Diogenes the Cynic

Your question presumed incorrectly that "primordial soup" is any sort of common scientific assumption as to abiogenesis. It is not. The answer to your question is that the precise orgin of the first replicating RNA molecules is unknown to science. We have some plausible hypotheses but no answer yet. Your question, "Do you really, really believe we came from a primoridal soup ?" shows an ignorance as to what science claims. In point of fact "primordial soup" hypotheses are no longer the strongest. Thermal vents seem to have more promise.

Questions about abiogenesis have nothing to do with evolution. Evolutionary theory is completely unaffected by how life originated. I think your real question is whether non-theists really believe that life originated from non-life, and the answer is that we have never discovered any reason that it couldn't have. The fact that we don't currently know how it happened does not open the door for magical explanations.

Diogenes the Cynic

The Garden Tomb is from the iron age. It's far too old to have been Joseph of Arimathea's "new" tomb. It was already at least 700 years old by then.

ynquirer

Nonsense. Paul uses hoti… kai hoti only in verses 3 to 5. You have included another three verses – 6 to 8 – that do not contain the clause.

Therefore, the reason why you stopped where you did is not what you say – that is ad hoc justification.

Is this the best piece of cynical sophistry you can produce?

pharoah

I don't know about the Greek part of it, but it certainly makes sense to stop at verse 8 - that's where Paul changes the subject from Jesus to himself.

Diogenes the Cynic

Fine. I think that verse 6-8 are pretty strongly implied as being part of his revelation. In fact, verse 8 IS his claim to have had a revelation. If you really want to split hairs about it, we will only call that which is included in the kai hoti construction[/i] as being part of what claims to have derived from his hallucinations. That still includes the claim that Jesus was buried, that he was raised on the third day, that he appeared to Cephas and then the 12. What is left out of the strictest construction are the claims that Jesus appeared to "the 500" (a claim nowhere corroborated or explained in the Gospels), then to James and "all the apostles" (which seems to be redundant since he had already appeared to the 12). It's pretty obvious that Paul intended those items to be part of his Gospel formula (unless its interpolated) but even if you insist on splitting these kinds of hairs, the subject of this thread is the empty tomb story and you're still completely stuck with the fact that Paul unambiguously claims to have received his 'burial" information from a hallucination.