Brett89

What about the 500 People that saw jesus rise from the dead after being crucified? Wouldnt that basically be proof that he was god, no one can survive crucifiction, being whiped then placed in a tomb and then coming back out again. So....whats the argument againt it, just looking for a response back to mabey make me rethink the whole thing. Thanks

Steven Carr

To roughly how many thousands of people did the Virgin Mary appear to on a office building in Clearwater, Florida?

Those pictures went around the world so the Virgin Mary appeared to millions of people (even if some are so blinded that they do not accept that it was an appearance of the Virgin Mary).

Religious people can claim 'appearances', even when the people 'appeared to' deny it, because of their blindness and unrighteousness.

But that doesn't stop me claiming that they are all witnesses to the Virgin Mary appearing on that office building, even if they rationalise with their heart what they saw with their eyes.

So , absent further evidence, Paul's 500+ mean nothing.

Cege

No one actually claimed to see Jesus rising from the dead, but the NT reports that many saw him afterward. Several did not recognize him, though (also according to the NT).

Paul, and only Paul, records in 1 Corinthians that 500 people saw Jesus alive after he was crucified and buried. Paul doesn't reveal specifically how he knows about 500 people but says some of them were still alive at the time Paul was writing.

But if rising from the dead and being seen by many people afterward is the basis for being a god, then Lazaruz (friend of Jesus) who was reported raised from the dead should be a god, too. Lazaruz was seen walking out of the tomb, and presumably by many after he got his clothes back on. And the 2 others that, according to the gospels, Jesus raised. And maybe those raised from the dead by apostles, according to the accounts in Acts.

It wasn't just rising from the dead that was the basis for teachings that Jesus was/still is God. Rising from the dead was fairly common in those days, at least according to the NT.

Koyaanisqatsi

You throw in the fact that Paul as much as admits that he would lie in order to convince anyone of his message and add in the fact that we know his Greek sheep didn't buy the idea that Jesus rose bodily from the grave and you have your answer.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be a lie, if you're a Paulist; call it an enthusiastic embellishment in order to convince those fence-sitting believers out there in magic donkey land.

:huh:

The first clue that it's made up, of course, is that it's a nice round number. How the hell did he know there were exactly 500 witnesses and why would there have been? Is there ever an exact number of humans in groups? I would have to say, no.

Sarpedon

Yes, King Herod apparently rose from the dead too.

Solo

If it is Paul reporting, to begin with. There was a really clever fellow pretending to be Paul who wrote 2 Thessalonians, warning the gullible to beware of fakes pretending to be Paul.

Jiri

MortalWombat

What about the 11 witnesses who signed a statement saying they saw an angel descend from heaven and present Joseph Smith with golden plates containing the words of the Book of Mormon? After all, it's written down in a holy book, so it must be true, right?

axolotl

And what about the 500 dead people who supposedly were resurrected in Jerusalem when Jesus rose up? You'd think 500 previously dead people walking around would have been noticed by a LOT more than the 500 who supposedly saw Jesus! And that the event would have been recorded by the Romans and the Jews ...!!

James Brown

Names please. Can we check out these people's stories, verify against reports, etc? No? Well, neither could the Corinthians.

It's curious to me that every account of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances contains a case of mistaken identity.

So how exactly did these 500 people "see" Jesus? Did they each sit down over dinner and drinks with him, catch up on gossip, inquire about what's really on the other side of the veil? Or was a crowd of people standing around and someone pointed to a guy on a hill and shout, "Is that who I think it is?"

And from where did Paul obtain this little tidbit of information to pass along to the Corinthians, they whom lived much too far away to be able to check this claim? Some say Paul and Peter swapped notes during the former's two-week vacation in Jerusalem. If so, then a long line of unknown editors, redactors, and copyists said that Paul said that Peter said that 500 anonymous people said that they all saw the same thing: namely, a walking corpse. Classic case of hearsay.

Cege

The number of those dead "saints" who walked out of their tombs wasn't given, otherwise I agree that they must have been noticed even if they were one or two.

I'm not being sarcastic, either, when I wonder aloud what those resurrected saints would have been wearing.