The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[robvalue]

Well, there's two answers to that. There's the amazing generous answer, from my previous challenge, and I'll just be repeating myself, but OK, I'll try once more.

"Telling the truth" means saying what they believed happened. You are imbuing them with not just complete and utter honesty but infalibility to not be mistaken, or fooled, to misenterpret, to oversimplify, to be confused, for memories to get distorted... or just plain not understand what's going on and filling in the gaps. There is a world of difference between what someone believes about an event, and the truth of the event. And given the unbelievably extraordinary nature of the claim, it will always be staggeringly more likely that they fell foul of one of the hundreds of ways a human can err rather than it actually happened just as they wrote. In fact, actual ressurection itself is not a given. The last part of Mark is highly suspected of being a forgery, meaning even he did not actually know Jesus had risen. It's suspected to have ended at 16:8 with just some guy telling them to spread the rumour he had risen. A story was probably later added to try and cement it as fact rather than a rumour. As you hopefully know, Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from Mark so this is really just the one account and it's not what people would like it to be. And this is all giving them the massive benefit of the doubt that they weren't just making things up. John is another story. Literally

Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_16

Not so generous answer: They got some things right, sure. It's not hard. If you're living at that time, you could write things down that were true. They can also make up a story based very loosely on a real character, and pepper it with actual true stuff to make it more convincing. There may have been a real "Jesus" at the heart of it, but that doesn't mean people can't make stuff up about him. It's not true that they had to either be telling the whole truth or just lies. Surely you can see that? You're still insisting on the false dichotomy that the gospels are either completely true in every detail or totally false. This is simply not true. In fact, the disciples making up the story fits the facts a whole lot better than the story really happening. Far better. It requires no greater assumption than people are willing to make up stories to get what they want, which we know is true. All this "they died for this and that" is also in the bible, so could be written to make it look like they really believed it. We're relying on the bible being true to validate the bible, instead of being sceptical. You simply cannot validate a whole book by matching up a certain amount as historically accurate. Be honest. If I showed a different holy book to be full of 99% historically accurate facts, you would not agree to just believe the remaining 1% supernatural accounts if it contradicted your religion.

At the end of the day, it's just a book of stories. How much of it is really true is unknown, but to just assume events happened without being able to verify them requires a huge innate bias. And as I've said before, even if Jesus came back from the dead, that proves nothing about his divine nature or about God. It just means someone came back from the dead.

As for the courtroom, I've repeatedly taken your examples and shown you that you wouldn't accept your own criteria which you expect me to believe. You only like the courtroom when people are saying what you want them to say, otherwise you find reasons to be sceptical. Please go back and re read some of my posts on this, and see if you can answer my objections more fully. Explain how you're not just making a special case for me to believe one story over another.

I would be really interested in hearing your other reasons why you believe though, because I highly suspect they mean more to you than these rationalisations. It's pretty clear, because as soon as I pin you down on what you've set up, but with a different claim being made, you throw the whole scenario out. So there's something else keeping your belief going.