Johnny Skeptic

Consider the following:

http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles...xperiences.htm

How can supernatural events be compared with modern court or academic settings?

How could Bible scholars have sufficient evidence that all of the disciples believed that they saw Jesus after he rose from the dead, or even the majority of the disciples?

Juststeve

There is no problem with evaluating the claim that someone saw Jesus walking around after his crucifixion in a judicial setting. Questions of identification, or misidentification, are frequently tried in court. I’ve done it myself. We do it by calling and cross examining eyewitnesses. Fact finder hear the evidence and draw conclusions from it. Was it really Jones he saw coming out of the liquor store, or not?

The problem with the court room analogy in the case if the resurrection is that apart from Paul we have no eyewitnesses to a resurrection event. What we have is accounts by anonymous Gospel writers about what someone else (the disciples) saw, or thought they saw. This is what we call hearsay and it is inadmissable at trial. The people who claimed to have seen Jesus come out of the liquor store left no account of what they saw. They aren’t around to be cross examined.

We do of course have Paul who gives an account of seeing the risen Jesus. His account however fails to convince. In essence he claims to have been traveling with a number of others when Jesus appeared to him and spoke to him. He also tells us that while he saw Jesus no one else did. Thus this sighting fails the crucial test of being independent of Paul’s own mind. What he had was an hallucinations, not an encounter with a bodily risen Jesus.

In short we don't know what the disciples saw or what they said. We have only what other writers said they saw. That just won't do when we have good reason to think that what they are claimed to have seen is so unlikely.

Steve

aa5874

When you say Paul had hallucinations that is not even hearsay but a fabrication.

No writer in the NT Canon claim Paul hallucinated. And the Pauline writers did not claim that they had hallucinations.

It would appear that Paul may have been accused of LYING, not hallucinating, since he claimed more than once that he was not LYING.

Ga 1:20 - Ro 3:7 - Paul seemed to have admitted that he was some kind of LIAR.

Now a Pauline writer claimed that he was the LAST to see Jesus without any details and could not remember how he managed to "See' Jesus.

2Co 12:2-3 - Now, he seems to suffer from amnesia.

Doug Shaver

They don't, without the disciples' own testimony in their own words, and we don't have that.

Any argument that appeals, or claims to appeal, to the testimony of Jesus' disciples assumes its conclusion and so is worthless to anyone not already convinced. This sort of apologetic is not aimed at skeptics. It's aimed at believers who need reassurance from credentialed academics that it's OK for them to ignore all skeptical arguments.

Juststeve

aa5874

The reason I say Paul had an hallucination is because of Paul’s own description of the event. Paul claims to have seen Jesus himself but admits that none of his companions saw him or heard what he said. This is very strong evidence that Jesus wasn’t really there to be seen, but only in Paul’s mind. That’s what I mean by an hallucination. What would you call it?

Steve

Solo

If a court were to hear the testimony of sightings of a man known to be dead (,and in today's procedural standards there would be a death certificate issued to an executed person,) the immediate legal concern would be the state of mind of the witness, and specifically "the nature of beliefs informing his/her apprehension of facts".

Again, I believe you are mistaken. There is no way that I see, a court, operating under regular process, would be in a position to render a valid decision. IMO, a competent trier of fact would have to set aside a verdict for the lack of material base to the witness testimony. Forget Lee Strobel. He knows he is not arguing legal issues.


This is begging the question, the question being "did the witnesses see Jesus alive days after his death ?". We shouldn't assume there was a problem with recording the testimony. We should assume the original witnesses would be available and could be cross-examined.

Paul, gives no such account. This is an account of the Acts of Apostles which is not corroborated by Paul's writings.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

Gary Habermas says that "the disciples thought that they had seen the risen Jesus." Whatever one thinks of the truth or falsity of such a belief, it does seem highly probable that Jesus' disciples came, shortly after his death, to believe that they had seen the risen Jesus.

(This conclusion is obviously vulnerable to unconventional claims about the date and background of the NT writings, eg the claim that the Gospels are 2nd century CE works, but on standard datings etc the conclusion does seem very likely.)

Andrew Criddle

Johnny Skeptic

But how many of the disciples believed that they had seen the risen Jesus, and which ones? Perhaps some of them did not believe that they had seen the risen Jesus.

Perhaps some of the disciples died by some means before Jesus rose from the dead, maybe most of them.

In the Gospels, the only people who saw the emtpy tomb were the women, Peter, and John. Who did the women, Peter, and John tell about the empty tomb? When the anonymous Gospel writers wrote their accounts of the empty tomb decades after the events, since their evidence was not firsthand evidence, was it second hand, third hand, fourth hand, fifth hand, etc.?

SirTristanC

I thought I saw a ghost once, but it turned out to be a plastic bag floating in the wind at night.

You can see how merely "thinking" they saw the resurrection of Jesus does not equate to actually witnessing it. That is what I believe the point to be, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Steven Carr

The twelve of them, as 'reported' by Paul?

Does any Christian of the first century ever name himself as ever having even heard of , say, Thomas?

Paul came to believe he had gone to the third Heaven.

Some Mormons came to believe they had seen the Golden Plates.

Some followers of TM came to believe they had seen somebody levitating.

According to Paul, Jesus 'appeared' to various people after his death just like he 'appeared' to them before his death.

That can't be right. Before his death, Jesus was actually with the disciples. He wasn't just appearing to them.

So where did Jesus hide in between his appearances after his death? Hanging around in cafes , filling in time until his next appearance?

The whole concept of 'appearances' guarantees that there was no Jesus who was with the disciples.

If Paul had believed Jesus was bodily resurrected, rather than making appearances, he would have used entirely different language.