Why be good?

[Esquilax]

Here's the thing: 

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John reported what they saw and experienced just as you did.

They endured threats, torture, imprisonment and death rather than deny what they knew to be true. 

Maybe they would have been just as insulted if someone had denied that what they said or wrote was true.

And the Early Church Fathers such as Clement, Polycarp and Papias vouched for their character.

It's reasonable for us to conclude that what the gospels tell us about Jesus is true - at least it is more likely than not.

That's what the historical reliability of the gospels tells us - that the authors were generally reliable in reporting what they saw and experienced.

Seriously? That was your big point? I had suspected, when you first started, but I had hoped otherwise; I guess you just decided to ignore the entirety of your own thread on the reliability of the new testament, then? Hardly surprising, for one so dishonest.

Okay, so here's the difference, oh king of equivocations: The people of this forum are people you can talk to, people whose identities are confirmed, who are currently alive to confirm their experiences and, in many cases, have had their identities confirmed visually by others here. The gospel authors, by contrast, were anonymous, the names on the books added later by people in no position to know, and regardless of your baseless, fiat assertions of certainty, the scholarly consensus, from people actually studying these things, disagrees.

You also have no idea, by that token, whether they endured any form of torture or threats, but even if they did, so what? People can endure those things and still be mistaken; the martyrs of every other religion are testament to that, if we are to take christianity as true.

That the early church fathers vouched for the character of the people who happened to confirm what they already believed, and would keep them seated in a position of power, is immaterial; their bias is obvious.

Given the above, and the supernatural nature of the claims, in a world where the supernatural hasn't even been demonstrated as possible, it is not reasonable at all to accept that what they wrote about Jesus was true. Hell, even if we lived in a world where the supernatural had been demonstrated as possible, we still could not say more than that the authors believed what they wrote... and possibly not even that, given the severe lack of evidence in support of either conclusion.

Which, of course, is all secondary to the main point, which is that you are only pretending that you know who the authors of the gospel are. Whether consciously or not, I don't care; you have no good reason to believe the authors are the ones on the epigraphs.

We had to spend a day contorting ourselves through these ridiculous games for this? Really?

Are we going to get an apology for the insane overreach with which you began this stillbirth of an argument? Or are you going to stick to your dishonesty guns to the last?