Mageth

And none of them claim to have seen him actually rise from the dead. He allegedly did that in a tomb when no one was around but one or two angels and a couple of sleepy guards. All they claim is that he was crucified (and not all of them witnessed that, didn't they mostly run away in fear?) and saw him again three days later fit as a fiddle.

That's like claiming you're an eyewitness to a murder when you see a dead body but weren't actually there when the shot was fired.

GunnerJ

Operation: Foot bazooka!

Maybe Philo not only mentioned Jesus, but debunked all the claims of the early Xian church! After all, we don't have all his works, so he could have written anything. There goes your little "No one debunked Xianity, so it's true" theory.

Seriously, why is it that we always see Xian apologists making wild speculations without even the slightest reasoning for doing so, besides that the possibilites mentioned support their cherished beliefs? Why, Atticus, is it OK for you to grasp at straws so pathetically?

Um, did you even read my post? I mentioned a specific situation in which it would have been "natural" for him to write about Jesus if he had been around at the time. And if he really did all the things the NT claims he did, then it seems that a scholar like Philo would have dropped a dusty old topic like the Law and written about Jesus instead. A carpenter walking on water, leftovers feeding thousands, people popping out of graves and walking around...

In any situation, if it was not probable, as you claim, that Philo would have been interested in writing about Jesus, then you must renounce your wild, unsupported speculation that Philo could have written about him: its not just a matter of having no reason to believe he could have done so in his "lost writings," but a matter of having a definate reason why he wouldn't write about him. Sorry.

Wait, I thought you had only two points?

...you mean they preserved the ones they didn't destroy?

Anyway, you can't have it both ways: either Philo's works are so fragmented and incomplete that he could have writen about Jesus (which would be out of character, considering, as you mention, how dedicated he was to writing about the Law, but never mind that for now...), but no copies of these writings remain; or the completeness of his works is a testament to the intellectual spirit of the early church with regaurds to pagan/non-Xian literature (and we will conveniently ignore the "incident" at the Library of Alexandria to make this point...) Once again, I must apologize, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

hinduwoman

Is it really applicable? The vedas consist of nothing but a bunch of prayers to various gods and reference to some events which are historical and in some cases allegorical. You cannot contradict prayers.

I think hindu mythology would have been a better term.

missus_gumby

Hi Atticus, it's missus_gumby from the welcome forum here. I have a few questions you may like to think about (and probably not answer here). Who do you think would have the most success, a hindu debunking christianity, or a christian debunking hinduism? And why?

Also, had you been born in New Delhi, which religion would you be debunking? If your answer is "christinity", would you agree with me that personal religious belief is, at least in part, merely a correlation with one's location when born?

Cheers

Martin

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: missus_gumby ]</p>

Skeptical

Actually, multiple attestations are not support for _objective_ accuracy, it is only support for consistency among "witnesses" (I suppose one could call this _subjective_ accuracy, but that seems a stretch). Additionally, the more implausible the attestation, the more independent evidence that is required.

In the 16th century, there were lots of "witnesses" to witchcraft. Many times there were multiple "witnesses" who all corroborated each other. Sometimes they implicated small children under the age of 12 who were then tortured and burned. Were these "witnesses" "accurate" because they all told the same story?

Try reading "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay. Lots of things have been believed by large numbers of people that were later shown to be absolutely false.

Not long ago you would be burned at the stake for suggesting the earth was not the center of the universe. "Everyone" agree and swore it was true. Today we know it is not. (at least, the evidence seems extraordinarily strong that it is not)

In any case, even IF multiple attestations supported accuracy, you fail to see that the supposed multiple attestations have many potential problems:

1) We cannot say for sure who is "attesting", which places immediate doubt on veracity (there is a reason courts don't allow anonymous testimony)
2) We cannot say if the "attestations" are independent of each other (they may all be simply repeating bits and pieces of what they heard from each other)
3) We cannot say if the "attestations" are dependent on other, un-corroborated "attestations". (in the case of Mat., it is all but certain he depends on Mark, so if Mark is unreliable, so is Mat.)
4) Witnesses to any event are generally unreliable, they become more so the more "skin in the game" that they have. The more someone wants something to be true, the greater skepticism one must use and the greater the evidence that must be presented.

Skeptical

I realize that there have been many posts for you to respond to in this thread, but it has been many hours since my original post and I have yet to see your response, so I will post a brief follow-up, specifically to the point in the above quote.

In my original post, I gave 2 specific examples of what I would consider solid evidence of divinity in the NT, the "level of proof" as you say:

1) A clear, specific, un-ambiguous prophecy of an event that 2nd century writers could not have known. The example I used was a prophecy about WWII or a specific date, time and place of a major earthquake. I don't think this would have been too much to ask of a divinely inspired document.

2) A prayer that when uttered allowed one to have an actual, physical conversation with God. (not a figurative conversation) People in the OT seem to talk with God personally all the time, and Gods literal voice supposedly descends from heaven when Jesus is baptized, so again I don't think this would have been too much to ask for from the one and only divinely inspired document.

There are other examples that could be given, but these 2 would have been pretty clear cut evidence of veracity of NT divinity (barring later forgery of course). Nothing like either of these 2 items are found in the NT. Nothing even close to either of these is found.

This is the level of proof that would be expected. If you make a supernatural claim, you should expect to provide supernatural evidence.

Additionally, you try to equate things like joining a political party and choosing an investment broker to determining the veracity of the NT. The issue comes down to how extraordinary is the claim. If my broker claimed he could make me a millionaire in a year with a $10,000 investment, he would have to back this claim up with some hard-core evidence or else I would dismiss him out of hand as a lunatic or charlatan. (unless, of course he had a dot-com investment opportunity circa 1998 :-) )

Claiming to be the one and only inspired word of God and that someone (actually multiple people) rose from the dead is a much higher hurdle to overcome. It would be hard to make a more outrageous claim, so equally compelling evidence is required for this idea to be taken seriously by someone who doesn't already believe that everything in the world works by magic.

(Sidebar: To call Christian belief a belief in "magic" may seem an uncharitable description, but in my view if you believe the NT is literally true, it seems a slippery slope to the proposition that everything is magic and science is evil. The one merit that fundamentalism has is that its proponents at least are consistent, they believe everything in the world can be explained by magic. More "liberal" Christians generally believe in science unless the results produced tend to disprove a core Christian belief, in which case they simply tend to ignore the scientific evidence so please be polite and don't bring it up)

Finally, I will repeat the question to you I asked in my first post, "what would you accept as definitive evidence contradicting the NT". If there is no evidence that would tend to disprove something, there can be no evidence that would tend to prove it either. Without the possibility of evidence, one is merely expressing an opinion.

I'm not asking whether you think such evidence exists, I'm just asking in _theory_, what would you accept as evidence of contradiction tending to disprove the veracity of the NT. After all, I told you what I would accept, it's only fair that you return the gesture. :-)

Hondo

Posted by Atticus_Finch

On your first point, maybe Philo wrote that the concept of Jesus was a load of hog-wash, we can speculate on this point forever, it proves nothing.

On your last point, this is in no way a testament to any fact about xtian authorities, it is indeed a testament to the persaverance of Jewish scribes and scholars.

Hondo

Ted Hoffman

Theli, I find the quote below to be very beautiful:
Atticus_Finch
Of course, its not inconsistent for the right hand to give something to the left hand and find the left hand sleeping. Because they are "one".
Your idea of trinity must be interesting. One part has to shout at the other to know what the one part feels.
Are you asserting that the simplicity and laughability of the site invalidates the arguments being made in that site?
If this were true, they wouldnt need to go to the top of a mountain now would they?
So you are saying the devil was using a figure of speech?
How do you know that?
Because otherwise the statement is ridiculous? Don't you know the church once took action against a scientist for saying the earth was round?
In any case "Man I can see a long ways" does not translate to "Man, I can see the whole world".
So your argument fails. Unless you create a better strawman or a better analogy.

Your point please?
Welcome to the world. There are credible witnesses, and there are doubtful witnesses.
Jesus did not live in a vaccum full of him and his disciples only.

Theli

HelenSL...

Stories has a way of being exagerrated after time.

But I wonder... By what criteria or reasons do you choose what to have faith in?
Why do you believe in Jesus resurection and not my trip to Jupiter?
Would that not be "faith" also?

Thanks for responding.

Tercel

Theli,
You may wish to try reading what I wrote carefully. I’m not saying that they believed that God should be orderly. Rather, it was believed that since God was an intelligent, purposeful being etc that the universe, as His creation, would be consistent, orderly and intelligible.

Yes.

No. If they were, then I’d be a naturalist: That would be very stupid.

It depends, I suppose how you define naturalism. I have seen some pretty wacky definitions of naturalism, the most amusing being “A belief that the natural world is all that exists”. Upon asking what the “natural world” was I was told that it was “everything that exists”: So apparently naturalism is the belief that all there is is all there is. Nice.
For some reason, in my experience, naturalists tend to like these tricks of definition which make naturalism trivially true or impossible to disprove. -If you have a look at the recent debate on Naturalism vs Theism on the Formal Debates board the defender of Naturalism gives one of these type of definitions (as one of the judges notes).

Anyway, as I see it, the proper definition of naturalism is that the belief that the physical universe is a closed system and sufficient unto itself. The philosopher Robert Koons puts it: “Ontological naturalism is the thesis [that] nothing can have any influence on events and conditions in space and time except other events and conditions in space and time. According to the ontological naturalist, there are no causal influences from things <strong>outside</strong> space: either there are no such things, or they have nothing to do with us and our world.”

I wasn’t thinking of arguing the historicity of the resurrection, but I can if you wish... since it is Easter and all...

That obviously depends on how likely you think the alternative explanations are. If we can rule them out sufficiently then, - to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: when we have finished the process of elimination and have only one answer left, that answer must be the correct one, no matter how bizarre we find that answer.

In this case the alternatives are that they were insane/hallucinating or lying. Or as you state:
It is indeed the question: which is more likely? The answer is far from as obvious as you might think. These people went on to set up a religion which honoured love, honesty, trust, truth etc, which would seem to significantly reduce the chance that they were telling major lies about the most major part of there religion. The vast majority of them apparently died because of their beliefs, and many more were imprisoned, whipped etc. The more skeptic atheists argue that our evidence of the martyrdom of the apostles comes from mainly from Acts and the Church writers of the 2nd Century - who the skeptics would have us believe were biased lying bastards ready to make up anything to suit themselves. But interestingly enough, no less than the Jewish Historian Josephus himself records the killing of James the brother of Jesus.

The gospels seem to imply that during Jesus’ ministry, Jesus was rejected by his family and they did not believe his teachings and thought he was crazy. Many an atheist has used this to try and suggest that Jesus was insane - hence solving the old “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” trilemma. Yet, after Jesus’ death and alleged resurrection, Jesus’ family are apparently believers, and Jesus’s brother -James- is an apostle (ie he has seen the resurrected Jesus) and a prominent Church leader. Not only had James apparently seen the resurrected Jesus, but it apparently converted him.

Paul mentions James as a witness to the Resurrection in Corinthians 15:3-7
“I passed on to you what I received, which is of the greatest importance: that Christ died for our sins, as written in the Scriptures; that he was buried and that he was raised to life three days later, as written in the Scriptures; that he appeared to Peter and then to all twelve apostles. Then he appeared to more than five hundred of his followers at once, most of whom are still alive, although some have died. Then he appeared to <strong>James</strong> and afterwards to all the apostles.”

When Paul visits Jerusalem in Acts, James is portrayed as the leader of (or at least one of the leading figures in) the Jerusalem Church. See Acts 15 and 21. Paul also notes in Galations that he met the apostle “James, the Lord’s brother” in Jerusalem (1:19) and that “James, Peter and John” seemed to be the leaders of the Jerusalem Church (2:8). Josephus also indicates that Jesus had Jewish followers after his death, and that James was the leader of the Jewish-Christians in Jerusalem.

“It seems clear that James, and probably most members of his Church, continued to maintain faith in Jesus and to follow the law, including Temple worship. Despite this, it appears that they suffered from persecution from the Jewish authorities. Acts records that Peter and John, two other leaders in the Jerusalem Church, were arrested and whipped for their refusal to recant their belief in Jesus. Paul records that he inflicted much persecution on the church before his conversion. Nevertheless, the Jerusalem Church survived and James was its leader for close to 30 years.” -Layman (He’s an occasional Christian poster on these boards)

Acts records the first persecution of the Christians as follows:
“Peter and John were still speaking to the people when... some Sadducees arrived. They were annoyed because the two apostles were teaching people that Jesus had risen from death, which proved that the dead will rise to life. So they arrested them...” Acts 4:1-3
One of the major differences between the Sadducees and the other Jewish religious groups was that the Sadducees taught that the dead would not rise to life again. Thus they were understandably upset by the Christian claims that Jesus rose from the dead.
The Sadducees clearly never got over this. Acts records that when Paul is later arrested in Jerusalem:
“[Paul] called out... ‘I am on trial here because of the hope I have that the dead will rise to life!’
As soon as he said this, the Pharisees and Sadducees started to quarrel, and the group was divided... the shouting became louder... The argument became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces. So he ordered his soldiers to go down into the group, get Paul away from them, and take him into the fort.” Acts 23:7-10

The Sadducees would have liked nothing better than to destroy the Christians completely because they preached the resurrection. However, the Romans maintained strict control and the Sadducees had insufficient legal powers of their own to do anything worthwhile against the Christians. The Roman governors had made clear that further persecution of the Christians would not be tolerated, so the Sadducees could do nothing but sit and gnash their teeth while their teachings were continually undermined by the Christians.

That is, until 62 AD. In 62 AD, Festus the Roman governor died suddenly. There was a short interlude without a Roman governor while a new one was appointed and travelled from Rome. The high priest at the time was a Sadducee. The chance was there and he took it.
Josephus was a Jewish Historian who’s major work is called the Jewish Antiquities and was written c94AD. He had previously been a Pharisee but was not a Christian.
He relates the story as follows:
That the Sadducees were eager to kill James and those with him (no doubt other Christians) can only be because James taught the Resurrection.
Was James a liar? He apparently didn’t buy into Jesus’ ministry before his death, yet after Jesus’ death we find James teaching that Jesus was resurrected, and leading the Jerusalem Church. What could bring about this dramatic change? The most obvious explanation would seem to be that James believed he had seen Jesus resurrected. -That, as Paul put it “He appeared to James”.

But the testimony of James is not all the evidence for the resurrection. In Paul’s list of those who had seen the resurrected Jesus, James is well down it. I merely choose to concentrate on James here because I thought it would be an interesting academic exercise since I had not seen James used as evidence before.

People tell lies for their own gain, yet it is difficult to discern any gain obtained by apostle’s lying. As I mentioned above, according to Church tradition, the vast majority of the apostles were killed and persecuted for their beliefs. Even if only a quarter of what the early church writers record is true, the apostles were prepared to suffer an awful lot for their beliefs. Certainly religious people are prepared to suffer and even be killed in the name of something that they believe with all their heart is true. But are liars prepared to suffer for their lies?

I think Blaise Pascal put it the most succinctly in what is probably my favourite quote on the subject:
“The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of [the disciples] had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, torture and death, and they would all have been lost” - The Pensees
He also makes the interesting point that the later denial of the resurrection by any of the apostles would have be absolutely catastrophic to early Christianity.

The idea of a hallucination/insanity can be ruled out completely without difficult. Almost by definition such things are limited to one person. Which simply leaves lying. Was James lying? Were the others lying? Christianity is a religion that teaches “Love thy neighbour as you love yourself” and encourages “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control” (Gal 5:22-23) but also says “now you must get rid of all these things: anger, passion, and hateful feelings. No insults or obscene talk must ever come from your lips. Do not lie to one another, for you have discarded the old nature with its habits and have put on the new nature.” (Col 3:8-9) These three ideas are not simply stated once, but rather repeated constantly throughout the New Testament. Is it believable that the apostles could found a religion teaching these things, yet lie through their teeth about the most important teaching of their religion?

No.

I would count that as you lying. It’s not supernaturalism because you don’t make any reference to the supernatural.

The claim has not even reached a sufficient level of credibility for me to consider trying to prove it wrong. But, your point here is true: Naturalism cannot be used to disprove Supernaturalism without begging the question.

Glad I’ve convinced you about Jesus. I'm sorry, but I still think you’re making the Jupiter thing up.

Tercel
PS I'll be away over easter, so any replies will have to wait until Wednesday.

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Tercel ]</p>