If I was going to write fiction and pass it off as a real event, I might bribe a few people to write their own "independent" accounts so that my fiction isn't so easily dismissed. It's not 'Matthew's' brazenness that makes the story suspect-- it's the fact that what should have been a monumental event gets no other mention anywhere. No one else --Jewish, Christian, or whatever-- found it amazing that men of renown had risen from their graves? No wonder they crucified god... they were pretty damned tough to impress!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
