The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[DeistPaladin]

Hilarious. Does the term "criterion of embarrassment" mean nothing to you? Never mind.


The fact that the gospel written for a Jewish audience was attributed to a hated tax-collector and Roman-collaborator ought to give even the most strident anti-Christians pause. Why do that unless it was TRUE?  So, yeah, it does stick out a bit for that very reason, doesn't it?

Again, this is called "Argument from Incredulity". 

You can find better exegesis on any number of websites or in good books. I suggest you try to find some of them.

I've read more than a few and heard many others in debates. They usually run along the lines of "when the Bible say... it really means..." and laughably twisted interpretations ensue. Some of these efforts to square the circle don't even rise to that level but consist of bare assertions like "Isaiah 7 was a double prophecy". 

Since you can't be bothered to even try to post any yourself, I'm going to take your defense of Matthew's perjury to be "nuh uh uh". 





Got it. Let me know if you can ever do any better. 

Ironically, if such an event had NOT happened, then none of the citizens of Jerusalem would have let Matthew get away with asserting that it had. After all, the gospel was not preached in some obscure village in remote corner of Galilee. The apostles stood up in Jerusalem in the day of Pentecost and proclaimed that Jesus was risen from the dead. Funny how no one ran down to the tomb and produced the body to put an end to the discussion.

Beyond the "Argument from Incredulity", here is the classic assumption by apologists that the ancient world was populated by fact checking commandos that, had the Gospel authors been lying, would have descended upon them like a team of ninjas to cry "false!" and presumably this pwnage would have survived Christian pyromaniacs and been preserved through the ages. 

But when we discuss the complete absence of any corroborating evidence for Jesus, the answer is "c'mon, whatdaya want, CNN footage? Nobody wrote anything down back then. Nobody paid any attention to some preacher who was just another doom crier. What are you expecting?"