Papias (at least what little of his writings survive as quoted by Eusebius) does not reference any of the supernatural claims made in the written Gospels, or show any awareness of the Canonical Gospels at all. Eusebius does quote Papias as describing a memoir dictated by Peter to one named Mark, and says that Matthew wrote a sayings Gospel in Hebrew, but neither of these descriptions matches the Canonical gospels, and he doesn’t quote from them, so later patristic identification of those descriptions with the Canonicals was basically grounded on nothing (Matthew and Mark were assigned those authorship traditions based on Papias. Papias did not actually make this identification himself).
In any case, the fragments we have left from Papias don’t contain any claims about the resurrection or other miracles of Jesus.
Where did you get that idea? That’s not at all the question. No one has even suggested it.
I think we can just take it as a given, that if an all-powerful magic being exists, he could re-animate anybody anytime he wants, using his magic powers.
The apparent death theory is unnecessary since no evidence has yet been produced to show that anyone ever claimed to have seen Jesus walk out a tomb after being crucified (indeed, he is unlikely to have ever been placed in a tomb at all, but just left on the cross or dumped in a common grave), but it is still far more plausible than magic. I don’t get why apologists don’t seem to understand that trying to argue that something is unlikely does not open the door to supernatural explanations. Natural explanations, however unlikely, always trump magic.
This is not the question at hand. The question at hand is whether anyone can produce any evidence that a dead body came back to life. The hows and whys are immaterial until you prove it happened.
Yes, this was my point with regard to the apparent death theory.
Craig and other apologists typically try to jump the question of whether or not we should regard the NT as reliable - they take it as a given; ‘how do you explain the empty tomb’?
But that’s like taking the lord of the rings text as a given ‘how do you explain Frodo’s quest to mordor if there was no ring of power’?
The funny think about Mark’s story of Jesus healing the blind man is that it takes Jesus a couple of tries. He rubs spit in the blind man’s eyes, and the blind man says everything looks kind of blurry (“I see men as trees walking”), then Jesus rubs his eyes again, and then he can see clearly. You’d think JC would be more efficient than Vespasian.
Some of the miracle stories appear to have been allusions to those of pagan deities. Changing water into wine, for instance, was the miracle of Dionysus, the god of the vine (an easy one to understand, actually. To the ancients, the grape vine really did appear to miraculously transform water into wine - or at least to quickly fermenting grape juice).
Depends on the existence of God. However, given that 1) resurrection is naturally impossible and 2) we see no evidence of the supernatural in our world or in reliable recorded history we can ask for strong evidence that a supernatural resurrection ever happened. Which is the point of this thread. Such evidence, either direct, through contemporary accounts, or indirect, through the actions of the people close to the events, is lacking. Have any?
Incorrect. Natural laws are tested all the time - there is nothing assumed. Every day, in everything we do, we make predictions based on natural laws, and they all happen.
I have no idea what you mean by observing natural laws in the sense you are using this phrase. We observe them through their effects. When I want to see what a computer game does, or understand game law, I can read the code. We can’t read code for the universe.
When someone throws a ball to you, you don’t just stand there assuming that the ball will suddenly veer 90 degrees. We all assume the inviolability of natural law since this has never been falsified, despite the efforts of a century’s worth of psychics.
Yes, given 38 data points you can plot a curve of order 38. But the purpose of a curve is to predict where future data points will lie, and the 39th almost certainly won’t be near it. BTW, this is exactly how “scientific” defenses of religion seem to work. They create a complicated natural explanation for events in the Bible, like the Flood, which inherently predicts future discoveries. When these falsify that theory, they invent a new one of higher order. You get a total mess when you reject the simplest explanation; that the Flood never happened. Here also the simplest explanation is that the resurrection never happened.
And of course it is perfectly possible to show that an event violates a current understanding of natural law. The position of Mercury did. We need to create a new model which explains all the old observations, which is simple as possible, and which has good predictive power.
There is plenty that is still impossible under the quantum physics model. c is still the speed of light. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle still holds. The bizarre behaviors possible due to this are inside laws, not outside of it. Particles popping into existence in the quantum foam are not only not in violation of these laws but are required by them. Our human lack of imagination about what is possible has nothing to do with what the laws say.
Deterministic as a mass, of course. But deterministic at the level of the individual molecule, not in any reasonable sense of the word.
Any evidence you’re presented has been pretty feeble, and you seem to be spending your time quibbling about the impossibility of the supernatural, not defending the evidence. I for one take the impossibility of the supernatural as a provisional law, like all laws are provisional, which would have to be shown to be untrue through significant evidence. Hundreds of years of close observation which has shown that all events are natural and that any events claimed to be supernatural have been disproved is plenty of reason to reject the supernatural hypothesis.
Even if it was authentic, it was obviously done when he was dead, so it is not very good evidence of the resurrection. Still, probably the best in this thread, anyhow.
At least this is an attempt to prevent physical evidence. Ok, can you give a summary of how the Shroud offers evidence of the resurrection? How do you connect the dots there?
