Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Redbeard The Pink]

Well, I should probably be intimidated when dialoguing with someone who is so much smarter than I am, but I do it so frequently that I've grown accustomed to it.  

Given your intellect, I would recommend reading William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith if you have not already done so. He gets a bad rap from folks in this forum, but I don't really think the negativity is deserved. The man is well-educated, highly intelligent and articulate. Even if you don't agree with him, you will undoubtedly enjoy being challenged by him.

I'd like to apologize for taking so long to get back to this. My wife and I are moving, and I haven't had much time online. I'll try to go back and read the stuff between my last post and this one, but I'm responding to someone directly here, so I'm just gonna throw this up here and read the rest of it later. Sorry if I'm repeating anything anyone else has said.

I am passingly familiar with William Lane Craig and his apologetics, and I have watched him debate various scientific minds. He has neither more evidence nor more reasonable arguments than any of the other theistic apologists I've heard.

I disagree. Witnesses disagree with one another all the time on various details of a crime or accident that they have witnessed, but they agree on the main points. Whether Nazareth existed or not is not a main point, is it? Certainly it is no where near as significant as whether or not God exists. And on that point, all of the gospel writers agree.

You're welcome to disagree...you're just wrong is all. For one thing, practically none of the bible books were actually penned by the people who witnessed the events they described; those events were mostly recorded (read: invented) many years after they were supposed to have taken place (the gospel stories especially).


This means that not only are they not eye witness accounts, they're not even written from eye witness accounts. That makes them worse evidence than eye witness testimony, which is already one of the lowest forms of evidence in existence. What's worse, many of those books were written under pseudonyms so they would seem like they were written by characters in the story. What's even worse, several of those books were entirely or partially forged to put words into an author's mouth and convey beliefs he didn't have (read: Paul). If god's word is so perfect, why would they have to do all that to make it agree with itself?


Besides, whether Nazareth existed is kind of a main point when the guy from your "historical" events is supposed to have grown up there. The gospels all agree that Jesus was raised in Nazareth, and they all agree that god exists. Unfortunately for you, the gospel does not count as evidence of those claims because they are source of those claims, and there is also no other evidence to support either of those claims.

Why? If I read in a book about the Civil War that a Union soldier recorded in his diary that his men had taken up a position near a farm house AND THAT FARM HOUSE HAS VANISHED AND BEEN PAVED OVER BY A WALMART PARKING LOT, is it unreasonable for me to accept the existence of the farmhouse using the diary as evidence for its existence 150 years earlier?

Unlike many of the apologists I've tangled with, I don't like getting bogged down in extraneous debating. For the sake of shortening the number of points I'm destroying, I'm going to assume you read this information in a history book. While it's reasonable to assume that a history book might contain accurate information, if I weren't sure of its accuracy, there are a number of things I could do. For instance, if the book contains photo evidence of the journal it describes (so we can reasonably believe it exists), and that journal was indeed written by a civil war soldier, then that journal is what historians would call an "original manuscript of a first-hand account." As far as historical evidence goes, that's pretty solid.


If the journal still survives, we could corroborate its existence if we didn't believe the history book, and we could run further tests on it to verify that it was likely written during the civil war in the field by a soldier. We could also compare it to other accounts of events from the time to see if we can add to its veracity. There may also be records of the soldier's service if we know who he was, we might be able to figure out where he lived and who his family was to tie him to other figures of history, there could even be photographs of him...you get the idea. As for the farm, we might be able to trace the history of the plot Wal-Mart is on using similar means. The American Civil War happened after documented science had already gotten kind of popular with some people, so records of that time are significantly better than the time period you're wanting to describe.


The problem with the bible is that there are no such original manuscripts still in tact, and the bible is also a book of myth, not history. The nearest copy we have of a New Testament text, as far as I know, shows up around 100 years after the story was originally supposed to have been written. That may be better than the circumstances for some ancient texts, but it's still piss poor compared to an original copy of a Civil War soldier's journal in terms of reliable evidence.

I agree that the positive claim has the burden of proof.

Ok, so now that we're clear on that...some proof, please? Any? Nothing you've presented counts as evidence of your actual claim. It's either another unsupported claim, or a misrepresentation of the evidence itself.

Wrong on both counts. First, scholars do have a pretty good idea of what they can safely remove from the Testimonium Flavianum and second, there is no dispute over the second passage from Josephus which mentions James, the brother of Jesus. Finally, you might want to check your dates for Tacitus. Tacitus was a contemporary of Josephus.

Man, for a second there I was excited because I was like "Oh man, did an apologist just nail one of my points? Oh shit! Wasn't expecting that!"

So then I double checked my research. And lol'd.

Now, I'll give you one thing: Tacitus and Josephus were absolutely contemporaries. I checked the dates, and presuming Wikipedia is right on this one (I, for one, love me some Wiki), those two men were alive at pretty much exactly the same time. That much I concede.


See what I did there? You showed me some evidence, and I changed my mind. What a concept.


Unfortunately for you, it doesn't do as much for you as you'd like, which brings us to the funny part. I did a little more research on both Tacitus and Josephus. First of all, Josephus is even worse than I thought. I was under the impression that the writings of Josephus had been "tampered with," and the debate was over which parts were forgeries and which parts weren't. As it turns out, the writings of Josephus have been thoroughly debunked as an apologetics tool since...get this mother fucker...THE 1800S!!! That's right, Tex, you just fired a piece of dead apologetics that's been a dud for over a hundred years. Wear your shame!


As for Tacitus, he lived from 56 C.E. (well after human Jesus would have lived, died, and floated back up to heeeven) to 117 C.E. and wrote his annals during the later part ofhis life (he died before completing it), putting most if not all of those writings a good 100 years after Jesus would have lived. In an era without modern documentation or science where life spans were averaging 50 years, it is remarkably easy to pass off a fictional character as a historical one to such an extent that Tacitus would have had no reason to disbelieve the story. Also, as I stated before and regardless of what apologists want to argue, he could have easily been writing about the beliefs of the christians regardless of their historical accuracy, meaning to preserve the historicity of the group and needing to briefly describe them in the process. Tacitus is far from being a smoking gun. Nice try.


Before you try to tell me it wouldn't be possible for early christians to manufacture a historical character, look at the Roswell incident. What most likely actually happened there is that a guy found some discarded foil and wood in the desert. By now, there's a large following of people who believe they found a whole flying saucer and alien bodies that were later autopsied. Another fun fact about aliens: virtually every purportedly true abduction story describes aliens that showed up on tv in the 1950s about a week before the first such abduction story was reported. Here's another one: the Chupa Cabra was first sighted by a woman in the 1990s, and the original description of the creature perfectly fit the creature from the '90s movie Species, and the lady later admitted that she might have been influenced by having recently seen Species when she made that report. Don't even get me started on Bigfoot. The point is, people (even some who should know better) believe whole piles of bullshit on bad evidence sometimes. If it's this common today, imagine what it would be like with no cameras around and no presses to print things on.

Of course I can have it both ways. Think this through:

Dude. No you cannot. I will gladly explain why. Again.


Your argument is an asinine dodge using the same logic you used before. You CANNOT use the same facts that historians use to argue the marginally possible existence of a historical Jewish zealot named Yeshua to argue for the existence of your god-man from the sky. One of those claims is extraordinary. One of them is not. One of them does not require extraordinary evidence. One of them does. You do not have extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary person, or even extraordinary actions. You are trying to use the same facts that point to the existence of a regular guy to point to the existence of a not regular guy. How much plainer can I make this? It does not work. It is a different standard of evidence.

After 10 years of online apologetics, I can bury you on this point. But I think we have more important issues at hand. We can discuss Catholicism later.

(To be continued...)

After growing up in a ministry family of people who routinely brought their full intellectual power to bear when couching their beliefs, I can tell you that I am not impressed by your ten years of online apologetics, nor by any of the points you've presented thus far. I posit that you cannot bury anything but your dick in a bible on this point, and I will gladly get into a debate about the nature of biblical languages if you'd like, but unless you're at minimum close amateur study of that kind of apologetics, that might not be the can you want to kick over. Oscar is a vicious monster, and he has a lot of weapons in there.