Seeker2000

I noticed that a number of books exists that is written by lawyers or judges who examined the evidence for Christianity and the resurrection and came to a positive conclusion, e.g. "The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Four Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence" or "Leading Lawyer's Case for the Resurrection".

Are there also books from lawyers who came to the opposite conclusion?

Also, isn't it difficult to judge over a case which is 2000 years old, anyway? Well, I didn't read any of them, but at least the author of the book from the first link also wrote the 3 vol. "Treatise on the Law of Evidence" which reportedly was the standard American work on the subject for many years.

Killer Mike

Imagine lawyers writing a book in the same manner about Superman stories. They use the "rules of evidence" and see the "eyewitnesses" as evidence that Superman really does all those amazing things and then concludes superman is real :Cheeky:

Next Case!!

Dr_Paine

I remember from one of Josh Mc"Dumbass"Dowell's books the argument from legal evidence. :rolling:

He actually suggested that the 500 who supposedly saw Jesus after the resurrection would be overwhelming evidence in a court case. Can you imagine taking testimony from 500 witnesses?! That would be months of testimony, McDowell noted.

Of course, these "witnesses" were likely the product of the one author's imagination. They're only mentioned in Matthew (I believe), anonymously at that.

Of course, any judge in her right mind would accept such "evidence"! :Cheeky:

"Your honor, three thousand of my closest friend's can attest to the fact that I was nowhere near the crime scene."

"WTF, you expect me to actually name and produce each witness individually?"

Seeker2000

I think you are talking about this passage:

"Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand,
by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles;
and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.
For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me."
1 Corinthians 15:1-10

I think the 500 are really not mentioned anywhere else, are they? I've never seen a remark about them in Matthew. About these verses from 1Cor, I think that many scholars think that part of it is an old credo, which Paul had received somewhere. So one cannot really say where it originated. Another theory I once read on one website said that part of this could even be a later interpolation. Who knows, but this theory is admittedly not very widespread.

Infinite_Rules

The problem with such stuff is that many people pass judgements not based on the strength of the argument, but rather on the social standing of the one making the argument. Lawyers and judges are high on the social economic ladder and any apologist spewing this nonsense will look very impressive.

Seeker2000

Hmm, that might be part of it... lawyers and judges do indeed have a high social standing. I think though that their argument rather goes, lawyers/judges know how to evaluate evidence, so they should know if the evidence in this case is in favor of Christianity or not.

Diogenes the Cynic

The problem is that they're taking mere assertions of evidence and witnesses as actual evidence and witnesses. For instance, they uncritically accept the the Gospels of Matthew and John as being the eyewitness testimony of apostles without any basis for doing so. By any genuine rules of evidence, you cannot accept an anonymous written story (a third person one at that) as representing the testimony of a witness who you can't prove even existed...especially when the story was written a half century or more after the alleged events, copies verbatim from other written sources, is written in a literary language which differs from the spoken language of the alleged witness, which makes demonstrably ahistorical allegations about known historical figures (e.g. Herod's slaughter), which makes wildly fantastic, physically impossible claims about its principle subject and in which the author never even claims to be an apostle or a witness. The evangelicals who write these kind of specious, spurious theses just expect that we should take the traditional attributions of authorship at face value. The reality is that the provenence of the Gospels is so muddled that it it would be impossible to even get them admitted as evidence, much less examined.

The claim that the "500" should all be accepted as witnesses is obviously absurd. The "evidence," such as it is, for the 500 comes from a single, ambiguous statement from Paul, who was not himself a witness, whose chronology of appearances contradicts the gospels and who claims he got all his information through spiritual revelations from Jesus. Is there any modern court that would accept "Jesus told me" as legitimate evidence?

These authors are essentially dishonest in how they're presenting the material. Even the title of the first book, The Testimony of the Evangelists, is dishonest. No such testimony exists...at least not in the sense that they claim to have witnessed anything first hand.These authors are not following rules of evidence at all. They're skipping over all the procedures for admissablity.