The Case for Atheism

[Jackalope]

Here's the problem with this whole line of thinking. You don't have 500 witnesses - you don't have a *single* witness. What you do have is an an unevidenced, uncorroborated claim that there were 500 witnesses. Furthermore, that claim was made by anonymous writers who recorded events that supposedly occurred decades prior, that they themselves did not claim to witness - and even if they did, so what? We have no idea who they were.

In other news, monkeys flew out of my butt this morning, and there were 500 witnesses to that fact. Who were they? Beats the hell out of me.

You're right we don't have any 2,000 year old men or women eyewitnesses of Jesus resurrection!

We don't have any *accounts* of the supposed witnesses.

The writer who made this claim wasn't annonymous it was the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15). He's writing between 10-20 years after Jesus death and saying to the Corinthian church if you have doubts about the resurrection ask them as most are still alive.

Paul wasn't there, and didn't even claim to be there, nor did he claim to have met Jesus in-the-flesh, as I suspect you very well know, if you've read the epistles - which, by the way, I have.

Nice try.

I think someone making a claim of 500 eyewitnesses to an event happening in say 2003 or 1993 - would be a pretty strong claim particularly if they offered for me to talk to these eyewitnesses (so they're hardly unknown to Paul or the Corinthians). If you also factored in that many of the eyewitnesses (such as Peter, James etc) who saw Jesus after the resurrection died on the basis of their testimony about the resurrection.

Given that the *only* writings we have with known authorship are from Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, who we very well know was *not* there, and a whole slew of writings from unknown authors who don't even make a claim of having personally witnessed anything, what we're left with is nothing but hearsay accounts.

Perhaps that's good enough for you. That's your business.