kctan

Some people out there will die for what they know as a lie. Its something to do with dignity, honour & such which chinese have grouped together called "face".

Perpetrators of lie will usually die for their lie rather then to be branded a liar & have their work gone to ash.

bd-from-kg

It's surprising that no one has commented on the article cited by joejoejoe. Its main point is that there is little evidence that more than one or two of the Apostles were martyred - i.e., died for their faith. This pretty much wipes out the argument cited, since other Christians were not witnesses to the alleged Resurrection (at least so far as we know), and the phenomenon of people dying for false beliefs is too common to be taken seriously as evidence for much of anything but the fact that there are a lot of gullible fools in the world.

Another interesting article along these ines is Farrell Till's
How Did the Apostles Die?, which comes to the same conclusion. As he points out, it's absurd to cite the Bible as evidence for any such martyrdoms, since the historical reliability of the Bible is the very question at issue:

Also, even if one or more of the Apostles was put to death for being a Christian, to make this argument work it would have to be shown that he knew that it was at least probable that this would happpen. For example, he might have been given an opportunity to recant and refused. There is no evidence of anything of this sort for any of the Apostles. For example, Paul was arrested (and perhaps executed) for being a troublemaker, not for being a Christian; recanting his beliefs wouldn't have helped him in the least. As for Peter, the only "evidence" as to how he died was written long after his death, by people who don't even claim to be witnesses and who obviously would have had a powerful vested interest in propagating a myth that he was a martyr to his faith.

In short, as Christians are wont to do, we find them putting forth an argument for an inherently incredible claim (that a dead man walked out of his tomb), based on facts which are not in evidence (to put it mildly), and which wouldn't be much of an argument even if the underlying factual claims were demonstrably true. What this argument really shows is that Christians have no idea how to evaluate factual claims objectively.

GunnerJ

Propzorz. Did you see my post?