The Roman Empire did have libraries. Thus, the New Testament doesn’t claim big, showy, large-scale geopolitical miracles as the Old Testament routinely did. Instead the New Testament claims smaller miracles…
Here you are making the claim that Old Testament miracles were bolder and more daring than New Testament ones because the Old Testament writers felt they could get away with a lot more because they knew that their contemporaries lacked the means to verify or discredit their claims. You imply that if not for the fact the Romans were better record keepers, the New Testament would be filled with more outlandish passages about God obliterating whole nations (i.e, Rome) or maybe more Red Sea splitting episodes.
The assumption you are making here is that the New Testament writers were more careful to avoid making easily falsifiable claims because people during their time had the means (libraries and records) to easily discredit them. I agree that people did have the means to discredit the claims of the New Testament writers but I disagree that their claims were any smaller or showy than the claims of the Old Testament writers.
For example, when the Apostle Paul, who wrote at least 1⁄3 of the New Testament, was addressing King Agrippa, a Pagan King, he spoke of the verifiability of his statements in a positive light.
For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner.”—Acts 26:26
One of those things that Paul was telling King Agrippa about was the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is arguably the boldest and most daring claim of the entire scriptures, Old and New Testament. Think about it. It’s a claim that a public figure experienced a very public execution, rose from the dead 3 days after being confirmed dead and ascended to heaven in front of 500 eyewitnesses. Paul spoke this boldly in front of a Pagan King who was very familiar with the events he was talking about and had the resources to verify the facts. By the way, he spoke this while his life was on the line.
There were many eager and motivated enemies of Christianity who had all the means necessary to squelch the outlandish claim of resurrection. The whole Christian faith rests on this miracle of the resurrection of Christ. According to Paul’s own words, Christians are the most pitiful creatures alive if the resurrection did not truly occur (1 Cor. 15:19). Surely, the enemies of the faith wouldn’t have missed any opportunities to discredit the claim that Christ resurrected. If they could, they would have gladly produced the dead body of Christ and ended the whole Christian religion overnight.
The New Testament writers also named real places and people in their accounts. Many of these people and places were still around by the time they committed the Gospel accounts to paper. Surely, unbelievers familiar with the events and people involved could have pointed out lies and deceptions before they continued to spread.
In addition, all the disciples suffered dearly, even to the point of the cruelest martyrdom, believing they will one day resurrect physically the same way they saw their Lord resurrect. It makes sense that people will die for something they think is true but have no way of verifying (suicide bombers dying for the promise of 70 virgins in paradise), but it doesn’t make sense for people to die for something they know is a lie invented by themselves (the disciples and the resurrection of their Lord). I wouldn’t put myself or my family at risk of death for the sake of something I fabricated, knowing it isn’t going to gain me guaranteed wealth, fame, or power. This absurd thing is exactly what people imply the New Testament writers were willing to do.
When assessing the eye witness accounts of the New Testament writers it would be unreasonable to not consider that they might have actually just been telling the truth. But I know….that’s just too scary of a thought.
One of those things that Paul was telling King Agrippa about was the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is arguably the boldest and most daring claim of the entire scriptures, Old and New Testament. Think about it.
No, it’s not. Nowhere even close. You seem unable to distinguish between ‘claims that are bold and daring’ with ‘claims that are important to my faith’. Claiming some guy came back from the dead for a couple of days, then disappeared again, but we totally have witnesses is not a bold claim.
The entire population of Earth being wiped out in a flood is a bold claim. Two entire cities getting destroyed by supernatural means is a bold claim. An entire world power getting torn asunder by a series of supernatural plagues is a bold claim.
Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a bold claim. The other claims require unfathomable property damage and loss of life on the multiple-world-war scale. Jesus’ claim requires about as many people who went to my High School Prom all agreeing to tell a lie. That’s what Eliezer means about the difference between large and small miracles.
To claim Jesus resurrected is a bold claim, especially since Jesus was a public figure who received a public execution within a very hostile and skeptical environment.
Let me illustrate with two scenarios. For the purposes of this example, let’s say I’m from a small town and both scenarios involve me making a claim to a miraculous event.
Scenario 1:
I tell the people in my town that all of Israel’s modern day enemies (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) just miraculously got wiped out by hail stones and fire from heaven. Yes, that is a bold claim.
Scenario 2:
I tell the people in my small town that the Sheriff they all know and all recently witnessed getting gunned down in public and whose funeral they all attended and saw his dead body in the casket, is still alive because he rose from the dead with 500 town folk (who I mention by name; Jess, Billy, Tom, Sarah May) who witnessed him ascend into heaven.
Without such a thing as the internet, which one of these claims is easier for the town people to verify or discredit? Which claim is really bolder?
Now, imagine if the town people were the ones who murdered the Sheriff and are eager to tie up any loose ends.
Anyways, one thing I’m sure you haven’t done is actually read the Bible without the presupposition that it’s lying. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I have yet to see any skeptic really do that.
Scenario 1 is still the bolder claim. Egypt wasn’t that far away from Isreal and any member of the village could have actually gone to Egypt. Jerusalem Isreal to Giza Egypt would be about a 2 week travel on foot. Tel-Aviv Isreal to Alexandria Egypt would be about a 3 day boat ride with biblical technology. Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to travel that far, but ancient traders did that all the time to trade goods.
As it turns out, those stories in Exodus were complete lies and fabrications. There is little evidence any significant number of Jews were ever in Egypt during that time period, and zero evidence the plagues ever occurred. The Bible was willing to lie about something so massive it would have made all the history books, and been carved on every monument. That’s really, really bold.
Additionally, we don’t have hundreds of reports of Jesus’ resurrection. We have one report saying that hundreds of people saw it, and that one report was written down a hundred years after Jesus’ death. If I claim that my great-grandfather rose from the grave in 1912, it doesn’t make it any more credible if I claim that 1,000 people also saw it. It would be silly to say that since 1000 is twice as much as 500, so my great-grandfather’s resurrection is twice as likely as Jesus’. The authorities didn’t bother discrediting it at the time any more than the CIA bothers with discrediting Elvis sightings. There was nothing there for them to discredit.
Scenario 1 is still the bolder claim. Egypt wasn’t that far away from Isreal and any member of the village could have actually gone to Egypt. Jerusalem Isreal to Giza Egypt would be about a 2 week travel on foot. Tel-Aviv Isreal to Alexandria Egypt would be about a 3 day boat ride with biblical technology. Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to travel that far, but ancient traders did that all the time to trade goods.
At least you are giving them some credit. It really wasn’t that easy to fool people with “fabricated” events involving prominent cities and countries. News traveled through trade as well; one way people verified info about farther away places back then.
I just can’t write about a major event involving two prominent cities being obliterated and get away with it unless there was some level of truth to it, even back then.
As it turns out, those stories in Exodus were complete lies and fabrications. There is little evidence any significant number of Jews were ever in Egypt during that time period, and zero evidence the plagues ever occurred. The Bible was willing to lie about something so massive it would have made all the history books, and been carved on every monument.
There’s a lot of significant events that probably occurred back then, which have not left that much of an archaeological or historical footprint; or maybe there is evidence but it has not yet been found; or maybe there’s evidence but it’s currently being misunderstood or ignored. Also, even if there is no remaining evidence (sometimes being all lost in times past), it does not mean that the event did not occur. The lack of evidence does not mean the lack of existence.
Maybe the Biblical account is an accurate record of the events you draw into question? Oh, but that is impossible for you to assume because you begin with the presupposition that the Biblical writers are lying about everything.
The Bible was willing to lie about something so massive it would have made all the history books, and been carved on every monument.
You seem here to be committing the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent.
Your argument:
If a massive event such as a 2 million person exodus really occurred, it would have made all the history books and been carved on every ancient monument. It did not make all the history books and get carved on every monument. Therefore it did not really occur.
Problem:
The ancient Egyptians didn’t have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak.
If I claim that my great-grandfather rose from the grave in 1912, it doesn’t make it any more credible if I claim that 1,000 people also saw it.:
If most of those 1000 people are still alive, live in my city, and are accessible by me for interviews and they affirm your claim it does add credibility to your claim. If there is clearly no ill incentive such as guaranteed riches, power, fame, or pleasure involved in your motives it will add more weight to your claim. If you are perfectly sane, giving no reason for me to doubt your sanity, it would add more weight to your claim. If you are risking your livelihood, the physical well-being of your whole family and your own life for the sake of your claim, it would add more credibility to your case. If all those things are there, it’s not reasonable for me to doubt your claim except if I have a strong presupposition that it is impossible for someone who was dead to become alive again...which by the way I do believe is very impossible unless there is a supernatural act of God.
Additionally, we don’t have hundreds of reports of Jesus’ resurrection. We have one report saying that hundreds of people saw it, and that one report was written down a hundred years after Jesus’ death.
Put yourself in the context of ancient Roman time. It would be ridiculous to expect that all these hundreds of eyewitnesses (who were most likely illiterate) would write down their testimonies to pass it down to us. The important matter is that most of them were alive during the time period when the claims of the Gospels were being publicized. And for a note, it was not written a hundred years after Jesus death; more like a few decades.
The authorities didn’t bother discrediting it at the time any more than the CIA bothers with discrediting Elvis sightings.
The CIA has whatsoever no incentive to care about Elvis sightings, whereby the Jewish leaders had every incentive in the world to care about the claim that Jesus resurrected from the dead and they did care a lot. I don’t have time to go into proof that they cared but just understand that the Jewish leaders had the same level of incentive to care about this claim as Homeland Security will have if multiple people claim they sighted a well known most wanted terrorist in their city.
The ancient Egyptians don’t have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak.
It’s not just about history books and monuments. It’s about every facet of life that gets effected. For example, when the black death hit Europe, we were able to see massive changes to everything.
Economists, archeologists, and historians for example can trace the massive economic disruption of the black death. The deaths of a large percentage of the population created economic pressures, increasing the demand for workers. You then see greater economic mobility for peasants because of the demand, creating a free-er marketplace for labor. Every single written word we have regarding economic exchange from that time notes the massive inflation of wages for peasants (along with Lords grumbling that peasants were getting uppity and greedy demanding wages). But it’s not just that. We can go back and look at how working conditions improved in the state of buildings from back then, as lords suddenly had to compete for peasant labor.
Peasant wages skyrocketed, in some cases 500-1000%. And even though long distance trade went down, consumer-good trade went up since peasants could now afford more. What’s more, archeologists have looked at those times and noted how there was a sharp decline in exotic goods and wealth in the elite holdings, and how there was a sharp increase in goods/tools found in peasant houses. The proof is not just in words (although it’s there too), it’s in the ground.
We can look back, not just at records but at land (keep in mind, there are also extensive records too). Year after year, lords stopped trying to cultivate land and can look at a field and see how decreases in labor translated to more fallow fields. Additionally, we can look in trash piles, and note the increase in animal bones. You see, animals could be fed on lands without much labor, so as you became unable to work land for agriculture, you could increase animal production to compensate. What’s more, we can also note products in the trash-piles. Dramatic shifts in clothing as wool/leather replaced plant based fabric. Additionally low-labor crops like apples, grapes, vegetables, etc replaced high labor crops like wheat.
This is just one aspect of it. You can look at the sizes and styles of buildings during that era. You can note how the Sondergotik, and Brick Gothic, and Rectilinear architecture styles all suddenly appeared at the same time. You can note how technology development and usage changed. You can look at public works. You can look at weapons and armor in war. You can look at the mass graves from plague deaths. You can look at the bones of those who died before and after the plague and note the nutrition differences. Everything felt the ripple effects. An event like that creates massive ripple effects that can be seen in every aspect of life.
I used the Black Death as an example because it’s the most dramatic and most famous shift, but similar results happen with every civilization that has dramatic events occur like wars/plagues/natural disasters. We can look at the Greco-Persian wars and see the impact to villas and peasant homes and trash piles etc. We can look at the end of the Zhou Dynasty in China and see the effects on trade and trash piles and buildings ect. But we can’t look at the plagues in Egypt and the exodus of the Jews. Every piece of evidence… not just writings and monuments but every piece of evidence from trash piles, to agriculture field samples, to architecture, to graves… everything shows that the stories in the bible never occurred. There never were any plagues, there never was a massive die off of first born sons, there never were a bunch of Jews who left. It simply never happened.
It was just a fairy tale made up out of whole cloth by the bible, a complete fabrication.
NB: As a meta-note you can make quotes by using the > command. So instead of using quote marks to quote, you can quote…
Like I mentioned earlier, there’s probably ample evidence for the events recorded in the book of Exodus. The evidence that currently supports the Exodus account is likely being misunderstood or ignored by mainstream historians and archeologists. A minority voice within the field of Egyptology, Dr. David Rohl’s makes a compelling case against the traditional ancient Egyptian chronology. A majority of Egyptologists acknowledge that there are major problems with the traditional chronology but they reject Rohl’s alternative chronology (which is expected when people are set in their ways). I think Rohl is on to something with his chronology.
Outside of mainstream Egyptology, David Down proposes a 500 year reduction in the chronology. The interesting thing is that with either Rohl’s or Down’s revised chronology there is very smooth correlation between the Biblical account and the archeological evidence. Seriously, the fit is so uncanny it is amazing that it does not at least perk the curiosity amongst the hardest skeptics. It seems like when challenged with reasonable arguments most skeptics don’t even take time to weigh the arguments but just simply hide behind what they believe to be majority consensus amongst so and so experts about the subject and continue to make bold assertions that the opposing view has whatsoever no evidence supporting their arguments.
As for the 10 plagues of Egypt, I think the papyrus of Ipuwer, which was found and interpreted in 1909 should not be so easily dismissed by skeptics as evidence for the 10 plagues. Please do not rehash to me the reasons it cannot be evidence because I have read and heard it all already and am not convinced by the arguments. The parallels between what is written in the papyrus and the Biblical accounts of the plague is just too clear for anyone who is familiar with the Exodus account to easily dismiss.
I think that even if skeptics are presented with evidence piled up to the moon in favor of the accounts in the Bible they will still find one way or another to dismiss it by whatever means possible because it is something they simply do not want to believe. The moral implications of the Bible being true are too great which creates a relentless motive to find ways to discredit it and convince oneself that it cannot be true no matter what...every alternative explanation that has nothing to do with the Bible suddenly becomes much more appealing no matter how outlandish.
It’s a document, thought to be fictional by most Egyptologists, describing many disasters, some of which are similar to the Plagues. The main disaster is disruption of the social order—downfall of the upper classes and rebellion among the lower classes, including slaves. It’s also mighty good poetry.
I think that even if skeptics are presented with evidence piled up to the moon in favor of the accounts in the Bible they will still find one way or another to dismiss it by whatever means possible because it is something they simply do not want to believe. The moral implications of the Bible being true are too great which creates a relentless motive to find ways to discredit it and convince oneself that it cannot be true no matter what...every alternative explanation that has nothing to do with the Bible suddenly becomes much more appealing no matter how outlandish.
I think that even if religious people are presented with evidence piled up to the moon against the accounts in the bible they will still find one way or another to dismiss it by whatever means possible because it is something they simply do not want to believe. The moral implications of the Bible being untrue are too great which creates a relentless motive to find ways to support it and convince oneself that it’s true no matter what.
By mocking, disbelieving, dismissing, and hating the Bible and the God it declares, you are only reacting exactly the way He said you will react. I’m not shocked when I see this type of stubborn unbelief because it is foretold.
...the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. - Romans 8:7
This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. - John 3:19
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. − 1 Cor 2:14
In a way your unbelief validates what scripture says is typically the natural human way of responding to God’s Word; unbelief.
The God of the Bible is not palatable to the natural man who is blinded by sin and rebellion; enslaved to lusts but thinking they are free men and women. I’ve heard skeptics say that if God were to appear to them right now, they will believe. I look them in the face and tell them that they might believe but it wouldn’t change their dislike for Him. Some might even wish to slay Him...oh, wait, we already did that before.
The philosopher Plato once imagined what would happen if a perfect man ever came to live on this imperfect planet.The kind of person Plato had in mind would be “a just man in his simplicity and nobleness,” willing to hold on to his “course of justice unwavering to the point of death.” The great philosopher could well imagine what would happen to such a man in this wicked world: “Our just man will be thrown into prison, scourged and racked, will have his eyes burnt out, and, after every kind of torment, be impaled.”—http://www.cepbookstore.com/samples/6703CH.pdf
Why do we hate the holy God so much? Because we bad...and I don’t mean in the cool Michael Jackson sense of the word.
Imagine I write a book. In this book there are two claims
I am able to fly like superman.
Obviously you will disbelieve that claim. This is because you are unenlightened. If you were not wicked and sinful, you would understand the truth of my abilities.
Does claim 2 make claim 1 more true? If not, please refrain from using this style of argument in this sort of debate.
“At least you are giving them some credit. It really wasn’t that easy to fool people with “fabricated” events involving prominent cities and countries. News traveled through trade as well; one way people verified info about farther away places back then.
I just can’t write about a major event involving two prominent cities being obliterated and get away with it unless there was some level of truth to it, even back then.”
There are just so stories about both the recent and distant past invented all the time. Even when disproved people continue to still believe them. Religion isn’t a special case; these are every where.
There are all sorts of widely believed bullshit about foreign cultures, unfamiliar occupations, and everything else. Just read snopes.
“Also, even if there is no remaining evidence (sometimes being all lost in times past), it does not mean that the event did not occur. The lack of evidence does not mean the lack of existence.”
In Egypt? With all the evidence we have? Unlikely.
“but that is impossible for you to assume because you begin with the presupposition that the Biblical writers are lying about everything.”
Is it fair to say that you’d agree that the authors of the Epic of Giglamesh were lying about everything?
“The ancient Egyptians don’t have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak.”
You can’t have it both ways: either the Ancients were smart and skeptical enough to believe in miracles based on evidence, or they were a bunch of plebs who only believed what the official history was. Not both.
“If most of those 1000 people are still alive, live in my city, and are accessible by me for interview and they affirm your claim it does add credibility to your claim. ”
But they weren’t. The symmetry isn’t there. They were all or very, very mostly all dead at that point.
At this point, we aren’t even talking about a world religion, just a particularly successful cult. How many people alive have personally met L Ron Hubbard? How many people are Scientologists? There you go.
“And for a note, it was not written a hundred years after Jesus death; more like a few decades.”
There’s no evidence of that.
“The CIA has whatsoever no incentive to care about Elvis sightings, whereby the Jewish leaders had every incentive in the world to care about the claim that Jesus resurrected from the dead and they did care a lot. I don’t have time to go into proof that they cared but just understand that the Jewish leaders had the same level of incentive to care about this claim as Homeland Security will have if multiple people claim they sighted a well known most wanted terrorist in their city.”
I think the authorities in this case refer to the Romans, who had been pretty successful with the whole religious tolerance thing. They let all sorts of insane mystery cults hold sway over small groups of followers as long as they recognized Roman law. The Romans would see a new cult, the eigth messiah in just as many years, and made sure they paid their taxes and didn’t make trouble, at least as long as they couldn’t be viewed as a threat.
Alternately, suppose I’m from Rome and I hear of the two scenarios:
Scenario 1: I tell the people in Rome that all of Israel’s modern day enemies (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) just miraculously got wiped out by hail stones and fire from heaven. This can be easily checked- just dispatch somebody to go look at them.
Scenario 2: The people in a small town somewhere claim that their Sheriff died, then rose from the dead, then vanished. This isn’t nearly as easy to check. You could look for the body- but, canonically, the body was given to one of Jesus’s followers (Joseph of Arimathea; see Matthew 27:57 and John 19:38 for descriptions of him as a disciple of Jesus), so we have no idea where the body is, besides his claim to have put it in a tomb. Even if he’s being honest, there are certainly other ways for the body to have vanished- for example, the Jewish Toledot Yeshu claims that a gardener named Juda stole the body.
We also don’t have solid evidence that he ever died- again, according to the Bible, Herod was astonished at how quickly Jesus died, and had a centurion check. That one man’s check is the reason it was believed he was dead; it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that he was wrong. (Or, for that matter, that the Roman officer didn’t feel actually giving a proper medical check, which would involve walking up to and feeling, closely and repeatedly, Jesus’s bloody, sweating, dirty body.) (And your prior should possibly favor that- after all, there have been many more verified cases of mistaken death pronouncements than there have been resurrections.)
There were witnesses, of course. Almost all of them were Jesus’s disciples, a small band of fanatical followers, some of whom would later demonstrate their willingness to lay down their lives for their faith. (Your claim that he was seen by 500 is flat out non-biblical.) Also, most gospels present the resurrection as having been seen by some Roman soldiers, who were then supposedly bribed to claim that the disciples had stolen the body. In other words, there is no reason to trust the witnesses who definitely were there, and all of the ones whose word could potentially be trusted (and who might not have been there) did testify that Jesus wasn’t resurrected- because they were supposedly bribed.
How exactly do you propose to test this claim, then?
You could look for the body- but, canonically, the body was given to one of Jesus’s followers (Joseph of Arimathea; see Matthew 27:57 and John 19:38 for descriptions of him as a disciple of Jesus), so we have no idea where the body is, besides his claim to have put it in a tomb. Even if he’s being honest, there are certainly other ways for the body to have vanished- for example, the Jewish Toledot Yeshu claims that a gardener named Juda stole the body.
All alternative explanations to what happened to Jesus’ body really point to the fact that his enemies were unsuccessfully scattering to explain the resurrection away, since they couldn’t legitimately counter the claim. Just because there are alternative explanations doesn’t mean the original claim of resurrection is false. Of course there would be alternative explanations, since the Jewish leaders had to formulate some type of response. Those explanations didn’t work back then and they still fall short today.
We also don’t have solid evidence that he ever died- again, according to the Bible, Herod was astonished at how quickly Jesus died, and had a centurion check. That one man’s check is the reason it was believed he was dead; it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that he was wrong. (Or, for that matter, that the Roman officer didn’t feel actually giving a proper medical check, which would involve walking up to and feeling, closely and repeatedly, Jesus’s bloody, sweating, dirty body.) (And your prior should possibly favor that- after all, there have been many more verified cases of mistaken death pronouncements than there have been resurrections.
The Romans were not inexperienced executors. They had it down to a science. It would be strange that these experienced executors would suddenly not be able to tell a dead man from a living one. Maybe it was Billy’s first day on the job? Also, I should think that Joseph Arimathea, who you mentioned earlier, would have noticed that Jesus was still alive before placing him into a tomb, which was guarded by 2 combat hardened soldiers may I add. The Jewish leaders were not stupid, they were quite meticulous. They knew Jesus had made claims to a resurrection and safe guarded against anything that might mislead the public into believing that he actually resurrected. One of the very things they safe guarded against was those sneaky disciples somehow stealing his body and claiming he resurrected. This explains the guarded tomb with two soldiers.
There were witnesses, of course. Almost all of them were Jesus’s disciples, a small band of fanatical followers, some of whom would later demonstrate their willingness to lay down their lives for their faith. (Your claim that he was seen by 500 is flat out non-biblical.
It is not an un-biblical claim because I got it straight out of a passage in the Bible;
1 Corinthian 15:6 - After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.
Also, most gospels present the resurrection as having been seen by some Roman soldiers, who were then supposedly bribed to claim that the disciples had stolen the body. In other words, there is no reason to trust the witnesses who definitely were there, and all of the ones whose word could potentially be trusted (and who might not have been there) did testify that Jesus wasn’t resurrected- because they were supposedly bribed.
Wild speculations. There is no reason to not trust the eye witness accounts of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
All alternative explanations to what happened to Jesus’ body really point to the fact that his enemies were unsuccessfully scattering to explain the resurrection away, since they couldn’t legitimately counter the claim. Just because there are alternative explanations doesn’t mean the original claim of resurrection is false. Of course there would be alternative explanations, since the Jewish leaders had to formulate some type of response. Those explanations didn’t work back then and they still fall short today.
It’s their word against that of the disciples; you have no reason to believe one side or the other, side from the fact that resurrections are so improbable.
Furthermore, I’m now starting to be confused: again, what kind of evidence would you possibly consider a disproof of the resurrection, either today or if you lived in contemporary Rome? After all, the only available evidence, objective non-cult witnesses, all claimed that Jesus did not in fact resurrect. If you don’t consider the resurrection disproved after that, then what available evidence would you consider a disproof? (This question is, after all, your original claim- that had the resurrection not occurred, there would evidence to convince you that it had not occurred.)
The Romans were not inexperienced executors. They had it down to a science. It would be strange that these experienced executors would suddenly not be able to tell a dead man from a living one. Maybe it was Billy’s first day on the job? Also, I should think that Joseph Arimathea, who you mentioned earlier, would have noticed that Jesus was still alive before placing him into a tomb, which was guarded by 2 combat hardened soldiers may I add. The Jewish leaders were not stupid, they were quite meticulous. They knew Jesus had made claims to a resurrection and safe guarded against anything that might mislead the public into believing that he actually resurrected. One of the very things they safe guarded against was those sneaky disciples somehow stealing his body and claiming he resurrected. This explains the guarded tomb with two soldiers.
These kind of screwups happen....not all the time, but there are a fair number of recorded and verified instances. (As opposed, again, to zero recorded resurrections. 5 seconds googling found Maggie Dickson, Anne Green, Zoleykhah Kadkhoda, and William Duell as execution survivors.) Also, the Jews were not in charge at the time, the Romans were- and the Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, didn’t want to kill Jesus, according to all of the Gospels.
It is not an un-biblical claim because I got it straight out of a passage in the Bible;
1 Corinthian 15:6 - After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.
Fair enough; I’d been only looking at the accounts in the Gospels. (Again, though, there are plenty of easy, non-supernatural explanations. This undoubtedly sounds like hedging to you, but that’s because you do believe, and your belief is high status. Your explanations of why UFO sightings are wrong would sound the same to somebody who had actually seen the alien ships.)
Wild speculations. There is no reason to not trust the eye witness accounts of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
Ah. So, you do trust the soldiers who reported that the body was stolen, then? ;)
More broadly, we simply don’t have much solid evidence; it’s a he-said she-said kind of situation- only it’s also one where one side was entirely made up of fanatical cultists (or, equivalently, extremely faithful believers) who were claiming something impossible by natural means.
It’s their word against that of the disciples; you have no reason to believe one side or the other, side from the fact that resurrections are so improbable.
There are ways to test oral testimonies and eye witness accounts for truthfulness and our courts do it all the time. There are lots of reasons to believe the Gospel writers over the other side. The late Simon Greenleaf, a skeptic at one point and also one of the founding members of Harvard Law School, wrote an essay on why the Gospel writers should be taken as innocent of deception if given a fair trial.
Greenleaf, one of the principle founders of the Harvard Law School, originally set out to disprove the biblical testimony concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He was certain that a careful examination of the internal witness of the Gospels would dispel all the myths at the heart of Christianity. But this legal scholar came to the conclusion that the witnesses were reliable, and that the resurrection did in fact happen.
In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether is it possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true.
The credit due to the testimony of witnesses depends upon, firstly, their honesty; secondly, their ability; thirdly, their number and the consistency of their testimony; fourthly, the conformity of their testimony with experience; and fifthly, the coincidence of their testimony with collateral circumstances.
Simon Greenleaf proceeds in the essay to expand on each one of the five tests of the Gospel testimonies. It’s an interesting read.
Okay, so let’s go back to another one of your statements, Randaly.
These kind of screwups happen....not all the time, but there are a fair number of recorded and verified instances. (As opposed, again, to zero recorded resurrections. 5 seconds googling found Maggie Dickson, Anne Green, Zoleykhah Kadkhoda, and William Duell as execution survivors.) Also, the Jews were not in charge at the time, the Romans were- and the Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, didn’t want to kill Jesus, according to all of the Gospels.
It seems that most of the examples you give are cases of execution by hanging or stoning. None of them are cases of people surviving execution by Roman crucifixion.
You also seem to speculate that maybe Pontius Pilate was somehow going soft on Jesus because he really didn’t want to kill him. There’s no need for me to rebuttal that, is there?
More broadly, we simply don’t have much solid evidence; it’s a he-said she-said kind of situation- only it’s also one where one side was entirely made up of fanatical cultists (or, equivalently, extremely faithful believers) who were claiming something impossible by natural means.
Yes, that’s the definition of a real miracle; something that occurs but is impossible by natural means. You will have to absolutely prove that miracles never occur in order for you to be able to completely write-off the claims of the eye witnesses of the resurrection based on the argument that such claims cannot be true because resurrections are impossible due to natural law. If there is a God, it’s not unreasonable to believe that He can bend or supersede His own natural laws whenever He wants to.
The claims of the Bible, upon scrutiny by unprejudiced men and women, are often found to be consistent with sound reason.
Greenleaf also makes a number of claims, like this one:
That the books of the Old Testament, as we now have them, are genuine; that they existed in the time of our Savior, and were commonly received and referred to among the Jews, as the sacred books of their religion; and that the text of the Four Evangelists has been handed down to us in the state in which it was originally written, that is, without having been materially corrupted or falsified, either by heretics or Christians; are facts which we are entitled to assume as true, until the contrary is shown.
Greenleaf has basically no idea what he’s talking about. He appears to be using theory and the bible as his main sources. But most of his claims (eg that the Gospels were written almost immediately after Jesus’ death, or that they didn’t change thereafter) are wrong. (Note: I only skimmed the essay, since it’s long. He may quibble later on.) See Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, or for that matter, Wikipedia. More generally, every single ancient religion produced numerous claims similar to those of the bible, with countless eyewitnesses; many events that weren’t religious also produced similar claims. For example, Herodotus, a historian, interviewed eyewitnesses of the Persian Wars, who produced the following claims:
the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs
the sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm’s length in a single day
a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon
a horse gave birth to a rabbit
a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish
These claims, and countless others made by almost every other religion in the world, are backed up by the exact same evidence you are claiming: that is, eyewitness testimony. We’ve also seen numerous modern events (UFO’s, ghosts, etc) where eyewitnesses claimed nonnatural causes; these were actually testable, they were tested, and found to be natural.
It seems that most of the examples you give are cases of execution by hanging or stoning. None of them are cases of people surviving execution by Roman crucifixion.
You also seem to speculate that maybe Pontius Pilate was somehow going soft on Jesus because he really didn’t want to kill him. There’s no need for me to rebuttal that, is there?
Yes, there really is. We have numerous examples of people who were ‘executed’ and survived, contradictory witness testimony which isn’t directly available today, reliable evidence from today that people often see ‘supernatural’ things which are perfectly normal, no reliable accounts of resurrections, and very good evidence (aka all of modern biology) that they are impossible. There’s no reason to start out believing the bible without strong evidence, which isn’t available. For something to be regarded as a miracle, you need to rule out natural causes.
Yes, that’s the definition of a real miracle; something that occurs but is impossible by natural means. You will have to absolutely prove that miracles never occur in order for you to be able to completely write-off the claims of the eye witnesses of the resurrection based on the argument that such claims cannot be true because resurrections are impossible due to natural law. If there is a God, it’s not unreasonable to believe that He can bend or supersede His own natural laws whenever He wants to.
No, I definitely don’t need to prove that miracles never occur in order to claim that an event was not a miracle. Miracles by definition are incredible events, and require incredible strong evidence to be believed. Without that evidence then there is no reason to belief that an event was a miracle. More generally, if you claim that something which a) has never been reliably seen and b) goes against all available evidence (aka modern science), then you need strong evidence to believe that claim. (Also, once again, you are ignoring the witnesses who claim that there wasn’t a resurrection.) (Also, you’ve given no evidence that distinguishes your belief in the resurrection from any of the miracles with similar evidence that you don’t believe in.)
The claims of the Bible, upon scrutiny by unprejudiced men and women, are often found to be consistent with sound reason.
I suggest you read through the rest of this site, and/or the heuristics and biases movement and history. People are crazy.
ETA: Also, once again, to bring this back to your original point: if you were a citizen of Rome, perhaps in Gaul or England, what potentially available evidence would have convinced you that the resurrection was false?
“Just because there are alternative explanations doesn’t mean the original claim of resurrection is false.”
Sure. But, y’know, Occam’s Razor.
“Those explanations didn’t work back then and they still fall short today.”
Because...?
“They had it down to a science. It would be strange that these experienced executors would suddenly not be able to tell a dead man from a living one”
Unless they were bribed. Or overworked. Or corrupt. Or a hundred other things.
Maybe it wasn’t typical to fuck up an execution, but I bet it happened sometimes.
“One of the very things they safe guarded against was those sneaky disciples somehow stealing his body and claiming he resurrected. This explains the guarded tomb with two soldiers.”
It also explains why the Israeli Resistance Front would know the soldiers out, roll away the stone, and steal the body.
Now, I’m not sure Jesus ever existed. There’s some evidence, but the strongest evidence is probably forged. But if I knew Jesus existed, then I’d believe that over the Resurrection story for the same reason: Occam’s Razor.
“Wild speculations. There is no reason to not trust the eye witness accounts of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.”
Dude. You said yourself that a human rising from the dead is impossible. There’s your reason, right there.
Now, you might believe on faith, but as far as I can see, you don’t have much better evidence than the Mormons, the Scientologists, the Muslims or the followers of Charles Manson.
Once you realize why you disbelieve in all other Gods, etc.
Anyways, one thing I’m sure you haven’t done is actually read the Bible without the presupposition that it’s lying. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I have yet to see any skeptic really do that.
Um… I read the Bible as a child, as I would expect most skeptics who were raised by Christian parents did. I actually turned against Christianity because I did not like the God depicted in the Bible, which happened because I took the Bible at face value. It wasn’t until later that I built up the materialistic worldview which sees the Bible as a piece of literature rather than a collection of historical claims.
If I had just treated the Bible as clothing that my family and friends chose to wear, it would have been easy to continue wearing that clothing, while not actually holding the implied belief system. (I like my family and the friends I grew up with!) Instead, I treated it as actually constraining my expectations of God and the universe, and the resulting beliefs clashed against each other until they were destroyed. (My materialistic beliefs work together much more nicely.)
Just because you find the God of the Bible unpalatable to your personal tastes of what God should or should not be, doesn’t make it any more true or false, does it?
Just because you find the God of the Bible unpalatable to your personal tastes of what God should or should not be, doesn’t make it any more true or false, does it?
Your claim was that you had not met a skeptic who read the Bible while expecting it to be true. I provided evidence that I am a skeptic, and that I had read the Bible while expecting it to be true.
You are, of course, free to take the No True Scotsman route and declare that I didn’t really presuppose that the Bible was telling the truth, but I might as well declare now that doing that would end this conversation.
If an islamic martyr today can be convinced that he gets x virgins in paradise (something your evident christianity would claim is untrue) in a world full of science as well as the true faith (from your point of view), why can’t some writer 1800 years ago be convinced that what he writes is the true word of god?
It’s possible that someone can be convinced that what they are writing is from God (which a few people have done). The difference that I see with other religious texts and the Bible is that the Bible does not shy away from naming real people, dates, and places. If I were to fabricate a lie I will steer away from mentioning identifiable people, places, and dates in fear of emboldening my audience to call out my BS. The more specific I am the easier it becomes to discredit my claims.
Look, ancient people were just as skeptical as people are today. They also had a BS meter like we do today. The people back then would not have easily believed that God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah or that 2 million people walked out of Egypt. They would not have easily accepted such claims if there was not truth to it, the same way people today would not easily accept a claim that Israel’s modern enemies got wiped out by a miraculous fire from heaven unless there was some level of truth to it. Ancient man had the same advanced faculty to reason and question claims like we do today. To think otherwise is an act of historical chauvinism.
Ancient people were just as skeptical with the key difference of having virtually no information, relative to what we do today. If I hear about something happening in Africa, I can go to the internet, or go to any of a dozen news sources to try and find out how true what I heard was. If someone 2000 years ago in europe heard about something happening in africa, they would have none of these options. People made things up, misinterpreted things heard from other languages and cultures, and just plain didn’t understand all sorts of things. Consider Herodotus, to all accounts a man who intended to write true stories of different countries and events, and yet whose accounts are littered with what we now know to be untruths and misrepresentations. We know that there were apocryphal gospels that never made it into today’s bible, so at some point historically things were selected by people in power, presumably because they furthered their agenda. You’re trying to argue that it’s implausible that the bible is one giant lie, and I agree, but it’s very likely to be a hundred different lies or distortions from a hundred different eras piled on top of each other. If everyone believes some simple claim, then then next censorship or invention is not the giant lie you make it out to be.
Why do you (and the author of the grandparent) think ancient people were just as skeptical as us? I’m not even sure that different cultures today are equally skeptical.
Perhaps if you do the radiator experiment where you have turned the metal plate round, you will find that in different cultures (or even situations) people will be more or less likely to be skeptical of the situation in front of them.
I’m agnostic as to whether or not they were, but I was granting the claim for the purposes of the debate. Whether or not your base level of “skepticism” is the same, the amount of knowledge you have influences what you are skeptical of. Ie, a child may be innately as skeptical as an adult, but has less information.
Along with the Bible, I suggest that you study the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Lotus Sutra, as exemplifying the mind-state of the epoch of religion. And then contemplate yourself as a Homo sapiens living in the next epoch, that of science.
Here you are making the claim that Old Testament miracles were bolder and more daring than New Testament ones because the Old Testament writers felt they could get away with a lot more because they knew that their contemporaries lacked the means to verify or discredit their claims. You imply that if not for the fact the Romans were better record keepers, the New Testament would be filled with more outlandish passages about God obliterating whole nations (i.e, Rome) or maybe more Red Sea splitting episodes.
The assumption you are making here is that the New Testament writers were more careful to avoid making easily falsifiable claims because people during their time had the means (libraries and records) to easily discredit them. I agree that people did have the means to discredit the claims of the New Testament writers but I disagree that their claims were any smaller or showy than the claims of the Old Testament writers.
For example, when the Apostle Paul, who wrote at least 1⁄3 of the New Testament, was addressing King Agrippa, a Pagan King, he spoke of the verifiability of his statements in a positive light.
For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner.”—Acts 26:26
One of those things that Paul was telling King Agrippa about was the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is arguably the boldest and most daring claim of the entire scriptures, Old and New Testament. Think about it. It’s a claim that a public figure experienced a very public execution, rose from the dead 3 days after being confirmed dead and ascended to heaven in front of 500 eyewitnesses. Paul spoke this boldly in front of a Pagan King who was very familiar with the events he was talking about and had the resources to verify the facts. By the way, he spoke this while his life was on the line.
There were many eager and motivated enemies of Christianity who had all the means necessary to squelch the outlandish claim of resurrection. The whole Christian faith rests on this miracle of the resurrection of Christ. According to Paul’s own words, Christians are the most pitiful creatures alive if the resurrection did not truly occur (1 Cor. 15:19). Surely, the enemies of the faith wouldn’t have missed any opportunities to discredit the claim that Christ resurrected. If they could, they would have gladly produced the dead body of Christ and ended the whole Christian religion overnight. The New Testament writers also named real places and people in their accounts. Many of these people and places were still around by the time they committed the Gospel accounts to paper. Surely, unbelievers familiar with the events and people involved could have pointed out lies and deceptions before they continued to spread.
In addition, all the disciples suffered dearly, even to the point of the cruelest martyrdom, believing they will one day resurrect physically the same way they saw their Lord resurrect. It makes sense that people will die for something they think is true but have no way of verifying (suicide bombers dying for the promise of 70 virgins in paradise), but it doesn’t make sense for people to die for something they know is a lie invented by themselves (the disciples and the resurrection of their Lord). I wouldn’t put myself or my family at risk of death for the sake of something I fabricated, knowing it isn’t going to gain me guaranteed wealth, fame, or power. This absurd thing is exactly what people imply the New Testament writers were willing to do.
When assessing the eye witness accounts of the New Testament writers it would be unreasonable to not consider that they might have actually just been telling the truth. But I know….that’s just too scary of a thought.
No, it’s not. Nowhere even close. You seem unable to distinguish between ‘claims that are bold and daring’ with ‘claims that are important to my faith’. Claiming some guy came back from the dead for a couple of days, then disappeared again, but we totally have witnesses is not a bold claim.
The entire population of Earth being wiped out in a flood is a bold claim.
Two entire cities getting destroyed by supernatural means is a bold claim.
An entire world power getting torn asunder by a series of supernatural plagues is a bold claim.
Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a bold claim. The other claims require unfathomable property damage and loss of life on the multiple-world-war scale. Jesus’ claim requires about as many people who went to my High School Prom all agreeing to tell a lie. That’s what Eliezer means about the difference between large and small miracles.
To claim Jesus resurrected is a bold claim, especially since Jesus was a public figure who received a public execution within a very hostile and skeptical environment.
Let me illustrate with two scenarios. For the purposes of this example, let’s say I’m from a small town and both scenarios involve me making a claim to a miraculous event.
Scenario 1:
I tell the people in my town that all of Israel’s modern day enemies (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) just miraculously got wiped out by hail stones and fire from heaven. Yes, that is a bold claim.
Scenario 2:
I tell the people in my small town that the Sheriff they all know and all recently witnessed getting gunned down in public and whose funeral they all attended and saw his dead body in the casket, is still alive because he rose from the dead with 500 town folk (who I mention by name; Jess, Billy, Tom, Sarah May) who witnessed him ascend into heaven.
Without such a thing as the internet, which one of these claims is easier for the town people to verify or discredit? Which claim is really bolder?
Now, imagine if the town people were the ones who murdered the Sheriff and are eager to tie up any loose ends.
Anyways, one thing I’m sure you haven’t done is actually read the Bible without the presupposition that it’s lying. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I have yet to see any skeptic really do that.
Scenario 1 is still the bolder claim. Egypt wasn’t that far away from Isreal and any member of the village could have actually gone to Egypt. Jerusalem Isreal to Giza Egypt would be about a 2 week travel on foot. Tel-Aviv Isreal to Alexandria Egypt would be about a 3 day boat ride with biblical technology. Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to travel that far, but ancient traders did that all the time to trade goods.
As it turns out, those stories in Exodus were complete lies and fabrications. There is little evidence any significant number of Jews were ever in Egypt during that time period, and zero evidence the plagues ever occurred. The Bible was willing to lie about something so massive it would have made all the history books, and been carved on every monument. That’s really, really bold.
Additionally, we don’t have hundreds of reports of Jesus’ resurrection. We have one report saying that hundreds of people saw it, and that one report was written down a hundred years after Jesus’ death. If I claim that my great-grandfather rose from the grave in 1912, it doesn’t make it any more credible if I claim that 1,000 people also saw it. It would be silly to say that since 1000 is twice as much as 500, so my great-grandfather’s resurrection is twice as likely as Jesus’. The authorities didn’t bother discrediting it at the time any more than the CIA bothers with discrediting Elvis sightings. There was nothing there for them to discredit.
At least you are giving them some credit. It really wasn’t that easy to fool people with “fabricated” events involving prominent cities and countries. News traveled through trade as well; one way people verified info about farther away places back then.
I just can’t write about a major event involving two prominent cities being obliterated and get away with it unless there was some level of truth to it, even back then.
There’s a lot of significant events that probably occurred back then, which have not left that much of an archaeological or historical footprint; or maybe there is evidence but it has not yet been found; or maybe there’s evidence but it’s currently being misunderstood or ignored. Also, even if there is no remaining evidence (sometimes being all lost in times past), it does not mean that the event did not occur. The lack of evidence does not mean the lack of existence.
Maybe the Biblical account is an accurate record of the events you draw into question? Oh, but that is impossible for you to assume because you begin with the presupposition that the Biblical writers are lying about everything.
You seem here to be committing the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent.
Your argument:
If a massive event such as a 2 million person exodus really occurred, it would have made all the history books and been carved on every ancient monument. It did not make all the history books and get carved on every monument. Therefore it did not really occur.
Problem:
The ancient Egyptians didn’t have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak.
If most of those 1000 people are still alive, live in my city, and are accessible by me for interviews and they affirm your claim it does add credibility to your claim. If there is clearly no ill incentive such as guaranteed riches, power, fame, or pleasure involved in your motives it will add more weight to your claim. If you are perfectly sane, giving no reason for me to doubt your sanity, it would add more weight to your claim. If you are risking your livelihood, the physical well-being of your whole family and your own life for the sake of your claim, it would add more credibility to your case. If all those things are there, it’s not reasonable for me to doubt your claim except if I have a strong presupposition that it is impossible for someone who was dead to become alive again...which by the way I do believe is very impossible unless there is a supernatural act of God.
Put yourself in the context of ancient Roman time. It would be ridiculous to expect that all these hundreds of eyewitnesses (who were most likely illiterate) would write down their testimonies to pass it down to us. The important matter is that most of them were alive during the time period when the claims of the Gospels were being publicized. And for a note, it was not written a hundred years after Jesus death; more like a few decades.
The CIA has whatsoever no incentive to care about Elvis sightings, whereby the Jewish leaders had every incentive in the world to care about the claim that Jesus resurrected from the dead and they did care a lot. I don’t have time to go into proof that they cared but just understand that the Jewish leaders had the same level of incentive to care about this claim as Homeland Security will have if multiple people claim they sighted a well known most wanted terrorist in their city.
It’s not just about history books and monuments. It’s about every facet of life that gets effected. For example, when the black death hit Europe, we were able to see massive changes to everything.
Economists, archeologists, and historians for example can trace the massive economic disruption of the black death. The deaths of a large percentage of the population created economic pressures, increasing the demand for workers. You then see greater economic mobility for peasants because of the demand, creating a free-er marketplace for labor. Every single written word we have regarding economic exchange from that time notes the massive inflation of wages for peasants (along with Lords grumbling that peasants were getting uppity and greedy demanding wages). But it’s not just that. We can go back and look at how working conditions improved in the state of buildings from back then, as lords suddenly had to compete for peasant labor.
Peasant wages skyrocketed, in some cases 500-1000%. And even though long distance trade went down, consumer-good trade went up since peasants could now afford more. What’s more, archeologists have looked at those times and noted how there was a sharp decline in exotic goods and wealth in the elite holdings, and how there was a sharp increase in goods/tools found in peasant houses. The proof is not just in words (although it’s there too), it’s in the ground.
We can look back, not just at records but at land (keep in mind, there are also extensive records too). Year after year, lords stopped trying to cultivate land and can look at a field and see how decreases in labor translated to more fallow fields. Additionally, we can look in trash piles, and note the increase in animal bones. You see, animals could be fed on lands without much labor, so as you became unable to work land for agriculture, you could increase animal production to compensate. What’s more, we can also note products in the trash-piles. Dramatic shifts in clothing as wool/leather replaced plant based fabric. Additionally low-labor crops like apples, grapes, vegetables, etc replaced high labor crops like wheat.
This is just one aspect of it. You can look at the sizes and styles of buildings during that era. You can note how the Sondergotik, and Brick Gothic, and Rectilinear architecture styles all suddenly appeared at the same time. You can note how technology development and usage changed. You can look at public works. You can look at weapons and armor in war. You can look at the mass graves from plague deaths. You can look at the bones of those who died before and after the plague and note the nutrition differences. Everything felt the ripple effects. An event like that creates massive ripple effects that can be seen in every aspect of life.
I used the Black Death as an example because it’s the most dramatic and most famous shift, but similar results happen with every civilization that has dramatic events occur like wars/plagues/natural disasters. We can look at the Greco-Persian wars and see the impact to villas and peasant homes and trash piles etc. We can look at the end of the Zhou Dynasty in China and see the effects on trade and trash piles and buildings ect. But we can’t look at the plagues in Egypt and the exodus of the Jews. Every piece of evidence… not just writings and monuments but every piece of evidence from trash piles, to agriculture field samples, to architecture, to graves… everything shows that the stories in the bible never occurred. There never were any plagues, there never was a massive die off of first born sons, there never were a bunch of Jews who left. It simply never happened.
It was just a fairy tale made up out of whole cloth by the bible, a complete fabrication.
NB: As a meta-note you can make quotes by using the > command. So instead of using quote marks to quote, you can quote…
Just want to say I love this comment.
Like I mentioned earlier, there’s probably ample evidence for the events recorded in the book of Exodus. The evidence that currently supports the Exodus account is likely being misunderstood or ignored by mainstream historians and archeologists. A minority voice within the field of Egyptology, Dr. David Rohl’s makes a compelling case against the traditional ancient Egyptian chronology. A majority of Egyptologists acknowledge that there are major problems with the traditional chronology but they reject Rohl’s alternative chronology (which is expected when people are set in their ways). I think Rohl is on to something with his chronology.
Outside of mainstream Egyptology, David Down proposes a 500 year reduction in the chronology. The interesting thing is that with either Rohl’s or Down’s revised chronology there is very smooth correlation between the Biblical account and the archeological evidence. Seriously, the fit is so uncanny it is amazing that it does not at least perk the curiosity amongst the hardest skeptics. It seems like when challenged with reasonable arguments most skeptics don’t even take time to weigh the arguments but just simply hide behind what they believe to be majority consensus amongst so and so experts about the subject and continue to make bold assertions that the opposing view has whatsoever no evidence supporting their arguments.
About Rohl’s new chronology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Rohl%29
Who is David Rohl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rohl
David Down’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Unwrapping-Pharaohs-Egyptian-Archaeology-Confirms/dp/0890514682
As for the 10 plagues of Egypt, I think the papyrus of Ipuwer, which was found and interpreted in 1909 should not be so easily dismissed by skeptics as evidence for the 10 plagues. Please do not rehash to me the reasons it cannot be evidence because I have read and heard it all already and am not convinced by the arguments. The parallels between what is written in the papyrus and the Biblical accounts of the plague is just too clear for anyone who is familiar with the Exodus account to easily dismiss.
You can see for yourself here: http://ohr.edu/838
I think that even if skeptics are presented with evidence piled up to the moon in favor of the accounts in the Bible they will still find one way or another to dismiss it by whatever means possible because it is something they simply do not want to believe. The moral implications of the Bible being true are too great which creates a relentless motive to find ways to discredit it and convince oneself that it cannot be true no matter what...every alternative explanation that has nothing to do with the Bible suddenly becomes much more appealing no matter how outlandish.
Full translation of the Ipuwer papyrus
It’s a document, thought to be fictional by most Egyptologists, describing many disasters, some of which are similar to the Plagues. The main disaster is disruption of the social order—downfall of the upper classes and rebellion among the lower classes, including slaves. It’s also mighty good poetry.
I think that even if religious people are presented with evidence piled up to the moon against the accounts in the bible they will still find one way or another to dismiss it by whatever means possible because it is something they simply do not want to believe. The moral implications of the Bible being untrue are too great which creates a relentless motive to find ways to support it and convince oneself that it’s true no matter what.
By mocking, disbelieving, dismissing, and hating the Bible and the God it declares, you are only reacting exactly the way He said you will react. I’m not shocked when I see this type of stubborn unbelief because it is foretold.
In a way your unbelief validates what scripture says is typically the natural human way of responding to God’s Word; unbelief.
The God of the Bible is not palatable to the natural man who is blinded by sin and rebellion; enslaved to lusts but thinking they are free men and women. I’ve heard skeptics say that if God were to appear to them right now, they will believe. I look them in the face and tell them that they might believe but it wouldn’t change their dislike for Him. Some might even wish to slay Him...oh, wait, we already did that before.
Why do we hate the holy God so much? Because we bad...and I don’t mean in the cool Michael Jackson sense of the word.
Imagine I write a book. In this book there are two claims
I am able to fly like superman.
Obviously you will disbelieve that claim. This is because you are unenlightened. If you were not wicked and sinful, you would understand the truth of my abilities.
Does claim 2 make claim 1 more true? If not, please refrain from using this style of argument in this sort of debate.
There are just so stories about both the recent and distant past invented all the time. Even when disproved people continue to still believe them. Religion isn’t a special case; these are every where.
There are all sorts of widely believed bullshit about foreign cultures, unfamiliar occupations, and everything else. Just read snopes.
In Egypt? With all the evidence we have? Unlikely.
Is it fair to say that you’d agree that the authors of the Epic of Giglamesh were lying about everything?
You can’t have it both ways: either the Ancients were smart and skeptical enough to believe in miracles based on evidence, or they were a bunch of plebs who only believed what the official history was. Not both.
But they weren’t. The symmetry isn’t there. They were all or very, very mostly all dead at that point.
At this point, we aren’t even talking about a world religion, just a particularly successful cult. How many people alive have personally met L Ron Hubbard? How many people are Scientologists? There you go.
There’s no evidence of that.
I think the authorities in this case refer to the Romans, who had been pretty successful with the whole religious tolerance thing. They let all sorts of insane mystery cults hold sway over small groups of followers as long as they recognized Roman law. The Romans would see a new cult, the eigth messiah in just as many years, and made sure they paid their taxes and didn’t make trouble, at least as long as they couldn’t be viewed as a threat.
The Jews are another matter, of course:
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/false_prophets/dt13_01.html
Alternately, suppose I’m from Rome and I hear of the two scenarios:
Scenario 1: I tell the people in Rome that all of Israel’s modern day enemies (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) just miraculously got wiped out by hail stones and fire from heaven. This can be easily checked- just dispatch somebody to go look at them.
Scenario 2: The people in a small town somewhere claim that their Sheriff died, then rose from the dead, then vanished. This isn’t nearly as easy to check. You could look for the body- but, canonically, the body was given to one of Jesus’s followers (Joseph of Arimathea; see Matthew 27:57 and John 19:38 for descriptions of him as a disciple of Jesus), so we have no idea where the body is, besides his claim to have put it in a tomb. Even if he’s being honest, there are certainly other ways for the body to have vanished- for example, the Jewish Toledot Yeshu claims that a gardener named Juda stole the body.
We also don’t have solid evidence that he ever died- again, according to the Bible, Herod was astonished at how quickly Jesus died, and had a centurion check. That one man’s check is the reason it was believed he was dead; it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that he was wrong. (Or, for that matter, that the Roman officer didn’t feel actually giving a proper medical check, which would involve walking up to and feeling, closely and repeatedly, Jesus’s bloody, sweating, dirty body.) (And your prior should possibly favor that- after all, there have been many more verified cases of mistaken death pronouncements than there have been resurrections.)
There were witnesses, of course. Almost all of them were Jesus’s disciples, a small band of fanatical followers, some of whom would later demonstrate their willingness to lay down their lives for their faith. (Your claim that he was seen by 500 is flat out non-biblical.) Also, most gospels present the resurrection as having been seen by some Roman soldiers, who were then supposedly bribed to claim that the disciples had stolen the body. In other words, there is no reason to trust the witnesses who definitely were there, and all of the ones whose word could potentially be trusted (and who might not have been there) did testify that Jesus wasn’t resurrected- because they were supposedly bribed.
How exactly do you propose to test this claim, then?
All alternative explanations to what happened to Jesus’ body really point to the fact that his enemies were unsuccessfully scattering to explain the resurrection away, since they couldn’t legitimately counter the claim. Just because there are alternative explanations doesn’t mean the original claim of resurrection is false. Of course there would be alternative explanations, since the Jewish leaders had to formulate some type of response. Those explanations didn’t work back then and they still fall short today.
The Romans were not inexperienced executors. They had it down to a science. It would be strange that these experienced executors would suddenly not be able to tell a dead man from a living one. Maybe it was Billy’s first day on the job? Also, I should think that Joseph Arimathea, who you mentioned earlier, would have noticed that Jesus was still alive before placing him into a tomb, which was guarded by 2 combat hardened soldiers may I add. The Jewish leaders were not stupid, they were quite meticulous. They knew Jesus had made claims to a resurrection and safe guarded against anything that might mislead the public into believing that he actually resurrected. One of the very things they safe guarded against was those sneaky disciples somehow stealing his body and claiming he resurrected. This explains the guarded tomb with two soldiers.
It is not an un-biblical claim because I got it straight out of a passage in the Bible;
1 Corinthian 15:6 - After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.
Wild speculations. There is no reason to not trust the eye witness accounts of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
It’s their word against that of the disciples; you have no reason to believe one side or the other, side from the fact that resurrections are so improbable.
Furthermore, I’m now starting to be confused: again, what kind of evidence would you possibly consider a disproof of the resurrection, either today or if you lived in contemporary Rome? After all, the only available evidence, objective non-cult witnesses, all claimed that Jesus did not in fact resurrect. If you don’t consider the resurrection disproved after that, then what available evidence would you consider a disproof? (This question is, after all, your original claim- that had the resurrection not occurred, there would evidence to convince you that it had not occurred.)
These kind of screwups happen....not all the time, but there are a fair number of recorded and verified instances. (As opposed, again, to zero recorded resurrections. 5 seconds googling found Maggie Dickson, Anne Green, Zoleykhah Kadkhoda, and William Duell as execution survivors.) Also, the Jews were not in charge at the time, the Romans were- and the Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, didn’t want to kill Jesus, according to all of the Gospels.
Fair enough; I’d been only looking at the accounts in the Gospels. (Again, though, there are plenty of easy, non-supernatural explanations. This undoubtedly sounds like hedging to you, but that’s because you do believe, and your belief is high status. Your explanations of why UFO sightings are wrong would sound the same to somebody who had actually seen the alien ships.)
Ah. So, you do trust the soldiers who reported that the body was stolen, then? ;)
More broadly, we simply don’t have much solid evidence; it’s a he-said she-said kind of situation- only it’s also one where one side was entirely made up of fanatical cultists (or, equivalently, extremely faithful believers) who were claiming something impossible by natural means.
There are ways to test oral testimonies and eye witness accounts for truthfulness and our courts do it all the time. There are lots of reasons to believe the Gospel writers over the other side. The late Simon Greenleaf, a skeptic at one point and also one of the founding members of Harvard Law School, wrote an essay on why the Gospel writers should be taken as innocent of deception if given a fair trial.
Here’s the essay if you wish to read it: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/jesus/greenleaf.html
Here are a few quotes from the essay:
Simon Greenleaf proceeds in the essay to expand on each one of the five tests of the Gospel testimonies. It’s an interesting read.
Okay, so let’s go back to another one of your statements, Randaly.
It seems that most of the examples you give are cases of execution by hanging or stoning. None of them are cases of people surviving execution by Roman crucifixion.
You also seem to speculate that maybe Pontius Pilate was somehow going soft on Jesus because he really didn’t want to kill him. There’s no need for me to rebuttal that, is there?
Yes, that’s the definition of a real miracle; something that occurs but is impossible by natural means. You will have to absolutely prove that miracles never occur in order for you to be able to completely write-off the claims of the eye witnesses of the resurrection based on the argument that such claims cannot be true because resurrections are impossible due to natural law. If there is a God, it’s not unreasonable to believe that He can bend or supersede His own natural laws whenever He wants to.
The claims of the Bible, upon scrutiny by unprejudiced men and women, are often found to be consistent with sound reason.
Greenleaf also makes a number of claims, like this one:
Greenleaf has basically no idea what he’s talking about. He appears to be using theory and the bible as his main sources. But most of his claims (eg that the Gospels were written almost immediately after Jesus’ death, or that they didn’t change thereafter) are wrong. (Note: I only skimmed the essay, since it’s long. He may quibble later on.) See Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, or for that matter, Wikipedia. More generally, every single ancient religion produced numerous claims similar to those of the bible, with countless eyewitnesses; many events that weren’t religious also produced similar claims. For example, Herodotus, a historian, interviewed eyewitnesses of the Persian Wars, who produced the following claims:
the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs
the sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm’s length in a single day
a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon
a horse gave birth to a rabbit
a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish
These claims, and countless others made by almost every other religion in the world, are backed up by the exact same evidence you are claiming: that is, eyewitness testimony. We’ve also seen numerous modern events (UFO’s, ghosts, etc) where eyewitnesses claimed nonnatural causes; these were actually testable, they were tested, and found to be natural.
Yes, there really is. We have numerous examples of people who were ‘executed’ and survived, contradictory witness testimony which isn’t directly available today, reliable evidence from today that people often see ‘supernatural’ things which are perfectly normal, no reliable accounts of resurrections, and very good evidence (aka all of modern biology) that they are impossible. There’s no reason to start out believing the bible without strong evidence, which isn’t available. For something to be regarded as a miracle, you need to rule out natural causes.
No, I definitely don’t need to prove that miracles never occur in order to claim that an event was not a miracle. Miracles by definition are incredible events, and require incredible strong evidence to be believed. Without that evidence then there is no reason to belief that an event was a miracle. More generally, if you claim that something which a) has never been reliably seen and b) goes against all available evidence (aka modern science), then you need strong evidence to believe that claim. (Also, once again, you are ignoring the witnesses who claim that there wasn’t a resurrection.) (Also, you’ve given no evidence that distinguishes your belief in the resurrection from any of the miracles with similar evidence that you don’t believe in.)
I suggest you read through the rest of this site, and/or the heuristics and biases movement and history. People are crazy.
ETA: Also, once again, to bring this back to your original point: if you were a citizen of Rome, perhaps in Gaul or England, what potentially available evidence would have convinced you that the resurrection was false?
Sure. But, y’know, Occam’s Razor.
Because...?
Unless they were bribed. Or overworked. Or corrupt. Or a hundred other things.
Maybe it wasn’t typical to fuck up an execution, but I bet it happened sometimes.
It also explains why the Israeli Resistance Front would know the soldiers out, roll away the stone, and steal the body.
Now, I’m not sure Jesus ever existed. There’s some evidence, but the strongest evidence is probably forged. But if I knew Jesus existed, then I’d believe that over the Resurrection story for the same reason: Occam’s Razor.
Dude. You said yourself that a human rising from the dead is impossible. There’s your reason, right there.
Now, you might believe on faith, but as far as I can see, you don’t have much better evidence than the Mormons, the Scientologists, the Muslims or the followers of Charles Manson.
Once you realize why you disbelieve in all other Gods, etc.
Um… I read the Bible as a child, as I would expect most skeptics who were raised by Christian parents did. I actually turned against Christianity because I did not like the God depicted in the Bible, which happened because I took the Bible at face value. It wasn’t until later that I built up the materialistic worldview which sees the Bible as a piece of literature rather than a collection of historical claims.
If I had just treated the Bible as clothing that my family and friends chose to wear, it would have been easy to continue wearing that clothing, while not actually holding the implied belief system. (I like my family and the friends I grew up with!) Instead, I treated it as actually constraining my expectations of God and the universe, and the resulting beliefs clashed against each other until they were destroyed. (My materialistic beliefs work together much more nicely.)
Just because you find the God of the Bible unpalatable to your personal tastes of what God should or should not be, doesn’t make it any more true or false, does it?
Your claim was that you had not met a skeptic who read the Bible while expecting it to be true. I provided evidence that I am a skeptic, and that I had read the Bible while expecting it to be true.
You are, of course, free to take the No True Scotsman route and declare that I didn’t really presuppose that the Bible was telling the truth, but I might as well declare now that doing that would end this conversation.
If an islamic martyr today can be convinced that he gets x virgins in paradise (something your evident christianity would claim is untrue) in a world full of science as well as the true faith (from your point of view), why can’t some writer 1800 years ago be convinced that what he writes is the true word of god?
It’s possible that someone can be convinced that what they are writing is from God (which a few people have done). The difference that I see with other religious texts and the Bible is that the Bible does not shy away from naming real people, dates, and places. If I were to fabricate a lie I will steer away from mentioning identifiable people, places, and dates in fear of emboldening my audience to call out my BS. The more specific I am the easier it becomes to discredit my claims.
Look, ancient people were just as skeptical as people are today. They also had a BS meter like we do today. The people back then would not have easily believed that God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah or that 2 million people walked out of Egypt. They would not have easily accepted such claims if there was not truth to it, the same way people today would not easily accept a claim that Israel’s modern enemies got wiped out by a miraculous fire from heaven unless there was some level of truth to it. Ancient man had the same advanced faculty to reason and question claims like we do today. To think otherwise is an act of historical chauvinism.
Sure. And people had crazy apocalyptic cults and mass hysteria just like we do today.
What’s your point?
Ancient people were just as skeptical with the key difference of having virtually no information, relative to what we do today. If I hear about something happening in Africa, I can go to the internet, or go to any of a dozen news sources to try and find out how true what I heard was. If someone 2000 years ago in europe heard about something happening in africa, they would have none of these options. People made things up, misinterpreted things heard from other languages and cultures, and just plain didn’t understand all sorts of things. Consider Herodotus, to all accounts a man who intended to write true stories of different countries and events, and yet whose accounts are littered with what we now know to be untruths and misrepresentations. We know that there were apocryphal gospels that never made it into today’s bible, so at some point historically things were selected by people in power, presumably because they furthered their agenda. You’re trying to argue that it’s implausible that the bible is one giant lie, and I agree, but it’s very likely to be a hundred different lies or distortions from a hundred different eras piled on top of each other. If everyone believes some simple claim, then then next censorship or invention is not the giant lie you make it out to be.
Why do you (and the author of the grandparent) think ancient people were just as skeptical as us? I’m not even sure that different cultures today are equally skeptical.
Perhaps if you do the radiator experiment where you have turned the metal plate round, you will find that in different cultures (or even situations) people will be more or less likely to be skeptical of the situation in front of them.
I’m agnostic as to whether or not they were, but I was granting the claim for the purposes of the debate. Whether or not your base level of “skepticism” is the same, the amount of knowledge you have influences what you are skeptical of. Ie, a child may be innately as skeptical as an adult, but has less information.
I agree. Perhaps I should have put this as a reply to the grandparent instead?
Along with the Bible, I suggest that you study the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Lotus Sutra, as exemplifying the mind-state of the epoch of religion. And then contemplate yourself as a Homo sapiens living in the next epoch, that of science.