Why aren't you a Christian?

[Mister Agenda]

Good questions.

I am not a Muslim/Sikh because the Quran doesn't not match the historical information we have regarding Jesus of Nazareth. The Quran teaches that Jesus was nailed to a cross and crucified. History says he was.

The Gospels said he was. The Romans didn't record it and contemporary historians didn't notice it. The Gospels are not unbiased.

I am not a Hindu or Atheist because of the compelling amount of reliable information regarding Jesus Christ and his resurrection.

Plenty of historians opine that Yeshua, the founder of Christianity, was a real person, based entirely on textual considerations internal to the Gospels and I'm inclined to agree that probability leans slightly that way. Your 'historians' shrink down to 'Christian apologists' when it comes to the resurrection. The oldest copy of the earliest Gospel (Mark) doesn't even describe a resurrection.

Jacob Kremer, a New Testament critic who has specialized in the study of the resurrection say, "By far most scholar hold firmly to the reliability fo the biblical statements about the empty tomb."

I don't gather why they should, the biblical account is the one in question, and there are no corroborating outside sources. Even if true, the conclusion one should reasonably reach on hearing a tomb is empty is that the body is missing, not that there was a miraculous resurrection.

Gary Habermas did a survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975 and found that 75 percent of scholars accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus empty tomb.

Wouldn't you think that aligns very closely with the number of scholars who already believed in the empty tomb?

Even Jewish scholars such as Pinchas Lapide and Geza Veres have declared themselves convinced on the basis of the evidence that Jesus' tomb was found empty.

What evidence? The only evidence is that the Gospels said so. The Gospels ARE the claim that the tomb was empty. Evidence the claim was true would be a Roman report complaining vandals broke into the tomb of an executed prisoner, a contemporary historian writing about all the hubub over a stolen body, SOMETHING outside of the Gospels. How do you find something THIS sketchy so convincing?

Jeff, you make it sound like you tried to be as objective as possible, waited until you had done years of study, and then picked the religion you regarded as most historically accurate.

Here's what I think: you were raised to believe and you are biased in favor of continuing to believe. You accept what supports your beliefs and reject what does not. I do not believe that if you had found that only 45% of scholars accepted the empty tomb story, you would have thrown up your hands and called it quits with Christianity.

You'll seem more reasonable if you avoid being disengenuous about your reasons for believing. I think your heart is in the right place, but you need to be straightforward with us if you really want a productive discussion.

As for me, as an act of devotion I read the Bible cover-to-cover. I re-read it in another version to make sure I hadn't gotten a mistaken impression because of the translation. I became an agnostic theist (although I didn't know the terminology at the time) in the sense that I still believed in God, but thought too highly of him to regard the Bible as a reliable source for information about him. Years of gradually increasing skepticism eventually led to a point where I realized one day that I had stopped believing in God altogether.

So the reason for me rejecting Christianity was the Bible, the reason I need a better reason to consider any version of God likely is that I've come to value and appreciate evidence and reason as relevant to what I should and shouldn't believe.

Joseph Smith got signed statements from respected people attesting to his honesty and the truthfulness of his claims and Mormonism is one of the fastest-growing religions. That doesn't mean God lives on planet Kolob. I suspect that despite the historicity, those respected citizens were duped, mistaken, or lying. I don't suspect that for historical reasons, I suspect that because the claims are unbelievable on their face. You don't need a PhD to tell a fairy tale presented as fact from a report of something that actually happened. I saw the Statue of Liberty disappear and reappear, and my conclusion is that I was tricked.

But maybe it wasn't a trick. Maybe it really happened. But it would take more than some historical hearsay to convince me.