DEBUNKING THE CONSPIRACY THEORY

[Esquilax]

Esq-

I'll give you this: you appear to be among the brighter members of the forum. So, you may have the ability to actually study the source material that occupies professional historians and to read their analysis of it.

So, why not use your obvious intellectual prowess to explain to everyone here why several thousand PhD's around the globe - each of whom having spent decades of their lives studying ancient languages, travelling to foreign countries, pouring over ancients parchments, scrolls and papyrii, etc - are simply WRONG in their professional judgment that Jesus was a real person and that the five minimal facts that emerge from their studies are valid?

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the existence of a historical Jesus is largely irrelevant to the claims made about him. Existence is a necessary, but not sufficient quality of Jesus-the-messiah, and given that other necessary qualities of the same narrative have not been provided (such as the sheer possibility of the supernatural) it's really little more than one small step. As such, I'm willing to take Jesus-the-man as read for the sake of argument, though I don't accept that this and the five facts you've listed can be used as evidence of the resurrection, and the reasons why are going to be the subject of a blog post once I've gotten that up and running.

What I don't like, though, are arguments like this one, where you attempt to rebut a position without input from the people that hold it, using talking points that may or may not actually be things that they hold to be true, without any assurances that even if they are accurate reflections of the position, that they represent the totality of that position. Apologists do this a lot, speaking for their opponents and, just coincidentally I'm sure, concluding that their arguments fall flat; in your case, your OP is so deep in your echo chamber that I can't possibly trust your conclusion that therefore, the conspiracy theory isn't viable. How could I look at an argument that consists solely of a representation of the position being refuted, from the perspective of a man who disagrees with it?

Alternatively, if you do concede that the five minimal facts cannot be denied, then would you care to propose your own theory which takes into consideration and accounts for all five of these facts with greater probability and explanatory scope than the Christian argument for a supernatural resurrection?

Because so far, I don't see that you actually have any real explanation...just a lot of empty denials.

First of all, this "you all haven't given any alternative solutions," refrain of yours is completely irrelevant, because if you're asserting that therefore your solution is correct then you're committing an argument from ignorance fallacy. Don't be that guy.

Secondly, here's my alternative: the five facts do not matter in the least. They have no bearing on the claim of the resurrection.

No, I'm serious: even taking them as facts, they do not demonstrate, or even concern, the mechanism or source of your proposed supernatural explanation, and hence cannot be taken, cumulatively or singularly, as evidence for the resurrection. They're just a list of unconnected facts, with no pathway between them and your conclusion; to say "therefore, Jesus was god and resurrected from the dead," would be a complete non-sequitur.

I can list five vaguely connected true things, and then a false (or if I'm being charitable, under intense dispute) "fact" too, Randy. It's not hard: my old room in Australia was found empty after I slept in it the night before, I'm married to an American citizen, my wife underwent a change of heart and ceased being a christian around the time she met me, her family believes that I've met them, we live on a second floor, and I teleported from Australia to America.

The first four things are true, and verifiable to a much higher degree than the minimal facts you presented, and yet the last one is not. The last one is a lie I told; actually I went to America in a plane... well, a series of planes. Since the first four facts do not contribute any additional, verifiable information that could be taken as evidence of my supposed teleportation, the actual act itself, then one may have no trouble at all in accepting the first four while discarding the last; after all, the last claim is supernatural in origin, and the supernatural has not been demonstrated as possible.

There is no appreciable difference, in that crucial, relevant area, between my set of five facts, and your minimal facts. Therefore, the minimal facts are similarly irrelevant to your conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead supernaturally. It's as easy as that.