MERGED: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 1) & (Part 2)

[Minimalist]

I was waiting for this horse's ass to trot out 'Socrates.' Fortunately, Carrier compares the jesus v Socrates evidence issue.

I'm sure our newly arrived moron will run shrieking from the room but for all you smarter people....

To understand the rest of this chapter, it will help to grasp the analogy of Socrates. He is comparable to Jesus in being a fa mous sage whose influence was profound and everlast ing (he is the fat her of what we now mean by Philosophy, in essentially the same way Jesus is of Christianity) without having written anything himself, his influence being entirely through his 'disciples', who each developed communities that then fr agmented and modified his teachings into many competing sects.

And yet Socrates' existence is not in any doubt, nor plausibly doubtable. Why? Because very much unlike Jesus, we know the names of over a dozen eyewitnesses who wrote books about Socrates; in some cases we
even know the titles of these books, and a number of paraphrases and quotations from them survive in other sources. And in two of those cases, the books even survive: we have the many works of Plato and Xenophon, each of whom was an eyewitness and disciple to Socrates, who each recorded his teachings and reported stories and other information about him. We have nothing at all like this for Jesus. Even more unlike Jesus, we also have an eyewitness account of Socrates from a relatively unfriendly source as well: The Clouds of Aristophanes is a comic play specifically written to poke fun at Socrates and his teachings and disciples, written by an eyewitness contemporary to both; Socrates even sat in the audience of its first production! What we knew of Jesus would be vastly more credible and quantifiable if we had anything even remotely like this for him. Yet we have none of the above: we have no eyewitness records at all, much less from neutral or hostile parties; we don't even know of any written eyewitness accounts ever having existed (much less dozens upon dozens of them), and we certainly don't have anything like identifiable quotations from them or their titles and authors.

Socrates 1
jesus 0 Final