Quote Originally Posted by beachguy in thongs
# Multiple eyewitness accounts - different people, different times, different situations, all seeing the resurrected Jesus, eating with him, talking with him.
Where? I haven't read any such eyewitness accounts.
# Eyewitnesses who were willing to suffer and die for their testimonies, which ends any chance of false motives for their testimonies.
By that logic, Islam is also true for the same reason, as are a plethora of other religions who have all had people willing to die for what was to them "eyewitness testimony" confirming their religion as truth.
# Conservative Bible scholars argue that the resurrection shows indications of being physical/historical event.
I'm not surprised that they would argue that, but what conclusive evidence do they have?
# The Gospels state that the early witnesses to the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus were women, whose testimony was not regarded as credible in the patriarchal Judaism of that period.
Funny the divine Jesus never abolished such sexism, or even spoke out against it. But that's no surprise really, since Christianity is mostly a mishmash of existing Jewish and Pagan beliefs.
# Various arguments having been put forth by legal scholars such as Simon Greenleaf and John Warwick Montgomery and others claiming that Western legal standards argue for the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.
Legal standards? What? How do they prove that a dead man came back to life through legal standards? In any case, I'm betting that they started out believing in the resurrection of Christ and worked backwards to confirm that conclusion. It hardly ever seems to be the other way around with these sorts of things.
# Lack of protests against the empty tomb which is admitedly a appeal to silence. There is no record of the Jewish and Roman authorities disproving the belief by publicly presenting the real corpse of Jesus.
So? Our government isnt clamoring to come up with evidence to disprove UFO conspiracy nuts or other fringe groups.

What evidence do we have that Jesus even existed? Really? What's the evidence? The absence of a corpse? Come on.
# Bible scholar Dr. Gary Habermas argues that there are eight pieces of evidence showing that 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 which proclaims Jesus's death and resurrection was a early creed of the Christian church [http://www.apologetics.com/default.j...rrection.html]
So what? Belief in a resurrected godman had been commonplace long before the birth of Jesus. Try reading something by someone who doesn't start out with the intention to prove their preexisting beliefs: http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/beginnings.html
# Bible scholar FF Bruce states that the presence of hostile witnesses during the time of early Christianity served as a historical check that lends further credence to the historicity of Christianity.http://www.leaderu.com/everystudent/...les/josh2.html
Yet another Bible scholar. Find me something by a non-partisan source, please. The simple fact is, there is no evidence at all from any of Jesus' contemporaries that he even existed. Well, scratch that. Jesus was a pretty common name, and there were plenty of Jesuses recorded back then, but not one that fits the description of the "messiah". You'd think somebody who was performing divine miracles on a regular basis would have gotten a mention by some non-partisan source somewhere during his lifetime, no? How is it that with all his divine powers he didn't convert everybody around him, didn't dazzle them into believing in Christianity? How is it that he only died with a handful of followers who then split up into many warring factions? Come to think of it, why didn't he just use his divine powers to fly away from the people crucifying him? That would have convinced everybody there of his divinity, I'm sure, and he could go off preaching his message to the world (yes, even to the Native Americans that were apparently not deserving of Jesus' teachings until centuries later). Instead, the asshole decides to die and on top of that, make all subsequent generations of humanity pay for it! What did I do to deserve that? Sorry, that doesn't sound like a divine superhero to me.
# Who could find a whole group of people willing to concoct a wild lie, be tortured and killed for it, and not have one of them tell the truth to escape death?
Don't ask me why people die for absolute faith in absolutely ridiculous ideas. Just look at Heaven's Gate or 9/11. Those people's beliefs weren't confirmed by the fact that they were willing to die for them, and neither are the early Christians'.
Charles Colson argues in his book Loving God that as a former Watergate conspirator he believes that conspiracies are hard to maintain especially in the face of persecution and argues that Apostles were telling the truth regarding the resurrection of Jesus.
So why would knowledge of Jesus' divinity be restricted to these few apostles after his death? Why did he abandon the religion (by dying and not using his superpowers to escape it) to just a couple people who couldn't prove anything about anything?

If I were God and I wanted to send my son to preach an urgent message to humanity, I'd have found a more efficient way to do it. Make him fly around the world, immortal, performing David-Blaine-esque miracles everywhere. I wouldn't just send him to some remort corner of Israel with "miracles" only convincing enough to convert a handful of the locals (a tiny fraction of a percent of the Earth's population), to be killed after 3 decades and have his life chronicled a couple centuries later in a work riddled with contradictions and obviously fictional stories. Why didn't Jesus write his own book? Why do we have to hear everything from dubious second hand sources? You'd think a divine being would have left more evidence of himself if he really wanted everybody to believe in him.
# The morality of Jesus and his disciples. Historian William Lecky stated, "He [Jesus]...has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice." It is unclear, however, how this is relevant to the question of Jesus' resurrection, save as a response to the claim that the Apostles lied.
Lots of perfectly morally upright but self-deluded individuals have unknowingly spread lies, and many morally corrupt individuals have successfully put on a disguise of morality. Why should it have been any different 2,000 years ago?
# # The relatively poor educational level of the disciples (most were fishermen), which would make the devising of an elaborate cover-up difficult.
Do you think education was about teaching people to perform cover-ups back then? No, they usually studied classic literature and the like. Uneducated people can do cover-ups. Just look at the mafia. But it probably wasn't really a cover-up of deliberate lies anyways. More plausible is that Jesus was a mishmash of fictional and real stories that later got personified and mythologized.
# The radical change of Saul of Tarsus to the Apostle Paul.
I have no idea what that is.
# The birth and rapid spread of the early church, all from people who were originally hiding in fear.
Well of course the early church spread. If it didn't it wouldn't be around today and we'd be talking about the origins of some other church. That doesn't prove that the church's beliefs are true.
# The Bible says that over 500 people were witnesses of the resurrected Jesus, many still alive at the time. This open declaration was in the face of non-Christians who could respond to the charge. To be fair, this is an argument from silence.
The Bible says lots of things. For instance, that the Sun once stopped in the sky for a couple days. That doesn't make it true.
# The Jewish Scriptures contain many statements that Christians have interpreted as saying that God would take a body, die for sins and rise again.
20/20 hindsight vision. I'm not impressed.
# The early dates for most of the New Testament.
What about them?
# The testimony of the early church fathers regarding the life, death, and resurrection of Christ - some of whom were martyred for their faith and claim to have met or been disciples of the Apostles.
So? People say Elvis didn't really die, but that doesn't mean he's really alive. Same goes for Jesus.
# Jesus fulfilled many Old Testament prophecies (see: Bible prophecy). The probability of the fulfillment of all of them by chance is presumed to be extremely small and best accounted for as a miracle.
Is presumed? Presumed by whom? Not by me. It seems much more plausible that the Jesus story was written to fit the prophecies as best as possible, not the other way around. You know, the same way Nostradamus freaks like to fit history into his prophecies, only the early Christians had more leeway since they were dealing with supernatural myths and not objective history.
http://www.messianic-prophecy.net/ http://www.geocities.com/stonerdon/s...speaks.html#c9 This ought to prompt us to take more seriously the possibility of a second miracle, the resurrection.
Second miracle? I haven't ever been shown that any miracles have happened anywhere at any time. If Jesus wanted me to believe in his miracles, he would come and perform some for me. But since he isn't doing that, I can only conclude that he doesn't care about people like me who are simply incapable of making themselves believe in things for which there is no evidence. And if that's the case, well I don't want to be worshipping anyone that inconsiderate anyways.
# # The experiences of millions of Christians worldwide today, who claim to have met Jesus personally and experience the Spirit which he promised would come.
But we can just throw out all the accounts of having met Mohammed or Vishnu or any of those other Gods of course. They don't count, because they don't agree with us.
blah blah blah...
I'm sorry, I can't deal with all these individually. I'm too lazy and I still don't see any conclusive evidence that Jesus even existed, much less that he was who Christians claim he was.

Let me get this straight. Here's a man who was sent to Earth 2,000 years ago to preach some message of peace (I guess God didn't care enough to send this message earlier), and yet despite being one with the omnipotent ruler of the universe didn't do anything worthy of mention by any of his non-partisan contemporaries and only managed to convince a tiny portion of the Earth's population that he was the real deal. Then, although he had all these miraculous superpowers, he could not defeat the Roman court system and its executioners. So he sacrificed himself to God (i.e. himself) and now he wants us all to pay for his sacrifice. I'm sorry, I've just never been able to understand how people swallow that.