show_no_mercy

You are getting the various hearsays all mixed up. James was supposedly killed by Jews, Stephen was supposedly killed by Jews while Paul (called "Saul" for some reason) watched.

Which church father supposedly knew "some apostles"?

Biblo

I believed they objectively saw something, not that it was a hallucination. But many of these cases are due to seeing lines in the clounds off in the distance. That is a more reasonable explanation.

Claudius the Emperor of Rome who reigned and died 11 years after Jesus died. Only 10 people wrote of his doings within 150 years of his death.

Compare that to Jesus, in which we have 42 writers within 150 years of his death. About a third were non-Christian.

Notice too that Julius Caesar within 150 years of his death, only 5 writers wrote about his military conquests.

The point of this is that for the standard of the day, the documentation is more amply supplied of His death, deity and resurrection than some of the most popular people in antiquity.

Not only this but the earliest still preserved papyrus’ still exist within about 70 years of His death. For others, we are talking hundreds and in some cases thousands of years apart.

bacht

You'll find a precedent for martyrdom in the books of Daniel and Maccabees, where Jewish saints resisted aggressive Hellenization even to the point of torture and death. Several Hebrew prophets are reported to have been abused and even killed for their unpopular messages (Jeremiah comes to mind).

The only Christian "persecution" which is historically reliable was expulsion from Jewish synagogues in the 2nd C, thus losing the Jews' special legal status. Compared to what the Jews had just been through in the preceding century this is nothing (Diocletian is a different matter but much later)

show_no_mercy

You are confused between "documentation" and "idol worship". More people wrote about Spiderman than Julius Caesar. Does this mean Spiderman is "better documented"?

Biblo

Adequate documentation is the point.

show_no_mercy

How are the NT writings "documentation"? They are all written in third person. Do you consider the Sophia of Jesus Christ to be documentation? Why or why not?

Biblo

Paul's not writing in 3rd person, nor Luke, Peter, James, Jude or John in their epistles.

Where do you find Sophia?

show_no_mercy

You're right, the letters aren't written in 3rd person. But the narratives most certainly are, which is where you get most of the "historical" stuff from. Hence they're not eyewitness accounts.

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/sjc.html

Biblo

I find all the Bible to be true, so it's not a probablem for me the various writing styles. I like the diversity. Go has diversity in His unity in the 3 Persons of the Godhead.

Biblo

A serious conversation should always come down to a person trying to find a naturalistic explanation to account for the resurrection data, and when they find they are not able to, they inevitibly give their lives to Christ or according to the Bible, shall be resurrected for Hell.