The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Randy Carson]

I don't know if this has been answered with any degree of satisfaction: so what if he came back to life?

Well, that would lend some credibility to His claim to be God for one...

[quoteThis is assuming it wasn't a case of him not being dead in the first place,[/quote]

Swoon Theory. Refuted definitively in the 19th century and discarded by scholars today.

or the person being spotted as the "resurrected" Jesus being someone else,

Which requires that his closest friends, family members and his own mother did not recognize him.

or the whole thing being made up

Conspiracy theory.

, or people hallucinating, which are all far more likely explanations.

Hallucination theory. Yep, you covered them all. Shall we discuss them one by one in detail?

Because once you are out of plausible theories, what you are left with is the very real possibility that Jesus did rise from the dead. Which is probably why you DON'T want to delve to deeply into them individually. It's better to just leave them as an unexamined group to increase your odds of being right (in your own mind).

If he did come back to life, what is this supposed to prove? Answer this: if I said to you, "I'm going to die and Allah will bring me back to life, because I am the son of Allah. Islam is true, Christianity is a lie. I will come back to life in 3 days, and you will see me and you'll know God is Allah." Now, you see me die right in front of you. Let's say I get absolutely pulverised. I get thrown in a car squashing machine, I'm truly done. There's nothing of me left but giblets. But guess what? 3 days later I just turn up, and I'm alive again! What does this tell you about the truth of my claims about Allah? Answer the question, or else I put a random person in the squasher too!

If that happened and you came back to life three days later and this was beyond dispute, then yeah, you deserved an audience. I think millions would want to hear what you have to say.

I'll try one more time with the "die for a lie" thing, although I think the video I posted takes that argument apart pretty conclusively.

Let's say there was an event, E. It may be that in fact the event was nothing at all, or nothing out of the ordinary. It may be that E is something incredible. We have no way of knowing at this point. The facts about this event are F.

Now, this is again giving the benefit of the doubt that the gospels were written by eye witnesses which is an unbelievable stretch but I'll allow it for the sake of argument.

Ya know, Rob, considering that you have made no effort to disprove anything I've posted in this thread concerning the reliability of the gospels, you sure do assert that they are not eye-witness account quite frequently. Over and over and over, actually. Just sayin'.

Let's say our author claims to have experienced event E. He may have experienced it, he may not have even been there at all, we don't know yet. He holds belief B about the event. And let's say his conviction about the belief is C, which would range from say 60% up to 100%.

Actually, the authors claim to have knowledge (k) not merely B. Their C derives from their K not their B. Consequently, their C would have to be 100%.

There are three possibilities now:

B matches F exactly
B has some correlation with F but not entirely
B has no correlation with F

Again, we don't know which. Us, the readers, did not experience the event. We only have his beliefs to go by. So we don't know which of the above is the case.

Okay, I gotta stop this here. I skimmed what came next but the flaw is compounding. The authors (two of them at least) had K not B.

Now, sure, you can torture someone to the point that they will deny something that they know to be true. It happens and our military men and women are trained to accept the fact that if they are captured, they will eventually break under torture. Nothing to be ashamed of in that. But we have no record that any of the apostles did.

More significantly, none of them broke the code of silence and said, "Okay, you win. Peter and the guys put me up to this. We stole Jesus' body and buried it off-shore in the Sea of Galilee. The whole thing was just a way to meet the hot chicks in Jerusalem."

No offense, but there's just not much point in slogging through the rest of your post when the premise is so flawed.

Consider K and rethink your position.

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Ref. Post #488:  There's an excellent story about people holding on to their beliefs while being tortured in 2 Maccabees chapter 7.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=CEB

In some cases the more force that is used to get people to change their minds only makes them more determined to hold on to their beliefs.  

Thank you for this example.

It has been acknowledged repeatedly by me and others that people are willing to die for their beliefs.

What is less certain is whether people are willing to make up a silly story and then die horrible deaths rather than deny the fiction.

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I see, thanks

I don't usually like discussing motivations of historical figures (real or in dispute) because I consider it a really unreliable way to get to the truth.

But let me play devil's arse hole anyway, if we're going to bring motivation into it: why would people die for the truth?

Most people would say that something they knew was true was actually false if it meant not being killed. I hope we can agree on that. So what would be the motivation for refusing to "admit" you are wrong, if your life is on the line?

To me, this implies that people's perceptions of your "belief" (true or professed) is more important than whether or not it is actually true. Because if something is evidently true, or well known to be true, then someone "admitting" under torture that it isn't true won't make any difference. If Stephen Hawking "admitted" that actually there is no sun, because he was being tortured until he said that, no one would change their beliefs based on this.

So my conclusion is that they thought one of the following:

1) They knew their version of events was false, but they felt it was very important to protect that fact. Maybe they felt it would be in everyone's best interests to share this false belief, for the greater good. Maybe there were further threats or implications involved in admitting it was false, so even if they knew it was false, they would not say so.

"For the greater good"? Of whom?

And further threats beyond death? Care to enumerate those?

2) They thought it was true, but they felt that the only way anyone else would ever believe the story is if they stuck to it. This suggests to me that the only way to  the "truth" of christianity is literally through the accounts of these few people. Clearly they didn't think the truth was self evident. So even now, the only way we have to truth is their testimony.

Nope. Jesus appeared to hundreds. They did "think it was true" they KNEW is was true. And that's very different.

Is this really so difficult? Sheesh.

Well, that was fun. Like I say, I don't take this kind of discussion too seriously, even when it works out in my favour.

The troubling thing is that you apparently AREN'T taking this very seriously; hence you don't even realize it when it does NOT turn out in your favour.

Tim O'Neill just killed the mythicist view in his article, btw, and you don't even know it...

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The Bible as a complete comprehensive book didn't exist until the English wrote it. There might have been bits and pieces of various scrolls as reference material for them to work with but the committee writers are the ones who wrote the current narrative.  They could have used oral stories to fill in the blanks.  But one thing is for sure and that is no complete scrolls written by Paul exist today.  So the conclusion must be that Paul didn't write a damn thing.  Someone else did.  

And be realistic about the whole thing.  The character supposedly wrote a lot of letters to various places around the Mediterranean Sea between 40-60 AD.  OK, it could have happened.  But is it likely that the recipients would have been able to have safe-guarded those scrolls through all of the wars and disruptions in the following centuries?  Some guys probably used them for toilet paper.  

It's time to start thinking like educated 21st Century adults instead of First Century illiterates.

The canon of scripture was established before the end of the third century and confirmed by various Church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries.