Kosh

"I sense the truth of it".....

What would cause 19 men to die horrible deaths in jetliners for their religious cause? A Lie?

What would cause 913 people to die horrible deaths (Jonestown, 1978) by drinking poison? A lie?

Of course, first you must prove to us that the 11 even existed, let alone "died horrible deaths", then you have the bigger fallacy which I just exposed.

:banghead: The failing of American education.

spin

Volume doesn't mean correctness, Willow old friend. What happened in history isn't dictated by the volume of later commentary. Your main source of direct evidence from the past, ie the nt, has not been shown to be directly relevant to the period in which the events you suppose are real are reported to have taken place. The gospels as we have them are later literature. They don't fit the indications of that lone informant so oft quoted, Papias. The first church father to know them was Justin circa 160 CE. In short the nt texts cannot be used as front line historical data. And the few classical allusions are in texts preserved by xian scribes.

I think a lot of Germans died during WW2 for a lie. This sort of approach is a non-argument and not worth presenting.

The martyrs:
The world gets turned upsidedown by extremists regularly.

I wouldn't want you to eat the post, Willow, but I do appreciate your snakey "claimed facts", yup, "claimed" is right here, because you have to "facts", so it's very hard to produce evidence on "claimed facts" of nearly 2000 years ago, either for or against.

1. They might not have existed.
2. They might have been confused and easily influenceable.
3. We might have productive traditions which have grown around them.


Yup. Wish you had a few.


spin

Vorkosigan

Willow: would the disciples have died for a lie?

Yup

"Would the disciples have died for a lie?" we're discussin it right now.

Glen Morton has a wonderful page on this nonsense:

• The Mission Canyon formation in the northwestern United States is part of a truly remarkable deposit. It is largely made of the remains of dead crinoids, which are deep-sea creatures called sea lilies. Clark and Stearn report,
  
  "Much of the massive limestone formation is composed of sand-sized particles of calcium carbonate, fragments of crinoid plates, and shells broken by the waves. Such a sedimentary rock qualifies for the name sandstone because it is composed of particles of sand size cemented together; because the term sandstone is commonly understood to refer to a quartz-rich rock, however, these limestone sandstones are better called calcarenites. The Madison sea must have been shallow, and the waves and currents strong, to break the shells and plates of the animals when they died. The sorting of the calcite grains and the cross-bedding that is common in this formation are additional evidence of waves and currents at work. Even in Mississippian rocks, where whole crinoids are rare fossils, and as a result, it is easy to underestimate the population of these animals during the Paleozoic era. Crinoidal limestones, such as the Mission Canyon-Livingstone unit, provide an estimate, even though it be of necessity a rough one, of their abundance in the clear shallow seas they loved. In the Canadian Rockies the Livingstone limestone was deposited to a thickness of 2,000 feet on the margin of the Cordilleran geosyncline, but it thins rapidly eastward to a thickness of about 1,000 feet in the Front Ranges and to about 500 feet in the Williston Basin. Even though its crinoidal content decreases eastward, it may be calculated to represent at least 10,000 cubic miles of broken crinoid plates. How many millions, billions, trillions of crinoids would be required to provide such a deposit? The number staggers the imagination."46

Vorkosigan

JoeWallack

I told you bout codicees, yea.
Ya know they're as corrupt as can be, yea.
Well here's another clue for you all all,
The Walpurgis was Paul's.


JW:
Logically, you can never prove the Impossible without Impossible evidence (think about that). As long as there is a Possible explanation why the "Impossible" is not impossible then it is not the Impossible. So ends the Serious discussion on whether an Impossible resurrection was Possible.

Moving on.org to your argument I don't think you appreciate just how little evidence you have for an Impossible event. David Copperfield could prophesy to you and an audience of your choosing exactly when and where he would make a Temple disappear right in front of your eyes and then do it. You would have the following evidence that David did the Impossible:

1) David Copperfield is known to you.

2) He personally told you and others you trust that he would make a Temple disappear.

3) You and the others saw David make a Temple disappear.

4) David let you knock on the Temple before it disappeared and it sounded like a Temple.

5) David let you feel the Temple before it disappeared and it felt like a Temple.

6) David let you lick the Temple before it disappeared and it tasted like a Temple.

In summary, a person known to you and people you trust predicted the Impossible to you, and you and the people you trust saw, heard, felt and tasted it with everyone present known to you and agreeing with what happened. Yet because this all has no religious significance to you, in spite of the evidence here you would assume that David merely did the Possible. On the other side, so many women at the tomb, so little time before Jesus' return.

In order to try and prove that "the evidence proves the resurrection" you first need to construct an actual, detailed argument. Otherwise your arguments sound like:

1) Evidence could prove the resurrection.

2) The evidence proves the resurrection.

3) The resurrection is true because of the evidence.

There's something missing. Right now you remind me too much of Michael Palin going to John Cleese for an argument:

"An argument is an intellectual process consisting of related statements designed to establish a definite proposition."

" No it's not."

In order to evaluate your claim that the evidence proves the resurrection please give us a concise, inclusive summary statement of your argument including your major assertions. Thank you.


Joseph

MAGIC, n.
An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...yguid=68161660

http://hometown.aol.com/abdulreis/myhomepage/index.html

I buried Paul.

justsumner

I am also a professional historian. My approach however is factual and scientific rather than biblical. I can find no, repate NO "witness" to these same "events."

Period. End of topic. Done.

Chili

Not quite. What if the Resurrection was a metaphysical event?

If heaven is a place on earth only a change of vision is required to see the difference and maybe that is what Resurrection is all about.

WinAce

• On the lives and deaths of the twelve Apostles, by Paul Tobin
• How Did the Apostles Die? from the Skeptical Review
• Martyrs: What do they prove? by Richard Packham
• The Martyrs, by Steven Carr

Now, then... May I suggest printing out the post on a slice of cheese before you eat it? It'll be less rough on your stomache than paper.

CX

Josh McDowell? Josh McDowell is the worst kind of popularizing, pseudo-academic apologist in Christendom. He has no grasp of formal logic, no grasp of historical methodology nor text criticism. He's a cheerleader for Xian apologetics who preaches to the choir.

That 700 hours line particularly irks me. I'd venture to say I've spent thousands of hours studying Xian origins, and the Xian text legacy and I would never begin to say that that some how qualifies me as any kind of scholar nor sets me apart as anything more than a reasonably well-informed dilletante.

In short, Josh McDowell is a joke. Look around the II library and you can find all kinds of responses to his tripe.

justsumner

ha ha ha.

And what if the moon was made of green cheese? BUT..historical evidence and science points to other conclussions. Perhaps it is made of Metaphysical green cheese.

Good god. Metaphyics is history now? :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling:

spin

If the resurrection were a metaphysican event then you have no way of transforming it into the objective world and therefore it becomes rather meaningless in that objective world.

If heaven were a place on earth and every place on earth has been visited, then someone has certainly been to heaven, yet, to quote Omar Khayyam, "none have returned to tell the tale", so we may assume that the first premise is wrong. If it requires a change in vision, then states of metanoia put one outside objectivity and what they perceive does not reflect on objectivity, ie they don't mean anything when you attempt to communicate them objectively.


spin