3 reasons for Christians to start questionng their faith

[FallentoReason]

Weak. Witness testimony > hearsay any day, especially when one is going through the trouble of setting up a new religion.

There are a multitude of reasons. Your assertion of "Witness testimony > hearsay" is probably easier for us to see that 2000 years in the future, but I strongly doubt that was on the mind of the author.

If you were going to sit down to write an account of something, wouldn't it seem natural to simply write down your own experiences instead of having to grab someone else's book and copy that? I find it very suss that "Matthew" writes as if he wasn't even there, when all he has to naturally do is tell us about his experiences with the man himself.

This is a red herring (not on topic about authors), but I'll answer you anyway.

Zechariah 3:8
"Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who sit before you, for they are men who are a sign: behold, I will bring my servant the Branch."

Isaiah 11:1
"There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit."

Nazarene means, "of the branch" or "off shoot".

It's not a red herring, because you said "Matthew" writes about prophecies fulfilled. That's an assertion that I disagree with.

Right, so "nazarene" means those two things. Sounds like you're shoehorning an explanation for him being from Nazareth.

Umm... You seem to be placing your own values on authors of another time and place. If all history books include a biography of the author, don't you think? Truly, these guys are not trying to convince people that Jesus existed or that they were there. They want conversion. They know their place in this matter is not important and omitted it intentionally.

So I'm not allowed to put forth my opinion, but you're allowed to pretend what they were actually thinking? Look, it's pretty straight forward; if they were actually witnesses, they would have written like they were there. They don't, therefore why should we believe they were witnesses let alone believe the stories to be accurate? The problem with hearsay compared to a first hand account is this:

W = witness
A = audience
P[1,2,3...100] = person 1, person 2 etc...
B = book

A witness account:

W -> B -> A

Hearsay accounts:

W -> P[1] -> B -> A
OR
W -> P[1] -> P[2] -> B -> A
OR
W -> P[1] -> ... -> P[15] -> B -> A

The degrees of separation between the supposed witnesses and when the account is written down for us is not known, therefore dubious and unreliable.

Funny you mention "conspiracy". There's some Christian friends I know in real life who fervently believe NASA never went to the moon and that 9/11 was an inside job by the US government. I'm not surprised in the least to see that they believe conspiracy theories, because the backwards thinking required to justify those views are the very same that are required to believe in religion.

You use 2 fallacies here: hasty generalization and red herring. You claim that some people in a group mess up so therefore the whole group is a mess up. You say that Christianity could be a conspiracy to distract away from the texts. My father works for NASA and I know no one in real life that thinks 9/11 is a conspiracy. Although, the South Park episode on that is great.

Fail. I didn't generalise because I specifically referred to some cases. I never said all Christians think NASA never went to the moon and 9/11 was an inside job.

1 John 4:1-3
1Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

Don't you find it incredible that within this generation, we have a full spectrum of Christians that can't decide what the truth is? I mean, if you think I'm stretching the truth, then how about your early comrades in the 1st century preaching a spiritual Christ? CLEARLY it wasn't so easy as simply asking someone "who was there", because otherwise we wouldn't have (what you might call a conspiracy nut) preaching a spiritual Christ when Jesus was apparently just on earth. The conviction in those Christians' hearts as well as their belief in a spiritual Christ should logically seem like a mutually exclusive thing, yet we had people saying they believed in God and this spiritual messiah.

First, I find it very easy to believe that Christians can't decide what truth is. They couldn't then, why should we be able to now? The passage quoted isn't talking about whether or not Jesus existed or anything actually happened, it was a matter of doctrine. There were people injecting their own thoughts into the teachings. My early comrades were dealing with Jews on one end and Platonist on the other. They were trying to deal with radically different groups and not have them distort teachings. You could ask the Jew "did Jesus exist" and they'll say yes, but they wouldn't say that he was the Messiah. You'll ask if he was a prophet, and they'll say yes, but not Lord. All sorts of crap flew at these guys early on, and the purpose of the letters were to keep those outside teachings out of the teachings of God.

Aw C'MON now! The passage explicitly says there were Christians preaching a spiritual messiah. You're avoiding the issue here, which is that it should be impossible to spew such nonsense about a spiritual messiah when Jesus was allegedly just on earth.

And seriously, the largest group of Christian misinterpreters are the Muslims. They were taught, but melded their own thoughts in. They were called "Nestorians" because they believed the word of Nestorius over the Christian main body in Rome and Byzantium. Then they merged the teachings of a new guy, Mohammed, into their thoughts, and now you have today.

Yes, I'm well aware. Muslims are a different story altogether.