So, any evidence in a storm.
He makes the claim in a public letter which is the ancient equivalent of network news.
nice dodge of the point.
that he sent to other believers who had no way of fact checking.
…in a new religion that heavily promoted “blind faith” and gave nicknames to those who checked things out-“Doubting Thomas”, anyone?
No, I was perfectly clear.
The question at hand is not whether these people were religious to varying degrees. It’s the quality of the evidence of “eyewitness testimony” in the bible. I’d like a cite that any of these people were convinced of the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus because of the “eyewitness testimony” in the bible.
It would be far more compelling if you could cite “worthies” who were not brought up in the Christian cultural tradition who changed their minds after reading this “evidence”.
Isn’t it odd that the people best placed to know, the contemporaries of Jesus in Palestine, took no notice at all of these stupendous miracles and, apart from a handful of his followers, completely ignored him. It’s almost as if they saw him as no different at all than all the other religious zealots proclaiming to have a direct line to Jehovah. If it weren’t for the genius of Paul Jesus would be forgotten now.
Again, it depends on the prior probabilities.
If Tacitus said the curtains in the temple were green rather than purple - equally likely prior possibilities - then his account would constitute decent evidence that the curtains were green, and would be accepted as probably true unless evidence to the contrary were found.
If Tacitus claimed that he was abducted by aliens, an event with a prior probability close to zero, then of course he would not be generally accepted until proven wrong. If the prior probability of a hypothesis is close to zero, then you require evidence that is completely incompatible with any alternative hypothesis (he was mad, deluded, joking, relating a myth rather than a true event) in order to move the needle from zero.
DrDrth, it’s not even slightly credible to claim that the gospels are, ahem, the “gospel truth” as related in absolute fact by primary witnesses who were there for all events.
Firstly, there’s good reason to believe that the gospels are partially based off of one another, demonstrating elaborations as the fish story evolved or was elaborated on over time.
But more importantly, the gospels have an omniscient third-person narrator - and also have detailed dialogue. That’s not how humans work. Besides the fact that people don’t relate their own experiences in the third person, people also don’t remember dialogue from when they’re not there, not with any level of accuracy.
And they really don’t remember dialogue that they weren’t there for sixty years later.
The gospels are fables - or rather one fable recorded at various stages in its evolution. They are, if not utter fiction, heavily fictionalized. This is not really disputable.
This tells us two things, for certain. One: Arguments based on the literal veracity of details in the gospels are garbage. And two: Those who were telling and retelling the stories and mythologies of the early christian church were not at all averse to spinning myths - not if those myths helped them gather followers and foster beliefs.
So we’re dealing with liars here.
I’m not even slightly impressed when a liar claims he has 500 witnesses (a nice round number) in a letter to people who have no way of verifying whether those witnesses exist.
Also I am a talking helicopter, and I have 500 witnesses to that fact. No, they can’t come to the phone.
The quality of the evidence in the Bible for the Resurrection is rather weak and frankly quite biased.
You are welcome to read a biography of say, Isaac Newton. I can refer you to Défense de la Révélation contre les objections des esprits-forts by Euler.
And you are welcome to point out the passage in that book concerning the evidence that convinced Newton concerning the resurrection.
You know…the actual topic?
I reject religious testimony from pretty much anybody, Newton included, because the Western default for over 1500 years has been to accept the religious delusion as non-delusional, despite the fact that it IS just such.
Second- or third-hand claims of the eyewitness testimony of unidentified dead people is admissible?
No, that he sent to people who doubted the claim and had the capability of checking.
If the BIBLE, the actual PRIMARY SOURCE of the Jesus myth, is weak and biased evidence, then a book written by a man, however genius he may have been, who was separated from the actual events of the Resurrection by 1600 years or more can only be even more weak and biased. I don’t understand the drive to convince us that impossible eyewitness accounts were real rather than delusional or wishful-thinking.
Damn right we don’t. I hereby state that I am the strongest man in the world, and that 500 people saw me lift a full-grown elephant over my head with one hand. In Africa, 30 years ago.
Now, are you going to hop on a plane and search Africa for verification, even though I didn’t give you the names of any of the alleged witnesses, and only a very general idea of the time and place, or are you going to simply dismiss me as a nut and go about your business?
And it is 100 times easier, cheaper, faster, and more comfortable to go from the US to Africa today than it was to go from Corinth to Jerusalem in 50 AD.
Besides, even if some people did somehow check a story with no specifics and concluded that it was false, what then? If you invested the great time and expense to debunk it, and went back to Corinth and said Paul was lying, would the rest of the congregation immediately go back to being pagans, or would they ignore you?
This example is now dated, but I used it in a similar thread last year: Bill O’Reilly had the number one show on cable news. And for some reason, he was suddenly accused of lying about a lot of his stories. He claimed to have pulled his photographer to safety under a hail of bullets during a riot in Brazil; he claimed to see have seen nuns executed in Central America; some guy involved in the JFK assassination killed himself with a shotgun, and O’Reilly claimed to have been on the guy’s front porch at the time, etc.
All of this stuff was conclusively debunked by people who were there. Someone even produced a tape of O’Reilly on the phone in Texas, hearing about the suicide and saying he needed to get to Florida ASAP.
So everybody had solid proof he was lying about all this stuff. O’Reilly simply denied it, called it a media smear. And his fans believed him, rather than the tapes, the photographer he supposedly saved, etc. His ratings actually went up by about 20%.
Same thing with TV preachers today. Faith healers are caught using hidden radio receivers in their ears. Ministers telling old women to send in their social security checks to spread the Gospel found spending 99% of the money on luxuries for themselves. Doesn’t matter, they still have followers.
Some people will believe absolutely anything, no matter how obvious it is that it’s phony.
Somewhat amusingly, a glance at the thread title and OP suggest to me the actual topic is proof, not evidence.
It has been a point of some amusement to me that people have been pounding on the “dishwater-weak evidence is still evidence, dammit!” drum so hard. Any port in a storm, I suppose… 
To be fair, they are anonymous second- or third-hand claims.
And I’m sure he interviewed each and every one of them, right?
Right?
I did that. In all 4 gospel accounts of that Sunday morning, no one witnessed the resurrection. The tomb was empty when they got there, except for a glowing space alien or two. There were, according to the bible, no eye-witnesses.
And I am not sure where you get Saul of Tarsus. As I understand it, he never actually met the guy, and his epiphany was decades after the fact.