The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Jenny A]

  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?

I could provide the flying dog or great grandmother alive and well.  Anything less would not be sufficient proof for anyone else to rely on.  And in the case of great grandmother, I'd have to provide a plethora of evidence showing that she had actually died rather than just mistakenly been thought dead.

The thing is that eyewitness testimony about the miraculous is simply never enough to make the miracle more likely  than not to the rational outside observer.  That's the thing about miracles, they are by definition so extraordinarily unlikely that even mass hallucination is more likely than a miracle, otherwise there would be nothing miraculous about it.

The simple fact that neither I nor the supposed witnesses to the resurrection could provide proof, is not proof it didn't happen.  But it certainly is not evidence that it did.

Willingness to die for a belief is proof the belief is strongly felt, but not that it is accurate.

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 remotely persuasive.  Are you sure you meant "coercive."  I have this silly picture running through my mind of a stack of Bibles holding someone hostage at gun point.

Once again, rational people don't believe UFO abduction reports based on eyewitness testimony for precisely the same reasons.   Other religions allege other miracles based on eyewitness testimony.  You believe in the Golden Tablets of Joseph Smith, the accuracy of the Prophet at Dephi, that Hindu priests can turn water into wine?  The evidence for those is the same as for the resurrection.  Claiming more for the Bible is just special pleading.

Have faith in it if you like, but it isn't proof.