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

[Jenny A]

But the big questions remain. Why second hand hearsay is acceptable written decades after the events is acceptable proof;

Because perhaps those second hand sources were still living DECADES after the event.

"Because perhaps" . . is that really the best you can do?

The average lifespan in the first century was abysmal by today's standards. But if you lived past 10 years you'd live to about 46 or so on average. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy That's based on classical Rome. Might be a little better or worse in Palestine a hundred years later, but not much. So no those decades later writers and witnesses are unlikely. Rather more unlikely than literate witnesses, if there was actually anything to witness.

And the Gospels are obviously not first hand accounts. They aren't written in the first person. They don't claim to be first hand accounts and the synoptic Gospels copy from each other way too much to have been independently written. Nor is there any indication that they are in anyway history as opposed to the recounting of legend. They read rather more like legend.

Kinda like how Reverend Jesse Jackson was present during the MLK assassination, and he is still alive almost five "decades" later and can still tell you what he saw.

Actually Jackson is instructive. Not because many people in the 1st Century lived nearly that long, but because of just what Jackson said and when. First of all, he didn't wait five decades to say boo about it did he? And his story has still grown in the telling over the last five decades. There's still a controversy about whether he was on the balcony (he wasn't). And yet he claims that MLK died in his arms.

why we would accept sources that contradict each fundamentally;

Because they don't.

Really? Here's a goodly long list of contradictions: http://infidels.org/library/modern/paul_...tions.html

why there are no first hand contemporary sources for such huge events. Got any real answers?

Because the average Joe couldn't read or write during those times, Jenny. If the average person in the U.S couldn't read or write, I wouldn't expect to see many facebook statuses coming from the U.S of A.

No we wouldn't expect that. But if we had no written sources for the assassination of MLK's until 1990, those of us who think would suspect it was legendary.

What happened is exactly what you would expect to happen, people could't read or write so they b began to spread.

You mean they spread the news orally? Possible. People have been spreading news orally since there have been people. But oral history is not very reliable and after a few decades it's hard to tell the facts from the legends. That's why we refer the centuries before humans learned to write as prehistoric.

All of which is beside the point. The fact that you or anyone else can come up with reasons why we don't have evidence, does not create evidence. To prove something you need real evidence, not just an explanation for why you don't have it.

And since you love asking questions, how about you answer this one: Why do you think Christianity spread so quickly and so far despite no "first hand" contemporary sources for such huge events?

Well first of all, you would expect Christianity to spread rapidly immediately, if that were the case. But there's no real evidence it did.

For a starting number, Acts 1:14-15 suggests that several months after the Crucifixion there were 120 Christians. Later, in Acts 4:4, a total of 5,000 believers is claimed. And, according to Acts 21:20, by the sixth decade of the first century there were “many thousands of Jews” in Jerusalem who now believed. These are not statistics. Had there been that many converts in Jerusalem, it would have been the first Christian city, since there probably were no more than twenty thousand inhabitants at this time… As Hans Conzelmann noted, these numbers are only “meant to render impressive the marvel that here the Lord himself is at work” [1973:63]. Indeed, as Robert M. Grant pointed out, “one must always remember that figures in antiquity… were part of rhetorical exercises” [1977:7-8] and were not really meant to be taken literally. Nor is this limited to antiquity. In 1984 a Toronto magazine claimed that there were 10,000 Hare Krishna members in that city. But when [researchers] checked on the matter, they found that the correct total was 80.3

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=95