DetectedDestiny

The other day, when I was visiting a christian friend of mine I looked through some of his apologetical books and in "Jesus, fact or fiction" by J. McDowell I came across the argument of the martyrdom of the apostles.
According to traditional church-history most of the apostles died a martyr death. Why would they have done this if the forged the religion they preached themselves? While I think McDowell is a real demagogue, I found this argument not easy to dismiss. As far as i can gather from my internet search, the only rebuttal for this argument is the assumed incredibility of the accounts concerning the apostles deaths:

http://www.infidels.org/library/maga.../4front97.html

http://www.evcforum.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000157.html

But even if they didn't die a martyr, why would they go to such great lengths to spread a forgery? Would it simply have been a lust for power or something? I can't find an answer that would explain this to me, but maybe some of you guys (or girls ) can?

Mageth

For one thing, the apostles may have actually believed what they were teaching (e.g. the resurrection) was true without it actually being true. In other words, they might not have felt what they believed was a forgery. That the apostles believed it (which the martyrdom legends are used to support) is not necessarily evidence of its truth.

Toto

Martyrs

I don't know why you think this argument is so hard to refute, when we have current examples of suicide bombers and cultists dying for lies all the time. Do the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center prove the truth of whatever they believed?

As for "why would they go to such great lengths to spread a forgery?" They were not spreading a "forgery", they were repeating a dramatic tale, one that improved each time it was told.

Postcard73

The Secular Web library has another article directly related to this apologetic argument:

Why Did the Apostles Die?

Mike(ATL)

Am I correct in understanding that to dismiss the martyr's death of the apostles we must believe that the apostles were either brilliant in their forgery of history or were psychotic enough to die for a cause they knew to be unfounded?

I prefer to add this to a long list of things that just don't add up for the skeptic

Toto

No you are not correct.

You need only assume that someone passed on legends of how the apostles died and embellished them, or invented a more dramatic ending. This has been observed to happen frequently in history.

And no one is suggesting that they knew their cause to be unfounded. People who die for a cause are usually not psychotic, and are not dying for something they do not believe in. But their willingness to die for the cause has nothing to do with the truth of that cause. Again, we have many examples from history.

Amaleq13

I, for one, do not think they knew their beliefs were unfounded.

Regardless, since we unfortunately have ample evidence of folks willing to die for contrary beliefs (e.g. Islam), martyrdom clearly cannot be considered indicative of the truth of any given set of beliefs.

Mike(ATL)

Do you have a particular example where someone was said to be martyred when we know for a fact they were not? In this instance was the record of their being martyred recorded so soon to the said time of death?

The Evil One

The list of possibilities breaks down like this.

Person X is said to have been martyred for a belief B which X was in a position to know the truth of.

Options:

- B is true and X died for it.

- B is false and X died for it despite knowing it was false.
(the absurdity of the second option is used by some as evidence that the first is correct. But, lookee here, lots more options! And none of these tell us anything about whether B is true or false)

- X didn't die for belief B, they died for some other belief instead and the legend was altered later by others

- X didn't die for belief B, they lived till a ripe old age and the legend was altered later by others

- X did die for B, but was never in a position to know whether B was true or not (and the idea that X was in such a position is a later embellishment)

- X did die for B despite knowing B was false, but had some other motivation to do so (speculate as you wish as to what that might be)

- X never existed and the whole thing is a legend.

Unless all the last five possibilities can be ruled out, we have no reason to suppose that B was true on the basis of X's martyrdom.

Jack the Bodiless

for completeness, I'll toss in one more:

- X did die for B knowing it was false, but did not die voluntarily. X was not given an opportunity to recant, or his recantation and plea for mercy was ignored.