The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[DeistPaladin]

You have far more patience than I do, D-P.  I hope you have all this stuff canned somewhere because he isn't worth writing it out for.

I just can't help myself trying to instruct people in how basic logic works. Call it a compulsion. 

[DeistPaladin]

Point #1
Since you admittedly missed the discussion an "only skimmed" the thread, then you do not realize that my statement which you quoted above was NOT the summation of my defense of Christianity but a specific response to a specific poster.

The "die-for-a-lie" point (as you call it) is one of the pieces of evidence in support the the HRotNT, but not the apex or summation of the argument. Keep that in mind.

Point #2
All of my OP was written by me and NOT copy and pasted. Don't be rude.

Right, as I said, there are variations on that theme. There's also the Trilemma "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument as well. There's also the "empty tomb" argument, which I like to call the "look, nothing!" argument. The variations all revolve around "Here's the NT, *insert fallacious argument here*, therefore Jesus". While there are many variations on that theme, what they all have in common is being long on fallacious reasoning and short on any shred of evidence. 
And while you may not have literally copied and pasted the argument, they are certainly not yours and they are not new. 

Gee, I don't recall offering much in the way of defense of the resurrection in this thread at all. Tangentially, perhaps. 

Yeah, and Donald Trump has a full head of hair. Everyone knows this is precisely what you have argued for (the whole point of bringing up the die-for-a-lie argument) and are trying to ultimately "prove". You're not fooling anyone into thinking you're just here to discuss Bart Ehrman's Historical Jesus. 

On the one hand, deniers such as yourself like to point out that LOTS of people have been raised from the dead. 

Who are these "deniers"? I know of no one that argues against the resurrection by pointing out that "lots of people have been raised from the dead". I know of no one who has been raised from the dead. Near death, perhaps. If people have been brought back from flat lining in the brain activity (I'm not a medical doctor so maybe so) it is only with modern medical science, which doesn't really apply to anything that happened 2,000 years ago. I'm keen to know what this argument is exactly and whether it's another straw-skeptic position that the likes of Lee Strobel are fond of. 

On the other hand, if resurrection does not and has not EVER occurred, then I should pay no attention to the members of this forum who like to trot out the claims of Horus and others who have allegedly been raised from the dead, right?

Now this argument I understand but clearly you didn't. No skeptic argues that Horus really did rise from the dead. The point is that other religions make claims too with just as much evidence as the miracles of your Jesus. As skeptics, we reject all these claims. You reject theirs but, by process of special pleading, think your's is the real deal. 

Precisely because they were willing to die for what they knew - not what they believed. That doesn't happen in your typical murder trial.

Oh where to begin?

First, there are many other problems with eye-witness accounts aside from the eye-witness knowingly lying. Memory isn't nearly as flawless as we like to think it is. We often remember things as we want to remember them. Some seem to have more trouble with this than others. Bias can skew memory more and more over time. Perceptions can be similarly distorted by emotions and bias. We often see what we want to see and remember what we want to remember. 

Tales get better with the telling, too, and certainly did with the Gospel accounts (just a little taste of my cross-examination to come). Have you ever read the Gospels in the order in which they were written? Mark, then Matthew and Luke and finally John? Did you notice how Jesus gets more and more powerful, more confident, more commanding with each version? Did you notice how John the Baptist sinks lower and lower on his knees until finally he's little more than Jesus' cheer-leader? 

Second, people do die for lies. 

Third, you can't use folklore to prove mythology. 

Sorry. Until I am allowed to link and post stuff like this, I'm not going to view or respond because I cannot respond in kind. Forum rules and all that. You understand, I'm sure.

Then just read this summary: eye-witness testimony is virtually worthless in science. 

I'm special pleading? You spent several minutes typing up examples of the most outrageous nut-jobs in recent memory who were willing to die for their causes then accuse ME of special pleading? Do you find David Koresh to be a typical example of the kind of person you would expect to meet every day? Seriously?

Um, no. I used him as an example of someone who died for a lie. 

"But he was just a crazy cultist!" you protest, "But Paul knew the Truth." (with a capital T)

This is special pleading in its purest form with a dash of circular reasoning. Christianity is true and therefore Paul wasn't a crazy cultist like David Koresh because he was following the Truth? 

Aside from your special pleading that the founders of Christianity weren't anything like these crazy cultists of modern times, what do you base this distinction on? 

Nope. Just facts. Historical evidence. Stuff like that.

I know you don't like watching videos but every time a Christian refers to their folklore and mythology as "historical documents" or "historical evidence", I simply must post this clip from Galaxy Quest. 





No, you have mythology and folklore. Actual historical documentation on Jesus is scant and there's nothing to validate either the supernatural claims attributed to the story of Jesus or the suffering martyrdom of the original disciples and apostles. 

Should be a hoot.

You have my permission to cheat and peek ahead and what's to come. I've already posted a link to my debate with a Christian on "Are the Gospels Based On A True Story?".

Please note how much wiggle room I offered my Christian opponent. 

The topic wasn't "did the resurrection happen?" It was not "Are the Gospels fully accurate as historical accounts". No, the topic was, "is there any reason to think there might have been a true story behind all this stuff?" 

I gave him as much of a sporting chance as I could. Smarter Christian apologists refused to pick up that gauntlet because they knew what was coming. This guy that took the challenge had no clue. 

I spanked him so badly he abandoned the debate. He ran away with his tail tucked between his legs. I almost felt sorry for the poor guy. 

---

Actually, something very much like that has turned up. It's called the Shroud of Turin, and despite the fact that it cannot tell us with certainty that the man on the shroud was Jesus, forensic studies suggest that this man died in a somewhat unusual manner (given that he was crucified) and that these unique details are correspond directly to the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus.

(And for the high schoolers thinking of jumping in at this point: go and read WHY the carbon-14 dating test performed in 1988 was due to flawed sampling.)

Well, I hope you can prove that. 

No, you don't. 

Word of advice: don't tell other people what they really think. It's a bad sign that you're a demagogue who's not arguing in good faith. I have already told you what evidence I will accept and have been more than patient as I try to explain to you why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 

Again, reflect on how you respond to three claims of my lunchtime activities, how much evidence you require to accept each one and why your standard of what meets the burden of proof changes with each one:

1. I had lunch with my wife.
   
2. I had lunch with President Obama.
   
3. I had lunch with my deceased father who's back from the dead and feeling much better now. 
   

I've presented this lesson to you three times now and you've ignored it each time. Do your homework. I'm trying to teach you how logic works. 

Me, too, most days. I think God is like that. But every now and then, God shows up. I'm sorry if you have not had that experience. Maybe you should give him permission to do so. He's generally very conscious of overwhelming your free will by His awesome presence.

I'm keen to hear what evidence you can offer that God showed up in your life? Did you happen to capture that moment on some sort of recording? Did God leave behind some sort of artifact that science can examine? Perhaps you've been given the power to heal, just as Jesus promised the faithful would be able to in Mark 16, and you can perform these miracles under medical peer review?

By the way, FYI, I once did offer such an open invitation. I made an offer on YouTube that Satan could collect my soul, free of charge, as long as he showed up personally to collect by the end of the day on 6/6/06 Eastern Standard Time. Not surprisingly, the day came and went uneventfully. Supposedly, he's willing to offer money, sex and fame for that kind of thing. Here I was unable to even give it away. Perhaps my soul is worthless. 

The next year, I made a similar offer on YouTube to Jesus. I would convert to Christianity and spend the rest of my days preaching his Gospel as he saw fit to direct if he would only show up personally to claim me as his willing and devoted servant by the end of the day on 7/7/07 Eastern Standard Time. Once again, no takers. 

I meant in that one unintelligible sentence. Read what you typed again and see if you can figure it out.  

Again, I don't know how to go slower for you. I mapped it out step-by-step on two occasions. You have already failed to meet your burden of proof before I even get started in my rebuttal. 

If you still don't get it, I'm moving on. 

---

Well, I have to admit something...I didn't see this the first time around. I got so caught up in the whole "David Koresh proves the apostles were nuts" thing, that I complete missed this even GREATER stupidity.

No, the point was that crazy cultists arise all the time that die for their own lies and therefore dying for something doesn't prove anything.

Similarly, "people saw Jesus after his execution", even if we are to put any stock in Christian stories at all, proves nothing. Equilax tried to educate you in greater detail on this point so I won't belabor it. 

Try to listen more carefully in the future. I'm trying to be patient with you and explain how logic works. A chorus line of straw men isn't a good sign of your attempts to debate in good faith (no pun intended). 

[Cyberman]

I'm actually disappointed we haven't had the empty tomb schtick. It's one of my favourites.

[YahwehIsTheWay]

I'm actually disappointed we haven't had the empty tomb schtick. It's one of my favourites.

Happy to oblige. 

Not only to we have THE empty tomb. We have at least two to choose from because the Lord obviously wanted to be sensitive to both True Christians and the followers of Mary-anity. 

The Mary worshipers have their traditionally overdone holy theme park at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Protestants found what more fits the bill for a modest carpenter that also happened to be God's gift to the world. The Garden Tomb was discovered by one General Gordon who used the Bible as his guide, which worked about as well as you might expect. And then there's James Cameron and his discovery...

Jesus is everywhere and nowhere too. Praise!

[Minimalist]

Don't forget Talpiot where the body was....er, bones.... er ossuary...of someone or other.

[Cyberman]

Jesus is everywhere and nowhere too. Praise!

Hi Ho, silver lining!

[Minimalist]

G'Nite, people.

[robvalue]

I don't know if this has been answered with any degree of satisfaction: so what if he came back to life? This is assuming it wasn't a case of him not being dead in the first place, or the person being spotted as the "resurrected" Jesus being someone else, or the whole thing being made up, or people hallucinating, which are all far more likely explanations.

If he did come back to life, what is this supposed to prove? Answer this: if I said to you, "I'm going to die and Allah will bring me back to life, because I am the son of Allah. Islam is true, Christianity is a lie. I will come back to life in 3 days, and you will see me and you'll know God is Allah." Now, you see me die right in front of you. Let's say I get absolutely pulverised. I get thrown in a car squashing machine, I'm truly done. There's nothing of me left but giblets. But guess what? 3 days later I just turn up, and I'm alive again! What does this tell you about the truth of my claims about Allah? Answer the question, or else I put a random person in the squasher too!

I'll try one more time with the "die for a lie" thing, although I think the video I posted takes that argument apart pretty conclusively.

Let's say there was an event, E. It may be that in fact the event was nothing at all, or nothing out of the ordinary. It may be that E is something incredible. We have no way of knowing at this point. The facts about this event are F.

Now, this is again giving the benefit of the doubt that the gospels were written by eye witnesses which is an unbelievable stretch but I'll allow it for the sake of argument. Let's say our author claims to have experienced event E. He may have experienced it, he may not have even been there at all, we don't know yet. He holds belief B about the event. And let's say his conviction about the belief is C, which would range from say 60% up to 100%.

There are three possibilities now:

B matches F exactly
B has some correlation with F but not entirely
B has no correlation with F

Again, we don't know which. Us, the readers, did not experience the event. We only have his beliefs to go by. So we don't know which of the above is the case.

So let's assume he really, really believes B to be equal to F. That is to say, he is utterly convinced beyond any doubt in his mind that his beliefs are accurate. Again, this does not mean the beliefs are accurate, or even slightly accurate; just that he firmly believes that they are. No matter how firm that belief, it does not tell us that he is right. Human beings are fallible.

Now I grab this guy and torture him and/or threaten him with death. I start doing all kinds of weird horrible stuff to him. Again, the fact that anything like this actually happened is part of the claim of the bible, not something we can verify before assessing the claim, but I'll allow it for the sake of argument. So I'm merrily torturing this guy, assuming he will crack. All he has to say to me is that his beliefs are wrong, and I'll let him go. He refuses, and I end up killing him without him admitting he is wrong.

What I have learnt by doing this? Do I know that he really, firmly held those beliefs? It seems fairly likely, but that is not a given. He may have other reasons for not wishing to deny those beliefs. There are many completely plausible explanations. But being the super generous torturer/narrator that I am, I'll allow that he really did believe it so much that he'd rather die than deny it, even to me. So we'll say C=100%. (Maths makes me horny.)

Now: what does this tell us about whether B is equal to F, partly equal, or not at all equal?

Nothing. It tells us nothing about it. If he was utterly convinced in his belief about what happened, if he was unwaveringly sure, then he would have followed through and been killed regardless of whether the belief was actually true. This guy I'm torturing (oh wait, he's dead now)... this guy I was torturing had no way to verify whether his beliefs were real. He was relying on his memory and his interpretation, both of which we know are fallible human tools. People get things wrong all the time. But you don't know when you've got something wrong, do you? If you knew that, then you wouldn't hold the wrong belief. How certain the guy is of the belief is only evidence to him; everyone else would be relying entirely on him accurately interpreting and remembering the events.

What we've actually learnt is that this guy cares more about not admitting his beliefs are wrong than he does about his own life. What does that tell us? Maybe he is stupid. Most people would just "admit" they are wrong, even if they think they are not, in order to stop someone killing them. It doesn't make their beliefs wrong because they pretend to someone that they are wrong. Maybe they weren't stupid, but they felt that admitting their lack of belief would cause harm to others so they literally martyred themselves. We're only speculating about their motivations here though, not about whether their beliefs are true.

So I hope it is clear that I've actually learnt nothing by killing this poor guy except that C=100%, if I'm being generous. From the torturer's point of view, his protestations of truth look exactly the same to me whether C=100% and B=F, or C=100% and B<>F. To claim otherwise is to say people literally cannot make a mistake.

This whole scenario permits an awful lot of details that I don't think should be given, but I do so to make the point. We have one dead guy, and we've learnt nothing about the truth. Nothing. I have no way of telling whether he was convinced of the truth, or convinced of a mistaken version of the truth. The idea that people would only stick to what is actually true with such convinction implies that they have some way of checking the accuracy of their beliefs. In this case, that would require the guy to be able to re-experience event E to see if he was correct. And he can't do that. All he has is his memory, which is fallible.

I expect the next objection would be that several people all got tortured and upheld their beliefs. I'll allow this again, for the sake of argument. Now we're dealing with the appeal to popularity fallacy: the truth of a belief does not depend on how many people hold that belief. It does not tell us whether it is true or not. People are routinely wrong about things, and it has been the case many times in history where vast numbers of people all believe something that is totally false. Ask a Muslim. Ask a flat earther, which used to be everyone. I myself have been so convinced of something before that I would say 100%. And I've turned out to be completely wrong. Would I have "admitted" under torture that my beliefs were wrong? Of course I would, because I'm not stupid. It doesn't mean I actually don't believe them, just that I am prepared to lie in order to not be killed. But say I thought that if I admitted I was wrong, they would then kill my wife and all my pets, as well as me. Then I wouldn't admit I was wrong, whether I was certain or not. See?

So it makes no difference how many people I torture to death. All I found out is about B, their beliefs. As I have no access to E, and neither do they; I am "seeing" through a human filter. One that is not reliable. Just saying it "could be reliable in this case" is both stating the obvious and begging the question.

In the end, if you just go ahead and believe yourself that B=F you have made a leap of faith with no justification. There can be all kinds of reasons why any number of people may firmly share the same belief B about the events E, and it is no way evidence that B=E. If anyone wants me to go into detail about that, I will.

I hope I didn't miss anything. Hey this guy is still moving a bit... *Whack* Sorted.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Ref. Post #488:  There's an excellent story about people holding on to their beliefs while being tortured in 2 Maccabees chapter 7.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=CEB

In some cases the more force that is used to get people to change their minds only makes them more determined to hold on to their beliefs.  

[robvalue]

I see, thanks

I don't usually like discussing motivations of historical figures (real or in dispute) because I consider it a really unreliable way to get to the truth.

But let me play devil's arse hole anyway, if we're going to bring motivation into it: why would people die for the truth?

Most people would say that something they knew was true was actually false if it meant not being killed. I hope we can agree on that. So what would be the motivation for refusing to "admit" you are wrong, if your life is on the line?

To me, this implies that people's perceptions of your "belief" (true or professed) is more important than whether or not it is actually true. Because if something is evidently true, or well known to be true, then someone "admitting" under torture that it isn't true won't make any difference. If Stephen Hawking "admitted" that actually there is no sun, because he was being tortured until he said that, no one would change their beliefs based on this.

So my conclusion is that they thought one of the following:

1) They knew their version of events was false, but they felt it was very important to protect that fact. Maybe they felt it would be in everyone's best interests to share this false belief, for the greater good. Maybe there were further threats or implications involved in admitting it was false, so even if they knew it was false, they would not say so.

2) They thought it was true, but they felt that the only way anyone else would ever believe the story is if they stuck to it. This suggests to me that the only way to the "truth" of christianity is literally through the accounts of these few people. Clearly they didn't think the truth was self evident. So even now, the only way we have to truth is their testimony.

Well, that was fun. Like I say, I don't take this kind of discussion too seriously, even when it works out in my favour.