(May 30, 2023 at 1:42 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Very eloquent, but not what I asked you. I’ll try again:
What evidence, exactly?
Boru
I think I must be missing something very obvious, because I thought I had covered your question. Could you unpack it a little further? Thanks.
Taking a guess at what you mean:
Personal experiences (things that convince 'me' because I have lived them).
Contemporary experiences (the lists are very long and break down into (a) experiences of people known personally, and (b) public evidence such as this and this .)
Historical evidence. The challenge above of explaining Early Christianity comes in two parts- (a) What motivated the resurrection Christians to talk about the Jesus events, especially given that large bald men with baseball bats would be presenting a broken-bones argument to challenging Christianity (b) why Early Christianity from Judaism took the form it did (see my previous post).
Some years ago I was planning a post about Jesus' resurrection. Randomly, I had a strange thought- what if, what if, my mother, dead a month previously, were to knock on my door right then. She cooked a meal for me, gave in her inimitable writing the lost recipe for beef mince, told me in conversation true stuff I couldn't possibly know myself, and all this was witnessed by a number of others in the house.
At some point I would ask her “Just before you died, you said you were curious, not scared, to find out what was beyond That Door. What is there there?”
Her answer would doubtless change my life, and what I did from then on.
This is what I see in the Gospels. A bunch of random people who have had experiences so strange, so personally undeniable, that they had to get them out there, regardless of the cost to themselves.
