ichabod crane

I don't think the analogy holds. A murderer is going to cop it anyway whether he admits guilt or not. By maintaining his innocence he maintains the faint hope that someone might believe him and eventually he could be acquited. He also inflicts psychological stress on the people who convict and execute him. People might rather face death then admit that they are wrong, but only if they have convinced themselves that they are right. Sorry, it just doesn't make sense.

Magdlyn

That's my position. Who died for Jesus? Not Mary Magdelene. Not his mom. Paul might have, or might not. That Peter did and was crucified upside down is a theological tradition, not historical fact.

As for the 12, we have nothing on any of them, not much on their lives at all, much less their mode of death. Judas did not die for Jesus, did he? He died after betraying him, so the stories go. And of course, 2 gospels cannot even agree on his mode of death. But either way, it was not a martyrdom.

Stephen, a later disciple, not one of the 12, was reported in AofA to be stoned to death (oddly, as suppsedly Jesus could not be lawfully stoned by the Jews). Just one more story. I take Acts as fiction made up to harmonize the gospels narratives with the letters of Paul.

On into the 2nd and 3rd centuries, there were Xtian martyrs. There were intermittent (not continuous) presecutions of Xtian. These martyrs are not probably the "disciples" your fundie friends are talking about. Their deaths are not in their Bible. Ask your friends to open their Bibles and show where people died for Jesus. Ask them for extra-biblical sources.

RRK

For this argument to work, we have to be assured of three things:

1. The martyr had actually seen the resurrection, or would be in a position to know it had been faked as an eyewitness.

2. There are reliable records showing that the supposed martyr was actually martyred.

3. There are reliable records showing that the martyr was killed for their belief in the resurrection, and would not have been thus killed if they had renounced said belief.

As far as I know, the above three conditions aren't met for even one person, much less the numbers many apologists claim.

blt to go

Are there any sources as to how the disciples died? I have always heard, "tradition holds that Peter was crucificed upside down, etc...."

But No Idea where the "tradition" comes from.

Can we say they "died for a lie" when we do not even know how they died?

jbernier

I would have to look this up but, off the top of my head, I believe that "Peter being crucified upside down" comes from the 4th century historian, Eusebius. He claimed to be using earlier sources but there is really no way to verify this(I think that in this case he cites a 2nd century Egyptian Bishop named Pantaneus; again, not 100% certain).

As I recall, the First Epistle to Clement, probably written somewhere around 100 CE, makes reference to Peter and Paul being executed in Rome some time earlier; again, though, this is just off the top of my head - it has been a couple years since I last looked at 1st Clement.

jbernier

I just pulled out my copies of Eusebius and 1 Clement. In Eusebius' History of the Church Book 2, chapter 25, he mentions that Peter was crucified in Rome, stating that "it is recorded" but not stating where it is recorded. In 1 Clement, ch. 5, Clement states that Peter suffered and was "martureo" in Rome, which could mean "martyred" in our contemporary sense or simply "bore witness". On the basis of these texts it is really quite difficult to say for sure what happened to Peter; it seems likely that he came to Rome but whether or not he died there and if that death was a martyrdom is really hard to say.

sodium

One other point. Even if we concede that people won't usually die for what they believe is a lie, and we concede that early Christians were martyred, it doesn't follow that they thought everything about early Christianity was true. A person might believe, for example, that Jesus was the Messiah, and believe that to convince the Pagans it was necessary to tell the white lie that he rose from the dead. I'm not saying that's necessarily what happened. It's just an example of how a person can tell lies as part of a movement, without believing that their entire movement is a scam.

Of course, the other problem is that we don't really know what the very earliest Christians preached. All we have is ancient books that tell marvelous tales, and which probably do not date from the earliest time of the movement.

GakuseiDon

Fair point.

jbernier

Indeed. They may have been sincere but that sincerity does not mean that they were right.

We can have some idea of what Paul preached, given that we have a half-dozen or so letters written by him - and this is within the first 30 years of the Jesus movements. But, yes, that is only a very small cross-section of the diversity that almost certainly existed in Christianity at that point.

Dargo

Wasn't Joseph Smith killed by an angry lynch mob? I guess that means the Book of Mormon must be true. He wouldn't have died for a lie would he? Why didn't David Koresh admit he was a fraud and surrender before being killed by the FBI? I'm sure there plenty of other examples of religious founders being killed.