and it isn’t definitive of a physical resurrection.

Even supposing that it was, it is still not an eyewitness account.

Keep in mind, eye witness evidence is among the worst type of evidence we can have! It is routinely dismissed in court in favor of better evidence (due to memory contamination, confabulation, etc)!

@Calculon

You may not agree with that analysis (I am sure you don’t), but that is not the point. The point is that there are reasons to believe that the earliest Christians believed in the resurrection. You might be able to make the claim that there is no evidence that you find personally compelling, but that is a very different claim than that there is just no evidence.

The analysis is disingenuous, since scholars do not believe that the gospels represent eye witness accounts.

“reasons to believe” in a resurrection is not very significant. I have the same reasons to believe in Bigfoot - my mother’s brother’s cousin said his unnamed friend saw one.

Would you say that was **good **evidence?

No, certainly not.

@Calculon

Secondly, apart from speculation run amok, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in the resurrection, otherwise you would present it.

This is a strawman; there is reason to believe the resurrection was spiritual. Even if it were conclusively shown that the early Christians believed in a physical resurrection, the point is that this is not good evidence that there was a true resurrection - it’s just evidence that some Christians **believed **there was.

Just like there were some people who believed that Vespasian cured a blind man.

@Calculon

Thirdly, saying that the earliest Christians were not persecuted for the resurrection is simply a distinction without meaning. The resurrection was central to the belief of the early Christians, and informed their attitude on a range of issues. While the Romans may not have specifically cared about the resurrection itself, it is silly to say that the Christians were not motivated by the resurrection in resisting Roman persecution. Obviously the Christians could have just abandoned their beliefs and became Roman, but doing so is not consistent with a belief in the resurrection.

This ignores the distinction in ‘resurrection’ and is entirely separate from the question of whether the resurrection actually happened or not.

@ITR_champion

Aesop’s fables are presented as fables and always have been. The gospels are presented as historical accounts and always have been. I simply don’t see any comparison there. As for the hypothetical scenarios about Vespasian or Joseph Smith, it’s hypothetical. One can make up hypothetical scenarios in which the history of humankind or anything else is vastly different in any number of ways. However, the challenge that all human beings are presented with is what to make of this cosmos that we live in. I evaluate the evidence available in this cosmos and make my judgments based on that.

(On a side note, Joseph Smith actually claimed that he was visited by the angel Nephi. The LDS Church revised it to Moroni later.)

The comparison is the value of the stories, which is what I thought you were saying with regard to why we should take the Christian miracles seriously (as opposed to those of Vespasian).

You are right about Moroni - I haven’t read much about Mormonism lately (in a few years).

@ITR_champion

Perhaps I wasn’t getting my point across adequately. According to the gospels, Jesus said these things. (That His Church would endure permanently, that He’d have followers in every nation, etc…) Such predictions have come true, or at least true to the extent that Christ’s Church and his message are still here twenty centuries later. This is a quite remarkable fact, given that very few carpenters and itinerant teachers have started a worldwide movement that lasted for two millenia. Hence the gospels make a number of very remarkable predictions and those came true. The remarkability of such statements would not be much diminished even if they were written forty years after Jesus’ time. I find a source that makes remarkable predictions which come true to be worthy of careful consideration. Vespasian made no such predictions; neither did Joseph Smith; nor anyone else that I know of.

I can tell that you put great strength in these predictions. I find them vague and unsatisfying, to be honest. I’m not even sure I’d grant you that Christ’s Church did remain in tact since I believe that the early Christians believed something different (radically so) than modern Christians.

The trouble with this is that Muslims could claim a similar thing - as could the Sumerians during their time. Hindsight is 20/20.

Vague predictions don’t impress me - it’s the precise predictions which failed that are more meaningful (this generation won’t die, that sort of thing).

@ITR_champion

Again, I may not have gotten my point across. You wrote this in response to my point that Jesus had promised the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the continual presence of God to encourage and guide Christians on earth. I did not mean to imply that I accept the truth of these things on the Bible’s say-so, but rather that they are a definite fact in my life and in the life of many millions of other people. So, once again, as the gospels contain a prediction of something highly remarkable which I find to have come true, I find that a piece of evidence pointing towards trustworthiness.

I cannot argue this - as it is subjective. We will have to agree to disagree. The best I can do is point to other religions which have adherents who believe their God/Avatar touches their lives as well.

@ITR_champion

Jesus was a Jew. The Jews believed that their moral rules and guidelines came from God; Jesus believed that He was God. It is thus not at all surprising that what Jesus taught would have common threads with Jewish teachings. However, at the same time, there are radical departures in what Jesus taught and what was taught in his social milieu. To name just a few: He taught that the poor and social outcasts are nearest to God while the rich and pwerful are farthest away; the society He was raised in taught the opposite. He taught that God was abandoning the centuries-old traditions of atonement lead by the priesthood. He ignored the His society’s traditional barriers between men and women, Jews and gentiles, and so forth.

(I’ve got a funny feeling Dio will respond by complaining that Jesus referred to gentiles as “dogs” again.)

There are radical departures in many of the spin offs of religions. During the first century there were many different Jewish cults - look at the gnostics - they were radically different.

I’m not sure how Jesus’s attitude towards the poor are any significant departure from Hillel’s golden rule - which predates Jesus and would have provided the fertile ground for such attitudes for the social outcasts and the poor to spring from.

[Calculon]

Meatros

So really your question is not genuine in the sense that you are actually wondering why people accept the gospels and not the miracles of Vespasian. You are trying to use it as some sort of “gotcha” trap to demonstrate that the gospels are unreliable.

I think it fails on several counts, and for me remains an entirely unconvincing argument.

First and foremost your accusation of “special pleading” on the part of Christians in accepting the gospel miracles is backwards. I think if there is any special pleading being done it is on the skeptic side in rejecting the historicity of the gospels. The simple fact is that if the gospels and other early NT writings presented Jesus as an entirely natural (as opposed to supernatural) person they would be accepted as historical largely without question. The only difficulty in accepting the gospels as historical is the fact that they record supernatural events, and many people have issues accepting the supernatural. Indeed the majority of NT scholars believe that the gospels and early Christian writings do have historical value, and generally accept the death, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances and belief of the early Christians as being historical. Of course not all believe that the resurrection actually took place, and not all accept all four parts. But to argue that the NT writings are historically worthless is simply out of line with current scholarship on the issue.

While the gospels may not be perfect, a lot of well accepted historical facts is based on much flimsier evidence. So for instance most of what we know about 1st century Judea comes to us through a single source, Josphus. So Josephus, writing about people like Herod the great are writing about one century after his death, and yet we still accept that Josephus is for the most part accurate in the details that he records. Herod’s tomb was even found recently based on the description given by Josephus. If you discount the gospels as untrustworthy because of their “late” date of writing or because they are not written by eyewitnesses, then you must also discount nearly all of Josephus “Antiquities” when he is describing anything earlier than about 60AD or so.

I think really your ideas of historicity are completely out os sync with those of modern historians. If we were to accept your ideas of what could be considered historical then we would have to abandon much of our understanding of ancient history, and even a lot of modern history. If reliable accounts of events can only be written by eyewitnesses, then that rules out most historical sources as having any value. For your argument to make much sense you have to really define carefully by what standards you judge historicity, and what impact that has on our understanding of history. Simply denouncing things as non-historical because they don’t fit some arbitrary quality is not really much of an argument.

Secondly I find your choice in particular of the miracles of Vespasian on which to hang your critique rather odd. The most obvious reason is that even if Vespasian did perform the miracles attributed to him, it doesn’t invalidate Christianity. So what if said I did believe that Vespasian performed miracles, then what? It is really a criticism without teeth.

As well I think that in comparison with the NT the accounts of Vespasians miracles are not more certain historically. The reasons are:

1. First and foremost it is not entirely clear that Tacitus actually believes that the miracles took place. Following the analysis here shows that the account given by Tacitus is very sarcastic and it is not clear that it is intended to be taken seriously. So for instance Tacitus portrays Vespasian as a transparent schemer who only agrees to try the miracles when it becomes clear that he can blame any failures on the people themselves. The last line in the quotation, “Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to be gained by falsehood”, reveals that Tacitus may believe that the witnesses were paid off to say what they did. Saying that there is nothing to be gained now implies that there was something to be gained at the time of the account. Also if the witnesses were paid off they would of course want to continue the lie later so they are not exposed as being dishonest.

Because of these features some Tacitus scholars believe that the account is not meant to be taken literally. This is in contrast with the gospels, which are obvisouly written to be taken as real historical descriptions within the style and conventions of ancient autobiography.

2. The accounts of the miracles of Vespasian were written 30-40 years after the fact, similar to the NT. So these accounts are not really more contemporary than the NT. Nor are the accounts eyewitness accounts.

3. There is no evidence that people accepted these accounts as being historical. This is not the case with the gospels as the early church obviously considered them accurate.

4. While the miracles are recored by two people, Tacitus and Seutonius, it is not clear what their sources for the story is. Most likely both are quoting reports of the miracles sent back to Rome by Vespasian himself, and are therefore not independent accounts. The gospels on the other hand contain a number of source traditions (Mark, John, Q, L, M, passion narative, multiple appearance sources) and often are independent accounts of the life of Jesus.

5. Vespasian was a known propagandist, who had obvious political motives for fabricating the stories of miracles. The miracle stories follow the expected pattern of miracles accepted by the Romans and therefore could be easily made up. Jesus and the disciples on the other hand were not political figures, and therefore have no clear motive for fabricating the resurrection. The resurrection also contradicts Jewish expectations of the Messiah in several key areas and is therefore not easily made up. So for instance the common Jewish understanding of resurrection at the time was that the resurrection of all people would happen at the coming of God’s Kingdom. Jews at the time had no expectation of someone being resurrected before then. The common expectation of the Messiah was that the Messiah would be a great political leader who would re-instate to glory and centrality the nation of Judah. There was no expectation that the Messiah would save Israel by providing a final sacrifice for their sins through his death, much less that this would be for all people in every nation.

Overall it makes no difference to me theologically whether Vespasian performed miracles or not. The reason that I don’t believe that he did is that I think the quality of the evidence is not sufficient and that the quality of evidence is much worse than that for the resurrection.

Calculon.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Calculon

First and foremost your accusation of “special pleading” on the part of Christians in accepting the gospel miracles is backwards. I think if there is any special pleading being done it is on the skeptic side in rejecting the historicity of the gospels.

Ridiculous. It would on;y be special pleading if so-called “skeptics” ONLY rejected the historicity of miracuous claims made in the Gospels but accepted them elsewhere. Since we don’t accept them anywhere, there is no special pleading. Moreover, we are not the ones making a claim in the first place, so nothing is even being “pleaded,” one way or the other except by you. If you want us to accept claims of magic made in the Gospels, then it’s up to you to show us why those claims are any more credible than the fantastic claims made by Josephus or Herodotus or Muhammed the Prophet.

The simple fact is that if the gospels and other early NT writings presented Jesus as an entirely natural (as opposed to supernatural) person they would be accepted as historical largely without question.

Not true at all. You apparently know little about historians.

The only difficulty in accepting the gospels as historical is the fact that they record supernatural events, and many people have issues accepting the supernatural.

This is far from the only difficulty in accpeting the Gospels as historical (although it’s good enough). There are also non-supernatural claims which are provably ahistorical, and there are contradictions between Gospels which cannot be reconciled.

Indeed the majority of NT scholars believe that the gospels and early Christian writings do have historical value, and generally accept the death, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances and belief of the early Christians as being historical.

Totally false. The majority accept no such thing. The majority accept that Jesus was probably a real person crucified by Pilate. The agreement on what is historical stops there. This is also a bullshit appeal to authority and is not an example of actual evidence. What is the evidence, son? Show me the evidence. Don’t try to hide behind your erroneous understanding of mainstream scholarly consensus. Tell me what the actual evidence is that anyone claimed to have seen a dead guy walk out of a cave. I’m here to tell you, man, it doesn’t exist.

Of course not all believe that the resurrection actually took place, and not all accept all four parts. But to argue that the NT writings are historically worthless is simply out of line with current scholarship on the issue.

Who said they were historically wirthless? They are not reliable historical records, but they have historical value in the same way that Homer and Gilgamesh do.

While the gospels may not be perfect, a lot of well accepted historical facts is based on much flimsier evidence.

such as…?

So for instance most of what we know about 1st century Judea comes to us through a single source, Josphus.

Wrong.

So Josephus, writing about people like Herod the great are writing about one century after his death, and yet we still accept that Josephus is for the most part accurate in the details that he records. Herod’s tomb was even found recently based on the description given by Josephus. If you discount the gospels as untrustworthy because of their “late” date of writing or because they are not written by eyewitnesses, then you must also discount nearly all of Josephus “Antiquities” when he is describing anything earlier than about 60AD or so.

This is absurd. Josephus makes supernatural claims that are not\ accepted, and the stuff that is accepted is only that which is corroborated by other evidence. You can’t compare natural claims with supernatural anyway. It’s asinine to say that some mundane claim made by Josephus is corroborated by archaeology, therefore every fantastic claim in the Bible must be true. What kind of logic is that?

Let me be clear: not a single supernatural claim made in any historical literature anywhere is accepted as true. The Bible is not a special case of rejection, you are trying to argue that it should get a special exception for acceptance. Impossible claims are impossible, by definition.

I think really your ideas of historicity are completely out os sync with those of modern historians. If we were to accept your ideas of what could be considered historical then we would have to abandon much of our understanding of ancient history, and even a lot of modern history. If reliable accounts of events can only be written by eyewitnesses, then that rules out most historical sources as having any value. For your argument to make much sense you have to really define carefully by what standards you judge historicity, and what impact that has on our understanding of history. Simply denouncing things as non-historical because they don’t fit some arbitrary quality is not really much of an argument.

Typical, internet apologist obfuscation and handwaving. Requiring that something actually be physically possible before it’s accepted as historically plausible is not an “arbitrary” criterion. Sorry, but it’s the only legitimate way to apply empirical method.

Secondly I find your choice in particular of the miracles of Vespasian on which to hang your critique rather odd. The most obvious reason is that even if Vespasian did perform the miracles attributed to him, it doesn’t invalidate Christianity. So what if said I did believe that Vespasian performed miracles, then what? It is really a criticism without teeth.

As well I think that in comparison with the NT the accounts of Vespasians miracles are not more certain historically.

This wasn’t the claim. the claim is only that the claims about Vespasian are better attested. We have eyewitness claims for Vespasion. we don’t have a single written word from anyone whoever met Jesus, nor do we have any historical evidence that anyone even claimed to have ever seen Jesus perform a miracle. Hell, we can’t even REALLY prove that Jesus ever existed at all.

[Calculon]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

The Gospels are not evidence. None of represent any firsthand, or even secondhand testimony. They were written decades after the fact, outside of Palestine by non-witnesses to Gentile audience in a Gentile language, and can be patently shown tp have been largely fabricated from the Septuagint and wrapped around a sayings source.

Do you reject all historical accounts that are not based on firsthand or secondhand testimony, or only those that you don’t like? Out of interest how much of Josephus’ “Antiquities” would you estimate that is based on secondhand (Jesephus wasn’t alive for much of it, so it can’t be first hand) testimony and is therefore reliable. Can you point to any other historians that insist that any account not containing first or second hand accounts is unreliable?

Secondly, can you provide cites that the gospels were fabricated based on the Septuagint and a sayings source? Do any NT scholars take this seriously?

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Paul himself denies that his formula was given to him by other people but is adamant that he learned it entirely from the voices in his head. he also doesn’t say anything about a physical resurrection, but says only that Jesus “appeared” to people.

Paul says in Galatians that he first recieved the gospel through the revelation of Christ. It is absurd to suggest that this means that Paul never heard the gospel told by anyone else after he recieved it in Damascus, or that he never used any wording of the gospel apart from the specific ones given to him by Christ. The theory that Paul received the gospel in Damascus, went to Jerusalem and heard the credal statement which agreed with the gospel that he recieved from Christ, and then told the Corinthians the credal statement is entirely consistent with what Paul says in Galatians.
Also attempting to drive the wedge between physical and spiritual resurrection is a little desperate. In the Jewish mindset resurrection was inherently a physical resurrection. In describing the resurrection body as “soma” in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is also indicating that he believes in a physical resurrection. There is really no good evidence anywhere that the early Christians believed in a spiritual resurrection.

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

There is no evidence, period. Neither the Gospels nor the letters of Paul give us any testimony from the original apostles or represent, in themselves any evdience that they saw a dead guy walk out of a cave. That claim can’t be traced before 70 CE, and is not found in the earliest layers of Christian literature.

Paul was considered an apostle, and we have writings form him. He also claims to be a witness to the resurrected Christ, and is in that sense a witness to the resurrection. So in that sense the claim is false.
Secondly the claim that the resurrection can’t be traced back before 70CE is also celarly false. For instance this blog details a number of theories of what sources the gospels contain, and what we can know about those sources. The traditions in the gospels appear to go back before 70CE, and the resurrection is amoung the earliest of those traditions. It seems as though you assume that the gospels just dropped from heaven, fully formed and containing entirely new traditions that the Christians simply adopted. This is clearly absurd. I think any reasonable account of the gospels must recognise that the Christian community created the gospels, not the other way around.

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

This is fatuous. There’s no evidence they weren’t Scientologists either. It;s also off point since I never made a positive claim they didn’t believe in a resurrection, only that there’s no evidence that they did. In point of fact, we simply don’t have any idea at all what they thought about Jesus. We can tell that the appearance narratives in the Gospels are fabricated, though.

People don’t go around changing their beliefs willy-nilly. Given that the Christians clearly believed in the resurrection at around 60AD (1Corinthians documents this), then the natural assumption would be that they believed this earlier. All you have for the early Christians believing something different is an arguemnt from silence, which is very weak.

I would also like to know how you are able to tell that the appearance naratives in the gospels are fabricated.

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

There’s no contemporary evdience or real corroboration that the earliest Christians were persecuted at all.

The persecution of Christians under Nero is not early enough for you?
Acts also tells of the persecution of Christians by Jewish leaders, presumably right up to about 1-15 years within the writing of Acts. Here it is certainly possible that the writer of Acts was a direct eyewitness to the persecution of Christians, and may have suffered persecution themself. What are your reasons for doubting these accounts as historical?

Calculon.

[Calculon]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Ridiculous. It would on;y be special pleading if so-called “skeptics” ONLY rejected the historicity of miracuous claims made in the Gospels but accepted them elsewhere. Since we don’t accept them anywhere, there is no special pleading. Moreover, we are not the ones making a claim in the first place, so nothing is even being “pleaded,” one way or the other except by you. If you want us to accept claims of magic made in the Gospels, then it’s up to you to show us why those claims are any more credible than the fantastic claims made by Josephus or Herodotus or Muhammed the Prophet.

As per usual this post is big on assertion but small on any reasoning behind your claims.

The rejection of the historical reality of the supernatural is special pleading because it applies a special set of criteria in accepting the event. What you are effectivly arguing is that we should have two different sets of standards for natural and supernatural events, and judge the acceptance of each one with different rules. That is the very definition of special pleading. What I am advicating is that if we are really interested in truth we should have one set of standards that applies to both natural and supernatural as to historicity. If that were the case then the gospels would be broadly accepted as historical.

I think really when it comes to the supernatural you are arguing not on the basis of evidence, but on ideology. You reject a priori all supernatural events as “impossible”, and so it doesn’t ultimately matter what evidence is presented. Your decision to reject that evdience as invalid is not dependant on the qulity of the evidence. While you may claim to be an evidentialist I think in this respect you are mistaken.

Nor do I think you have any good reason for rejecting the supernatural. The impossiblity of the supernatural is not a belief you can arrive at through empirical observation. You might say that you reject the supernatural because there is no evdence that the supernatural has occured in the past. Even is this is true, it does not justify ruling out all supernatural events in the present. Also, if the supernatural does not happen then I would also question why you feel the need to rule out the supernatural in the present. If the supernatural does not happen, then any supernatural claim should be able to be shown to be groundless through normal rules of evidence. If you cannot rule out a supernatural event though the normal rules of evidence then it may just be that you are witnessing a supernatural event that disproves the statement that the supernatural does not exist.

Ultimately I think you are simply stuck in a non-falsifiable, circular argument. The supernatural does not exist because there is not evidence for it, and there is no evidence for the supernatural because it doesn’t exist.

Can you give any sort of coherent reason as to why we should regard the supernatural as impossible. Without any valid, logical reason then I think the assertion that miracles be judged by different standards to natural events is special pleading with respect to the supernatural.

Calculon.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Calculon

Do you reject all historical accounts that are not based on firsthand or secondhand testimony, or only those that you don’t like?

It has yet to be shown that the Gospels were even intended as historical accounts, but in point of fact, I reject all impossible claims out of hand, no matter who makes them. Moreover, you’re asking the wrong question. Nothing is “rejected” as historically plausible a priori. It just requires corroboration to be accepted with certainity. That goes for Josephus and the diaries of Julius Caesar as well as for the Bible. The problem for you is that those former two have plenty of corroborating evidence, while the Gospels have nothing, and are further crippled by provably ahistorical claims they make even aside from the obviously fictional claims.

Secondly, can you provide cites that the gospels were fabricated based on the Septuagint and a sayings source? Do any NT scholars take this seriously?

Yes and yes. you should catch up on your scholarship. Take an intro class to the New Testament.

Paul says in Galatians that he first recieved the gospel through the revelation of Christ. It is absurd to suggest that this means that Paul never heard the gospel told by anyone else after he recieved it in Damascus, or that he never used any wording of the gospel apart from the specific ones given to him by Christ.

Why is it absurd? It’s Paul’s own claim, and there is no evdience the claim existed before Paul, so why noty? paul says he never even talked to an apostle until three years after he had his hallucination of Jesus, so what reason do you have to call Paul a liar?

The theory that Paul received the gospel in Damascus, went to Jerusalem and heard the credal statement which agreed with the gospel that he recieved from Christ, and then told the Corinthians the credal statement is entirely consistent with what Paul says in Galatians.

No, it’s actually directly contradictory. Paul himself says no such thing and is adamant that he got his information from his own visionary experiences.

Also attempting to drive the wedge between physical and spiritual resurrection is a little desperate.

Um..no. It’s just citing what Paul says. You are the one with the burden to prove that Paul didn’t believe his own words or mean what he said

.In the Jewish mindset resurrection was inherently a physical resurrection.

Paul says that anyone who believes ion a physical resurrection is an “idiot.”

In describing the resurrection body as “soma” in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is also indicating that he believes in a physical resurrection.

No, he explicitly distinguishes it from a physical resurrection and calls it a “spiritual” on. It’s beyiond desperate to try to cling to his use of the word soma, since he only uses that word to distinguish physical “bodies” from spiritual ones.

There is really no good evidence anywhere that the early Christians believed in a spiritual resurrection.

There’s no evidence that the apostles themselves believed in any resurrection at all, but the words of Paul himself suggest nothing but a spiritual resurrection for his own beliefs.

Paul’s beliefs are irrelevant anyway, since he never knew Jesus and all his beliefs were derived from hallucinations. Nothing in Paul’s letters tells us anything reliable or useful about what the apostles believed, except that they evidently thought he was full of shit and didn’t like him very much.

Paul was considered an apostle, and we have writings form him.

He was a self-appointed apostle who never knew Jesus and was a witness to nothing.

He also claims to be a witness to the resurrected Christ, and is in that sense a witness to the resurrection.

He makes no such claim at all

.
Secondly the claim that the resurrection can’t be traced back before 70CE is also celarly false. For instance this blog details a number of theories of what sources the gospels contain, and what we can know about those sources. The traditions in the gospels appear to go back before 70CE, and the resurrection is amoung the earliest of those traditions. It seems as though you assume that the gospels just dropped from heaven, fully formed and containing entirely new traditions that the Christians simply adopted. This is clearly absurd. I think any reasonable account of the gospels must recognise that the Christian community created the gospels, not the other way around.

I’m not going to debate a blog link. Please summarize what these “sources” actually are. I ghuarantee they don’t exist and that anything you can quote I can handily smash.
People don’t go around changing their beliefs willy-nilly. Given that the Christians clearly believed in the resurrection at around 60AD (1Corinthians documents this), then the natural assumption would be that they believed this earlier. All you have for the early Christians believing something different is an arguemnt from silence, which is very weak.

I would also like to know how you are able to tell that the appearance naratives in the gospels are fabricated.

That’s a question with a long answer, but to summarize very briefly, it’s because they’re all mutually contradictory (and in big ways, not in small ways), because they’re so lately developed, because they contain patently implausible bullshit (like the zombie assault on Jerusalem), because none of them have any idea what do after Mark’s Gospel leaves off at the empty tomb, and they all start improvising wildly and because the empty tomb itself is hugely implausible and cannot be traced as a Christian claim before 70 CE.

The persecution of Christians under Nero is not early enough for you?

No, because it doesn’t have anything to do with the earliest Christians (i.e the apostles).
A

cts also tells of the persecution of Christians by Jewish leaders, presumably right up to about 1-15 years within the writing of Acts.

Acts is fiction.

Here it is certainly possible that the writer of Acts was a direct eyewitness to the persecution of Christians, and may have suffered persecution themself.

Possible that the author knew something about Roman persecution, but the author was not a witness to anything that happened to the apostles, and, in fact, does not make any claims about them being persecuted, so who give a shit what Acts says?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Calculon

As per usual this post is big on assertion but small on any reasoning behind your claims.

The rejection of the historical reality of the supernatural is special pleading because it applies a special set of criteria in accepting the event.

This is descending into blather. It applies no special set of criteria at ll. It applies only the obvious and basic criterion that impossible things are impossible until proven otherwise.

Ultimately I think you are simply stuck in a non-falsifiable, circular argument. The supernatural does not exist because there is not evidence for it, and there is no evidence for the supernatural because it doesn’t exist.

No, only the first part is true. There is no evidence for it, and that’s all. Evidence that doesn’t exist cannot be rejected.

[Calculon]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

This is descending into blather. It applies no special set of criteria at ll. It applies only the obvious and basic criterion that impossible things are impossible until proven otherwise.

So by what criteria do you decide that something is “impossible”. Is it evidence based, or is it based on your own ideology. If it is based on evidence, what is the evidence that resurrection is actually impossible? If it is based on your own ideology, why should we accept your ideology as being the correct one? The resurrection is obviously not impossible in a Christian based ideology, or to a number of other supernatural based understandings of the world. Why is your atheistic naturalist ideology obviously the correct one?

Secondly, what does it mean to say that things are impossible until proven otherwise. If something is impossible then it cannot be proven to be true, that would be an obvious contradiction.

Your “obvious and basic” criterion seems to me to be meaningless. First you give no definition as to how something is decided to be “impossible” in the first place. Secondly your criterion is self-contradictory in that impossible things, by definition, cannot be proved to be true.

Can you give any more meaning to this statement?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Calculon

So by what criteria do you decide that something is “impossible”.

By the basic laws of physics. Anything which violates the laws of physics is, by definition, physically impossible. It has never, ever been demonstrated the that laws of physics have ever been violated a single time in history.

[PBear42]

I’ve been following the thread and thought I’d drop in to mention two points supporting the skeptical view which I don’t think have been mentioned. The first is the “dog that didn’t bark.” If Jesus had been physically resurrected, the obvious thing to do would have been to go to a public place, e.g., the Temple, and declare his miracle in the sight of all. That he didn’t is strong evidence there was no physical resurrection. The second is the Doubting Thomas passage in John 20:29. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This shows that early on there were many who doubted the account for want of evidence. We are told not that the evidence is clear but rather that we should take it on faith.

[Calculon]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

By the basic laws of physics. Anything which violates the laws of physics is, by definition, physically impossible. It has never, ever been demonstrated the that laws of physics have ever been violated a single time in history.

So your basic criterion for impossibilty is that if something is supernatural it must be impossible. How does this refute my observation that the reason that you reject the resurrection is not because of lack of evidence, but because of your commitment to naturalism? Based in this criteria no amount of evidence could convince you of the ressurection because is simply a priori impossible.

You can see the circular nature of the argument even in the three sentances that you type here. First you assert that if an event breaks the laws of physics then it cannot happen. You then try to justify this by saying that supernatural events have never happened. But the only way that you can possibly justify that is by stating that it has never happened because it is impossible. It is like saying that you know that the bible is true because it says it is.

To put it another way, what evidence would you require to accept that a supernatural event had actually taken place? I suspect that there is no actual evidence that would convince you of the truth of supernatural events, and so your appeals to evidence are really meaningless. You have arrived at your beliefs not based on evidence really but on an a priori acceptance of naturalism that is immune to evidence. Anything that you come across that does not fit your pre-conceived worldview is simply denounced as not being real.

Calculon.

[Czarcasm]

@Calculon

So your basic criterion for impossibilty is that if something is supernatural it must be impossible.

IF it defies the laws of physics, and IF there is no solid evidence that it has happened before, and IF there is no solid evidence that it happened this time, THEN it is safe to say it didn’t happen.
Quit trying to isolate small parts of the argument and pretending the rest of it doesn’t exist.

[Czarcasm]

@Calculon

To put it another way, what evidence would you require to accept that a supernatural event had actually taken place? I suspect that there is no actual evidence that would convince you of the truth of supernatural events, and so your appeals to evidence are really meaningless.

To put it another way, you think you can win this argument if you pretend to ask the other side questions then provide your own strawman answers.

[Calculon]

@Czarcasm

IF it defies the laws of physics, and IF there is no solid evidence that it has happened before, and IF there is no solid evidence that it happened this time, THEN it is safe to say it didn’t happen.
Quit trying to isolate small parts of the argument and pretending the rest of it doesn’t exist.

My experience in talking with people about the resurrection is that the real problem is not the quality of historical evidence for the resurrection. The real problem is accepting that a supernatural event has taken place. That is the real barrier to people accepting the resurrection, and based on his replies to this thread I think it is really the problem of the OP and of Disogenes. Until we can agree that it is at least possible for the resurrection to happen then discussing evidence is simply going to go nowhere, as I would be the only one that values evidence.

With respect to your formula, I think there is solid evidence that the resurrection did happen, and so one is not justified in saying that it didn’t happen. I think you might also need to think about the phrasing of that statement, because it implies that you cannot say that anything that is physically possible did not actually happen. You put the three conditionals together with “and” operators, so logically if something is physically possible then the first statement is false and therefore the whole conditional is false.

With respect to isolating arguments, what part of the argument do you suggest that I am neglecting?

@Czarcasm

To put it another way, you think you can win this argument if you pretend to ask the other side questions then provide your own strawman answers.

If Diogenes feels that I am mis-representing him in some way he is free to come in here and correct me. Or if you feel you can point out where my statement mis-represents what his position is then feel free to point it out. Just broadly accusing me of using strawmen really gets us nowhere.

Calculon.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Calculon

My experience in talking with people about the resurrection is that the real problem is not the quality of historical evidence for the resurrection.

No, that’s a real problem. There is absolutely no evidence at all.

The real problem is accepting that a supernatural event has taken place.

If you could produce evidence, that wouldn’t be such a problem.

That is the real barrier to people accepting the resurrection, and based on his replies to this thread I think it is really the problem of the OP and of Disogenes. Until we can agree that it is at least possible for the resurrection to happen then discussing evidence is simply going to go nowhere, as I would be the only one that values evidence.

It is physically impossible. That’s a fact. That means you need to produce hardcore evidence to prove it happened. We value evidence greatly, but you simply can’t produce any. You can’t even prove that anyone claimed to have seen Jesus perform any miracles, much less that he performed any.

With respect to your formula, I think there is solid evidence that the resurrection did happen,

Let’s see it. Let’s see a single shred.

[PBear42]

@Calculon

My experience in talking with people about the resurrection is that the real problem is not the quality of historical evidence for the resurrection. The real problem is accepting that a supernatural event has taken place. That is the real barrier to people accepting the resurrection, and based on his replies to this thread I think it is really the problem of the OP and of Disogenes. Until we can agree that it is at least possible for the resurrection to happen then discussing evidence is simply going to go nowhere, as I would be the only one that values evidence.

I’ve read a fair amount of biblical criticism (not enough to be an expert, but a lot) and I don’t think this is a fair characterization of the literature. Indeed, the Jesus Seminar is the only group I can think of taking Dio’s hard line. Whereas, for me, it’s perfectly obvious that if God exists he can do whatever he pleases. Whether God exists (in particular, for purposes of this thread, the Christian God) is the question, which in turn depends on whether the NT is credible evidence. That’s the issue raised by the OP.

BTW, I’d appreciate your thoughts on Post #111, especially “the dog that didn’t bark.”

[Voyager]

@Calculon

To put it another way, what evidence would you require to accept that a supernatural event had actually taken place? I suspect that there is no actual evidence that would convince you of the truth of supernatural events, and so your appeals to evidence are really meaningless. You have arrived at your beliefs not based on evidence really but on an a priori acceptance of naturalism that is immune to evidence. Anything that you come across that does not fit your pre-conceived worldview is simply denounced as not being real.

Calculon.

I can answer this. Recorded evidence, repeatable events. If anyone could show this, the “supernatural” event would no longer be impossible.
That time is not constant is a far more “supernatural” claim than the existence of ghosts - but it is accepted because it can be demonstrated.

BTW, Alexander the Great was convinced that he was descended from gods, and we have very good evidence of this claim - but not of the truth of it, so no one accepts. We don’t even have as good evidence that Jesus claimed he was the true son of God.

[kanicbird]

@Voyager

I can answer this. Recorded evidence, repeatable events. If anyone could show this, the “supernatural” event would no longer be impossible.

Why do you assume supernatural events would obey natural laws such as repeatability?

BTW, Alexander the Great was convinced that he was descended from gods, and we have very good evidence of this claim - but not of the truth of it, so no one accepts. We don’t even have as good evidence that Jesus claimed he was the true son of God.

Actually I would accept this, Alexander the Great very well could have been a Nephlium. And if Alexander the Great is accepted as a Nephelium there is no issue with Jesus being the Son of God, and for that matter explains much in our world like people who command great power over other, our leaders today in all disciplines. So those people with great power would be the evidence the OP is asking for in the existence of the sons of God having children with the daughters of men.

[monavis]

@kanicbird

That there are people trained by God in all disciplines that have answers to the different questions. Also that God has such training for everyone, but each person won’t be a expert in everything.

I claim I don’t know if the pagan miracle that was stated was true, but i know that it is well within God’s power to do so, and within His pattern that it could be true.

As for actual fakes, such as made up, it really doesn’t matter, it is outside my discipline and the writings I know how to use. If it’s important for me to know God will proved the resources. If not, I can assume if God did something similar in scriptures there is no reason to suspect He can’t do what is claimed in this case pagan scared writings.

There are also counterfeit miracles. Which are real miracles where another person takes credit, though God worked through another person.

You should state that "you"believe that God was working working through another person, but it isn’t based on truth but belief.
It is not a creditable argument to people who do not belive as you do. And where is your proof?