Bending over backwards to be fair, I think he meant eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus, rather than his actual resurrection (which, if it happened, would have been in a sealed tomb).
But it’s curious that even according to the Bible, nobody believed it UNTIL they had seen him with their own eyes. The disciples allegedly saw Jesus performing miracle after miracle (including raising other people from the dead) for three years, but even when their best friends, even when their own brother, told them that Jesus had risen, they didn’t believe it. Thomas didn’t even believe it when he did see it, not until he touched him.
These guys were hand-picked by Jesus. They’re all saints now. I think we should follow their example.
We were discussing evidence for the resurrection. He said that it’s not rational to take what we have, and using that, accept that the resurrection actually happened. Your rebuttal was to say that Newton et al. believed it and they were rational, so there!
But Newton didn’t believe based on evidence for the resurrection - he couldn’t have because there isn’t any that’s at all worthwhile. Whatever reasons Newton had for being a Christian, it wasn’t because some guy wrote a letter to some other people 700 miles away, claiming that 500 people saw the resurrected Jesus. Or if by some chance it was that, that just shows us a blind spot in Newton’s otherwise rationality.
So if you’re not citing the evidence that convinced this list of luminaries, then yes, you are simply making an argument from authority.
And if it needs to be said, you can’t really go by anything that people believed (or claimed to) before the 20th century, because before then we didn’t know about the nuclear reactions that allow the sun to shine for billions of years, which in turn gives enough time for things like evolution. Before Darwin’s theory of evolution, there was no strong rebuttal to the Watchmaker argument, among others.
If there is no rational alternative to the Bible, and society demands (depending on the time and place, possibly with the death penalty for heresy) that you believe it, then a rational person is at least going to profess belief.
By the fact you didn’t quote or respond to the rest of my post I presume you agree that all four gospels are third person accounts that have omniscient narrators and perfect recall decades later and are, thus, obviously fiction.
By the fact you didn’t quote or respond to the rest of my post I presume you agree that all four gospels are third person accounts that have omniscient narrators and perfect recall decades later and are, thus, obviously fiction - and don’t want to admit it.
Of course, not. It is about throwing one wild speculation on top of different wild speculations. Your source provides nothing more than a claim that “Well, it coulda happened.” meh
Your claim was that Jesus asserted a specific truth and your link provides even less evidence than your misunderstanding of a single translated word. Since the rest of the crowd has not risen to the bait*, I see no reason to pursue it.
*This is not an accusation of trolling, which I do not believe you were attempting. I just wanted to be sure that others did not misunderstand the reference you threw out.
Well, let me put it this way - your utter refusal to engage in debate about topics that are uncomfortable to you (due to them utterly destroying your position) leaves me in a position to shrug and say, “Well, if that’s the best he can do, he really doesn’t have any evidence, crappy or otherwise, suggesting that Jeshua ever got resurrected.”
And really, that appears to be the situation. The case for Jeshua (aka Jesus) having been resurrected is entirely dependent on people taking the bible’s word for gospel - and more specifically for people take some rather dubious accounts and letters as being factual accounts despite the nature of their content and providence. There is no evidence for this resurrection outside this credulous reading of the bible.
If you had bothered to read the whole debate, you will see I have discussed most of your points, which seem to be based upon a rather large ignorance of Biblical scholarship and thus are not worthy of addressing. For example, not all Gospels are third person accounts, that has been discussed here at length. Also you are quite ignorant of the Synoptic gospels, and how they came about.
Declaring yourself the winner in a debate as someone is unwilling to discuss ridiculous points is rather childish. You other points are based upon ignorance and not bothering to read the debate here.
It’s impossible to win a debate on the internet. It’s possible to lose one, though.
I will confess that I haven’t made a terribly specific study of the bible - I only read good fiction. But it remains the case you have to give the bible credence as fact before you can claim to have objectively available reason to believe this resurrection nonsense.
Which puts people in favor of the resurrection claim in the unenviable position of trying to present the book as what it clearly isn’t - a historical novel penned by the very hand of God, such that every individual sentence in it can be presumed to be completely factual and true, untainted by bias, exaggeration, hearsay, or lies.
If one does not credit the writers of the bible with the purest of honesty and accuracy, then things fall apart pretty quickly.
Just askin’, but have you or any of the other Christian Apologists, especially the OP, ever read any books on other Christian sects, much less other faiths? Or simply those who disagree with you? F’rinstance,
Irenaeus was born in the second century, some time after the so-called Gospel of John was written, adding several relay stations to the Biblical game of Telephone we’re playing.
Or at least claimed to - there is no evidence (beyond their ‘word’ ) that they did.
keep in mind, that in order for their new faith to be of any value and not die a quick death, their messiah HAD to be resurrected, otherwise he couldn’t do the things he said he was going to do.
