Would They Die for a Lie?

[Vicki Q]

The earliest Christians did not believe that Jesus was "king"; all of that came later.

I'm not at all sure what you mean by this. Please unpack. Paul called Jesus Kyrios ('Lord', a Caesar designation), thereby denying that the emperor was Kyrios. And so on and so on and so on.

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The point of the OP is that religious fanaticism and persecution prove nothing.

This needs careful definitions, but going with what I think you/he are saying:

The examples given merely demonstrate that people will die for a belief they have, even if that belief is incorrect. The Waco thing is moreover rather more complex, in that there's a lot of vagueness around who did what and why.

Maybe a counter-example or two could be found in which people died for something they knew to be untrue. That doesn't alter the fact that such things are extremely rare. For the very earliest Christian disciples to head off in different directions into a lifetime of getting beaten up and killed, without at some point eventually going 'You know what, I'm just going back home to watch box sets on Netflix because this is rubbish', strikes me as really quite unbelievable.


I mean you have to believe in what you're doing to put yourself through all this:


Ouch.