Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Mr.wizard]

The problem with this argument is even if you could establish your "minimal facts" , as fact, they don't point to anybody rising from the dead.

The Minimal Facts are:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion
2. Jesus' disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them
3. Saul, the persecutor of the Church, was suddenly changed
4. James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed
5. Jesus' tomb was found to be empty

Not a single one of these has to do with a person rising from the dead.

[Jenny A]

Jenny-

Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.

No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.

Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Mark was written about the year 70, that's about 40 years after Jesus was crucified.    http://www.bc.edu/schools/stm/c21online/...spels.html  To put that into perspective, that's 20 years after Paul wrote his letters.  And more to the point, way too late to be a first hand account, certainly way to late to depend upon for the details.  Not to mention that the book reads like what it is, a theological tale, not a historically accurate one. 

Mathew and Luke really were written in the 80 and 90s.  That is 60 to 70 years after the crucifixion and one of your minimal "facts" depends upon them.  That is that the disciples believed that they had seen Jesus resurrected.  Mark won't get you there because he ends with the empty tomb.

John may have been written as late as 110. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

So take the gospels as gospel and what you have is garbage in garbage out.

[Minimalist]

Mark was written about the year 70, that's about 40 years after Jesus was crucified.

Dating based on the so-called "little apocalypse."

According to the narrative of the synoptic Gospels, an anonymous disciple remarks on the greatness of Herod's Temple,[7] a building thought to have been some 10 stories high and likely to have been adorned with gold, silver, and other precious items. Jesus responds that not one of those stones would remain intact in the building, and the whole thing would be reduced to rubble.

This did happen, in 135 when Hadrian's builders leveled the site and rebuilt it as the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina.  The mid second century makes much more sense for all this xtian bullshit than the first.

In 70 the city was burned and remained an eye-sore, except for the camp of the Xth Legion, until Hadrian decided to rebuild it.  To this day, Israeli archaeologists are 30 feet below street level digging around in ruins from the first century.  Clearly, the claim of the gospel writer...whoever the fuck it was...was more clearly met in the mid 2d century than the first.

But jesus freaks are so desperate for proof that their bullshit is true that they ignore reality whenever confronted by it.

[Randy Carson]

Randy, you have failed to meet any of these arguments with anything but more lies from your bible. You keep saying that you don't need NT books because there are these facts that "NT scholars" accept to probably be true. Citations, please.


The facts you bring up are things those scholars believe because they appear in the New Testament, and they believe the claims of the New Testament for one reason or another (but I'll bet you a bucket of Wartok shit that whatever they're taking as evidence is worth less than a bucket of Wartok shit...seriously, does anybody want this Wartok shit?), and once again the problem with that is that (as I have pointed out in this very thread a good 2 or 3 times at least) THE NEW TESTAMENT IS THE SHIT-SUCKING, MOTHERFUCKING, HAS-TO-BE-PROVEN-BY-SOMETHING-BESIDES-ITSELF CLAIM!!!

ALL you're doing by referring to "NT scholars" is trying to get us to accept as fact things that you have STILL failed to prove, nor have you managed to demonstrate so much as a scrap of plausible evidence for things that HAVE be presupposed for your argument to work. It's appeal to authority, it's begging the question, I think I've even seen some straw-manning of Christ Myth theorists...in case it wasn't clear, I AM yelling at you at this point because you can't get it through your skull that your gospel is a work of MYTH, FICTION, and PROPAGANDA, and that mainstream historians (of, you know, REAL history) have agreed on this fact for years. All the logical fallacy and circular logic and irrelevant fault-finding in the universe will NEVER grant you the rhetorical victory you want because your arguments are based on things that were not true 2,000 years ago and are not true now.

You get one warning to speak politely and refrain from gratuitous profanity before you go on my ignore list.

This is that warning.

If you want to talk to me, and I don't care whether you do or not, then you will do so like a mature adult.

By the way, I went to Barnes & Noble the other night and bought two books:

Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman and The Case for the Real Jesus by Lee Strobel.

Guess which one I'm going to enjoy quoting most?

[pocaracas]

Because ancient people know better than modern biologists. I agree science must be mute and historians can talk all they want. No limits for them because.....magic. Historians use magic all the time as explanations. Historians never appeal to science.

Modern biologists know more about biology, but they aren't any more capable of recognizing a dead body when they see one than Jesus' contemporaries were. In fact, come to think of it, there is one fact recorded in the gospel of John that your modern science can explain...and that proves John was actually telling the truth.

When the Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side, John records:

31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32 The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. 33 But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,” 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”

It turns out, this little detail which would have made NO SENSE to John or his readers, is very factual. People in Jesus' day would not have been able to explain why "blood and water" flowed from Jesus' side, but modern medical experts can. Can you?

So, modern science can tell us why that happened to a crucified body...
Could the person relating that detail be drawing from one of the multiple such crucifixions he witnessed?
The killing of a criminal was seen as a sort of a sport, so everyone would go out to see it.... This practice went on until the 1700's, or even 1800's, in Europe.

We know Jesus performed miracles because ancient sources say so, fuck science, fuck common sense. Also fuck inductive reasoning and the principle of analogy. We needs them? I love Jesus.

Exactly. We can say that Jesus probably performed miracles because eye-witnesses say so. This is not an affront to science; science simply cannot account for things outside the natural realm.

So, I can take Homer's word that Hercules was truly the son of Zeus and a very beautiful mortal woman?
Or maybe I should only accept the part where Hercules was invincible?
Or maybe I should focus on Achilles?

[Randy Carson]

Simply saying, "Gee, people rise from the dead a whole lot less frequently than con men die for a lie" doesn't really cut the mustard. First, we're talking about a dozen of these con men and not one of them cracked. How likely is that? Second, Paul would not have been converted by the mere stories of con men when he was already putting believers into jail and had seen the stoning of Stephen, the first con man to die for his faith.

Serious question: do you really think that your fan-fiction about people who, even if they were real entities, you've never met and have no basis for ascertaining the likelihood of their actions, should be considered seriously?

Why do you think "I imagine these people I never met would have acted in this way," is any kind of real rebuttal?

Esq-

You're missing the big picture. Really.

Nestor granted minimal facts 1-3. Jenny granted Paul's conversion. I've gotten a PM or two from folks who do not want to be outed.

This is not blitz chess. We're playing slow time controls, and it could take years. I might not even be around to see the end of the game.

[Randy Carson]

If the sort of God described in the New Testament exists

Stop.  Stop right there.  This is you trying to twist what evidence exists of the events at the time to support a conclusion that you already believe in without consideration of the evidence itself.  This is how creationists work: "We know god exists, now let's compile evidence for it."  It's a completely fallacious, intellectually dishonest means of 'inquiry'.  And that's the main reason you've been taken to task.  The scholars that you have no problem quoting?  They don't work that way.

You also continue to prop up the claim - the biblical account of Jesus' resurrection - as evidence of itself.  It also doesn't work that way.  You need corroborating evidence.  And there's very little.  Most of it is in the form of, "This is what these people in the ancient middle east actually believed, and here's some actual history providing context for some of the oddities/events/whatever."  There is nothing at all that suggests that the resurrection actually happened.  Nothing at all to suggest divinity in action.  Except in your bible.

Moreover, the bible as the claim is suspect itself since the gospels aren't direct evidence.  They're not even direct eyewitness testimony.  They were written, what, 50+ years after the fact?  And contain conflicting accounts of Jesus' life?  The claim is literally hearsay, compiled and written by people with a vested interest in selling their messiah to the masses.  It cannot be taken with nearly the seriousness you demand.

You want to talk about presupposition?  You're exhibiting it in spades.  And stomping your feet while repeating the same thing with new quotes from various scholars (often bereft of context and not actually saying what you think they're saying) is not an argument.

If this is the best you can do after a decade of online apologetics, consider me unimpressed.

Only since May 13 with atheists, but I'm coming up to speed pretty quickly on the arguments and tactics.

However, in this thread, I'm defending five minimal facts.

What refutation have you offered to any of them?

[Randy Carson]

You also continue to prop up the claim - the biblical account of Jesus' resurrection - as evidence of itself.  It also doesn't work that way.  You need corroborating evidence.  And there's very little.  Most of it is in the form of, "This is what these people in the ancient middle east actually believed, and here's some actual history providing context for some of the oddities/events/whatever."  There is nothing at all that suggests that the resurrection actually happened.  Nothing at all to suggest divinity in action.  Except in your bible.

 All I want is corroborating evidence from sciences for dead people resurrecting. Ex. scientists recreating the circumstances and resurrecting people who have been dead for days. That or modern unbiased researchers seeing dead people resurrecting after days on a fairly regular basis. That would make a resurrection in ancient times more likely.

He says the Christian god did it, which is another way of saying a resurrection happened. It's not a matter of god or not god, it's resurrection happened or not (theistic example, a god didn't do it because it didn't get done in the first place).

I'm confused.

You atheists are quick to point out that there are other accounts of other people coming back to life...I think the last poster cited something in India, IIRC.

So, if there are numerous instances of resurrections occurring, why would Jesus' resurrection be so difficult to accept?

Or are you going to tell all these other forum members to sit down and be quiet?

'Cause y'all can't have it both ways...

[Randy Carson]

Jenny-

Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.

No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.

Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Assuming we've given you good data, what is stopping you from abandoning your 'faith' and taking a logical view?

Obviously, because I think my data set is superior to yours which is incomplete.

[Randy Carson]

Jenny-

Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.

No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.

Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.

Garbage in, garbage out.

What difference does it make if it was written 70 or 40 years after the fact?

Not much for the purpose of the OP. However, Jenny seems to believe that the late dating of Mark gives her the out she needs to avoid accepting Mark as a reliable recorder of historical events.