SirTristanC

@aa5874: Your post has no relevance in the context of this discussion, which is whether there exists any secular accounts of the biblical story of 500 witnesses to Christ, and whether it is even possible for such a large event to have no secular historical evidence. The discussion moved to include other biblical accounts that lack secular evidence, chief among them the revelation to Paul of Christ's resurrection. Dogsgod posted off-topic, but that's no reason to join them.

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There is no evidence in any Roman, Greek, Persian, or even (stretching the possible locales of biblical events) Egyptian historical accounts of biblical stories having occurred.

To understand why it is so unlikely to have a group of 500 people witnessing anything simultaneously during the biblical era, one must first understand how dispersed human civilization was at the time.

According to the U.N., which likely got the statistics from verified and respected archaeologists and sociologists, the human population around the time of Jesus was less than .3 billion. Currently the population is around 6-7 billion, so this is a substantially lower number of people.

In the vast deserts of the middle-east, where the Bible is widely believed to have occurred, small towns and villages were far more common than massive cities and metropolitan regions. In fact, other than Babylon, there existed only a handful of cities of any major size, and those cities are not mentioned in the Bible, but are spoken of in the Qur'an, and in various secular sources. The reason for small to mid-size settlements can be seen immediately upon visiting the region: harsh climate and few life-sustaining resources are available. If a settlement had more than 500 people, it would have been a major city in the region, and would have had (among other things) historians, scholars, and a ruler. These people either knew of or recorded everything that happened in their regions, from rainstorms to criminal trials. For them to have ignored any of the events recorded in the bible would have been a major oversight, an insult to their profession. We see redundant and detailed accounts of secular occurrences, yet no accounts exist outside the bible of any such happenings despite the utter impossibility of finding a group of 500 people that didn't include at least ONE historian.

The entirety of the bible can be proven false/unlikely by merely using statistical facts and observing secular historical accounts. Not to mention the scientific principles that it clearly violates in so many stories (though I suppose an all-powerful being could do that anyways).

As for how 500 people recognized Jesus, it's obvious they didn't. I'll bet you could put 500 people in a room with Jerry Rice and maybe (MAYBE) 20-30 people would recognize him without being told who he was.