I work with someone who claims to be a server farm administrator. He doesn’t know how to log into a server; Ask me how I know this. Never the less, he claims it to anybody who doesn’t know any better.
I work with another person who is a developer. She claims to be an application admin. She isn’t. Yet, every email she sends, there it is, “Administrator”, in her signature.
Why would they make this claim knowing that I don’t believe them? Answer: Because I’m not the audience and those who can’t tell the difference do believe them.
Nope, not argument by authority. I am not saying anyone should believe due to those worthies believing. Believe or not. But he basically claimed no one that was rational and objective could believe, and I disproved that since those worthies are considered both rational and objective.
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a couple times, the Bronze Age ended in the Eastern Mediterranean 1200 years Before Christ. By the time of Jesus Herod the Great had built Jerusalem into a showplace of the Eastern Empire, a top tourist destination for the Jews of the Diaspora. It was hardly a backwater, and you disservice them by dismissing them with an inaccurate comment.
There was much actual evidence. First, Saddam used them on his own people. Next, the UN found tonnes of them after Kuwait, and tonnes were unaccounted for. Saddam openly bragged he had them, and was known to be buying things that could make WMD. So yeah, that’s pretty solid evidence.
Now, after Blix was given a free hand and said he couldnt find any- then all that evidence certainly became doubtful. Very doubtful.
Actually, the missing WMDs were finally found- rotting away, lost in the desert, a danger mostly to the environment.
Those people were all religious to varying degrees, in a world that was culturally overwhelmingly religious. So what? Do you have any cite to support the idea that any of those people accepted the objective truth of the resurrection of Jesus because of the quality of the eyewitness evidence presented in the bible?
Your argument that “I believe X and you believe Y, therefore X and Y are on an equal footing” is bogus. That’s not how evidence works, and it’s not how reality works (fortunately).
If you want to assert your right to hold beliefs motivated by religion, go ahead, nobody is challenging that. This thread is supposed to be about evidence, something that rises above subjective considerations.
Greatest minds of their time? Yep.
Nobel prize winners? Sure.
We stand on the shoulders of giants? Absolutely.
But they weren’t rational & objective about everything. Just the stuff they were really really right about and could PROVE experimentally or mathematically.
They might have believed in the resurrection but not a single one of them tried to prove it. Care to guess why?
There was a large church in Jerusalem, the commonly accepted number for its size is roughly 3000, but digging through the sands of time is difficult. The Council of Jerusalem took place there. As to not being able to go there, Corinth and Jerusalem are not horribly far apart. We know that Roman sailing vessels averaged between 2 and 6 knots depending on wind. Corinth is about 700 nautical miles from Jerusalem. That’s a trip from between 5 and 14 days. Hardly an insurmountable distance during the Pax Romanum and a distance quite regularly travelled. It’s completely reasonable to assume that Corinthians would have had some contacts with the church in Jerusalem and able to track down these witnesses should they wish to (although we don’t know that they actually did.)
A lot of people raised in the faith are able to compartmentalize those beliefs-indoctrination in even the most open of cultures is a powerful force. Now about the actual evidence, and that supposed consensus on who wrote the books attributed to John while you’re at it?
The actual evidence is the eyewitness accounts. Believe them or not.
*Raymond E. Brown, among others, posit a community of writers rather than a single individual that gave final form to the work.[82] In particular, Chapter 21 is very stylistically different from the main body of the Gospel, and is thought to be a later addition (known as the appendix). Among many Christian scholars the view has evolved that there were multiple stages of development involving the disciples as well as the apostle; R.E. Brown (1970) distinguishes four stages of development: traditions connected directly with the apostle, partial editing by his disciples, synthesis by the apostle, and additions by a final editor…More recent criticism
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran marked a change in Johannine scholarship. Several of the hymns, presumed to come from a community of Essenes, contained the same sort of plays between opposites – light and dark, truth and lies – which are themes within the Gospel. Thus the hypothesis that the Gospel relied on Gnosticism fell out of favor. Many suggested further that John the Baptist himself belonged to an Essene community, and if John the Apostle had previously been a disciple of the Baptist, he would have been affected by that teaching.[citation needed]
The resulting revolution in Johannine scholarship was termed the new look by John A. T. Robinson, who coined the phrase in 1957 at Oxford. According to Robinson, this new information rendered the question of authorship a relative one. He considered a group of disciples around the aging John the Apostle who wrote down his memories, mixing them with theological speculation, a model that had been proposed as far back as Renan’s Vie de Jésus (“Life of Jesus,” 1863). The work of such scholars brought the consensus back to a Palestinian origin for the text, rather than the Hellenistic origin favored by the critics of the previous decades.[citation needed]/I]
Francis Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Euler, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, Marconi, Carver, Fleming,Heisenberg, Dyson, and literally hundreds of Nobel laureates. All of whom pretty much define “rational and objective”.
Do you deny those worthies are rational and objective? Are you trying to claim you are more rational and objective than those worthies?:rolleyes:
Argument By Authority again? By the way, are you claiming that the ones you’ve named and the supposed hundreds you haven’t all shared the same beliefs?
BTW, :rolleyes: at something I never claimed? Classy.
I’m trying to keep up here - are you saying that the people in Corinth were in a position to call him on the claim that there were 500 witnesses? That’s all I can parse out of what you wrote, but if that’s what you meant, it seems pretty outlandish.