The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[downbeatplumb]

There are reasons to dispute all of your premises,

Well, that's true, Jenny. And to be honest, one of the reasons to dispute my premises is because you don't like the conclusion they point to.

Pre-marital sex? That's out? Contraception? No good according to the true Church. Etc, etc. People have lots of reasons for disputing information that is presented to them, and not all of it is based upon the strength of counter arguments.

Wow judgemental much.
Anyhoo your premise that the bible is reliable is not borne out by the available evidence.
The fact that I find it laughably stupid is just a bonus.

especially that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts or that they were attributed to the Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John early.

I have ARGUED my case. You have merely asserted yours.

That we remain unconvinced attests to the strength of your "arguments".

Nor is there much corroboration of the Gospels elsewhere in the historic record.

Jesus was a carpenter from a backwater outpost of the Roman Empire. One wonders that he got a mention at all. But he did, didn't he? And today, the Catholic Church sits in the heart of an empire that vanished long ago. But, yes, the external corroboration is significant.

Well no he didn't till much much later and in inconsistent unreliable ways which seem to point to him possibly being fictional.
I tend to think there may have been a charismatic leader of the David Koresch ilk whose life was enbellished by his followers. I think this mainly because of the silly manner of his death that they crow bar in divine justification for.
  

The Gospels contradict each other.

So did the eyewitnesses of the sinking of the Titanic.

But this means that at least some of the accounts must be wrong.

My major point is that you simply cannot prove god, or miracles, or a resurrection via eyewitness testimony, even if it were modern day eyewitness who you could cross-examine.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in order to make them more likely than not.  For example, if I claimed my dog flies, my say so, even in a court of law under oath would be unlikely to convince anyone because the chances that I would be lying or disillusion would be much greater than the chances of a wingless flying dog.  So too if I and my whole family claimed my great grandmother rose from the dead last Friday.  That would be so even if our disinterested neighbors agreed.  To prove her resurrection would need to provide solid physical evidence of her death, produce the great grand mother herself, and provide proof of her identity.  Even then, we'd have a hard time proving that she really had died and that she wasn't someone else. This is why skeptical people do not believe in ghosts, ESP, or UFO abductions despite tons of eyewitnesses.

So, how would you go about proving to those skeptics that your dog had flown or that your grandmother had been raised from the dead? What would or could you do that the Apostles did not do? And how would you feel when EVERYONE IN TOWN began to mock you, call you a liar, and eventually turn on you even with threats against your life? Would you deny that your dog had flown even if you faced imprisonment, loss of employment, etc? Would you turn your back on what you knew to be true just because other people denied it?

Dogs can't fly.

Dead people can't resurrect and water only gets turned into wine by being part of a fermented grape.

So, I see your quest to prove the resurrection or that Jesus was god via the Bible as hopeless.  Regardless of whether the claims you make about it above are true, the Bible is not sufficient evidence on which to base supernatural claims.  No historical account is.

Sufficient for what? To be coercive?

Sufficient to be convincing. There are many supernatural accounts in history. An enlish Kings touch was supposed to cure scrofula for instance and many of the caesars had supernatural events linked to them that no one takes seriously because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE SUPERNATURAL. 

---

Nah.  That's not how burden of proof works.

The Scientific Burden of Proof

In the sciences, the burden of proof falls to the one proposing a hypothesis. It doesn’t matter what the hypothesis is:

If you want to propose that Particle X exists, the burden of proof falls to you.
If you want to propose that Particle X does not exist, the burden again falls to you.

Either way, in science the person proposing a hypothesis needs to provide evidence for it by using the scientific method (i.e., making a prediction based on the hypothesis and then seeing whether the prediction is fulfilled when a test is run).

Only by doing this can the hypothesis be scientifically established (to the extent that anything can ever be scientifically established).

And your hypothesis is that there is a god and we are unconvinced.
Theists are the ones making the positive claim, we are not.

There is a cat in my garden now.
Do you believe me when I supply no evidence either way?

Or does the burden of proof fall to you to support whatever choice you make on the cat in garden statement?

Do you understand this?

The Philosophical Burden of Proof

Most discussions about the existence of God are not scientific ones. They may involve observations about the universe and things that science studies (e.g., order, design, etc.). However, they also involve premises that cannot be verified scientifically. Many of them involve premises of a philosophical nature, and so the discussion of God’s existence is often regarded as a philosophical matter rather than a scientific one.

Who holds the burden of proof in philosophy? As in science, it’s whoever is making a claim. It doesn’t matter whether you’re:

asserting the existence or non-existence of Plato’s Forms,
claiming the truth or falsity of a particular view of epistemology, or
asserting that moral judgments are just expressions of emotion or something else.

The principle remains the same: The burden is on you to argue for your own claims.

Philosophy may use a different method than science, but its assignation of the burden of proof is the same.

Taken from: Who Has the Burden of Proof When Discussing God? | Strange Notions

The one who has the burden of proof is the one making the positive claim.

You say there is a god, we find the complete lack of evidence unconvincing.

Now was there a cat in my garden?

No clues.