Butters

Just a quick comment on Millers idea that ancient people were not superstitious or gullible.
It is typical apologist tripe, meant to impress his own gullible crowd. He. And his main source, Theissen point to the attitudes of small groups of elates, spread out over hundreds of years, representing Greek and Roman scholars, and tries to claim that their attitudes were the same as the common man on the street. It’s analogous to a historian in the future, quoting a few university professors, and a few freethinkers, and claiming that their were no Christian conservatives in the USA in 2006. Quote mining at it’s best.

Malachi151

The whole premise of this debate seems silly to me. Furthermore, coming up with a calculated "chance" that Jesus could have been resurrected is even more rediclious than creationist calculations about the chance of cells spontaniously forming.

Claims of resurrection are simply dismissed by the fact that they were commonly made back then.

Either Christians have to accept that many people were resurrected and ascended into heaven in the past, in which case the ascention of Jesus is not special, or they have to accept that this claim is a story just like the other claims are stories.

You don't issue "odds", or whether or not something like happened. That would be like me talking about the chances that Superman really did fly around the earth fast enough to make time go backwards so he could save Louise Lane.

aa5874

Craig, does not believe in the 'miracles' done by Allah or the others that Ehrman mentions. So, he does doubt 'miracles' done by Gods, but still believes there is one.

Sauron

Well, that didn't take long. Craig's source is Richard Swinburne, an Oxford professor in philosophy. Googling "Richard Swinburne" Oxford, and "97 percent" together yields this summary of the probability argument:

Hint: if I have a box with 9 black marbles and 1 white marble, and I reach my hand into the box and grab 1 marble, what is the probability of getting a white marble? There are only two possibilities. But what is the probability of the marble being white?

No wonder conservative christians are the laughinstock of academia.

Johnny Skeptic

It is a question of probablities. If Glenn Miller and his sources are right that claims of miracles were very rare during the 200 years before Jesus and the 200 years after Jesus, if miracles occurred in the 1st century (Matthew says that Jesus performed miracles thoughout all of Syria), the result would have been an extraordinary amount of interest thoughout the Roman Empire and beyond, but history does not record anything remotely close to that in the 1st century. Historians are not prone to passing up stories like those, whether they believed that the stories were true or not.

The New Testament says that Pontius Pilate was frequently in touch with the Pharisees, and that the Pharisees knew that Jesus performed miracles. If miracles occurred, surely the Pharisees would have told Pilate about them, and Pilate would surely have immediately started an investigation. He would have sent spies to follow Jesus wherever he went, and if the spies saw any miracles, they would have told Pilate about them, and then Pilate would have immediately contacted the Roman Emperor. From then on, everything would have escalated to the point where a number of historians would have recorded the news, but we know that nothing even remotely close to that happened.

If you really want people to know that you can perform miracles, you don't limit performing them to a small geographic region, that is, unless you wish to create doubt, uncertainty, and wars.

darstec

I know that if I were Pilate and heard of someone that could cure the blind and raise the dead, I would be afraid, very afraid. [Certainly anyone who could raise the dead with a thought could equally kill with a thought. I would think that even the disciples would have gathered that much and should not have run away from a few soldiers. Something very very screwy with the whole story.] From some posts I had made in the past, I gathered that the Romans were a very superstitious lot, including the commanders and generals. I doubt Pilate was any different. So either he never heard the stories, or he was the bravest Roman soldier in history.

Sven

It will be repeated ad infinitum even if it is rebutted by dozens of statisticians, including ones with a fundy background. Just look at creationists arguments which have been refuted 100 years ago, and which even Answers in Genesis says one should not use.

Merzbow42

I refuse to believe an Oxford Professor in Philosophy came up with that garbage. There must be more to it.

Sauron

I admit that I was surprised, too. Any my source is 2nd hand info.

But I'm not going to pay money to buy this guy's book.

Toto

There isn't. It's based on Bayesian probability theory.

See Mind numbingly stupid math