Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[TheBeardedDude]

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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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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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).

Even assuming that Josephus wrote about Jesus and that those passages weren't inserted later, it still doesn't bolster Christian claims with respect to Jesus. A guy named Yeshua (a common name that is translated as Joshua for everyone but Jesus it seems) lived between the years 0 and 35CE, and? That's like saying that because Bob is a common name, we should believe any fantastical stories written about a Bob if we can verify that a guy named Bob did in fact live during the time the stories take place.