Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[Pat Mustard]

So no theists are going to respond to comments about Paul then?  Where did Steve go all of a sudden?  Seems like whenever the gospel writers' legitimacy is called into question, he disappears.  Not that I blame him.  Even the slimiest of all slime, WLC, won't debate the authenticity of the NT.

What specific, non-fringe, comment about Paul would you like to see an answer to? 

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/establish...eliability

Steve have you anything other than WLC saying "the bible is true because god told me", because even in the more credulous wings of biblical scholarship he is known as an idiot with no authority.

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Perhaps a refresher...

Special Pleading: Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification. Special pleading is often a result of strong emotional beliefs that interfere with reason.

The only circumstances that were similar in this situation were that something was written. Everything else was different. So, we have one similarity and hundreds of dissimilarities. Therefore the circumstance were not even close to being similar and therefore no special pleading can occur.

They are literally the same thing. Joseph Smith makes claims of visions and conversations with God and claims to have been divinely-inspired to write about Jesus. Saul of Tarsus does literally the exact same thing. One is accepted, the other not. Both have the same level, type, and quantity of evidence to back-up their claims (none at all).

So yeah, it is literally a textbook example of special pleading. Thank you for demonstrating it well 

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That sounds like a claim, in need of support.

What "claim" are you referring to? The paucity of contemporary accounts of Jesus? I've never encountered any. The closest anyone seems to be able to get is a reference by Josephus (who doesn't provide any corroborative details of the gospel accounts), who never met Jesus and never witnessed anything Jesus did (so not a contemporary source). Saul of Tarsus lived at least a generation after Jesus died, so he's not a contemporary. And while the gospels exist, the earliest any of them has been dated to (as far as I am aware) is ~70CE, so none of the gospels are contemporary accounts in any verifiable way (and we don't even know who wrote much of them).

Josephus doesn't count as the passages mentioning Jesus have been conclusively proven to be later interpolations inserted in the 4th cenury by Eusebius (their use as "independent testimony" was destroyed in the 19th century when textual analysis showed the style of writing to be much different to Josephus' own and the words in the passages to be anachronistic to late 1st century).