The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[robvalue]

I'm not going to go through it all again, but quite simply, the chances of the accounts being accurate I would say is well below 1%. So far below as to be negligible in fact. I would bet my life against £100 that if we could go back and see what happened, it would be significantly if not entirely different to the accounts. Yes, I mean that. The evidence is that weak.

The amount of people who believe something has no bearing on whether it is true. That is the appeal to popularity fallacy. If this was the case, both Christianity and Islam would have to be true, because "all those millions can't be wrong." They can be wrong. By definition, at least one of those groups is wrong. I just happen to think it's most likely they are both wrong.

With claims this extraordinary, the evidence you need in order to be convincing must be similarly extraordinary. And it is not. It is really poor in fact. I don't believe you would accept similar levels of evidence for anything else besides religion, and not even from other religions.

There are huge numbers of perfectly reasonable explanations as to why we may have such accounts, that require extremely little in the way of assumptions. To decide that it really happening is the most likely requires a whole host of unprecedented and unfounded assumptions.

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I don't think Christianity is a joke, but I do think it's a very elaborate con at its core. I couldn't be more sure that it is nonsense. I can't and won't claim absolute certainty, because there is always room for unbelievable cosmic coincidences and yet unknown information and evidence.

I honestly think that if you could see things the way I do, you would agree with me. But you are so tightly wrapped up in it, and so used to thinking beyond doubt it is true, that you just can't objectively analyse it. I'm not criticising, it's just the facts as I see them. If you'd been raised Muslim, you'd be making the same sort of arguments and professing just as heartily that Islam was the one and only true faith. Statistically, that is the case. To us atheists, it all sounds the same.