andrewcriddle

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul appears to regard the origins of Christianity as he knew it as being the appearances of the risen Christ to various apostles, most of whom are still alive at the time Paul is writing (c 50 CE).

This seems to show that Paul regarded Christianity as starting relatively recently probably during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

Andrew Criddle

Ulrich

During the reign of Canstantine, the population of the Roman Empire was approximately 55 million people, if 10% were Christian, that would make apporximately 5.5 million people. According to adherents.com, the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), which was established in the 1830s had 5,503,192 adherents in the US alone in 2003. They also report that approximately 48% of all Mormons live in the US, giving us a worldwide figure of over 11 million Mormons since the Church started 170 years ago.

Once you look at the numbers in the proper perspective, the rise of Christianity does not seem all that impressive.

muTron the homeless

Hardley seems a fair comparison to me unless I am missing something

One question I would have is what sort of groth curve is expressed in the Mormon numbers. Meaning have they grown at an accelerated rate in the last say 50 years or so. Perhaps the Mormons have been aided from modern mass communication, television adds, marketing, and the advantage of being spawned in an industrilized society.

The early Xians had donkeys and sandles. The early spread of Xianity still seems somewhat impressive if not singular in it's achievements.

Juststeve

Folks:

I think we can all agree that the vast majority of Christians by 70 C.E. believed based on what they were told, not what they saw. A story about a risen savior has the power to produce converts whether the story is true of not. Good marketing not eyewitnesses explains the spread of christianity.

Steve

Skeptical

Wrights argument suffers from an even more serious and fatal flaw.

Even if one were to assume a resurrected Jesus was necessary and sufficient to explain the early Jesus movement, all this would show is that it was necessary and sufficient that people _believed_ that there had been a resurrected Jesus.

There is no requirement dictated by logic for there to be an actual connection between belief and fact. Quite the contrary, history shows that beliefs, even widely and strongly held beliefs, are just as often wrong as they are right.

So, the most Wrights argument could ever establish is that the _belief_ in a resurrected Jesus is all that can account for the early Jesus movement. This, of course, simply begs the question as to whether the belief corresponded to objective reality.

His argument is, quite frankly, not impressive in the slightest and clearly cannot show what he thinks it shows, even if one accepts without question all of his premises.

Obviously there are significant reasons to doubt his premises, just wanted to show that even if you accept his hypothesis, it leaves him in no better position than if you disagree with his premises. Ergo, there's no "there" there.

jeremyp

I'm a bit confused by this whole thread (sorry, but I'm new to this). Why is there even a debate?

The argument seems to be "Jesus was resurrected because there's no other way for Christianity to have got going". Well I can think of other ways that Christianity could get going. To be sure, they might be highly implausible, but I say the ultimate in implausibility is "dead person comes back to life". So the argument is really "Impossible thing (resurrection) happened because otherwise extremely unlikely thing must have happened (for e.g. confidence trick by Paul of Tarsus that fooled whole Roman empire)".

Surely, as long as there is any unrefuted non supernatural explanation for the rise of Christianity it has to be preferred over the idea that Jesus was resurrected, if only on the basis of probability.

Toto

Welcome jeremyp.

I think you are absolutely correct, but I attended a debate where William Lane Craig, who is supposed to be a hot shot academically respectable philosopher, actually argued that the Resurrection was the best explanation of the alleged events, because it only required one supernatural event. I would have thought that philosphers would be throwing rotten tomatoes at him for that egregious breach of logic, but he still seems to be respectable.

Clutch

1. Why is this impressive? Is there any set of popular attitudes or commitments in which we would be surprised to have observed a 10% shift between 1705 and today? 300 years is a long, long time.

2. Nobody is disputing that Christianity spread. The question is whether its spread requires explanation in terms of the truth of (some interpretation of) the resurrection story. There's no reason to think that any of Constantine's Christians had better reason than we have for accepting the story; hence there's no reason to think that our reasons for believing are augmented by the fact that they believed.

Ulrich

It is a fair comparison, because competing religions in this day in age have the same aids as Mormonism, and competing religions in ancient times had the same challenges as Christianity when it comes to gaining new adherents.

The only thing I am really trying to show here is that the growth rate of Christianity is nothing special when compared to other religions. I concentrated on Mormonism because it was mentioned earlier in this thread as a contemporary example.

The point is that if the spread of Christianity and number of adherents should be taken as an indicator of the veracity of the claims it makes (i.e. the resurrection), then the same must be done with other religions. I doubt that many non-Mormon Christians would be willing to believe the claims of Joseph Smith based on the growth rate of the religion he started.

The argument presented by Mr. Craig really amounts to an argument ad populum, and that is simply fallacious reasoning.

cognac

We don't know enough of what his followers believed about him before his execution to say that his death would cause a "fundamental ideological crisis." It's merely speculation to make any comparison between before and after based on the documents we have, which are all post resurrection and are skewed by what followers came to believe that event meant (whatever that event was). And it appears that the most influential "follower" responsible for Christianity's early spread wasn't even a follower before the execution event.