Reddit reviews Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
We found 32 Reddit comments about Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The historical Jesus is there. Certainly Jesus of Nazareth existed. Josephus, Tacitus, and I think the Talmud, and maybe Suetonius all have info about Him although scant.
For reading (not light) about evidence for the resurrection, I would suggest:
The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham
The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple by Richard Bauckham
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Baucham might be a good place to look at. His argument is that the gospels could only have been written by eyewitnesses.
I'll start with theology (broadly construed) first. There's no particular order, but I've separated them into "lighter" and "heavier" categories. I'm happy to talk about why I think each book is a "must read" you want. I'll try to come back later and give some fiction recommendations.
Lighter theology:
Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition by Jamie Smith (top recommendation if you haven't read it).
Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport: Making Connections in Today's World by Richard Mouw.
Knowing God by J.I. Packer.
Chosen by God by R.C. Sproul
Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin by Cornelius Plantinga.
Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill.
[Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ] (http://www.amazon.com/Rejoicing-Lament-Wrestling-Incurable-Cancer/dp/1587433583) by J. Todd Billings
Christ, Baptism and the Lord's Supper: Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham.
The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John Walton
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins.
Literally everything by CS Lewis
Any of Zondervan's Counterpoints series. My current favorite in the series is Five Views On Biblical Inerrancy by Al Mohler, Kevin Vanhoozer, Michael Bird, Peter Enns, and John Franke
Heavier Theology
The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics by Robert A. J. Gagnon
Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships by James Brownson.
Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation by R. Michael Allen and Scott Swain
Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader by Allen
The abridged version of Reformed Dogmatics by Herman Bavink.
Systematic Theology
When folks discuss the gospels as eyewitness testimony, they're not saying that they were written by eyewitnesses, merely that eyewitnesses were the sources of the information (rather than a game of telephone.)
Have you read Jesus and the Eyewitnesses?
Hill makes a pretty good argument for the early establishment of the original canonical gospels from the forensic evidence of Egyptian papyri: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199551235/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I believe that Bauckham makes the case that the names recorded in the gospels statistically match with the general proportion of those names in the period, something that anyone inventing the gospels much later would have had a very hard time doing: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906
I’m not sure how Bauckham is received. Can anyone chime in with how his work has been reacted to?
Monotheist arguments
*
Christian specific arguments**
I do not find any of these convincing, but they are the arguments I've found so far.
>many (most) of us could not give specific details about events that happened just 50 years ago
My wife can tell me about life in communist Poland during the eighties--including many specific details. Her stories can be verified by other people I know who had the same direct experiences.
Do you think Jesse Jackson is a trustworthy source for information about the assassination of MLK? He was there when it happened. It happened almost fifty years ago. Do you think he could still give a trustworthy account?
The various documents that make up the New Testament were written by and in collaboration with the people who were directly involved in the events recorded in the New Testament. This is, of course, disputable/debatable, and I'm not going to debate it. But if it is true that the New Testament documents were written by, under the direction of, or with the assistance of the people who were directly involved in the events they record, what justification do we have for doubting whether they're trustworthy? Unless, that is, we start with doubt or have some defeater for their claims.
According to the patristic canon, Jesus rebuked Peter exactly because it's bad to hurt people, even when it comes to self-defense. Moreover, according to the eyewitness hypothesis, the name of the slave whose ear was cut (Malchus) is given in the Gospel (of John) because he survived the events, and thus could have been used as an eyewitness (there would be people reading the Gospels who would have known Malchus and his story, or at least would be able in principle to verity it). Which kind of changes the whole narrative: it is the fact that he was spared that allowed him to, indirectly, help to spread the Gospel.
Not to mention the fact that Jesus explicitly undid the harm Peter did. In other words, I don't think it sounds like a good argument.
> Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?
And there are a lot of smart people, smarter than you or I who say that the gospels have lots of historical problems for instance...
> A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906
There were no eye witnesses to Jesus. The gospels were written at least two generations after his death and the verification for the life of Jesus is pitiful. Meanwhile, some of the verifiable events (earthquake, eclipse, Harod's actions, etc.) are shown to have not occurred.
Anyway, good luck with your appeals to authority.
Nice! Just picked up another on my wish list, Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
I suggest you have a look at the book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. There might be a little more evidence of the Resurrection than previously thought.
It's interesting to me because when I talk to people and how they come to their faith, it's all kinds of different stuff that actually ends up being the "straw that breaks the camels back." Why don't I tell you what convinces me and then give you some recommendations in various directions.
Now, I was raised a Christian. That's important because I'm not sure that I would be a Christian now if I wasn't raised as one. I make that admission not because I think it's a weakness to my case, but because I want you to understand that I understand the difficulty in believing something like this seemingly ridiculous story.
Many of my friends, very few of whom are Christians, actually call me the "most open-minded person" they know or at least one of the most. One of my best friends (an agnostic Jewish girl) says that I would make a terrific atheist if it weren't for that whole "believing in God thing."
Though I have always identified as a Christian, I did go through a time when I decided to weigh the evidence.
I'll consider any evidence and look for its flaws. I like science, but I don't like the double standard that exists between science and faith. In the opinion of many atheists, if ANYTHING appears to be incompatible with their perception of faith, it's automatically proved incorrect and any effort of a person of faith to answer why it may not be incompatible is met with deaf ears. Conversely, if ANYTHING appears to be incompatible with science, that's "fascinating!" or "interesting!" or "a great opportunity to arrive at a greater truth."
With that being said, I think there are quite a few things that we (as a society) take for granted that may or may not be true. For example, we all believe that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. But the reason we arrived at that conclusion was not because it was the only possible answer, but because it was the simplest answer. (By the way, I believe that the earth revolves around the sun, this is just an example). Another example is gravity. It behaves so steadily that we even label it with a gravitational constant. But we know it does funky things at the quantum level and at the cosmological level (like near the event horizon of a black hole). We have no idea why.
This thinking brought me to the realization that I might not understand nearly as much as I thought I did. It felt lacking and EVERYTHING felt like faith at that time. Because of that, I decided that I would look for internal consistencies or inconsistencies in the Bible. The one that really stood out to me was Noah's flood. I had always heard that there was varying evidence for or against a global flood, but the vast majority of the arguments didn't seem to be asking the right questions. IF there WAS a global flood, it would certainly be an unprecedented event-- something that we had never observed in our time... so how would we know what to look for? The Bible itself records that water came up out of the earth-- that's not indicative of most floods.
But even that wasn't the most interesting part of that story to me. The Bible is actually a very valuable historical resource. Archaeologists rely on many of its dates and locations to find out more about sites in the middle east. That's why the flood account is so fascinating to me. No one believes that the flood account was written down for HUNDREDS of years after it is supposed to have happened. Yet, according to that account people before the flood were living for hundreds of years (up to 969). Then, for seemingly no reason, the author of the account picks the flood as the dividing point where lives are considerably shortened. I have yet to hear a good explanation for why someone over 1000 years later, yet still over 3000 years ago, would randomly decide to put that kind of change in there. Because of that, I thought, "Hm, maybe the earth drastically changed at that point." I can't prove that, just so you know. It's just an interesting thought that I had.
Now, beyond all that, I look at the historical record of the gospels and the few hundred years of church tradition immediately after that. The thing that always stands out to me there is that, regardless of the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, we do have pretty reliable reasons to believe that prominent apostles chose to die rather than go back on their claims that Christ raised from the dead. I just couldn't wrap my head around why 12 prominent guys, plus Paul, would choose to die for something they would have known to be a lie. I could understand people today who died for blind faith, but this isn't blind faith. It's not cultish (doesn't fit the psychology). It doesn't appear to be hallucinatory (doesn't fit the current medical understanding). The only thing that I could think is that it was either an incredibly elaborate lie that hundreds of people were willing to die for, or it was the truth.
When you take that into consideration with the actual gospel accounts of the resurrection, things get really interesting. I think a lot of people read those accounts (or, trust people who have read them) without considering that they may have actually happened exactly as recorded. They're certainly not written as ridiculous accounts of mad men. They don't protect the reputations of those surrounding the events. If the gospels claimed Jesus had made a roast beef sandwich rather than resurrecting, I'd bet that most people would arrive at the conclusion that they actually happened.
That's just a few reasons in addition to the ideas that resurrection was not exactly smiled upon in that culture, that the church had to survive persecution from the very beginning that the odds of Christianity actually taking hold was so unlikely it might as well have been impossible, etc. etc. As I said, none of these thoughts are exactly original.
Now as to why you should believe, I don't know what it would take to convince you. If you're wondering why I believe in Christianity over a multitude of religions, it's actually extremely original (yes, even in light of the Horus myth). No other surviving system says, "Humanity is despicable, wicked, and evil. There is literally nothing you can do to save yourselves." Yet Christianity is viewed primarily as a religion of hope and redemption. And it has convinced millions of people.
As for your comment about "superstitious goat herders" the book I like best to explain that these guys and their accounts are actually a lot more reliable than they seem is Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It's not perfect, but it's very very thought provoking and fairly readable.
As I alluded to a number of times, I think most people tend to just treat the stories in the Bible as "impossible" without actually reading them and considering them. To a point, I don't blame them. It does seem unbelievable. But some really rational and reasonable people have looked at the evidence and come to the conclusion that it might not be as totally crazy as they once thought. Will it convince you? I don't know, I pray that it would, but ultimately that's up to you. If there's ever any question you have, I encourage you to come to me with it. I do this kind of thing a lot, speaking of which, here's another conversation I had with some other people on this subreddit. That conversation even caused /u/superwinner, a pretty frequent regular on this part of the site (this very thread, no less), to say, "Thats it, I'm friending the shit out of you." That's pretty much my crowning achievement on this subreddit.
I have much compassion for other members of this human race regardless of religious stance, and the same goes for you. I'm quite pleased that you seem willing to at least engage me on this issue and I thank you for doing it so honestly and respectfully. I hope that you find my response at least considerate and worth YOUR consideration. One final thought though-- it's not going to be ME or anything I say that convinces you one way or another. It'll be your own decision, perhaps in tandem with God, perhaps not (depending on what you choose). Either way, feel free to always consider me as a resource, even if you don't end up believing and you just want to understand why a Christian might believe something-- like why they choose one God over all the others. Good question, OP.
Brant is outstanding. I was able to take his class one summer when he was just a young professor visiting Notre Dame (Indiana). One of the books we used in his class was "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" by Richard Bauckham. Another outstanding book on this topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906
Nein das habe ich nicht geschrieben. Mir gefällt die Idee aber gut und ich kann nur jedem empfehlen dem historischen Gehalt der entsprechenden Quellen mal gründlich auf den Zahn zu fühlen und sich nicht allein von populären, auf den ersten Blick überzeugenden Meinungen leiten zu lassen (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).
>Wikipedia does not seem to agree with your authoritative stance on these issues.
When wikipedia becomes the goto for scholarship, let me know.
>Why wouldn't you mention this evidence, or give the sources about it?
Because the evidence is in entire books that you have to read through in order to understand it. Look into the authorship of the gospels and the research that various scholars have done... a lot of it is available online, I am sure, but I am not interested in doing the research for you. There are all sorts of things in the gospels that raise huge red flags as to who actually wrote them, like geographical errors, the fact that Jesus and his disciples spoke aramaic and not greek, errors in jewish custom, etc.
>Many first hand accounts are not written in the first person, and many first hand account include parts that the author was not present, but was informed about later. You are jumping to conclusion in the extreme.
I'm jumping to conclusions? You have a piece of writing that is completely anonymous. It doesn't claim to be an eye witness account. It has numerous scenes that could not have been witnessed by anyone, and numerous other scenes that when considered together make it obvious that no one person could have been the source. That doesn't even take into account the other research I am talking about. Even based on just this, the most obvious conclusion is that it was not written by an eye witness. There is literally no evidence that points to that conclusion. Yet you say I am the one jumping to conclusions? Right.
>A few, but one of the main reasons many weren't added, was because they doubted the authorship. It's good to know that they were vetting out the letters for authenticity, even in the very early church, wasn't it?
Actually there were dozens. And the way they determined if something was authentic was basically whether the writings matched their current beliefs or not. For example, at the council of Nicea, any gospels that portrayed Jesus as being more divine than human were left out. It wasn't about determining which document had the most credibility. They didn't have forensic investigatory methods to determine that stuff. It was almost exclusively about whether the document was heretic or not. The only reason that the gospels even have the names they do is because Papias gave them those names to make them more credible (things were seen as more credible if they had an apostle's name on it... such was the state of their credibility checks). The claim at that time was that Mark was a follower of Peter, not Jesus, and that he was not an eyewitness. Iraneus was the first to suggest that more than one gospel should be followed... before him, it would have been very unusual to follow the teachings of more than one.
>To say that the apostle John did not write John, simply because it was not written in the first person, and he probably didn't see absolutely everything he wrote about personally, is ludicrous.
I'm sorry, but we know with almost absolute certainty that none of the disciples wrote John. The vast majority of modern scholars believe (and teach in schools all across the world) that John was written later having been passed orally to different communities.
Here is a book by Christian scholar Richard Bauckham that tries to make the case that the gospels are based on eye witness testimony.
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1295405950&sr=8-3
In fact, he only asserts that a single one of the Gospels was written direct by an eyewitness: the Gospel of John. However, he does not think he was a disciple, but instead just an unnamed follower. Credibility kind of goes out the window when you've narrowed it down to "an unnamed follower." As I said, he doesn't actually argue that the other three gospels are based on first or even second hand eye witness testimony, and he admits that most scholars won't agree with his view on John.
I can assure you that this is taught in seminaries around the world, and is accepted by scholars all over the world, christian or not.
There is one Anglican scholar who is well-versed in biblical historical studies: Richard Bauckham.
He has one book which challenges the consensus of the academia that the gospels are a redaction based on witnesses only in a derivative way.
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
This is not just a popular book. This is an academic book, targeted not only towards the populace but the academia as well.
I don't think these things can be asserted so confidently as what "we know" from the research of modern historians. It is true that there are many historians who see the gospels as deriving mainly from oral traditions several decades removed from the original events (not as legends, which is the view Lewis is attacking), many excellent historians who do think the gospel authors were or spoke with eyewitnesses, like Richard Bauckham, who makes the case in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the synoptics all derive closely from the testimony of both major and minor eyewitnesses, and that the author of the Gospel of John was himself an eyewitness. Lewis' assessment of the gospels as history, which he sees as falling within his own professional expertise ("I have read a great deal of legend" doesn't just refer to how he liked to spend his free time), remains perfectly defensible today. In fact, the 20th Century largely saw a move in biblical studies away from the hyper-critical views of the late 19th Century.
>For those of you who have looked in to biblical historicity, on any level,
I guess this technically qualifies me?
>how do you reconcile potential errors and inconsistencies
Such as?
>as well as the concepts that stories of YHWH and Jesus could have been co-opted from other faiths
By asking for primary source evidence for these claims.
>Are there any books or websites you could recommend?
Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey
Evidence for Christianity by John McDowell
The King Jams Only Controversy by James White (this is actually a book about textual criticism and manuscript transmission).
Jesus and the Eye-Witnesses by Richard Baukham.
The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Mike Licona.
This book series by NT Wright.
(Note, these will probably go against or "provide a nice contrast with" captainhaddock's view --the current most popular post in the thread).
Other reviewers on Amazon beg to differ.
>It upsets me that I believed that without doing research.
Don't be too upset. It's a very common mistake—even among religious people.
>I can accept that the writings may have been done by witnesses.
Rather than claim that the witnesses were the ones to place pen to papyrus, I would start with the more modest proposition that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony—and there is good evidence that this is the case. I am partway through a very interesting book on this subject in which the author challenges the old idea that the Gospels are based on generations of anonymous oral tradition, but instead record first-hand eyewitness testimony.
>I still believe that the writings can be deluded seeing as we all know that over time, stories can be blown out of proportion.
I understand. Even if it's shown that the Gospels do give us the actual testimony of the Apostles, it is possible that the Apostles themselves are not perfectly reliable. Let me tell you something that many, many Christians are deeply (and often passionately) mistaken about: Christianity is not dependent on inerrant, infallible, or even on inspired writings. This ought to be readily apparent when you consider that Christianity predates those writings. Even if only a few of the most elementary points recorded in the Gospels/Acts are accurate—points which the overwhelming majority of both religious and secular scholars affirm—then there is sufficient grounds for basic Christian belief.
I've appreciated this conversation, and you obviously have done quite a bit of thinking about it. Your comments are very sincere, and you've got a great grasp of the issue. As you know, I really have nothing else for you. To date, the autographs have not been discovered, and who knows if we would know they were the autographs even if something was found. It might give us an earlier manuscript, but it wouldn't change the debate much. A man named Jesus most likely (according to Gospel records and the accounts of a few other contemporary historians) existed in a small country in a corner of a large empire. He was spurned by the religious authorities, so there's no likelihood they would write about him, and he was executed as a criminal by Rome, so there's no likelihood they would write about him either. A movement grew up around him (according to Gospel and historical records), and great teaching and miracles were attributed to him by those who supposedly knew him. What he taught and did was allegedly done in public arenas and witnessed by many people, some of whom believed and some of whom didn't. Anonymous written records started showing up a half a century later, and they weren't assembled into a single volume until centuries later. You're right—that's the history, and I can't add to it or change it.
For me, there are a few loose ends that make me give "validity" more weight.
Well, thanks for listening. We know the heroes of history and stories that surround them—people like Abraham Lincoln and Alexander the Great. But the stories of Jesus are different from that. And I know fantastic stories are told about a lot of people, but a few stand out: Ulysses, Achilles, and Hercules, for instance. But the story of Jesus is even different from those. It has a whole different character to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Christ_in_comparative_mythology. As I started out saying, I don't know what else to say. You know that mountains of work have been done on the historicity of Jesus and grappling with the reliability of the documents about his life (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906, especially pages 5-11, as one example.) And here's a very informative 10-minute YouTube video if you are truly interested in the topic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=292NTf1cCNw)
There's no 'proof' as such, since we're dealing with history, not science. However, there is evidence which we can examine and weigh critically.
For one example of this evidence, the ascription of the authorship of the Gospels comes from an early tradition of the Church, for which our earliest evidence comes from Papias, writing a generation later, around 100AD. We do not have his work extant, but we have quotes of him from later writers.
Papias appears to have been aware of a tradition that Mark's Gospel was derived from Peter, who handed him a collection of his own sermons in Rome, just before he was martyred, and which Mark then put into order. Papias also relates a separate tradition that Matthew also used a similar source and put it together in Hebrew. What this actually means is debatable. Scholars believe it variously to mean that Matthew wrote his gospel originally in the Hebrew language, or translated it into Hebrew, presumably from Greek, or that this Hebrew way was not the Hebrew language, but just a different way of organising the material so as to appeal to a Jewish audience. (Or perhaps Papias is talking about a completely different Gospel, the mysterious "Gospel of the Hebrews".)
Whether this tradition was true, or merely a legend that had been associated with the scrolls after the fact is another question, which I can't provide an adequate analysis of here. For this, and for other evidence regarding the authorship and sources for the Gospels, I would recommend that you get hold of a copy of the superb Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, by Richard Bauckham which goes through all of the evidence in rich detail, and provides an unparalleled examination and overview of the argument.
Yes, I do believe it is a possible to behave in a way which is contradictory to God's morality, but to believe that one is behaving in accordance with God's morality. So, what, then shall we do? It boils down to this: Truth either exists or it doesn't (I believe it does). I believe Christianity is true, and it is quite possible that I am right. Looking at the evidence (cross-referencing, continuity in text, prophecy (read Isaiah 53)) it seems most plausible. Theism is more logical than atheism to me. Christianity is more logical than any other religion. It stands apart in that God saved humanity.
If my beliefs are determined by my geography, then clearly you are an atheist because of where you were born/lived. I believe China now has the largest Christian population in the world. Why?
I'm not here to convert you to anything either. I'm here to share the truth as I know (believe) it. I don't gain points by "converting" just like you don't for "deconverting" me, which I do not think you're trying to do.
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331922895&sr=1-1
Honestly, I'll buy this book for you, if you will read it. If you won't read it, that's fine. Please don't have me buy it for you and cast it aside though. That wouldn't be nice.
What does Richard Carrier believe happened?
We have over 5000 Greek manuscripts from the new testament. Why so many if this was mythological? Clearly, some things were meant to be historical accounts with the way that they were described.
Which historians see the gnostic gospels as fully relevant?
Specifically, what is highly embellished, made up or recycled?
Two thoughts. First, if you are interested in a scholarly work that refutes Ehrman et al, here is one you can check out.
Second, "what is true"?
A painting [generally] isn't photorealistic. It has all sorts of things that aren't accurate in it. In some senses, it isn't "true." But the difference between it and reality also serve a function. Because of these differences, the artist is able to communicate a message. The artist didn't make something photorealistic because he wasn't trying to. Instead, he was trying to communicate something.
Ancient biographers approached their work in much the same way. They were completely uninterested in doing modern biography, where you lay aside all bias and present the facts in precise chronological order. They felt free to play around with details (especially of chronology and geography, and especially by mixing and matching different speeches) to present a picture that they thought most accurately painted the life, personality, and core teachings of their subject. In some ways they treated biography more like literature than journalism. So when you ask "what time precisely did Jesus die [or what order did he call the disciples, or did he clear the temple at the beginning or end of his ministry, etc...]" my answer is:
The Gospel authors weren't concerned with communicating that. So I'm not going to evaluate them the way I evaluate modern biography. I will evaluate whether or not they were accurate in the things they were trying to be accurate in. But those weren't details like chronology and geography.
User Basilides answers your eyewitness claim eloquently:
> "...one of the things Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) proposes is that the Twelve Apostles are named in order to identify them as eyewitnesses and also that the twelve were responsible for assuring the accuracy of the gospel narratives. But if that were true, how is it (As Stephen J. Patterson noted in his review: "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses," Review of Biblical Literature; 2010, Vol. 12, p365-369)
that we ended up with four wildly divergent accounts? If the Twelve took it upon themselves to "peer review" the manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then whence so many discrepancies?
> I have already pointed to plenty of bullshit in the gospels. As Richard Carrier pointed out in his essay on the Resurrection, why is it that no one else in history noticed the tearing of the temple veil mentioned in Mark's passion narrative, not even the priests whose sole duty was attendance of the veil? Also see my previous post on the subject of gospel reliability here. Fact is, either the gospels are not based on eyewitness testimony or the eyewitnesses are pathological liars. Neither hypothesis is encouraging for someone arguing the resurrection."
> Was Jesus Raised: Reliability and Authorship of NT Documents
The claims of an eyewitness account are extremely shaky.
> bottled in the same plant
Are the factory codes the same? The factory codes on the can would be the analogy to the oxygen ratios of the rocks.
> Evidence?
Do you have evidence they witnessed it? Let's see it.
> commonplace for people to write down history
Not only do we have many manuscripts from that time, but we are talking about a singularly unique event: Re-animated corpses wandering around the town for days. And no one wrote a single page about it? Writing was indeed common then, so why don't we have documentation of it?
> Tacitus' Annals ... yet no one questions his authenticity
No extraordinary claims are made. We don't really have a reason to doubt them. I'm sure we could dig up someone who would disagree with their historical accuracy. How is this relevant to the veracity of the resurrection claim?
> Few objects of that sort survive this long.
The most important figure to ever walk the earth is crucified, and there are no relics of his life left behind? There are no souvenirs? We have manmade relics that date back thousands of years before Christ. They survived the ages just fine.
> Faith is the evidence of things not seen.
Faith by its very definition is gullibility. It is belief without evidence. It is belief without reason. People had "faith" in the god Mithra long before Jesus was around (6 BC). They had the exact same evidence you have. Born on the 25th of December to a virgin, witnessed by shepherds who followed a star, known as the son of god, could raise the dead, cure the blind and sick, sacrificed at the spring equinox (Eostre or Easter), rose up after three days and ascended into paradise. Get this, followers would even 'eat' their god in the form of wafers and bread marked with a cross. Followers even spoke of a judgement day when 'sinners' and the 'unbaptized' would be dragged into darkness.
Sounds pretty familiar right? These followers had just as much evidence and faith as you. Why are they wrong, and you are right?
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauchman
> The Bible is the 'claim'
This makes no sense.
The Bible is collection of 66 different book, written by many different writers, in three different languages, in many different genres, on many different topics. How is that a "claim"?
There are not claims, they are sources.
People make claims based on an examination of those sources.
>So they all have the same, identical goal of declaring God and Jesus true. They are not independent sources.
So when two cosmologists [or historians, or ...] build on each others work they are not independent sources and should be rejected?
How do you know when an someone says that the Garden of Eden, Noah's Arc, the 2 million Jews escaping Egypt didn't exist/happen are telling you something that is true? Or more likely to be true?
How do you verify those claims?
>Anyone can cite anyone else's work, but that does not verify the first work nor prove it to be true.
Do you use this same level of skepticism when you read everything else? What "independent sources" do you use to verify the WW2 or the Ferguson protests have happened? Or who won the first Super Bowl or 1968 World Series?
You can't, according to you, use one source to verify another.
>Did you read your own source ??? That number, 5800, notes the number of COPIES in different languages of SOME of the OT and NT stories. That number does not represent 5,800 individual, independent books, each unique. So your reference is extremely misleading.
You think that every copy is going to be a complete Bible???? Do you not realize that they were separate books? Do you not realize that just the environmental exposure will cause some of the manuscript to disintegrate?
>... there is no proof of any of the Bible outside the Bible stories.
This is false. One can look at K. A. Kitchens On the Reliability of the OT or Walter Kaiser's The OT Documents - Are They Reliable and Relevant? or Craig Bloomberg's The Historical Reliabilitiy of the Gospels or F.F, Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? or Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
Sauces...Ah, can I just refer you to a book?
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham
Jesus was a very common name indeed. That's why you often see disambiguation when Jesus' name is referred to in conversation but not in narrative (because which other Jesus would they be talking about?):
> Matthew 21:6--The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.
>
> Matthew 21:11--And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”
>
> Matthew 21:12--And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.
And then a few chapters later:
> Matthew 26:64--Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
>
> Matthew 26:69--Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. And a servant girl came up to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.”
>
> Matthew 26:71--And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.”
>
> Matthew 26:75--And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.
But that one is supposed to be easy, because Jesus was a fairly common name (6th most popular in Palestine among Jews). However, outside of Palestine, Jesus was not a common name at all. So would someone outside of Palestine 150 or so years later know to do this kind of disambiguation if they were making up this story? Possibly, but it's unlikely.
The name of John the Baptist is also disambiguated in John 14 in much the same way.
I mention this because if the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, they use person names very convincingly. The apocryphal gospels, on the other hand, use names in very wacky ways, for example, the Gospel of Thomas's main character is a dude named Didymos Judas Thomas, which means Twin Judas Twin, and no one used names that way back then.
What's also interesting is that in the NT Gospels (early to mid 1st century, except for John which was written probably later 1st century), Jesus is called Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip (mid 2nd century), he's still called Jesus, but he is mostly referred to as "Christ". And then in the Gospels of Peter (late 2nd century) and Mary (late 2nd century), the name "Jesus" isn't even present. Instead you have mainly "Lord" and "Savior".
So yeah, someone in the 2nd century probably had no idea what were the common names in the 1st century among Jewish Palestinians. But the gospels, which were supposedly written so late, gets those kinds of names right. Without the internet.
Eine ausgewogene Sichtweise kann nur entwickelt werden, wenn beide Seiten gehört werden.
Timothy Keller - The Reason for God - Believing in an Age of Skepticism (chapter summaries)
C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
J. Warner Wallace - Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels
Richard Bauckham - Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
Alvin Plantinga - Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
Francis S. Collins - The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Craig A. Evans - Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels
You can find longer list over at christianapologetics or at Kindle Deals in Christianity, Christian Worldview, and Apologetics
Textsammlung des IGUW
bethinking.org exists to help you make sense of the big questions about life.
The Biologos Foundation Ressource Finder
The Veritas Forum Talks
I think the most important reason is Jesus. We have good reasons to believe that he rose from the dead.
The arguments are sketched out in a book that was published several years ago called The Case for Christ. Recently, there have been two more scholarly treatments of roughly the same subject, one by a guy named Richard Bauckham, called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and the other by N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God.
A guy named William Lane Craig is probably the most active popular defender of the historicity of the resurrection. He has written lots of books and essays on the subject, and google will also turn up transcripts and recordings of his debates.
> Which moral law? Where does that law come from? The higher being that I don't believe in?
The set of all objective moral values that apply to every single person regardless of their culture or beliefs. "Killing children for fun is wrong" and "Murder for personal gain is wrong" and "Helping people is good" might be a good place to start.
And yes, that moral law comes from God. I'm happy to hear how you think it can exist without God.
> Are you thick or just intellectually dishonest? This is not at all what they were saying.
Lol, straight to the personal insults? Okay.
The Redditor specifically said "the same logic" that guides religious belief leads to terrorism. Maybe they could have expanded their point better? I don't know, it's not my point. But as it stands, it was a disgusting assertion. I wouldn't defend it.
> Why do you believe in Jesus and the christian God and not in another god or the flying spaghetti monster? (Honest question, not a joke)
I believe in Jesus because I'm convinced that the New Testament accounts of Jesus found in the gospels report actual history, ie, Jesus really did live, die and rise again.
If you'd like to look into a robust defense of this, a good intro book to read is Bauckham's "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses".
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906
> So because of a Book that was in part dictated by god (allegedly) that says Jesus exists you believe Jesus exists and because you believe what Jesus said you believe god exists? ... don't you see the circular logic?
It's hard to respond to this because it assumes so much falsehood that I can only call it a strawman.