Richard Carrier

[Tonus]

Any Roman soldier who abandoned his post was sentenced to death. If you doubt me and wikipedia, google away.

Errr... that was my point. What good would a bribe do them, if the penalty for screwing up was death? Why wouldn't they instead admit that an angel of god came down and freed the risen Christ? Especially if the appearance of the angel was accompanied by AN EARTHQUAKE???

The story makes no sense, as told.

People refuse to respond to God all the time-- it's their freewill choice. The Bible, and life in general, is full of examples. The Israelites heard the LORD at Mt. Sinai and saw the Red Sea part, yet they worshiped idols anyway. If God appeared to you this minute, would you love Him? And if you didn't love Him, what would you tell others about your encounter?

Is it really true that people see such amazing things all of the time and refuse to respond? We live in a world where a people come in droves to see a smudge that they believe to be the face of Jesus and where someone paid $28,000 for a piece of toast with the virgin Mary's face on it. People constantly 'respond' to the dumbest and most superficial crap that has even a tenuous link to the divine. But we're supposed to believe that the events following the death of Christ were greeted with a shrug of the shoulders, even in the case of guards who might be executed for not telling the truth?

To me, it seems much more likely that people would respond to the truly miraculous the way they respond to banal things that they wish were miracles. Instead, we have a book with many examples of people who directly witnessed the hand of god and were, inexplicably, unimpressed. That just doesn't make sense to me.