The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[robvalue]

OK, so you yourself would not believe 10 eye witnesses who just said they talked to god. You'd assume they were mistaken. But you want me to believe a bunch of guys I've never met writing 2000 years ago about what they think they have experienced. I hope you can see the problem there.

I've tried to make my challenge very clear, but it seems you don't have anything more than "they wouldn't lie" and I've said already it's not a matter of whether they are lying. People can believe they are telling the truth, as in the above example, and be mistaken, just as you would say your mates are. Considering I've given you absolutely every advantage I possibly can, I'm afraid you're going to have to do better than that, especially with the clear double standard you are showing with my example.

If you want me to stop giving you all those bonuses, I could just say I don't believe a word of anything in the bible except where it can be independently verified. Which is barely anywhere. Proving there was "a Jesus" is a far cry from every word being true.

[downbeatplumb]

There are reasons to dispute all of your premises,

Well, that's true, Jenny. And to be honest, one of the reasons to dispute my premises is because you don't like the conclusion they point to.

Pre-marital sex? That's out? Contraception? No good according to the true Church. Etc, etc. People have lots of reasons for disputing information that is presented to them, and not all of it is based upon the strength of counter arguments.

Wow judgemental much.
Anyhoo your premise that the bible is reliable is not borne out by the available evidence.
The fact that I find it laughably stupid is just a bonus.

especially that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts or that they were attributed to the Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John early.

I have ARGUED my case. You have merely asserted yours.

That we remain unconvinced attests to the strength of your "arguments".

Nor is there much corroboration of the Gospels elsewhere in the historic record.

Jesus was a carpenter from a backwater outpost of the Roman Empire. One wonders that he got a mention at all. But he did, didn't he? And today, the Catholic Church sits in the heart of an empire that vanished long ago. But, yes, the external corroboration is significant.

Well no he didn't till much much later and in inconsistent unreliable ways which seem to point to him possibly being fictional.
I tend to think there may have been a charismatic leader of the David Koresch ilk whose life was enbellished by his followers. I think this mainly because of the silly manner of his death that they crow bar in divine justification for.
  

The Gospels contradict each other.

So did the eyewitnesses of the sinking of the Titanic.

But this means that at least some of the accounts must be wrong.

My major point is that you simply cannot prove god, or miracles, or a resurrection via eyewitness testimony, even if it were modern day eyewitness who you could cross-examine.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in order to make them more likely than not.  For example, if I claimed my dog flies, my say so, even in a court of law under oath would be unlikely to convince anyone because the chances that I would be lying or disillusion would be much greater than the chances of a wingless flying dog.  So too if I and my whole family claimed my great grandmother rose from the dead last Friday.  That would be so even if our disinterested neighbors agreed.  To prove her resurrection would need to provide solid physical evidence of her death, produce the great grand mother herself, and provide proof of her identity.  Even then, we'd have a hard time proving that she really had died and that she wasn't someone else. This is why skeptical people do not believe in ghosts, ESP, or UFO abductions despite tons of eyewitnesses.

So, how would you go about proving to those skeptics that your dog had flown or that your grandmother had been raised from the dead? What would or could you do that the Apostles did not do? And how would you feel when EVERYONE IN TOWN began to mock you, call you a liar, and eventually turn on you even with threats against your life? Would you deny that your dog had flown even if you faced imprisonment, loss of employment, etc? Would you turn your back on what you knew to be true just because other people denied it?

Dogs can't fly.

Dead people can't resurrect and water only gets turned into wine by being part of a fermented grape.

So, I see your quest to prove the resurrection or that Jesus was god via the Bible as hopeless.  Regardless of whether the claims you make about it above are true, the Bible is not sufficient evidence on which to base supernatural claims.  No historical account is.

Sufficient for what? To be coercive?

Sufficient to be convincing. There are many supernatural accounts in history. An enlish Kings touch was supposed to cure scrofula for instance and many of the caesars had supernatural events linked to them that no one takes seriously because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE SUPERNATURAL. 

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Nah.  That's not how burden of proof works.

The Scientific Burden of Proof

In the sciences, the burden of proof falls to the one proposing a hypothesis. It doesn’t matter what the hypothesis is:

If you want to propose that Particle X exists, the burden of proof falls to you.
If you want to propose that Particle X does not exist, the burden again falls to you.

Either way, in science the person proposing a hypothesis needs to provide evidence for it by using the scientific method (i.e., making a prediction based on the hypothesis and then seeing whether the prediction is fulfilled when a test is run).

Only by doing this can the hypothesis be scientifically established (to the extent that anything can ever be scientifically established).

And your hypothesis is that there is a god and we are unconvinced.
Theists are the ones making the positive claim, we are not.

There is a cat in my garden now.
Do you believe me when I supply no evidence either way?

Or does the burden of proof fall to you to support whatever choice you make on the cat in garden statement?

Do you understand this?

The Philosophical Burden of Proof

Most discussions about the existence of God are not scientific ones. They may involve observations about the universe and things that science studies (e.g., order, design, etc.). However, they also involve premises that cannot be verified scientifically. Many of them involve premises of a philosophical nature, and so the discussion of God’s existence is often regarded as a philosophical matter rather than a scientific one.

Who holds the burden of proof in philosophy? As in science, it’s whoever is making a claim. It doesn’t matter whether you’re:

asserting the existence or non-existence of Plato’s Forms,
claiming the truth or falsity of a particular view of epistemology, or
asserting that moral judgments are just expressions of emotion or something else.

The principle remains the same: The burden is on you to argue for your own claims.

Philosophy may use a different method than science, but its assignation of the burden of proof is the same.

Taken from: Who Has the Burden of Proof When Discussing God? | Strange Notions

The one who has the burden of proof is the one making the positive claim.

You say there is a god, we find the complete lack of evidence unconvincing.

Now was there a cat in my garden?

No clues.

[Minimalist]

The four gospels contain clear support for the resurrection of Jesus which He offered as proof of His claims.

Bullshit.

The Mahabaratta gives accounts of numerous Hindu gods.  My guess is you don't think those are "historical."

[robvalue]

As it happens, even if Jesus really did ressurect, that proves nothing about how he resurrected, why or that God exists. It's just a strange phenomenon. The fact that he gave an explanation doesn't make it true, any more than someone doing a magic trick giving the crowd an "explanation" makes it true.

So even if I did believe he came back from the dead, that's all I'm believing. He doesn't get a free pass to just say whatever he likes because he did something cool and it's all just true.

[Minimalist]

The original bullshit story ends with an empty tomb and a bunch of scared women running away.

The rest of it was added-on to beef up that rather shitty tale.

[Randy Carson]

OK, so you yourself would not believe 10 eye witnesses who just said they talked to god. You'd assume they were mistaken. But you want me to believe a bunch of guys I've never met writing 2000 years ago about what they think they have experienced. I hope you can see the problem there.

Rob, the significance of this is huge. You have graciously conceded virtually every objection that skeptics have with regard to the NT and the claims of Christianity.

First, I would want to know what they had to say. But YOU specified that God told us all to become Muslims. This I would know to be false, and the real issue is Islam itself. Second, if they claimed to speak to God about something else, I would be more inclined to listen. As an atheist, however, I do not expect you to make such distinctions. However, the character of Mohammed and the earliest converts to Islam do not offer much in the way of positive reinforcement. Mohammed wanted to be a prophet, the Jews rejected him, so he took his frustrations out on them by violence.

I've tried to make my challenge very clear, but it seems you don't have anything more than "they wouldn't lie" and I've said already it's not a matter of whether they are lying. People can believe they are telling the truth, as in the above example, and be mistaken, just as you would say your mates are. Considering I've given you absolutely every advantage I possibly can, I'm afraid you're going to have to do better than that, especially with the clear double standard you are showing with my example.

And I do appreciate your willingness to find some common ground. We agree that the disciples did not think they were lying...a better way of saying it is that they clearly believed what they were saying, and their lives...indeed, the course of human history...reflects the sincerity of their beliefs. This rules out the oft-repeated conspiracy theory, for example.

So, if you were in a courtroom, and men of demonstrably good character spoke in obvious detail about something they claimed to have witnessed, how would you decide whether to believe them or not?

Philosopher Richard Swineburne speaks of the "principle of testimony" - in the absence of counter evidence, we should believe what others tell us they have done or seen. Without this principle, Swineburne tells us we would have very little knowledge of anything because most of our beliefs are based on what others have told us about geography, science or history. What we know is not based upon our own direct experience but upon the testimony of reliable and knowledgeable people.

If the authors of the NT wrote early, demonstrated themselves to be eyewitnesses or recorders of eyewitnesses, showed considerable knowledge of the locale, people, customs, etc., were corroborated by internal and external evidence, and stood by their stories despite threats, punishments and death, would you say that they were both reliable and knowledgeable?

If you want me to stop giving you all those bonuses, I could just say I don't believe a word of anything in the bible except where it can be independently verified. Which is barely anywhere. Proving there was "a Jesus" is a far cry from every word being true.

That's true. We can agree that there was a Jesus simply on the basis of external witnesses. However, we need to consider whether reliable and knowledgeable men recorded the accounts of Jesus in the the NT, don't we? If they did, what are we to make of those accounts?

[robvalue]

You're going back to the same example you used before, and I called you out for false equivocation. You're trying to make out supernatural claims are the same as natural ones and require the same evidence. No. A courtroom would not accept supernatural claims full stop. It's a flawed comparison, and I'm surprised you're using the same one again.

[Randy Carson]

You're going back to the same example you used before, and I called you out for false equivocation. You're trying to make out supernatural claims are the same as natural ones and require the same evidence. No. A courtroom would not accept supernatural claims full stop. It's a flawed comparison, and I'm surprised you're using the same one again.

You're just using the same excuse again. 

Were the authors of the NT reliable? Evidence suggests they were.
Were they knowledgeable? Evidence suggests they were.

Should we be willing to listen to people who are reliable and knowledgeable about things they have seen?

Scholars sometimes talk about a hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutics is just a fancy word for an approach to interpretation, and so a hermeneutic of suspicion would mean that one begins, in the case of the Bible or in the case of some other ancient document, suspecting that what one has in front of one is likely not to be accurate until one finds enough reasons to reverse one’s position.

Hermeneutic of suspicion is not appropriate for ancient historical works in general. If it were followed, our world civilization textbooks would be blank until we reached very recent centuries. One has to develop a global perspective on the likely reliability of a given author, of a given work, and then if there are repeated places where they can be discredited, yes, move to a hermeneutic of suspicion. But otherwise, one begins with a hermeneutic of trust or one would not have ancient history to write at all. In fact, that’s what historians regularly do…except that some, when they come to the gospels, change the ground rules which is not fair and is not going to lead to the most reliable historical results, either. We want to have a level playing field. - Craig Blomberg, PhD

[robvalue]

I don't care if they are reliable. I already told you, I would concede they are the most reliable people ever. It makes no difference.

I gave you exactly the same scenario, with your 10 most reliable people in the world, and you take the same position as me. Scepticism. The only difference is you already believe certain claims, and you're trying to make a special case why they should just be taken at face value.

All religions claims are equal: they make supernatural claims, and they provide no credible evidence.

I don't know how many more times I can say this, but even if they think they are writing the truth, it doesn't mean they are interpreting the events accurately. So no, if the most reliable men on the planet got up in court and said Jesus just visited them and told them to kill someone, so they did, the court would not believe them. No matter how much they thought it was true, believed it was true, the court would not accept it. Would you? Clearly this "reliable" property only matters if the claims are ones that you have already decided are true. Otherwise, people are simply mistaken, according to you. Can you see there is a problem here? These 4 reliable men, from your own scenario, could stand up in court and say Islam is true. Yet you don't believe them. Now we should be sceptical.

Your case only makes sense if we pre suppose the claims are actually true.

[Randy Carson]

I don't care if they are reliable. I already told you, I would concede they are the most reliable people ever. It makes no difference.

I gave you exactly the same scenario, with your 10 most reliable people in the world, and you take the same position as me. Scepticism. The only difference is you already believe certain claims, and you're trying to make a special case why they should just be taken at face value.

All religions claims are equal: they make supernatural claims, and they provide no credible evidence.

I don't know how many more times I can say this, but even if they think they are writing the truth, it doesn't mean they are interpreting the events accurately. So no, if the most reliable men on the planet got up in court and said Jesus just visited them and told them to kill someone, so they did, they would not believe them. No matter how much they thought it was true, believed it was true, the court would not accept it. Would you? Clearly this "reliable" property only matters if the claims are ones that you have already decided are true. Otherwise, people are simply mistaken, according to you. Can you see there is a problem here? These 4 reliable men, from your own scenario, could stand up in court and say say Islam is true. Yet you don't believe them. Now we should be sceptical.

Rob-

If 10 men told a court that Jesus told them to kill, then we would dismiss them for a number of reasons not the least of which is the fact that murder is a crime. Period.

However, if they testified that Jesus had told them to become Muslims, then I would be skeptical on the basis of what I know OF JESUS. IOW, because what they are claiming contradicts Jesus himself, I would be doubtful.

How do the claims of Christianity contradict what you already know of God?

As a weak atheist, I'm guessing that you have no personal experience of God, so what exactly is the basis for your position? Lack of evidence? And when evidence is presented, you say, "Oh, that doesn't count" and you go on your merry way thinking that there is no evidence.

Seems to me that maybe you don't WANT to hear any evidence?