(August 6, 2014 at 8:14 am)frasierc Wrote: Maybe you missed my previous comment, I was saying Paul was referring to 500 witnesses – I wasn’t including Paul in that list. If you claimed 500 witnesses had seen an event and that most of them were still alive and that I could contact them – I think that’s a strong claim. If you don’t think that’s strong evidence – that’s entirely your choice its up to us as individuals to assess the evidence and come to our own conclusions.
Paul makes a claim about Jesus resurrection based on a large number of eye witnesses – most of whom were still alive who people could check with. Why would he make such a claim if he was lying? It would be very easy to refute – particularly as many who made claims for Jesus resurrection were killed - yet I don’t see any evidence that his claim was refuted. Do you consider all other eyewitness testimony of historical events beyond a 100 or so years ago invalid?
This particular claim grinds my gears no end. Corinth is approximately 800 miles from Jerusalem. How "easy" would it have been for someone to make the journey decades after the alleged events to find these anonymous witnesses? And assuming the traveler could find someone willing to say, "Why, yes, I saw Jesus resurrected 20+ years ago," what reason would our visitor have for taking the claim seriously? Not everyone in the ancient world was that dim and uncritically accepting of mere claims.