Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[SteveII]

Your comparison is way way off. Joseph Smith wrote down a bunch of things that happened only to him. No one else was there. This is actually a good comparison to the alien abduction example atheists are so fond of. 

The 9 authors of the NT wrote down what happened in public.

And yet none of those 9 were verified eye witnesses to the events.  That's 1 good witness to 0 witnesses on your side.  Spin cuts both ways.

Tens of thousands of people would have been affected in some way by the events they relate. We have historical evidence that some significant number of people acted on their belief that the events of the NT happened (even before the gospels were written): there are churches across the Roman Empire before 50 AD. 1 Peter? Are you kidding me? That's 5 chapters out of 260. 

This testifies to the fact that people believed the stories.  That's hardly in question.  Many believed in the Eleusinian mysteries.  Their belief doesn't count as evidence to the truth of those mysteries.  The fact that a belief spreads to others isn't evidence of the facts supporting that belief.  This is a nonsense complaint.

In addition, your use of the term 'anonymous' is inaccurate and often used in an attempt to poison the well. Do you actually think that the people who received the first copies of the gospels received them on their doorsteps and did not know where they came from? Get real. They would have known exactly who the editor was and where the information came from. The name of the editor is unimportant to pass along. The only concern was the apostle's name who provided the input.

This is meaningless speculation.  Your speculations on the matter don't count as evidence.  Plenty of documents were circulated in the ancient world with either no attribution or false attribution.  Some of those documents even appear in the bible, which impugns your weak "just so story" about people not accepting anonymous testimony.  And our knowledge of practices back then flatly contradicts your rosy spin.

So, your comparison is nonsense and your charge of special pleading unsupported.

Why?  Because you don't believe the testimony of one good witness but you gullibly swallow the hearsay testimony of a corral of anonymous writers, liars, and forgers?  Regardless, preferring the anonymous testimony of 9 unknown writers to one known writer isn't any kind of rational metric, it's simply a preference for what you already believe.  We don't know whether any of those 9 even witnessed anything.  It's your comparison of the two that is nonsense.  You don't believe Joseph Smith.  Period.  That's your only actual criterion.  In a prior post you stated that you believe the testimony of the new testament is what it appears to be ("I believe that most of the epistles are what they appear to be.").  You accept uncritically the Christian testimony, yet get skeptical when the testimony is in favor of another religion.  That's special pleading.

Ah, but you are proving my point. You just spent who knows how many minutes telling me how the facts we have (which are very different and more plentiful than Joe's) could be interpreted another way or insist on characterizations which you couldn't possibly know for sure. You cannot prove that the events of the NT did not happen. I cannot prove they did. 

Even if I am speculating on the gospel editors, I don't speculate without reasons and I still have 3 editors and 1 Luke. While one account can be dismissed, a whole web of hundreds of facts exists, including 27 books and a bunch of people and churches (the context). My theory is that the events happened as this web of facts suggests at face value. It is not an illogical reading of the facts. I am not ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

Even if you came up with a theory that would account for all of them, me believing my particular theory over that of Joe's sole testimony without any context is definitely not special pleading because I have laid out justification for treating the two circumstances differently. I could be dead wrong, but I am certainly not special pleading Christianity.