Best jesus, the gospels & acts books according to redditors

the long answer is 700 pages long

I recently read the books on this topic by Ehrman, Doherty, and Carrier.

I found Carrier's case for a Mythical Jesus to be compelling, even though I found him to be annoying as a writer. He is rude to people who disagree with him and chooses language designed to offend. His writing is shrill and stiff. That said, his book is scholarly and well documented.

Ehrman argues for a historical Jesus. His book was almost the opposite of Carrier's. His tone was friendly and approachable. He seemed calm and reassuring. I kind of wanted him to prove his case. But his arguments sucked.

Doherty dissected Ehrman's case paragraph by paragraph. (I read Carrier first, then Ehrman, then Doherty.) Doherty raised many of the concerns I noticed myself. Ehrman's arguments just didn't make sense. Never mind the history or the evidence — I'm no scholar — his arguments didn't make logical sense.

I wouldn't say it's proven either way. Given the scarcity of evidence, it may never be. That said, Carrier made a surprisingly strong case against a historical Jesus. If Ehrman's defense of Jesus is the best that academia can do, I'd say Jesus is pretty much dead.

But I would love to see a serious and scholarly attempt to refute Carrier's work. Ehrman's work didn't cut it.

I. Sure, some forms of theism are coherent (Christianity is not one of those forms, for what it's worth; the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma being a couple of big problems), but not all coherent ideas are true representations of the world; any introductory course in logic will demonstrate that.

II. The cosmological argument is a deductive argument. Deductive arguments are only as strong as their premises. The premises of the cosmological argument are not known to be true. Therefore, the cosmological argument should not be considered true. If you think you know a specific formulation of the cosmological argument that has true premises, please present it. I'm fully confident I can explain how we know such premises are not true.

III. There is no doubt that the teleological argument has strong persuasive force, but that's a very different thing than "being real evidence" or "something that should have strong persuasive force." I explain apparent cosmological fine-tuning as an entirely anthropic effect: if the constants were different, we wouldn't be here to observe them, therefore we observe them as they are.

IV. This statement is just false on its face. Lawrence Krauss has a whole book about the potential ex nihilo mechanisms (plural!) for the creation of the universe that are entirely consistent with the known laws of physics. (Note that the idea of God is not consistent with the known laws of physics, since he, by definition, supersedes them.)

V. This is just a worse version of argument III. Naturalistic evolution has far, far more explanatory power than theism. To name my favorite examples: the human blind spot is inexplicable from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution; likewise, the path of the mammalian nerves for the tongue traveling below the heart makes no sense from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Evolution routinely makes predictions that are tested to be true, whether it means predicting where fossils with specific characteristics will be found or how fruit fly mating behavior changes after populations have been separated and exposed to different environments for 30+ generations. It's worth emphasizing that it is totally normal to look at the complexity of the world and assume that it must have a designer...but it's also totally normal to think that electrons aren't waves. Intuition isn't a reliable way to discern truth. We must not be seduced by comfortable patterns of thought. We must think more carefully. When we think more carefully, it turns out that evolution is true and evolution requires no god.

VI. There are two points here: 1) the universe follows rules, and 2) humans can understand those rules. Point (1) is easily answered with the anthropic argument: rules are required for complex organization, humans are an example of complex organization, therefore humans can only exist in a physical reality that is governed by rules. Point (2) might not even be true. Wigner's argument is fun and interesting, but it's actually wrong! Mathematics are not able to describe the fundamental behavior of the physical world. As far as we know, Quantum Field Theory is the best possible representation of the fundamental physical world, and it is known to be an approximation, because, mathematically, it leads to an infinite regress. For a more concrete example, there is no analytic solution for the orbital path of the earth around the sun! (This is because it is subject to the gravitational attraction of more than one other object; its solution is calculated numerically, i.e. by sophisticated guess-and-check.)

VII. This is just baldly false. I recommend Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain" for a coherent model of a materialist mind and a wealth of evidence in support of the materialist mind.

VIII. First of all, the idea that morality comes from god runs into the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma pretty hard. And the convergence of all cultures to universal ideas of right and wrong (murder is bad, stealing is bad, etc.) are rather easily explained by anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Anthropology and evolutionary psychology also predict that there would be cultural divergence on more subtle moral questions (like the Trolley Problem, for example)...and there is! I think that makes those theories better explanations for moral sentiments than theism.

IX. I'm a secular Buddhist. Through meditation, I transcend the mundane even though I deny the existence of any deity. Also, given the diversity of religious experience, it's insane to suggest that religious experience argues for the existence of the God of Catholicism.

X. Oh, boy. I'm trying to think of the best way to persuade you of all the problems with your argument, here. So, here's an exercise for you: take the argument you have written in the linked posts and reformat them into a sequence of syllogisms. Having done that, highlight each premise that is not a conclusion of a previous syllogism. Notice the large number of highlighted premises and ask yourself for each, "What is the proof for this premise?" I am confident that you will find the answer is almost always, "There is no proof for this premise."

XI. "...three days after his death, and against every predisposition to the contrary, individuals and groups had experiences that completely convinced them that they had met a physically resurrected Jesus." There is literally no evidence for this at all (keeping in mind that Christian sacred texts are not evidence for the same reason that Hindu sacred texts are not evidence). Hell, Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Christ" even has a strong argument that Jesus didn't exist! (I don't agree with the conclusion of the argument, though I found his methods and the evidence he gathered along the way to be worthy of consideration.)

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I don't think that I can dissuade you of your belief. But, I do hope to explain to you why, even if you find your arguments intuitively appealing, they do not conclusively demonstrate that your belief is true.

Hmm. I would love for Sam to interview Richard Carrier next to see if he convinces Sam that the historicity of Jesus, like many 'fringe' historians believe, is in doubt.

edit: his book, On the Historicity of Jesus, was peer reviewed and published by a major academic press, and is the first book on the subject to do so. That was in 2014. Carrier and other mythicists believe there is not enough historical evidence to say 'Jesus, the man, probably existed,' and if you read his arguments, they're compelling. Notice, he doesn't say 'Jesus definitely never existed,' just that the other side hasn't met their burden of proof.

His earlier book, Proving History, outlines many of the problems in the field of Jesus studies, namely, that no historical criteria has led any two scholars to the same conclusion about the actual life of Jesus the man. To quote:

>“I won't recount the whole history of historical Jesus research here, as that has been done to death already. Indeed, accounts of the many “quests” for the historical Jesus and their failure are legion, each with their own extensive bibliography. Just to pick one out of a hat, Mark Strauss summarizes, in despair, the many Jesuses different scholars have “discovered” in the evidence recently. Jesus the Jewish Cynic Sage. Jesus the Rabbinical Holy Man (or Devoted Pharisee, or Heretical Essene, or any of a dozen other contradictory things). Jesus the Political Revolutionary or Zealot Activist. Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet. And Jesus the Messianic Pretender (or even, as some still argue, Actual Messiah). And that's not even a complete list. We also have Jesus the Folk Wizard (championed most famously by Morton Smith in Jesus the Magician, and most recently by Robert Conner in Magic in the New Testament). Jesus the Mystic and “Child of Sophia” (championed by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and John Shelby Spong). Jesus the Nonviolent Social Reformer (championed by Bruce Malina and others).

>Excerpt From: Carrier, Richard C. “Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus.”

(It goes on from there.)

I'm no historian, but have been interested in the Jesus myth question since I lost my faith a few years ago. I am a fan of Richard Carrier, to reveal my own bias.

A few thoughts that I think are fair:

1. Arguing that Jesus is a myth is not a good strategy for arguing against Christianity. Mythicist Richard Carrier acknowledges this and points to an excellent article by philosopher Daniel Fincke.
   
   
2. The truth is that a historical Jesus existing is, in fact, the broad consensus of most Biblical scholars, even those who are not Christians. Obviously, this doesn't mean that it is necessarily correct (even a consensus can be wrong), but it is the consensus at this point.
   
   
3. There are some really, really crappy mythicist theories out there. Zeitgeist the movie is a good example.
   
   
4. Up until now, there has not been a peer-reviewed scholarly case made for mythicism. As of June 2014, Richard Carrier published a peer-reviewed book on the subject, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, but it is too early to say what impact, if any, this publication will have on the consensus. Carrier is compiling a list of responses to his book and his replies to their criticism.
   
   
5. There is some indication that other Biblical scholars are moving toward agnosticism on this subject. This article by Carrier mentions several that appear to be softening on the subject, or even joining the ranks of mythicists.

Richard Carrier has explored this issue recently in a two-book series (Proving History, and On the Historicity of Jesus. Here is a lecture he gave while the second book was in progress, if you want an overview of the arguments. He's the most prominent historian I know of who considers a mythical Jesus most plausible.

This is only a summary because it gets kind of long, but the bullet points are this:

The identifications of Mark and Matthew come from descriptions of books given in a book written by an early church father named Papias. We no longer have any copies of this book. What we know of it is only what is quoted from it in the 4th Century by Constantine's church historian, Eusebius.

Eusebius quotes Papias as having said the following

>And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.

The "presbyter" referred to is a shadowy figure called John the Presbyter (or John the Elder - presbyter means "elder"), who was allegedly a teacher of Papias. Eusebius says this was not the same person as the Apostle even though another church father named Irenaeus mixed them up.

Note that Papias does not quote from Mark or Matthew or give any information which would identify them specifically as the Canonical books. Those descriptions were used to identify anonymous books. The above mentioned Irenaeus decided that THIS must be the book written by Mark, and THIS must be the book written by Matthew.

The reason these identifications are now rejected by critical scholars is because the descriptions don't match the Canonical books. Papias says that Mark wrote down Peter's memoirs verbatim, and not in chronological order or any other order.

Mark's Gospel is very ordered and employs Greek literary sctructures called chiasms that can't happen from spontaneous speech (it would be like somebody speaking in iambic pentameter or exclusively in limericks). That becomes even more unlikely when the alleged speaker was an Aramaic speaking fisherman who would have known only pigeon Greek at best.

In addition, it needs to be remembered that the Gospel of Mark does not itself claim to be a memoir of Peter's, nor does the author claim to have known him. Furthermore, Mark's Gospel is anti-Petrine in tone and portrays Peter as an unredeemed coward who runs away and denies Jesus, and who himself is denied any witness of the resurrection. Why would a memoir of Peter's leave out any witness of a risen Jesus?

Mark is also written in a 3rd person, omniscient voice and includes scenes for which Peter could not have been a witness because, even internally to Mark's narrative, he wasn't there. The baptism by John the temptations in the wilderness, the prayer in Gethsemane and trial before the Sanhedrin for example.

Mark's Gospel also contains a number of geographical and legal errors would not be expected from a witness.

There are also scenes which appear to be based on rewritings of stories from the OT (particularly stories about Elijah and Elisha), but that's a whole other long argument. I'll just refer you to Randel Helms' Gospel Fictions.

So the evidence for Mark being written by a secretary of Peter's relies on a quotation from a lost book by a guy who says another guy told him that somebody named Mark wrote a memoir of Peter's, but describes a book which does not match the Canonical, which does not claim to be a memoir of Peter and which has internal evidence contradicting such a hypothesis.


Papias also says that Matthew compiled a collection of "sayings of the Lord" (Logia) in Hebrew.

Canonical Matthew does not claim to be written by Matthew or by any witness at all. It's not a sayings Gospel and it was composed in Greek, not Hebrew. It copies extensively from from Mark and the Septuagint (both Greek sources) and probably another Greek source called Q. The Q material is basically just sayings and may have, in a circuitous way, gone back to a collection of genuine Jesus sayings, but Matthew uses Mark almost exclusively as his narrative source. Why would a witness use a non-witness as a source?

This is already getting windier than I intended, so I'll rush through Luke and John.

The identification of "Luke the physician" as the author of Luke-Acts comes from Paul mentioning a companion of that name in Philemon and two mentions in the pseudo-Pauline epistles, Colossians and 2 Timothy. Because some passages in Acts are written in the 1st person plural (commonly called the "we passages"), it was assumed that the author must have been a companion of Paul's. Paul mentions a dude named Luke. Bingo, the author must have been this Luke dude.

The author himself never calls himself Luke or says he knew Paul. He was writing pretty late (around the turn of the 1st century), he says some things that contradict Paul's authentic epistles. His Gospel uses the same sources as Matthew (Mark and Q) indicating a lack of access to witnesses (in his prologue to his Gospel he says straight up that he is using previously written sources).

There is more than one theory about the we passages, including one argument that it was an ancient Greek literary device used for sea voyages or that it was a previously written source used by Luke. Bart Ehrman says that he thinks that somebody else wrote a fake account of travels with Paul and that Luke thought it was real.

The identification of John of Zebedee as the author of the Fourth Gospel first comes from Irenaeus, who identifies him as the "beloved disciple" (the Gospel itself never says who the beloved disciple was. The inference is made because it also never mentions John of Zebedee, so the reasoning was that the BD must have been J of Z).

For a variety of reasons, including the highly sophisticated Greek (from an uneducated, Aramaic speaking fisherman who the book of Acts explicitly says was illiterate), the late dating, the highly developed Christology, the long, developed theological speeches which would not be plausibly remembered and are not corroborated in the synoptics and the reflection and knowledge of the schism between Jews and Christians including the anachronistic placement of the expulsion of Christians from synagogues within the life of Jesus.

The last chapter also seems to imply that the Beloved Disciple had already died relative to the writing of that chapter.

As with the other Gospels, there is no real evidence in favor of the tradition and there is internal and external evidence against it.

Sort of indirectly related to SneerClub subjects, I hope that's ok. Apparently this guy Richard Carrier - of course not himself a New Testament specialist at all - tried to show that Jesus did not exist by waving the Bayes wand. Needless to say, it got rather bad reviews in professional journals. It seems a pretty astonishing example though of the belief that by applying Bayes' formula to any subject, you don't need to actually know anything about it...

> Redditepsilon, 2 day old account. While a very young account is usually indicative of some sort of got'ca or make-a-claim hit and run account - Redditepsilon, your post history provides some evidence that you will actually discuss/debate against your topic post, so some short answers (mostly copy and paste from previous debates) to these common claims.

> If we look at the background historical data on the resurrection of Jesus, which is the empty tomb,

Let's look at what is arguably the most important narrative related to Jesus in Christianity, the Resurrection narratives. Ignoring the completely inaccurate portrayal of the Roman trial law and procedures in the Trial of Jesus, and the historically unsupportable removal of the body of the decessed Jesus from the crufix and tomb burial - which presumes that the body was actually placed in the tomb (link - warning a HUGH wall of text), let's look at the consistency and accuracy of the various canon Gospel narratives related to the resurrection. The much studied, and selected, Gospel canon narratives, canon selected by learned men who had both (1) strong motivation to select narratives that supported their worldview and confirmation bias and (2) demonstrated rejection of dogma/narratives that did not fit their self-selected criteria, results in a series of Resurrection narratives that are highly non-internally consistent.

• Comparison Chart: Biblical Accounts of the Resurrection
  
• A Table Comparing the Contents of the Resurrection Narratives in each of the Four Gospels
  
  Before the Christian Apologist kicks in and claims that these narratives are all essentially the same (somehow), consider the narratives from the claim that there is a truth position in Christianity/Yahweh's existence that results from the argument of internal consistency and historical fact. Given the widely different versions of the Resurrection narrative, for what is arguably the most important and essential event/tenet of Christianity, the argument from internal consistency of it's own historical fact fails to be credible.
  
  > the post-mortem apparances of Jesus to different people and groups of people
  
  Besides the claim of the apostles that they saw Jesus post-resurrection, who were these other people?
  
  > the origin of the disciples faith that Jesus rose from the dead
  
  But speaking of the appearance of post-resurrection Jesus - Jesus purposefully provided empirical physical, and falsifiable, evidence that he (Jesus) was alive and in natural physical human body form (Doubting Thomas, John 20:24-29) following the Resurrection. 1. Why does Jesus fail to provide such evidence now? and 2. In light of the actions of Jesus, why is Religious Faith considered such a virtue?
  
  > the willingness of Jesus' disciples to go to their deaths for that faith
  
  Fallacy of argumentum ad martyrium (argument from martyrdom). While the argument from martyrdom, an appeal to emotion, produces an emotional response, the act of martyrdom/suicide in no way provides, or supports, a truth position against the belief that is used to support the label of martyr. People voluntarily die for all sorts of beliefs that have no truth value.
  
  For a detailed assessment see: March to Martyrdom! (Down the Yellow Brick Road…)
  
  > is that a convincing evidence on a balance of probability, that Jesus was raised from the dead?
  
  No. The claim/assertions of resurrection is, at best, highly questionable.
  
  > And doesn't that suggest he was raised by God from the dead?
  
  Again no.
  
  > it's almost certain he [Jesus] existed.
  
  Did Jesus the man exist as depicted in the New Testament of the Bible?
  
  Given the contradictions internally within in the narratives and the contradictions in events/dates between the narratives and events/dates presented in contemporary histories, I would say that it is unlikely that, presuming existence of a historical figure, the depiction of Jesus the man in the Gospels is accurate.
  
  I will concede that there was a man, a Jewish man, that acted as a Rabbi, and that preached a form of divergent Judaism, and that lived around 4 BCE'ish till around 29 BCE'ish (when this man is said to have died). I concede that a historical Jesus existed, where Jesus is the name given to the archetype of the person upon which the Jesus narrative in the New Testament is based. Yĕhōšuă‘, Joshua, Jesus, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, was not an uncommon name within the Hebrew community and may represent the actual name of this archetypal person. This Jesus character is also attributed with what can arguably be described as a lite version of the morality of Buddhism, and this Jesus was a decent, though with a rather shallow philosophy, fellow. This Jesus was also atypical of the contemporary Jews as he was in his 30's and had not married.
  
  The Divine narrative attributed to the Jesus character, however, is a different issue.
  
  If you are interested in a mythist position concerning the historical Jesus, check out:
  
  
• On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier
  
  Summary: The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Carrier re-examines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity and poses the key questions that must now be answered if the historicity of Jesus is to survive as a dominant paradigm. Carrier contrasts the most credible reconstruction of a historical Jesus with the most credible theory of Christian origins if a historical Jesus did not exist. Such a theory would posit that the Jesus figure was originally conceived of as a celestial being known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture; then stories placing this being in earth history were crafted to communicate the claims of the gospel allegorically; such stories eventually came to be believed or promoted in the struggle for control of the Christian churches that survived the tribulations of the first century. Carrier finds the latter theory more credible than has been previously imagined. He explains why it offers a better explanation for all the disparate evidence surviving from the first two centuries of the Christian era. He argues that we need a more careful and robust theory of cultural syncretism between Jewish theology and politics of the second-temple period and the most popular features of pagan religion and philosophy of the time. For anyone intent on defending a historical Jesus, this is the book to challenge.
  
  OP, if you wish to have a more indepth discussion/debate, a suggestion... Pick just one claim/assertion, start a new topic (here in /r/debateanatheist or /r/DebateReligion), present your claim and supporting argument/position, and then defend that claim and argument. When you post as many claims as you did in this topic post (and presented without actual credible evidence or supporting argument), the length of a full and detailed response becomes silly.
  
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  EDIT: Going back to the empty tomb argument....
  
  OP, here are some previous discussions concerning the claims made around the empty tomb that came up in /r/AcademicBiblical.
  
  /r/AcademicBiblical is a fairly active subreddit that discusses early Judaism and Christianity—with a focus on Biblical texts, but also related noncanonical literature (1 Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.)—in a scholarly context. A highly recommended subreddit for all those interested in studies of Judaism and Christianity.

Other scholars think the ratio is more likely to be 0%. Source: Richard Carrier.

> By the methods and standards of the historical community writ large, a historical Jesus existed.

I'm curious if you have any material to back this up. The most (only?) interesting part of the debate to me is whether historical Jesus studies actually uses good historical methods, and it's the topic of the book Carrier just wrote(which i haven't read yet, but have listened to an interview about).

I'm also not a historian, and really haven't looked into this issue, so I'm interested if you have any insights.

(FWIW, I couldn't care less if there was a historical, non-creedal Jesus or not. I'm really quite puzzled why people seem to care so much. But if everyone's gonna talk about it, I might as well learn something. ;-)

There is a really good book, Pierced For Our Transgressions that does a nice exegetical study of how the Scapegoat is a type of Christ as it relates to penal substitutionary atonement. I highly recommend checking the book out if you can.

I don't really see the Scapegoat relating to Christ's temptation in the wilderness. For me, this is more of a parallel to the 40 years the Israelites spent in the desert, or perhaps to Elijah and Moses fasting 40 days and nights. I was listening to Michael Kruger's lecture series on the Gospels from the RTS mobile app, and he mentioned that some scholars have drawn parallels of Jesus' life to the Exodus. I'll have to go back and find those sources, but I found them to be quite interesting. Maybe somebody more knowledgeable than I can shed some light here.

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

Yes. His book On the Historicity of Jesus is published by an academic house and passed peer review.

He's also previously published scholarly articles, but I don't have any handy.

>start with one lie that, if true, is sufficient, but then pepper in like two or three other things that are progressively less relevant

Bingo. And it's also the mark of a truly stupid liar, because each successive addition to the excuse chain brings down the mathematical probability that the core statement is true.

(Disclaimer: considering that I'm almost 40 but I only learned about this last year from this excellent book by Richard Carrier I think it's fair to say I'm a pretty dumb motherfucker myself, but I'll try to make sense.)

Take any statement A. You don't know whether it's true or not, but you can assign it a probability of being true. Let's say that the probability is 0.5 (50%) - a coin toss is worth your best guess at this point.

Then, imagine that there are more statements like that, let's call them B, C, and D. Again, you know nothing about the truth behind them, either, but you can again estimate that each of them has a 0.5 probability of being true.

Now, take three people:

Person 1 tells you "A".

Person 2 tells you "A and B".

Person 3 tells you "A, B, C, and also D, believe me, believe me".

At this point you still don't know anything about any of those four statements, but you can calculate the probability for each person of being full of shit.

Person 1 only claimed one statement, A, so the likelihood he's full of shit is 0.5 (50%).

Person 2 went further and claimed A and B. The probability that both are true is 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25.

Person 3 is the bigliest guy with the best words, believe me. The probability of his four-part statement chain is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.0625 - that's 6.25%.

Because person 3 is a fucking moron he went and stacked multiple statements on top of one another, thereby bringing his full-of-shitness from a 50% likelihood to a whopping 93.75%. Just like that, what a fucking clown.

PS: You can of course have different probabilities for each statement, and they can differ from one another, too. But by definition if you don't know the truth for sure then it logically follows none of the statements can ever achieve a probability of 1. The conclusion is that every additional statement will always reduce the overall likelihood.

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I would recommend the work of Michael
Kruger like Canon Revisited or The Question of Canon.

Beyond that, a classic is Warfield's The Authority and Inspiration of the Bible. Maybe even Blomberg's The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.

It seems likely that the original authors were recording the existing mythos of their people, and the myths were used in their society like myths are used in every society: to explain and give meaning to a world they didn't understand, to provide a cohesive narrative for the group, to pass along and reinforce values. I have found learning just a little about the common mythologies of the world extremely interesting and helpful in putting the bible into correct perspective. Like, how many times a flood myth pops up and the different interactions between the diving and humanity in those stories.

You might enjoy Bart Ehrman's writing on the new testament and Jesus as he explores the story of Jesus, who wrote, changed and codified it and why, and how it became a religion.

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

Aside from Finklestein's book, there is Robert Price's Holy Fable: The Old Testament Unencumbered by Faith. Robert Price is a former evangelical minister-turned-atheist, but with a deep understanding of the bible. It is maybe a bit too skeptical, but it's still got a lot of good info.

In general:

The Torah / Pentateuch was written by (at least) 4 different sources, and compiled (much?) later. There's the Elohist, the Yahweist, the Deutoronomist, and the Priestly source. This explains why there are 2 different versions of a number of stories - for example, there are 2 creation stories; Noah is simultaneously the "only righteous man" God could find, and also a lazy drunk; there are two full sets of 10 commandments, only 3 of which overlap (so there are actually 17 commandments) etc. Someone (likely the Deutoronomist) compiled the book, and not wanting to risk being wrong, included multiple stories and tried to make them jive with one another.

Generally speaking, Moses is nearly universally agreed to have been a myth, along with Joshua. There is no archeological evidence that ancient Hebrews were ever in Egypt, or ever wandered in the desert for 40 years, although stories of Pharaoh may have come from a time when Egypt ruled the Levant (Moses is an Egyptian name, from the same root as Tutmose or Ramses).

The ancient Hebrews were, most evidence supports now, one of many Canaanite tribes, and happened to be the one that managed to stick around. They were also polytheistic for a very long time into their existence - a number of stories have been altered to whitewash this out. The 12 (13? 11 plus grandsons? sources are all over the place on this one) sons of Judah/Israel heading the 12 tribes of Israel are likely figureheads that were ret-conned into existence as more tribes joined with the Hebrews through conquest. Kind of like "Oh, well, we'll join you, we're probably related somewhere way back anyway!". There is also little to no evidence of an epic conquest of the holy land, a. la. Joshua, and many of the vast cities and huge fortresses referenced in the book of Joshua were, archaeology says, minor hamlets with hundreds or thousands of people at most.

There is very little evidence for the existence of David. There is an inscription on a very old (non-Israelite) stone tablet that may reference the "House of David" from several hundred years after David was supposed to have been around. I'm willing to concede that he may have existed, but he was likely a "chieftain" rather than a king. Almost all scholars agree that there was never a united kingdom of Israel and Judah. Jerusalem, at the time of David (10th century BCE), was a very small village or outpost, and there is also no evidence of a first (or Solomon's) temple. There is, however, ample evidence of a 2nd temple (which was greatly expanded by Herod near the BCE/CE switch).

1,2 Kings was written either during the Babylonian exile, or shortly after it. There are just too many anachronisms (bronze weapons, camels, etc) for it to have been written during the time of its subjects, and its subject matter (continued allegiance to Yahweh will bring you victory, breaking Yahweh's commandments will bring you strife) is clearly aimed at explaining circumstances to an Israelite population that has experienced lots of strife.*

1,2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah (originally all one work) looks to be a redaction and rewrite of 1,2 Kings in large part, but by the priestly source - who is working hard to clean up the image of certain people (David had Uriah killed? Nah, let's skip that. David's sons did bad things? Nix it. etc) at the same time that he's working to ret-con a place of prominence for priests of his tribe.

Anyway, skipping ahead to the New Testament, I would also recommend another extreme skeptic's book: Dr. Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus. Dr. Carrier's position is well outside the mainstream consensus, but there's no denying that A.) He is extremely well versed in his subject area, and B.) the mainstream consensus is very conservative, as it is made up of largely religious institutions and believers who all have a vested interest. So his book is good for contrast, and the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

For starters, the earliest parts of the New Testament are the letters of Paul. Paul, for sure, wrote 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans 1-8. The rest are kind of up for grabs, with some possibly by Paul, and some certainly being forgeries and written as late as the 2nd or possibly even 3rd century. Paul's Jesus is very vague (as in, celestial, not earthly, and working through revelation), and Paul nearly goes out of his way to not talk about Jesus' earthly life - even in places where Jesus ostensibly talked about specific topics that would indisputably bolster Paul's arguments.

Next, we have Mark. Mark's gospel was written first, and Mark's Jesus is somewhat timid and understated. Mark also has little understanding of Galilean geography (the vast "Sea of Galilee" that witnesses such horrible storms is, in reality, a pond that you could kayak across in an hour, for example). Then, Matthew wrote his gospel, using Mark as a source, along with possibly the "Q" source, or possibly just adding things that he had heard or liked. Matthew's Jesus is a scholarly rabbi, and he talks of how Christians should keep the Jewish customs along with the new customs of Christ. Matthew also corrects Mark - a lot. Then, we have Luke, who uses Mark and possibly "Q" or possibly Matthew as his source. Luke's Jesus is the Gentile Jesus, who brings new rules and is for everyone, not just Jews. Those are the Synoptic gospels; then we get to John.

Oh, boy. John... is nuts. John's Jesus is large, in charge, and slinging miracles and witticisms in every direction. There's nothing about helping the poor or healing the sick, but there's a huge serving of hating the Jews. John also contains a number of Gnostic themes that have likely been toned down over the years - John's gospel is the one that is most obviously cut up and rearranged and altered. There's a lot of things like "And then Jesus did his first miracle. And then he did many other miracles. And then he did his second miracle", or Jesus teleporting, popping up all over Galilee, one place after another. But anyway, it’s likely that John’s gospel was so popular that it couldn’t be kept out of the New Testament, once the Council of Nicaea got around to picking which books got in, so it had to be altered in order to tone it down a bit.

The contents of Acts are impossible to square with the letters of Paul - Acts tells a story of the early church, huddled together, building outward, ministering to Galilee, growing larger in harmony. But Paul - Paul does not get along with the so-called fathers of the church in Jerusalem. We also know, partly from other sources, that the early church was very fractured, and only now looks harmonious because the winning faction got to poke and rewrite a lot of the history.

The rest of the New Testament was largely written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and can't have any relevant information to share about the life and times of Jesus, having been written several generations at least after the last person that could have ever met him had died.

Anyway, that's a more-or-less short version of some of the ins-and-outs of some major episodes of the Bible.

* Totally my aside: the concept of religious guilt, IMO, stems from here. In olden times, gods were like mascots - you moved to a new place, you adopt the local gods -
or, you get conquered, it must have been that their god was stronger, so why not jump on the winning bandwagon. The Deutoronomist, the likely source of the idea of the "covenant with god", introduces the idea that believing in a god is a two-way street. Believe enough, and do what he wants, and good things will happen -- but don't believe, or don't do what he wants, and now bad things happen, and it's kinda your fault. The aim was to keep the Hebrews from converting to Babylonian or other Canaanite gods.
Cue thousands of years of catholic guilt, etc.

If anyone wants a good, scholarly study of this subject, check out check out Kenneth Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes.

If you're wondering what makes Catholicism true among other religions, consider that Christianity is rather unique among religions for its truth value being directly tied to an historical event: Christ's Resurrection. If Jesus did rise from the dead, Christianity is decisively vindicated, regardless of the other religions' claims (which is not to say other religions may not have insights or elements of the truth, just that they are not the full truth in the way Christianity is). For that reason I advise looking into apologetics defending the resurrection. Here's a short reading list to get you started:

• The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
  
• Defending the Resurrection by J.P. Holding
  
• The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Michael Licona

>It's not like in Mark's "lost" ending Jesus stayed dead

Right. That was The Gospel according to Thomas Jefferson.

>or came back as a zombie and terrorized Judea

Not sure who that's "the Gospel according to", but I'm interested.

> Why, Christianity as opposed to atheism or other religions?

Hey man, I can't help you much with the questions about the specifics of creation and the role death plays in it, that has never bothered me a lot and I came to Christianity already believing that evolution is true. But I can help you with this question, I hope.

If you really want to find out you will have to do your own research on Christianity and other religions and on atheism and make up your mind. That said I think the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong. I'd encourage you, if you have the time and money, to read the following two books: The Jesus Legend by Boyd & Eddy, and The Resurrection of Jesus by Licona. Both are very thorough and scholarly, the first dealing with the reliability of the gospels in general and the latter dealing with Jesus' resurrection in particular.

If you want a well grounded faith, you need to have a solid foundation. So many people believe in Jesus because they think the Bible is inerrant and when they discover that it isn't so, their faith quickly falls away. When our faith depends on the inerrancy of the Bible, our faith depends on our ability to resolve any and all of the apparent (and real) contradictions, both internal to the Bible and between Bible and external reality (like with young earth creationism and science). When we come across a contradiction that we can't resolve, our faith then will quickly come crashing down.

It should be the other way around: Jesus should be our foundation, and because Jesus is God and He held Scripture in high regard, we should have a healthy respect for Scripture as well. Perhaps then we won't tie ourselves in knots in trying to come up with tortured interpretations whenever the house of cards of inerrancy threatens to come crashing down. Look to Jesus when something in Scripture doesn't make sense; Jesus is the full revelation of God, the clearest picture (or icon if you like) of God that we will ever get in this earthly life.

The similarities of the crucifixion and resurrection to pagan stories are usually overstated.

Richard Carrier has one book out and another on the way addressing the issue from a more scholarly direction. Proving History is the first book. The second is due out in a few months if I remember correctly.

Robert M. Price also has a good work on the subject. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems

Start with those two. They both have talks on YouTube about the historicity of the gospels. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm utterly convinced, but they are pretty compelling. Carrier and Eherman have had a bit of a feud over the issue and again, Carrier seems to have the better argument.

If you want, you can get a Jefferson for a Hamilton.

> The means of magic differ in various cultures. Often in Greco-Roman antiquity
magicians were thought to manipulate spirits, hence, from a strict early Jewish
and Christian perspective, to traffic in demons.

• Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

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

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.

>The stumbling blocks I now face in terms of figuring out what I believe mostly revolve around the question of the historicity of miraculous claims in the New Testament.

There are a couple good books on the Resurrection by N.T. Wright and William Lane Craig. Inspiring Philosophy has some good videos on it, too. If you are looking for an overall study on the historical Christ, Dr. Brant Pitre's The Case for Jesus helped me a lot, too.

Edit: Found [this] (https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0830827196&pd_rd_r=SJ4TFXY6VPE6WWN54P2K&pd_rd_w=rp8N4&pd_rd_wg=hhCdC&psc=1&refRID=SJ4TFXY6VPE6WWN54P2K). Looks to me to be less apologetic-y and more based on the historical facts, but comes to a similar conclusion.

Paragraph 1: "It pains Jehovah when his servants are treated unfairly. He will make sure that justice is served."

Yeah, eventually...

Paragraph 2: "The Mosaic Law ended in 33 C.E. when the Christian congregation was established."

Nooooo, that's not quite what Jesus said...

Matthew 5: 17 - 19 [JW online bible]: "Do not think I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. 18  Truly I say to you that sooner would heaven and earth pass away than for one smallest letter or one stroke of a letter to pass away from the Law until all things take place. 19  Whoever, therefore, breaks one of these least commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in relation to the Kingdom of the heavens. [Governing Body, are you listening???] But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in relation to the Kingdom of the heavens."

I notice they skipped that bible reference in paragraphs 2, 3 & 4...

Paragraph 5: "When did Jesus teach? He taught during his ministry on earth. (Matt. 4: 23) He also taught his followers shortly after he was resurrected."

Yet oddly he said nothing about peddling corporate literature from door to door...

Paragraph 6: "Where are Jesus’ teachings recorded? The four Gospels record many of the things Jesus said and did on earth."

Those four gospels contradict each other - a LOT. https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Fictions-Randel-Helms/dp/0879755725

Paragraph 7: "Jesus’ teachings cover all aspects of life. So the law of the Christ governs what we do at home, at work or at school, and in the congregation."

Hilariously Jesus got the vital part about washing one's hands before eating meals DEAD WRONG. So I'm not sure about the accuracy and efficacy of the rest of his "laws", either.

Paragraph 8: "A well-made house built on a solid foundation makes those who live in it feel safe and secure."

Not if the owner of that house has been coerced or guilted into handing over the title of the house to a publishing corporation pulling a scam on religious people...

Paragraph 9: "Jesus willingly put the needs of others ahead of his own. Above all, he showed great love by surrendering his life in behalf of others."

Yeah, that's called making a human sacrifice. Who says the god of the Old Testament underwent a personality change when it came to the New Testament?

Wow, paragraphs 10 & 11 are a pack of lies!

"We can imitate Jesus by putting the needs of others ahead of our own." Aka co-dependency, an unhealthy form of attachment. Also - according to the New Testament, that also includes human sacrifice of his followers, if such is "demanded" of them.

"Jesus showed how deeply Jehovah cares about his worshippers." (Human sacrifice, anyone? See Matthew 10: 38, 16: 24, Mark 8: 34, and Luke 14: 27....)

"Jehovah is eager to welcome back a lost sheep who repents and returns to the congregation."

Funny how the congregation elders have failed to get that message...

And the fun continues in paragraph 12: "We view each of our brothers and sisters as valuable and precious, and we gladly welcome back “a lost sheep” who returns to Jehovah."

What a sick joke of hypocrisy spoken with forked tongues.

Paragraph 13: "Love fellow believers as Jesus loved you. That requires a self-sacrificing love. We are to love our brothers and sisters even more than we love ourselves. We must love them to the point of being willing to give up our life for them,"

Yet oddly there's nothing preventing the petty gossiping about minutia and nasty tattling to the elders.

Paragraph 14: "... or we take time off from secular work to help with disaster relief..."

Still drumming the disaster relief money pot, I see...

And: "We are also helping to make our congregation a place where each individual can feel safe and secure."

Even the pedophiles... Too bad about the kids, though. Their parents should have kept a closer eye on them.

Paragraph 15: “Justice,” as used in the Bible, basically means to do what God considers to be right and to do so without partiality"

Seriously? Have these fools never read the bible? Uzzah, Uriah, the daughter of Jephthah, the unnamed concubine of the Levite in Judges 19, the sons of Saul, all the little babies (and all the animals and plants) drowned in the "Flood", all the little babies and animals and plants due to be killed at "Armageddon"...

Paragraph 16: "He preached without prejudice to all, rich and poor. He was never harsh or abusive in his treatment of women."

Pity WT and the Governing Body don't follow his example. They cuddle up to the rich and denigrate women to second-class status.

Paragraph 17: "...and preaching to all who are willing to listen—regardless of their social or religious background."

Oddly the WT Society seems desperate to preach to people who'd rather just be left alone, too. Search "get rid of JW" on Reddit for a glimpse of the number of people who don't want to be pestered by bible-thumpers, especially early-ish on a weekend.

Paragraph 18: "Second, consider what Jesus taught about justice. He taught principles that would help his followers to treat others fairly. "

CoughTwo [eye]WitnessRuleCough...

Paragraph 19: "And if we have been a victim of injustice in Satan’s world, we can take comfort in knowing that Jehovah will cause justice to be done for us."

But isn't it nice to realize that bad old "Satan's World" will do its best to help protect us and cause justice to be done for us whenever evil people in the congregations victimize us...?

Paragraph 20: "Under the law of the Christ, how should those in authority treat others?"

...Getting a little too big for our britches, elders and ministerial servants? "Authority" doesn't mean untrained volunteers in a religious setting; it means secular authorities with the power and training to investigate and truly punish wrongdoers with something harsher than having their "privileges" taken away.

Paragraph 21: "Some men may find it difficult to show such love, perhaps because they were not raised in an environment where treating others fairly and lovingly was valued."

Gasp! You mean - like those who are second, third and fourth-generation (and more) JWs???

Paragraph 22: "Elders must remember that the “sheep” do not belong to them."

HAW! Unfortunately, neither does the kingdom hall, even though the elders and other congregation members may have paid for it and helped build it!

Paragraph 23: "What is the role of elders in handling cases of serious wrongdoing? Their role is different from that of judges and elders under the Law that God gave Israel. Under that Law, appointed men handled not only spiritual matters but also civil and criminal cases."

Ah, HAW HAW HAW HA HA! [snort!] Seriously? Elders have been [mis]handling criminal cases for decades, especially those involving criminal sexual predators who prey upon children and underage teens!

Paragraph 24: "How do elders handle the spiritual aspects of serious wrongdoing? They use the Scriptures to weigh matters and make decisions."

So... Asking a teenager or young adult how many times they were penetrated, whether they enjoyed it, whether they pleasured the other person, whether they performed oral upon each other, is all SCRIPTURAL and therefore fair game for the crusty old elders' lascivious questions???

Paragraph 25: "Still, we are living in a world where “wicked men” have advanced “from bad to worse.” ... We must not let down our guard."

Especially not in a pedophile-friendly environment.

And for next week:

"How can the Christian congregation reflect God’s justice when dealing with child sexual abuse?"

Can't wait to see that demonstration of insane, self-serving hypocrisy....

Tangentially related to the Christian/Pagan thing, Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? and Randall Helm's Gospel Fictions both demonstrate how the Bible arose as an amalgam of ancient myth and oral tradition. I believe Dan Barker also covers some of that ground in Godless.

> but a historical Jesus isn’t a point of contention for historical/biblical scholars.

Also existence of Bigfoot is not a point of contention for lifelong believers. I don't understand why you appeal to a source with such a conflict of interest.

Point of Contention

>actually

probably*

That's the best we can do, since the evidence is suspiciously lacking and internally contradictory.

1
2
3 4
5 6

Happy Ēostre, and happy reading!

> people who believe that Jesus never existed despite historical data

please enlighten us and share just one contemporary historical evidence of Jesus' existence

for those new to this topic: there are none - every single piece of evidence comes much later, the earliest several decades after the death of Jesus. The more detailed and dependable "historical evidence" even later, at times hundreds of years later. None are contemporary.

for those curious to learn more via an PhD academic treatise on the topic:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason/dp/1909697494

No, not that likely at all: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

You really can't go that far. There's plenty of debate on that subject. The problem is nearly all Jesus scholars are Christians, who clearly have a vested interested in Jesus actually having existed.

Here's a an example of two articles from reputable sources that disputes historical Jesus's existence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/18/did-historical-jesus-exist-the-traditional-evidence-doesnt-hold-up/?utm_term=.e4d85d9499a1

https://www.livescience.com/13711-jesus-christ-man-physical-evidence-hold.html

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QSO2S5C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Remember, there is not one single mentioning of Jesus that was written during his supposed life. Such a thing just does not exist. 2,000 years of people wanting it to be true have planted many many fakes (Shroud of Turin, for example). But that's not even the real problem with finding out if a particular person existed such a long time ago. Physical evidence decays, gets translated improperly, gets lost or destroyed.

I'm not saying he did, or did not live. I'm saying that your original statement "that virtually all scholars agree existed" is not true. These events happened too long ago to verify 100% that any of it happened at all. Combine that with 2,000 years of mistranslations, faked artifacts and most scholars having preconceived notions, it's just not possible to verify these things.

I understand you will disagree. But consider this: Nearly all active Mormons scholars believe the golden plates really existed. And that only supposedly happened in 1823. Time muddles the true events of everything. 2,000 of time muddles the true events a lot.

Edit: a few words

I cannot encourage you ENOUGH to read "Miracles" by Craig Keener. http://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-Testament-Accounts-Volume/dp/0801039525 It also goes into the accounts of modern healers, and he interviews those who were supposedly healed by known healing giants, such as Kathryn Kuhlman and John Wimber, and from churches like Bethel.

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?

Or this book.

The story of Jesus? Water into wine, resurrection, walking on water? Nope.

Do I think it's silly and frankly stupid to pin a historical theory of nonexistence purely on the lack of primary sources? Yep. Do I get into a tiff with people here on /r/exmormon about this every couple months or so? Yep. Is Zeitgeist a terrible movie because it sounds smart and well-founded but is nothing better than the crap usually found on the "History" Channel? Yep. Is the Jesus Myth Hypothesis (no historical individual known as Jesus of Nazareth existed and the Christ mythos that built up was fully imported from traditions outside of Christianity) a real historical theory with serious historians behind it? Yes. Is it currently a minority theory? Yes.

For those who want to talk about this realistically, please get your information from more than YouTube videos or popular documentaries. The issue of where the Christ mythos came from has been debated for centuries and is still unresolved, but there are accepted ways of doing historical research that have arisen in the past few hundred years because they work. Simply parroting somebody who says "There's no mention of Jesus in contemporary records, ergo no historical existence" isn't going to get you very far when talking to real historians of any stripe.

This book is a collection of essays by some of the current leading experts on this issue and includes an essay from one of the few respected historians who promotes the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, Dr. Robert Price, and defends it far more ably than what you usually find floating around on the Internet.

Also, Dr. Bart Ehrman, who is pretty much the biblical studies equivalent of Grant Palmer (ie, while he's a respected researcher and authority, his best skill is in distilling existing research for popular consumption) has recently released his own rebuttal to much of the Jesus Myth arguments.

For me personally, the reason I feel that Jesus of Nazareth was a real individual comes from a careful analysis of early Christian works (the Gospels and the genuine Epistles of Paul, especially Galatians) using them against each other to discern where they have overlap that they would probably have rather not had (usually called the Criterion of Embarrassment). There are many such tools used by historians in biblical and other non-religious historical studies to try and determine facts from biased historical sources through contextual analysis and such secondary research.

Let me put it another way: how many of us feel that every single prophet in the Old Testament, including the folk heroes of Elijah and Elisha, were similarly non-existent? David? Solomon? Do you think that a real box was carried around by ancient Jews and was placed in their temple at Jerusalem? Do you think there was a temple at Jerusalem before some Jews returned from Babylon? A tent that it was patterned on located at Shiloh? Could you describe it's size and layout? Because there's no proof for any of these items at all (well, the Babylonians prided themselves on destroying Jerusalem with its temple, but that's the only external mention of it), and I think most of us would probably be very comfortable with the idea that some actual historical figures and things existed (probably vastly different in real life from how they were remembered). Why should Jesus (a figure with far less time from when his own followers felt he lived and when they started writing their own stories about him) be any different?

IIRC, this book has the best run down of the birth contradictions that I've ever read.The book is short, easily readable, and gets to the point.

Dr. Richard Carrier's new book further cements the Mythicist view as very plausible.

Reposting my comment from earlier in the month:

Non-religious academics

• Did Jesus Exist? The historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (Video of Ehrman reading from the book)
  
• Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? by Maurice Casey
  
• Jesus: An historian's review of the Gospels by Michael Grant
  
  Religious academics
  
  
• The Historical Figure of Jesus by E P Sanders
  
• The Evidence for Jesus by James Dunn
  
  At the more apologetic end, there's the recent book by Brant Pitre: The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ.
  
  
  At the "rejecting the idea of Jesus" end there's:
  
  
• Incredible Shrinking Son of Man by Robert Price
  
• On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier
  
  Neither of which have found wide favor among either religious or non-religious academics (Ehrman and Casey's work being direct rebuttals for many of the arguments).

What you're talking about is something experts in the field call "public memory" or "collective memory", is used to describe a shared pool of information and memories of a social group, often times racial, religious, or national. This is an important factor to historians when they write history. It's also the same reason why primary sources, or first person accounts taken down shortly after an event usually have greater weight than first person accounts taken years or even decades later.

I'm not sure what online materials exist specifically for this. But one great resource that's a fun read is a book by historian Bart Ehrman entitled Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. Ehrman discusses and explores collective memory from about 2,000 years ago, examining the gap between what happened after Jesus of Nazareth died and 40 years later when the first gospel (Mark) was written down. He relies on modern scholarship around collective memory and psychology to understand how memory within groups can change over years, and it's truly fascinating.

>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.

Monotheist arguments

• The Cosmological argument (e.g. Unmoved-mover)
  
  
• The Ontological argument (e.g. Necessary objects that possibly exist, necessarily exist. God is defined as a necessary object, and god could possibly exist, ergo.)
  
  
• The Moral argument (e.g. If Absolute Morality exists, god must exist to sustain it. Absolute Morality exists, egro)
  
  
• The Teleological argument (e.g. Given [x data] it seems nigh improbable life could have arose in the universe. Since life exists, it seems something intended that it be so. That intention came from god.)
  
  
• The Presuppositional argument (e.g. If Logic exists, god must exist to sustain it. Logic exists, ergo.)
  
  *
  
  Christian specific arguments**
  
  
• The Empty Tomb argument.
  
  
• Would someone die for a lie?
  
  
• The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
  
  
• I-read-a-lot-of-philosophy-and-Aquinas-therefore-Jesus-is-Lord
  
  
• Personal revelation
  
  
• Pascal's Wager
  
  
• Belief in Christ historically secured the only viable birth of the natural sciences
  
  I do not find any of these convincing, but they are the arguments I've found so far.

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?

I think the best thing to do here (especially if you enjoy reading) is to do some study into the good reasons why Christianity is believed to be correct. William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith is one of the best, most cohesive defenses of the reasonability of the Christian faith I've ever read but there are plenty of other good sources too (Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God and The Coherence of Theism, J.P. Moreland and Bill Craig's Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview, Paul Copan and Bill Craig's Come Let Us Reason, Craig Keener's Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, and Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief just to name a few).

> I'm genuinely interested in how a person can balance the stories and beliefs of a particular religion and conversely understand it on an intellectual and scholarly level.

From a psychological perspective, it's easier for educated and intelligent people to construct an alternative narrative (or explanation) for facts that may contradict what they want to be true for some reason. This isn't constrainted to religious beliefs; you'll also find the pattern in secular contexts (here climate change and politics). Atheists are capable of this, too.

For instance, there's a several different possibilities for scholars of the Historical Jesus, which – for atheists – naturally triggers the question: Why can someone like this still believe in the theology about Christ?

Some answer: These two areas have nothing to do with each other. The fields have different objectives and constraints, so the results from a historical perspective has no implications for theology.

Others think, the historical perspective has implications, but these do not contradict the theological perspective, but informs or supplements it.

Still others seem to perceive a contradiction, and accept only one of them (atheists, for instance).

Edit: I'd recommend Allison's "The The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus" if you want to learn more.

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.

Once you begin to understand the context of Jesus’ time and teachings, you start to realize exactly how much of a radical his teachings were.

Start here:

Do you mind terribly if I copy and paste something I wrote in a similar thread? It might help you make up your mind. Represents my many years of study as a believer. It is:

Science cannot help us answer the question, "Is there a God?" because it is not testable or subject to the scientific method.

Philosophy can help, and the arguments for or against the existence of God are called ontological arguments. There are several good ones: some of the strongest seems to be the Argument from Morality, the Argument from Beauty, and the Original Cause. Not sure if I can summarize all of them but maybe this is a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

The Argument from Morality is what really ensnared former atheist turned Christian C.S. Lewis. He believed that while we do have man made rules we also have rules about fairness and justice that seem to come from nowhere, and point to the idea that there is an ultimate giver of this morality, God.

Regardless, if you examine the question of God's existence from philosophy you can re-examine whether you want to be an atheist. I think most philosophers find agnosticism more defensible. Philosophy never gives us a slam dunk answer, only a preference or something we can "defend."

All right. So what if there is a God? Then which religion, if any, is correct is the next question. Christians believe there is a God because they believe in what Jesus said. You might find the Jesus stuff hard to believe. Here's what we know, and the logic behind my belief:

-Jesus lived, preached, was crucified - this is pretty much historical fact.

-What's in dispute is whether he rose from the dead.

-His early followers sure believed he did. Even accounting for their ancient world writings, which were subject to literary problems not found in the modern world (i.e. moving dates or changing the order in which things happened) we can be pretty sure this Jesus fellow sparked a movement of believers that really believed he was raised from the dead and revealed God.

-Therefore, either Jesus really did this, or some mistake was maid. A third hypothesis - they made Jesus up - is just silly.

From here you can examine the Christian claims for truth and compare them to those of other religions. So, in sum: study some of the basic philosophical arguments for God, study the historical Jesus and the historical Resurrection, compare to other religions, and make your own decisions. Some other links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-evidence-for-jesus

http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/crj_explainingaway/crj_explainingaway.htm

http://www.amazon.com/The-Resurrection-Jesus-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196

I'm an atheist, and most will hate me for this, but I don't recommend The God Delusion. There are better books, and Dawkins is much better when he writes about biology.

Atheist worldview book: I recommend Sense and Goodness without God by Richard Carrier

Books about Christianity (there are so many to recommend, but these are some favorites):

• The Christian Delusion by various authors.
  
• Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms
  
  I'm a big fan of Spong, so I would recommend any of his books. Also Robert M. Price is worth looking into, he has lots of free sermons and writings available from when he was a liberal pastor and theologian, which he is not anymore.
  
  

Preface

Unfortunately I don't think there's a "one stop shop" book on the atonement. The atonement has a biblical/exegetical basis as well as philosophical and theological ramifications. Hence, to do justice to the atonement as a full-orbed topic in a single book, you'd have to find a scholar who is well versed and up-to-date in the relevant biblical scholarship as well as philosophical theology. That's exceedingly rare, and in fact I'm not sure if there is such a scholar today.

What's more, the atonement can be framed in terms of additional categories or sub-categories like biblical theology, Pauline theology, Johannine theology, and so on. (By the way, Tom Schreiner, Simon Gathercole, and Jarvis Williams are good in discussing the atonement in Pauline theology.)

In short, the atonement is a massive topic.

One book

However, if I had to pick a single book on the atonement that gets as close as possible to this ideal (but ultimately falling short of it), I think I'd recommend Pierced for Our Transgressions. The book has decent biblical/exegetical and theological (including historical theology) foundations. Not stellar in these categories, but not bad, solid. However, it significantly lacks in philosophical theology. In any case, I think you'd have to supplement this book with other books. I'd recommend:

Biblical/Exegetical

• Beilby, James and Eddy, Paul (eds.). The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views. This book is a debate between four scholars arguing for four different views on the atonement: Gregory Boyd argues for the Christus Victor view; Tom Schreiner argues for the penal substitutionary view; Bruce Reichenbach argues for the healing view; and Joel Green argues for a kaleidescopic view. In my view, Schreiner makes the best case, but read it for yourself to decide.
  
  
• Morris, Leon. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. Either this book or its less technical and more popular but still strong treatment The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance. This is an older text, but it was and remains a landmark text. D.A. Carson still tells seminarians and ministers to "sell your shirt and buy" Morris' book if they have to. Likewise see Morris' brief essay "Theories of the Atonement".
  
  Theological
  
  
• Murray, John. Redemption Accomplished and Applied. A classic Reformed text from a stalwart Reformed theologian.
  
  
• Nicole, Roger. Our Sovereign Savior. A good chapter on the atonement by a world class theologian. Nicole was a Swiss Reformed theologian.
  
  
• Nicole, Roger. Standing Forth: Collected Writings of Roger Nicole. Includes essays on the atonement and related matters.
  
  
• Packer, J.I., Dever, Mark, and Duncan, Ligon. In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement. This book contains several essays on the atonement from J.I. Packer including Packer's classic introduction to John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.
  
  
• Warfield, B.B. "Atonement". A brief article that gives an overview of five possible theories about the atonement. Warfield has other good material on the atonement, but I thought this would be a decent representative.
  
  Philosophical
  
  
• Craig, William Lane. The Atonement (in the University of Cambridge's Elements in the Philosophy of Religion series). A short book. An overview of the philosophical issues. Cambridge Press did offer it for free as a downloadable pdf, which is how I obtained it, but I don't know if that's still the case now.
  
  
• Helm, Paul. "John Calvin's Position on the Atonement". Free article from an astute Reformed philosopher. Helm has discussed the atonement in published books too.
  
  
• Helm, Paul. "The Logic of Limited Atonement". Another free article.

For anyone interested, there is a great talk from David Fitzgerald about the evidence of Jesus. And then there is a talk by Richard Carrier about the Jesus myth theory. Then there is also great deal of debates where Richard debates opponents of the myth theory. You can look and see, if their arguments seem valid. Lastly, Richard Carrier wrote a book which should be his complete case for the Jesus myth theory along with apologists arguments (didn't read it but I'm going to).

This is a better investment than the lot of them, from an honest learning perspective, even if you don't agree with the conclusion. Ehrman is a seriously flawed source where, while you're still going to get exposed to some objectively true information that will be new to you, the logical fallacies and assumptions can do as much harm to developing a realistic understanding of the subject matter as it can be of benefit.

You might want to pick up Richard Carrier's latest work.

I suggest moving the Lataster (Washington Post) and Tarico (Alternet) to the top of the list. These are concise well written articles that serve as a good introduction, and are more authoritative (reviewed and edited by the publisher) than the many personal blogs on the list.

There's a few duplicates as well.

One link to add - Richard Carrier's book:

https://www.amazon.ca/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

If you want to read about Jesus mythicism, Richard Carrier's book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt is a far better place to start.

You might want to read this book. Even reading the reviews might be helpful.

http://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418932301&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=david+carrier+jesus&pebp=1418932362622

>Du greifst nur die Talpioth Särge heraus.

Du kannst also nicht bestreiten das in deiner Liste Mist steht. Was sagt das über die Verlässlichkeit der Endaussage?
>Wieso sollten die anderen Argumente nur schlecht und nicht belastend sein?

Weil sie dem Schluss, der daraus gezogen wird, nicht entsprechen.

>Hast du belastende Argumente für diese Sichtweise oder ist es mehr ein Glaube?

Die Historisierung von mythischen Gestalten kommen in der Antike andauernd vor, siehe Äneis oder Gilgamesh. Zudem ist es aus der historischen Abfolge der NT Schriften ersichtlich das eine Historisierung erst im Verlauf der Ausbildung des Christentums zustande kam. Zudem fehlen Hinweise, die man bei einer tatsächlichen historischen Existenz Jesus erwarten würde, vollständig, währen die Hinweise, die wir haben, bestens durch die Existenz einer Gottesgestalt die historisiert wurde erklären lassen ( "Argument der besten Erklärung")
Ich würde dir ja Richard Carrier und als Gegenposition Bart Ehrmann zum Lesen empfehlen, allerdings scheint es mir dass du nichtmal das kritisch gelesen und beurteilt hast was du selbst postest.

> Und eine Abhandlung über die Augenzeugenfrage.

Was als Augenzuegenbreichte in deinen Quellen gelten, wird unter historischen Methoden als "Gerüchte" abgetan.

>Auf Wikipedia heißt es:

Ein Konsens von Forschermeinungen dient dem wissenschaftlichen Prozess, nicht als endgültige Wahrheit. Der Konsens ist in diesem Falle geprägt von nicht belastbaren Argumenten.

>There is no evidence today that the existence of Jesus was ever denied in antiquity by those who opposed Christianity

Wenn man da die Bedeutung hineinliest du du wahrscheinlich darin siehst, versteht man den Kontext von Religionen der Antike nicht. Das ist kein üblicher Kritikpunkt und ist daher auch nicht zu erwarten.

> your religion is based on a text written over 1400 years ago

All four Canonical gospels, the letters of Paul etc, Acts and Revelation were all written by 110-140 AD at the latest, although it was probably earlier.

Source: Currently reading this book, On the Historicity of Jesus, which is putting forward a thesis that there was no historical person who is Jesus Christ as described by the New Testament. Full of fascinating stuff they never teach you in school, like the letters of Paul were written around 60AD before the Gospels, and never mention Jesus as a human being, only as a risen celestial being/god.

If you want to learn more I would suggest reading:

historicity of Jesus - Richard Carrier.

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All - David Fitzgerald.

>As an atheist, I don't believe that sufficient evidence has been provided to prove God's existence. To me, saying a miracle is an act of God is identical to saying a miracle is an act of magic. Attributing something to God, or magic, is no explanation.

Completely understood. You don't need to believe in something to agree that it is a valid concept, however. I don't believe in Hogwarts but I still can follow the plot of Harry Potter. It is true that if there is no God, there are no miracles. The question you asked is a conceptual one, however.

>Such as?

Spontaneous healings I suppose would be one example. If you want a whole host of non-Biblical instances of recorded "miracles" (you can assess for yourself if they are miraculous) there is a great two-volume anthology written on this topic. I don't expect you to buy it, but if you really want to look into this stuff, my posts will be no substitute for actually reading the accounts of supposed miracles.

>So you're saying that something extremely rare can be called a miracle? Such as?

I know you wanted non-Biblical, but just for clarification's sake, take David slaying Goliath. He slings a stone at the giant's face. Now this is really nothing special. Anyone can sling a stone. What would make it a miracle is if David wasn't going to hit Goliath if he acted alone, and God had intervened somewhere in order that the stone hits him right where he had to be hit in order to topple Goliath. This would be an instance of a miracle having more to do with probability than with the act itself.

Thanks, just checking whether there was something new.

Carrier talks about this in his "On the Historicity of Jesus". His claim about Tacitus is that he was probably quoting the Gospels indirectly through Pliny, so Carrier claims it might not be an independent source.

He reviews a bunch more, including Josephus, in his chapter 8 "Extrabiblical Evidence".

If I wanted to fact-check Carrier, I would start by reading both his and Ehrman's blogs when they argue with each other, and both Carrier's and Ehrman's books on the topic.

I don't have a personal opinion on the existence of Jesus either. I asked only because it would be interesting if there were an easy way to poke holes in Carrier's work, since Carrier is so thorough.

> It's been a rough few years for me spiritually. I've gone through a "deconstruction" where I don't know if I agree with the typical Christian theology anymore. I took a lot for granted growing up in the church. Losing all of that assumed theology has been hard. It really forced me to question everything. And I don't have a lot of answers.

It seems like you're speaking of what's going on in my mind. Last year i even questioned God's existence; I desperately looked everywhere, because all of my foundations were failing and what i was teached since a kid could, after all, not be the exact truth. Why would God remain silent in so many situations or let the innocent suffer is just beyond me. Many things will remain unknown, but to this day i still want to believe in a God so powerful that there's nothing he cannot heal or do. This book helped me going through the doubt of His existence, perhaps it can help someone else: Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, by Craig Keener. My post was more in the sense that i don't know what else to do. God exists, sure, but He seems absent of our(my) suffering.

Miracles by Craig Keener... https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525

Also, Sam Storms writes a ton on spiritual gifts... has a decent book on 'em too!

> 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.

I'm not aware of a religion, but there is a book written by Thomas Jefferson that just includes what Jesus taught and tosses out the claims to divinity. It's called The Jefferson Bible or The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes, plenty. The Jefferson Bible is excellent - it's the New Testament minus the inanity. I highly recommend it.

The new testament still scores pretty good compared to other ancient writings/writers.

Most of the items he listed as discrepancies between the gospels fall in the category of "an omission by one author isn't a contradiction". The timing issues have been explained by the gospel writers using different calendars and methods of measuring time, and multiple sabbaths (Therefore multiple days of preparation) during the passover week.

He touts Mark as an example of fine Greek written by a very educated man, but it's written in a Greek spoken by commoners and slaves; even approaching the ungrammatical at times.

In short, it seems that he quickly goes through a list of one-line statements that represent his side of the argument and never touches on the opposing view; when entire books have been written on many of these topics.

I would second Wright's Resurrection.

For Gospels, Blomberg's Historical Reliability of the Gospels. I believe this is an expansion of his dissertation from Aberdeen (but don't quote me on this). I read this back in undergrad.

Jesus Christ is a manufactured entity, made up by people who thought they were being inspired by god who were following other people who though they were being inspired by god, going back to at least 500 BC. Other good book.
People need to educate themselves on mythological literature. If you still want to believe in god, even a lot of believers are taking a second look at their mythological literature.

I got kind of lazy with the links, but anyways here is my collection of Christianity related books, links etc.

Listening:

• Thomas Sheehan - Historical Jesus (Stanford available through iTunes U)
  
• Bart D. Ehrman - Historical Jesus (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  
• Christine Hayes - Intro to OT (Yale university)
  
• (Note I'm not sure this is a legal download...) Bart D. Ehrman - From Jesus to Constantine (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  
• The Bible Geek with Robert M. Price
  
• NT Pod with Mark Goodacre (Duke Uni)
  
• From Israelite to Jew with Michael Satlow (Brown University)
  
• <http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/audio.htm>
  
  
  Books:
  
  
• Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance For Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity
  
• When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Studies in Cultural History)
  
• Vision and Persuasion: Rhetorical Dimensions of Apocalyptic Discourse
  
• The life of Jesus critically examined - Old Classic
  
• David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition
  
• The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
  
• From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ
  
• Re-Imagine the World
  
• The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate
  
• Who Killed Jesus?: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus
  
• The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
  
• Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-history-investigation-problems/dp/0687279267>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Fictions-Randel-Helms/dp/0879755725>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/WHAT-GOSPEL-Rose-Charles-TALBERT/dp/086554185X>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Christ-Origins-Testament-Images/dp/0300084579>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Acts-Unraveling-Its-Story/dp/159815012X>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Outside-New-Testament-Introduction/dp/0802843689#reader_0802843689>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Great-Angel-Study-Israels-Second/dp/0664253954>
  
• <http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Writ-Oral-Lit-Folklore/dp/0847691985>
  
• Bart D. Ehrman - Misquoting Jesus
  
• Bart D. Ehrman - Jesus, Interrupted
  
• Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible
  
• Earl Doherty - The Jesus Puzzle - A Novel About the Greatest Question of Our Time
  
• John Dominic Crossan - The Last Week - A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem
  
• Richard Carrier - Not the Impossible Faith
  
• The Oxford Bible Commentary
  
  
  Links
  
  
• Bible Map
  
• Bible.cc
  
• Red Egg
  
• Gospel Parallels
  
• Greek Biblical and Modern Pronunciation
  
• Nag Hammadi Library
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_Hypothesis
  
• http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/NTcanon.html
  

https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Morals-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/1578988780

bad methodology

http://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595

edit: to be fair, you can use the same Bayes analysis the other way - http://www.amazon.com/The-Probability-God-Calculation-Ultimate/dp/1400054788/

One definition of religion is "pretending to know things you don't know." By that definition, Ehrman is religious. The evidence for Jesus' existence is so poor that Ehrman cannot honestly claim to be sure Jesus existed.

Worse, he's lying like a motherfucker. In the interview, he claims there's no serious Bible scholar who doesn't believe Jesus existed; Richard Carrier points out Dr. Thomas Thompson, a "myther" professor of Jewish studies, who is well enough known that Ehrman is sure to know of him. Later on, Ehrman comes along with the old saw about how we don't have convincing evidence for Julius Caesar either. This is a really, really poor ploy, as Caesar is richly documented by his own writings, those of his contemporaries, by monuments, by coins bearing his name and image, by the events that necessarily followed his crossing of the Rubicon, and so on.

Carrier's book Proving History compares "traditional" methods of historical verification against Bayes' Theorem and demonstrates that most of the methods most often used in support of Jesus' historicity are lacking. Obviously, the jury is still out on whether Carrier is right about this, but I've heard inklings of a small flurry of historians eager to adopt BT to improve the quality of their work. If Carrier is right, the consensus Ehrman is confidently bracing himself on (and this interview is full of arguments from authority and simple intellectual browbeating and bullying on Ehrman's part) is as fragile as the Bible's story line, and a whole bunch of historians are/were mistaken.

Even regardless of Carrier's work (soon to birth another book, The Quest for Historical Jesus), sufficient serious scholars have raised sufficient doubts that, in a field that's more aligned with the Scientific Method, researchers would have to come clean and honestly admit "we don't know," as they do about the origin of the universe or the mechanism of abiogenesis.

When he claims the historicity of Jesus is a done deal, Ehrman is dishonest.

By way of thanks for suffering through all this text, I invite you to enjoy this informative video: So…if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then?. In this video and elsewhere, Carrier is "doing it right:" nowhere does he boldly claim one way or the other, he simply shows us the reasons that exist for doubting a flesh-and-blood Jesus.

EDIT: Here's a takedown of Ehrman's latest book. To be fair, this is a popular book Ehrman apparently rushed to slap together; his other, more scholarly works (e.g. Misquoting Jesus) are held in much higher regard in the community.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

Please have a look at Richard Carrier's great book that questions the historicity of Jesus. Richard is an athiest scholar who doesn't take it as granted that Jesus was a real person.

Jefferson edited the bible to take out all of the supernatural aspects and just left the teachings of Jesus.

You should really look into the Jefferson Bible.. Thomas Jefferson was a religious scholar who was EXTREMELY open minded about religion, surprising for someone of his time. He even owned a Koran! He ended up writing this book, his version of the bible without all that stupid mythology and slavery crap.. It's actually a pretty good read!

Here is the Amazon link if anyone is interested in having a physical copy.

>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.

Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes is a good one. It's very accessible.

Reading back, I do not interpret my comments as you've narrated. Can you show an explicit example that shows why you do?

A second reading does not show me that I'm not telling you why I think that way. I guess I'll just try to be more explicit.

Here's how I think. I'm a person who, in their natural state, isn't very reasonable and isn't very logical, like every other human being on the planet (whether they want to admit it or not). I don't think I or anyone else has the cognizance to look at a set of beliefs as broad as Christianity or any other religion and say that it makes completely unfalsifiable claims, especially when there's things like this and this and this and this. I'm not going to go into those books individually and say why I think they're right or wrong. I'm just going to say they offer big boy arguments, believe in something falsifiable, and make arguments towards it. Saying that Descartes or C.S. Lewis had unfalsfiable beliefs is plainly and undeniably false, and worse, is unfair to the fact that they support these arguments with carefully planned logic.

Saying Fred Phelps or the average Bible Belt fundamentalist has unfalsifiable beliefs isn't. So saying the whole kitten kaboodle is unfalsifiable is a sweeping generalization of a broad range of beliefs under the term "religion."

It's just not fair to the people who wrestle with their beliefs and really try to give solid reasons for believing. It puts them in the same category as buck-tooth fundamentalists.

If you want this conversation to continue, I'm going to ask you apologize for attacking my character over something as inconsequential as an internet discussion, and I'm going to further ask you not to do shit like that again. I don't know what kind of filter makes you think any of those statements are "insulting" unless you think it's an insult for someone to say your thinking isn't fair/logical. So far the first and only insults and attacks on character have been made by you. Unless you consider "I guess you don't hear a whole lot of profound statements" a pretty big insult. I agree that it was nasty & mean to say and I've apologized to the person affected.

>our religion, ie: for Judaism

I was under the impression that you didn't believe the Torah. Do you?

>Put up or shut up.

I'm not sure how you would like me to, but I'll list some resources below. If you would rather delve into it by having a strict dialogue between the two of us, that's cool too. I may not be able to respond quickly every time, depending on how this carries forth, but I'll do what I can. As you mentioned, your soul is "at stake and all that."

Gary Habermas and N.T. Wright are the top two resurrection scholars. Michael Licona is also a leading scholar on the resurrection debate. Philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and Antony Flew have even shown their faces on the scene as well.

Books

• The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas & Michael Licona
  
• The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Michael Licona
  
• The Resurrection of God Incarnate by Richard Swinburne
  
• The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
  
• The Resurrection Factor by Josh McDowell
  
• The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus by William Lane Craig
  
  Presentations
  
  
• Gary Habermas - "The Resurrection Argument That Changed a Generation of Scholars"
  
  
• William Lane Craig - "Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?"
  
  
• William Lane Craig - "The Evidence for Jesus's Resurrection."
  
  
• N.T. Wright - "The Resurrection"
  
  
• N.T. Wright - "Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?"
  
  
• Michael Licona - "Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus"
  
  
• Michael Licona - "Evidence for the Resurrection"
  
  
• Doug Powell - "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"
  
  Debates
  
  Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and Michael Licona are the most frequent debaters on the Christian side, and Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier are the most frequent debaters on the non-Christian side. Habermas, Craig, and/or Licona have debated the following (possibly) recognizable names on this issue: Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, Antony Flew, John Shelby Spong, Gerd Ludemann, Shabir Ally, Arif Ahmed, John Dominic Crossan, Robert M. Price, and Dan Barker.
  
  YouTube is great for finding those debates. There are also, of course, dialogues in book form.
  
  >if you don't like my tone
  
  I'm actually enjoying your tone, haha

http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christian-Origins-Question-Vol/dp/0800626796

http://www.amazon.com/The-Resurrection-Jesus-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196

http://www.amazon.com/The-resurrection-factor-Josh-McDowell/dp/0918956722

Yea I'm in the same boat, not a scholar but I've educated myself through Bart Erhman and Mike Licona. Ill go through your list with the knowledge I have.
>As already pointed out by /u/AdultSoccer, none of the gospel authors name themselves in the text.

This is not "evidence to the contrary" as you said, but only absent evidence.
>•The Gospel of Mark is heavily borrowed from in Luke. The author of Luke-Acts makes note of John Mark in Acts 12:25, but does not identify him as the author of the Gospel of Mark.
•The Gospel of Matthew borrows even more from the Gospel of Mark than Luke. Yet, according to tradition, the disciple Matthew is an eyewitness, whereas John Mark is recording what he has learned from Peter.

Yes, the gospel writings most likely used each other as sources, but that does not discredit who they are or there story on that basis alone. For example, if you were going to write a biography of your mom, in order to get an accurate portrait of your mom, could you not ask your siblings, her friends, her relatives, etc., what she was like, to have a more complete portrayal?
>•Mark 7:31 states Jesus went from Tyre through Sidon, to the Sea of Galilee, and finally into the re. . .

I appreciate the map! But Jesus was not in a race or anything, and, if I had to guess, chose that route to show himself to as many people as possible.
>•John Mark was Jewish, yet the author of the Gospel. . .

for the Malachi prophecy, the writer only mentions Isiah, but then quotes both Malachi and Isaiah. It should be noted, though, that both Malachi and Isaiah were referring to the same event, and Isaiah would be the "greater" of the two prophets. As far as contributing the ten commandments to Moses, I'm sure you know the story. God gave Moses the commandments, and Moses then gave them to his people. The verse you gave reads, "For Moses said. . ." and Moses did indeed say these things. As far as Joseph buying the shroud on the Sabbath, the writer was just saying what happened. Yes, that would be against the law, but Jesus also worked on the Sabbath for the Kingdom of God. It appears that work for the kingdom of God on the Sabbath was acceptable, but I'm no scholar here.


I would also like to say that Plutarch's biographies don't have his named attached to them either, similarly as to the gospel's biographies of Jesus. So it is not atypical that the "by: ____" does not appear. No one denies Plutarch wrote his though. I see you called into question Papias's attributions. For Mark; Papias says, "no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord" meaning that the accuracy of sequence of events was not taken into account. Yes, Mark begins with John the Baptist preparing the way, and ends with Jesus's death, but the order of his parables and teachings, according to Papias, may not be in a chronological order. Mark just goes from one parable to the next, many times. For Matthew writing in Hebrew according to Papias; We dont have any of the original manuscripts so we dont know what the original language was. I dont see why Papias would care to lie about this, so I would say that the original language as probably Hebrew.
I appreciate your comments though!


Also, Papias was the first, but Justin the martyr also cites Mark around 150 CE. For the other gospels, all the early church fathers had one voice in who wrote the gospels, and no one else was challenging this. So the only evidence available points to their traditional authorship. The church father were not always accurate though, so, again, we cannot say with 100% certainty, but this is history 2000 years ago, and, relative to other events of the era, the available evidence is pretty good.

Lastly, if something like this is holding you back from believing (that is, "academically, we dont know who, for certain, wrote the gospels"), know that nearly 100% of new testament scholars will admit that there are at least 2 different independent sources in the gospels, and the majority of scholars say there are 4-5 independent sources. So, if you are weighing the evidence for Jesus's resurrection, know that, regardless of who wrote what, there are still several eyewitness accounts as to what happen. Check out Licona's book on this, which has over 700 pages and 2000 footnotes. He has also debated Erhman several times, you can find it on youtube

Interesting article. I appreciate his points. I may have fallen into the error that he describes of quoting people when I haven't taken the time to checkout their sources (or else misquoting them).

I disagree with your first paragraph.

I disagree with his dismissal of "Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Author of Hebrews, James, Peter, and Jude." with the exception of Paul. When he starts to dismiss Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Lucian, then I think that it doesn't pass the smell test. I suspect that he will dismiss anyone, no matter what. A priori.

And then of course, there are counter references: http://www.bethinking.org/jesus/ancient-evidence-for-jesus-from-non-christian-sources

As far as I can tell, the historical reliability of the gospels is well established. There are a number of books, articles, etc, etc. that are convincing enough for me. (I've just put a random one below). If the gospels are reliable historically, then there are 4 more witnesses for Jesus' life.

https://www.amazon.ca/Historical-Reliability-Gospels-Craig-Blomberg/dp/0830828079


but I have to get back to my real job now and do some work ...

> How do you know? A plausible reading of Paul's epistles point to Jesus being a celestial deity whom was crucified in the firmament.

Huh? What does this even mean? No credible historian denies that Jesus was a human being. I'd love to see the sources you have for that

> That relies on the gospels, which are rejected as historical sources by historians.

Highly false. There are a lot of Christian Historians with PhD's from Harvard, Yale, Oxford etc. that do not reject the gospels as historical sources....in fact, there are only a select few Historians in general, Christian and non-, that would say the gospels are not accurate as historical literature, one example: The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

> Unless the body was stolen, lost, or Jesus was a mythological character.

valid points, and common counters to the resurrection. But again, there are numerous studies on the resurrection from PhD scholars, e.g. The Evidence for the Resurrection by JND Anderson

> What'd you find on NT?

Unfortunately, almost all that I have read has been from books that I have in person but I'll link some of them:

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels - Craig L. Blomberg

The Reason for God - Timothy Keller

Making the Case for Christianity - Korey Maas, Adam Francisco

The Resurrection Fact - John Bombaro, Adam Francisco


I've also had Dr. Daniel Wallace recommended to me, although I haven't gotten to look into his work much. I know he has some videos scattered on YouTube that can be watched, here is one.

I'd also recommend anything by John Warwick Montgomery!

> Yeah, sure thing. Really, the most damning thing to me is that he only interviewed apologists; the skeptics that he mentions in the book did not have the opportunity to defend themselves there. But here are some sources that I found interesting:

Thank you!


EDIT: Formatting

Delving into Robert Price would probably be a lot of work with very little return on the investment given that he is, effectively, the only scholar to hold his position. There are scores of well received historical Jesus works I would recommend before cracking open anything by Price, perhaps the only exception being The Historical Jesus: Five Views

If you are up for an entire book, try "The Historical Jesus: Five Views". The five writers each present their own view, and each rebut the views of the others.

Here is a good resource which lists the different views on the historical Jesus and which scholars and books support those views.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html

Here is a book which is written as a debate between five scholars: Price, Crossan, Dunn, Johnson, and Bock.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Historical-Jesus-Five-Views/dp/0830838686

When you say "historicity," are you talking about whether or not Jesus existed or what the historical Jesus would have been like?

Bart Ehrman, an atheist, has a book on the former that pretty well represents the consensus of historians that Jesus did, in fact, exist.

I haven't read this, but this book looks like it might be a good intro to the historical Jesus. I don't know all of the scholars on this list, but the ones I do know are good, and it shows a spectrum.

>"You agree that we should do good things (which is part of Christianity), but reject the idea that God exists" (which is also part of Christianity).

Sorry, you can't claim that Christianity is the origin of doing "good things". Its absurd to think that no one ever treated people kindly and well before the advent of Christianity, or even its parent Judaism. Here's an excellent summation of this from Doubting Jesus' Resurrection by Kris Komarnitsky.

Empathy in its socialized form – compassion – appears in almost every religious and philosophical tradition, not just the Judeo-Christian tradition.11 For example, Hindus in 150 B.C.E. said, “One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to one’s self; this is the essence of morality” (Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113:8). Confucius in 500 B.C.E. said, “Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself” (Mencius VII.A.4; see too Doctrine of the Mean 13). Buddhists in the second century B.C.E. said, “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself” (Udana-Varga 5:18). Zoroaster in 600 B.C.E. said, “Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others” (Shayast-ne-Shayast 13:29). The Greek philosopher Isocrates in 375 B.C.E. said, “Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.” The Greek philosopher Epictetus in 135 C.E. said, “What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others” (Encheiridion). Mohammed in the seventh century C.E. said, “What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of human beings, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the sufferings of the injured” (Sahih Bukhari). The stated purpose of the world’s first known legal code in 1780 B.C.E. was, “…to cause justice to prevail and to ensure that the strong do not oppress the weak” (The Law of Hammurabi).

Regarding the idea that Christian God exists, I don't reject its possibility. I just don't believe its true due to the lack of compelling evidence, as well as the innate contradictions of the Christian mythos. If we consider a more deistic (not specifically Christian) view, I have fewer issues but still have no compelling reasons to believe even in that sort of a "god", although I'll admit the possibility.

>To be fair to myself, I feel that I have to put God aside for a moment, and look at the facts, plainly, and as objectively as I can. And follow the evidence where it leads.

This is good. Start your investigation as an agnostic. Make truth your goal. So often, I hear that Christians doing investigations/research are committed to God no matter what. Well, then their investigation is biased from the start. Now, we're all biased no matter how hard we try not to be, but committing oneself to God before investigating one's religious beliefs seems like, for you, a bias that you're attempting to mitigate, and for that I applaud you.

When I was in your shoes, some Deist writers (like Thomas Payne in The Age of Reason) really got me thinking at first, and helped me to see that while there might be a God, there are some serious challenges to whether that God is the God of the Bible. For a while I started calling myself a Deist. I still flirt with the idea.

One interesting idea I initially learned from Payne is that Genesis mentions a place called "Dan" but the Bible doesn't tell the story of how the city of Dan was named until much later (like Joshua/Judges). Here's a blog post by a prof at a Baptist seminary explaining the issue in more detail.

For archaeology, especially that of the Exodus story, I'd look into writings by William Dever. He's more moderate than Finkelstein. The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible includes some writing by Dever, and also covers some other issues you're interested in - e.g. textual criticism, especially that of the book of Daniel, which is very interesting to me.

As for treatments of the Resurrection from the "other side" I'd recommend Doubting Jesus Resurrection by Komarnitsky.

Lastly, I found it helpful to find areas where consensus arguably exists among scholars of a given area of study. For example, while there is disagreement about the applicability of the Documentary Hypothesis, it's my understanding there's still consensus that multiple authors composed the Pentateuch. Other areas of consensus include late authorship of the latter part of Daniel where prophecies are made (which is relevant to the Christian because Mark, the earliest gospel, interpreted these prophecies as being about Jesus and the 1st century).

Anyway, I hope I've given you some interesting things to look at. Good luck!

Heard of the Jefferson Bible?

Thomas Jefferson rewrote the New Testament and took out all the hocus pokus.

It's just a story about a man who thinks we should stop killing each other and help the poor, and how he was brutally killed for it.

>You seem to lean quite heavily on Bayesian Methodology. If you're interested, I'd like to discuss this a little bit more. You seem to be willing to apply probabilities to historic events.

Here is an outline of Bayes Theorem and its relevance to Histoical analysis.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/CarrierDec08.pdf

I recommend anything Richard Carrier.

Here is a book with the methodology in action.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

I probably suffer from some extreme confirmation bias as I was completely sold on this method before I ever heard of Richard Carrier. The New Testament was the first book in the canon that are started looking at using bayesian reasoning and it was a result of that analysis that I left Mormonism. I had stopped believing in Jesus before I began examining Mormon unique topics.

When I found Richard Carrier it was simply a validation on the way I aproached the question, he just did it way better than myself.

But I guess you can thank my BYU professors for my atheism. They sold me on statistics (although I was already taking statistics courses in highschool). Statistics has always been very intuitive for me. Learning it formally was such a delight.

If you are new to Bayes Theorem I would say start here. Best explanation I have found online for beginners.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Good to hear there are still open-minded people out there. I think Richard Carrier is closer to the truth though 1, 2.

I personally don't know much about the subject, but I do know that Richard Carrier has written a book about using Bayes' Theorem for examining the historicity of Jesus. I haven't read it, though.

edit: However, a review on amazon states that "Dr. Carrier is writing a second book to follow up this one called "On the Historicity of Jesus Christ" that will address that question. He does touch on the subject somewhat in this book, but the purpose of this book is to lay the theoretical groundwork for the next volume."

Absolutely, Komponisto is the man too! Also, Richard Carrier's video on youtube is fantastic, and his new book Proving History has helped me to organize and answer epistemic worries that I have been struggling with for years. More and more I'm coming to understand why it truly is a revolution for rationality.

Additionally, you may be interested in Richard Carrier's discussion of the topic, and his new book Proving History and the upcoming On the Historicity of Jesus Christ.

I recall Richard Carrier wrote a book precisely about that matter.

Proving History: Bayes' Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus.

Are there any subjects you're particularly interested in? I'll link a few below that I found very helpful, but I know everyone has different sorts of interests and stumbling blocks, so if there's something more specific you're looking for (or if you want more resources on a particular topic), let me know.

• Naturalistic explanation of "spiritual experiences": Church services and retreats, where most people have very moving spiritual experiences, have quite a lot in common with hypnotic manipulation techniques. Outside of these high-emotion environments, another interesting idea I've heard is that of simulacra, through which humans can manufacture and simulate their own ideas of how reality (and God) should be, and thus experience a deception. A personal testimonial that also drove the point home for me was that of a philosophy student who started to reexamine his faith through a more critical lens.
  
  
• Historical evidence for Jesus/gospels: According to Rational Wiki, there is very little reason to trust the gospels, and although it is likely that some historical Jesus existed, there is essentially no verification of his existence outside of the gospels until centuries later. Robert Price (Bible Geek podcast, which can be found in a number of places including here) also brings up some fantastic counterpoints to the most common apologetic arguments, and seems to really know his stuff. If you're interested in a book, I've also heard great things about Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus.
  
  
• Contradictions in the Bible: A good graphical representation on Bibviz that compiles a few different resources. This does list all apparent contradictions, even minor ones that most Christians can easily dispute or dismiss, but there are many others that are not as easy to dismiss. (For example, in Genesis 1 and 2, did plants or humans come first?) These are most effective when considered in opposition to Biblical inerrancy/infallibility. If inerrancy isn't a big deal to you, then this point isn't as important.
  
  
• Evolution: Talk Origins is an excellent tool for learning more about evolution if you've been brought up with creationism (either old earth or young earth). It has plenty of resources that very specifically counter the most common creationist arguments, and even has some point-by-point rebuttals to some creationist books. If inerrancy is something you struggle with, the fact of evolution can be a pretty big hit, since the creation story doesn't only crop up in Genesis 1-12, but also in several places in the New Testament. If it's not, evolution isn't a huge deal, but is still fun to learn more about.
  
  
• Atrocities of God: The first thing that really got to me was seeing the Christian God as an abuser. As a Christian, I didn't like the comparison, but as I thought about it, I realized that all of it was true according to Biblical principles, and it bothered me. As I previously mentioned, God did condone rape in the OT. On top of that, the OT law commanded that you stone a woman who was found to not be a virgin on her wedding night. I'm sure there are plenty others, but these stood out to me. They don't disprove Yahweh's existence, but they do show that he's not such a "loving" God as Christians claim. A rebuttal I've heard (though not a good one), is that obviously a loving God can do these things, because he (or at least biblical authors) claim that he's loving, and also record him doing these things. Those are opposing claims; they cannot both be true, at least with a healthy understanding of what it means to be loving.
  
  
• Hell: The most common interpretation is that anyone who doesn't explicitly believe in/follow Jesus will be subject to eternal damnation and torture. There are other interpretations. C.S. Lewis clearly seemed to give some leeway in who went to hell (as evidenced in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle), and at least wanted to believe that everyone had a chance at heaven, even after death (as evidenced in The Great Divorce). Rob Bell also wants to believe that everyone will go to heaven (see Love Wins), although I think many people called this book heretical. Another alternative explanation I've read supported the idea of annihilation for non-believers, rather than eternal punishment, which had far better Biblical support than I expected. Personally, I couldn't rationalize God punishing people for simply not believing in him, given how scant the evidence is in favor of Christianity, or how God could punish people who left the church because of how Christians abused them in God's name. On the other hand, if you check out what Jesus says about hell in the gospels, he seems to imply that these groups would receive hellfire and punishment of some sort. It's not so easily dismissed.
  
  
• Natural Disasters: Not a source, but the problem of suffering is one that Christians have never been able to adequately explain. Sure, you can pin human-inflicted suffering on sin, but natural disasters? Not so much. Think of the tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands of people around the Indian Ocean (most being Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or otherwise non-Christian), many of whom have likely never heard the Christian gospel. These people are doomed to eternal punishment, and it's because of God's creation alone. Even if you assume they don't automatically get sent to hell, what physical or even spiritual good could this possibly accomplish? This, in my opinion, is inexcusable.
  
  Anyway, that ended up being way longer than I intended, but hopefully some of the sources help you. At the very least, it should give you something to think about and some possible topics to consider when evaluating your religious beliefs.

I personally think the historical Jesus did exist, however, you keep pestering for a solid work claiming otherwise so I recommend you read this

As a side note - you have been very rude, dogmatic and unyielding. Its neither necessary nor polite.

Just butting in here to recommend On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

Carrier has stated he was firmly in the historical Jesus camp until he was introduced to Earl Doherty's hypothesis in The Jesus Puzzle.

I would also highly Highly recommend reading some criticisms of the myth theory, just to sharpen and refine your thoughts on the subject. Start here with reddit's (or rather /r/badhistory 's) own Tim O'Neill: http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive.html

Give her Richard Carrier's new book, it's all about how Jesus probably never existed at all.

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

As I said it is generally accepted but still debated.

Generally accepted does not mean it is a fact.

>new source that disputes the existence of Jesus.

There are no sources which dispute the existence of Moses or Romulus but that doesn't mean we should start accepting them as real historical figures.

>Jesus and other similarly or worse attested characters like Hannibal and Alexander the Great.

Alexander is way better attested than Jesus, we even have more evidence of Pontius Pilate than Historical Jesus.

>no respected expert in the field believe in it.

There are several, most prominent ones are Robert M. Price who holds double doctorate in NT studies and Thomas L Broody who's also a biblical scholar.

>Neither Koresh or Jim Jones had a large following

At its peak Peoples temple had a following in upward of 20,000 so i don't think its a right comparison but yeah Koresh or Marshal Applewhite kinda fits the bill.

>but is more rickety than any of them. It doesn't explain why or how. There are no sources supporting it.

I suggest you read some works on Christ Myth theory because all those point were covered by many authors, here's a good introductory article and as for books, Richard Carrier's On the historicity of Jesus is pretty comprehensive and there's also The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews which you can download freely.

Part 3 of 3

F. Jesus has all the attributes of God

1. All of them: John 1:1; 12:45; 14:7-10; Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 4:4; Phil. 2:6; Col. 1:13, 15, 19; 2:9; Heb. 1:3
   
   
2. Self-existent: John 5:26
   
   
3. Unchangeable: Heb. 1:10-12 (in the same sense as YHWH); 13:8
   
   
4. Eternal: John 1:1-3; 8:56-59; 17:5; Col. 1:16-17; Heb. 1:2, 10-12; 7:3
   
   
5. Omnipresent: Matt. 8:5-13; 18:20; 28:20; Mark 7:24-30; Luke 7:1-10; John 1:47-49; 3:13; 4:46-54; Eph. 1:23; 4:10-11; Col. 3:11
   
   
6. Omniscient: Matt. 9:4; 11:21-23; 12:25; Mark 2:6-8; 8:31-32 (etc.); Luke 6:8; 10:13-15; 21:20-24; John 2:23-24; 4:16-18; 11:11-15; 13:10-11, 21-29, 36-38 par.; 16:30-31; 21:17; Acts 1:24; 1 Cor. 4:5; Rev. 2:23; cf. Mark 13:30-32
   
   
7. Omnipotent: Matt. 28:18; John 2:19-22; 10:17-18; 1 Cor. 1:23-24; 2 Cor. 12:9; Eph. 1:19-21; Col. 2:10; 1 Pet. 3:22
   
   
8. Loving (in a preeminent, unlimited way): John 13:34; 15:9, 12-13; Rom. 8:35-39; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 3:19; 5:2; Rev. 1:4; cf. Rom. 5:8
   
   
9. Incomprehensible: Matt. 11:25-27
   
   G. Jesus is “equal with God”
   
   
10. John 5:18: Although John is relating what the Jews understood Jesus to be claiming, the context shows they were basically right: In v. 17 Jesus claimed to be exempt from the Sabbath along with His Father, and in 5:19-29 he claimed to do all of the works of the Father and to deserve the same honor as the Father.
    
    
11. Phil. 2:6: Jesus did not attempt to seize recognition by the world as being equal with God, but attained that recognition by humbling himself and being exalted by the Father (vv. 7-11).
    
    H. Jesus holds God’s position
    
    
12. Jesus sits on God’s throne, occupying the highest position possible: Ps. 110:1; Matt. 22:44; 25:31; 26:64; Mark 12:36; 14:62; Luke 20:42-43; 22:69; Acts 2:33-35; 5:31; 7:55-56; Rom. 8:34; 1 Cor. 15:25; 2 Cor. 5:10; Eph. 1:20; 2:6; Col. 3:1; Heb. 1:3, 13; 8:1; 10:12-13; 12:2; 1 Pet. 3:22; Rev. 3:21; 7:17; 22:1, 3
    
    
13. Jesus rules over all things: Matt. 11:25-27; 28:18; Luke 10:21-22; John 3:35; 13:3; 16:15; Acts 10:36; 1 Cor. 15:27-28; Eph. 1:22; Phil. 2:10; 3:21; Heb. 1:2; 2:8; Rev. 5:13
    
    
14. Jesus rules in this position forever: Luke 1:33; Eph. 1:19b-21; Heb. 1:8; Rev. 11:15; cf. Eph. 5:5; Rev. 22:1, 3
    
    I. Jesus is the Son of God
    
    
15. “Son” in Scripture can mean simply one possessing the nature of something, whether literal or figurative (e.g. “son of man,” “sons of thunder,” “sons of disobedience,” cf. Mark 3:7; Eph. 2:1).
    
    
16. Usually when “son of” is used in relation to a person (son of Abraham, son of David, etc.) the son possesses the nature of his father.
    
    
17. Jesus is clearly not the literal Son of God, i.e., he was not physically procreated by God.
    
    
18. On the other hand, Jesus is clearly the Son of God in a unique sense (cf. “only-begotten son,” John 1:14; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9) and in a preeminent sense (i.e. the term is more fitting for him than for anyone else, e.g., Heb. 1:4-5).
    
    
19. Scripture is explicit that the Son possesses God’s essence or nature (cf. F. above).
    
    
20. Jesus’ repeated claim to be the Son of God was consistently understood by the Jewish leaders as a blasphemous claim to equality with God, an understanding Jesus never denied: John 5:17-23; 8:58-59; 10:30-39; 19:7; Matt. 26:63-65.
    
    
21. Jesus is therefore by nature God’s Son, not God’s creation or God’s servant; Jesus is God’s Son who became a servant for our sake and for the Father’s glory (John 13:13-15; 17:4; Phil. 2:6-11; Heb. 1:4-13; 3:1-6; 5:8; etc.).
    
    J. Objections
    
    
22. Prov. 8:22: This text is not a literal description of Christ, but a poetic personification of wisdom (cf. all of Prov. 1-9, esp. 8:12-21; 9:1-6), poetically saying that God “got” his wisdom before he did anything—i.e., that God has always had wisdom.
    
    
23. Col. 1:15: Does not mean that Christ is the first creature, since he is here presented as the Son and principal heir of the Father (cf. vv. 12-14); thus “firstborn” here means “heir” (cf. esp. Ps. 89:27; see also Gen. 43:33; 48:14-20; Ex. 4:22; 1 Chron. 5:1-3; Jer. 31:9); note that v. 16 speaks of the Son as the Creator, not as a creature (cf. E.1. above).
    
    
24. Rev. 3:14: “Beginning” (archê) in Rev. as a title means source or one who begins, i.e. Creator (cf. Rev. 1:8; 21:6; 22:13); elsewhere Christ is called thearchê in the sense of “ruler,” Col. 1:18, cf. plural archai, “rulers,” in Col. 1:16; 2:10, 15, also Luke 12:11; Rom. 8:38; Eph. 3:10; 6:12; Tit. 3:1; cf. Luke 20:20; Jude 6; 1 Cor. 15:24; Eph. 1:21. An alternative view is that archê in Rev. 3:14 refers to Christ’s position as head of the new creation.
    
    
25. 1 Cor. 11:3; 15:28: Christ is still subordinate to God, but as the incarnate Son to the Father; i.e., they are equal in nature, but the Son is subordinate relationally to God, especially due to the fact that he has permanently assumed human nature. (It may also be that the Son is in some sense eternally “subordinate” to the Father, though if so only in a functional sense; Christians who affirm the Trinity hold different views on this question.)
    
    
26. John 20:17; Rom. 15:6; 1 Cor. 15:24; 2 Cor. 1:3; Rev. 1:6; 3:12: Jesus calls the Father “my God” because he is still man as well as God; note the distinction between “my God” and “your God” in John 20:17 (i.e., Jesus never speaks of “our God” including himself with the disciples).
    
    
27. Mark 13:32: Jesus’ statement that he did not know the time of his return is to be explained by his voluntary acceptance of the humble form and likeness of a man (Phil. 2:7); in fact Jesus, as God, did know all things (John 16:30), and after his resurrection he does not including himself as not knowing (Acts 1:6-7).
    
    
28. Mark 10:17-18: Jesus does not deny being God, but simply tells the man that he has no business calling anyone “good” in an unqualified sense except God. Those who acknowledge that Christ is perfectly good but deny that he is God have a problem at this point.
    
    
29. Heb. 4:15: Jesus was tempted, cf. James 1:13; but note that Jesus could not sin, John 5:19. God, in his divine nature, cannot be tempted, but if he incarnated himself (John 1:1, 14), then in his human nature he could genuinely experience temptation.
    
    
30. John 1:18: No one has seen God, but people have seen Jesus, e.g. 1 John 1:1-2; but note that no man can see the glorified Jesus either, 1 Tim. 6:16, and to see Jesus is to see the Father, John 14:9.
    
    
31. 1 Tim. 1:17: God cannot die, but Jesus did, e.g. Phil. 2:8; but of course the point of 1 Tim. 1:17 is that God’s divine nature is immortal, not that God could not assume mortal human nature. Note that no one could take Jesus’ life from him, he could not remain dead, and he raised himself: John 10:18; Acts 2:24; John 2:19-22.
    
    
32. 1 Cor. 8:6: Father called God, Jesus called Lord: but here “God” and “Lord” are synonymous (cf. v. 5; cf. also Rom. 14:3-12 for a good example of “God” and “Lord” as interchangeable); moreover, this text no more denies that Jesus is God than it does that the Father is Lord (Matt. 11:25); cf. Jude 4, where Jesus is the only Lord.
    
    
33. 1 Tim. 2:5: Jesus here supposedly distinct from God; but Jesus is also distinct from (fallen) men, yet is himself a man; likewise Jesus is distinct from God (the Father), but is also God.
    
    
34. Deut. 4:12, 15-25; God not appear in a human form to Israel, lest they fall into idolatry; but this does not rule out his appearing in human form later after they had learned to abhor idolatry.
    
    
35. In many texts Jesus is distinguished from God: He is the Son of God, was sent by God, etc.; in all these texts “God” is used as a name for the person most commonly called God, i.e., the Father. source
    
    See also Putting Jesus in His Place
    
    Again, I apologize that there is so much evidence for Jesus being God

VIDEO:
5 minute video from Oxford philosophy professor. Great setup for the following.
https://vimeo.com/138076932

BOOKS:

Most of these are written in a beginning to intermediate style. However, they accurately reflect the scholarly work on the topic. If you want the academic works, let me know.

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Jesus-Gary-Habermas-ebook/dp/B01GKLSI8S/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1525454337&sr=8-4&keywords=gary+habermas

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Resurrection-Jesus-Gary-Habermas-ebook/dp/B001QOGJY0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525454337&sr=8-1&keywords=gary+habermas

https://www.amazon.com/Guard-Students-Thinkers-Guide-Christian-ebook/dp/B00U894IGA/ref=la_B001IOH3GQ_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525454627&sr=1-6

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LUJDNE/ref=dbs_a_def_awm_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3

https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Jesus-J-Ed-Komoszewski-ebook/dp/B001QOGJXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525454914&sr=8-1&keywords=Reinventing+Jesus

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QOGJVI/ref=dbs_a_def_awm_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Reliability-New-Testament-Evangelical-ebook/dp/B01MSUCJ66/ref=pd_sim_351_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=FNH5CSR0J6AF3B88HMS9&dpID=51heGflFcaL&preST=_SY445_QL70_&dpSrc=detail

https://www.amazon.com/Dethroning-Jesus-Exposing-Cultures-Biblical-ebook/dp/B007V91I7M/ref=pd_sim_351_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=FKG1E1KYR46C9H9DDSQ5

https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-God-Incarnate-Richard-Swinburne-ebook/dp/B003554IXM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1525456309&sr=8-3&dpID=51WkknIrkbL&preST=_SY445_QL70_&dpSrc=detail

INTERNET:

Reasonable Faith is probably one of the best sources there is. William Lane Craig has two PhD's. One on philosophy and the other in theology. He is a well respected scholar who brings his professional work to lay audiences. On his site you will find podcasts, readings, debates, videos, question of the week, etc. It just happens that this week's question is related to the topic of Jesus' resurrection.

https://www.reasonablefaith.org

Starting with podcast 14 Dr. Craig begins his assessment of the Resurrection.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-2/s2-doctrine-of-christ/

Here is the complete podcast which is excellent!!! After listening to this you'll know more than most.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-2

A concern: is it reasonable though to compare what are ultimately highly dissimilar entities? The stock market always retains some fundamental partial real-world value. With the stock market, even in '29 style crash, there is always some universally accepted residual physical value.

With the church there is NEVER a universally accepted physical value in the theology of any kind, only a vaguely individually determined emotional one, sometimes called 'spiritual', but it's emotion all the way. Personally, I would have difficulty relating the two.

One book I'd recommend that might appeal to your approach is Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt.

Carrier uses Baye's Theorem to analyze the probability of Jesus' existence. As one reviewer noted:

"Carrier rigidly applies the logic of Bayes' Theorem to the evidence for the historicity of Jesus -- and finds no reason to conclude he actually existed. While the author's rigorous use of Bayesian method makes this book a tough slog at times, it is difficult to imagine how it might be refuted. . . . Put together, our prior knowledge and the subsequent evidence shows that is far more probable that Jesus was a mythical figure who was later given a historical-sounding life story than it is that he was a historical figure even remotely resembling the figure in the Gospels."

If one comes to a logically, even mathematically, based conclusion that Christ never existed then the question of the church being 'true' is moot.

Yea. Check out On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier

Faith On The March by A. H. Macmillan

Yeah there is certainly no good defense for what they believe.

> The fundamental difference is we aren't just believing women who were sexually abused because she said so.

That's not a fundamental difference. You seem to be mistaken here. If you subscribe to the traditional authors of the Gospels, both Mark and Luke were corroborating outsiders. If you do not subscribe to the traditional authors, all four were outsiders, corroborating the events.

> If their testimony was the only evidence, it wouldn't hold much weight.

You seem to be claiming that the testimony of eyewitnesses is not valid.

> Biblical scholars disagree with you.

Biblical scholars also agree with me. I've examined the cases for the authorship of the Gospels in quite a bit of depth. There are a lot of biblical scholars who subscribe to the traditional authors, and for substantial reasons. I consider the cases for traditional authorship to be stronger than the cases against, but we can discuss this if you wish.

> You're the one claiming they still happen, show me a case of a human resurrecting after being clinically dead for several days that hasn't been debunked.

If you are serious about researching this, the two-volume set by Dr. Craig Keener, "Miracles" (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AAZ16M5WZVWE&keywords=craig+keener+miracles&qid=1567000719&s=gateway&sprefix=Keener+miracle%2Caps%2C252&sr=8-1) should be useful. He researched not only the NT miracles but also modern miracles including resurrections.

> The source of the claim is not all that is used as the evidence in any of those cases. If that were true, then the entire community of historians would agree across the board that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact. But that isn't the case, is it? Why do you think that might be?

Neither is the source of the claim the only evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, for instance. There was some material evidence (the empty tomb), there was consequential evidence (the birth of the Church), and there was logical evidence (the preaching of the apostles). But I'm well aware that many people still deny the resurrection. There are also scientists who deny global warming. People see the same data and arrive at different conclusions.

Has anyone read Craig Keener's Miracles? I am considering purchasing it, because I have heard it referenced in arguments by some Christians (The argument is usually something like, "You don't believe in miracles, but Craig Keener wrote a book documenting over 1,000 pages of miracles. Have you looked at all of them?).

After this beautiful exhaustive book i cannot understand how could someone NOT believe: https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525

That's a very tortured reading of just one of the stories of a post-resurrection appearance.

I was thinking about what you said about us deserving more proof. Frankly, I think we've got far more than we have any right to when compared to previous generations.

In Jesus' day, only a few thousand people saw him work a miracle. Only a thousand at most saw him after the resurrection. In all of human history, seeing the supernatural has been confined to a relative handful of people.

Today, though, every single person in the developed world has access to

• scientific proof the universe began at a finite moment in time
  
  
• solid evidence of intentional design in the fabric of the universe, our planet, and biology
  
  
• documented evidence of miracles
  
  
• documented evidence of a non-material aspect of humans, some would even say of life after death
  
  
• solid evidence that the gospels are trustworthy
  
  
• and evidence that whether the gospels are historically reliable or merely "religious stories", Jesus really did rise from the dead.
  
  No, we don't get to see Jesus in the flesh -- walking on water or otherwise -- but we've got more than any generation since his has had. Far more. And we're going to be held responsible for what we did with that privilege.

There’s a lot of good responses here already but I wanted to offer some resources and ideas that have helped me.
First of all, despite what the new atheists say, you don’t need faith to believe in God, which is why there are so many deists in academia. The weight of the scientific evidence alone is enough to conclude that there must be some kind of intelligence behind reality. This includes the fine-tuning argument, a variation of which convinced Antony Flew, a life long atheist academic and strong critic of religion to change his mind about God and embrace deism, and quantum mechanics, which doesn’t prove God’s existence but rather undermines materialist assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. These findings have convinced others in the scientific community such as lifelong atheist, Richard Conn Henry, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT to embrace deism.
So just based on what’s happening with physics, it’s reasonable to believe that there’s some kind of intelligence behind reality. However, this in no way proves the existence of the God of the Bible.
To support the Christian view of God you can look at the evidence for the reliability of New Testament accounts. This is where faith comes in. You have to decide whether or not you believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Obviously, there isn’t a scientific way to definitively prove whether or not an historical event happened. But if you want support for the idea that miracles happen and are relatively common, even today, I’d recommend Craig S Keeners magisterial 2 volume work “Miracles” which details hundreds of modern day miracle accounts.

Other reading:
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard who was a professor of philosophy for many years at USC, helped me to understand my faith at a deeper level, which has helped immensely. It turns out it’s much easier to believe in something when it actually makes sense to you.

On Guard by William Lane Craig explains many of the logical proofs that other commenters have offered here, which are great but can be really difficult to understand without spending a good amount of time with them.

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart: Hart is a leading Orthodox theologian and philosopher who spends a lot of time talking about the logical incoherence of materialism. All his stuff is great but it’s difficult.

This is just a small sample of what’s out there in terms of apologetics but it’s a start. There’s enough that you could spend your entire life reading compelling arguments for the God’s existence. However, the most effective way to strengthen your faith, in my opinion, is to see how effective the teachings of Jesus are for yourself, to ACTUALLY DO what he says and see how it transforms your life first hand. This is how you make your faith unshakable. Nothing beats personal experience.

Dr. Craig Keener has a good book on this. He is a highly respected biblical scholar who has taught at several different seminaries of different traditions and is widely published. This is a large book, but it looks at both the biblical miracle accounts and historical accounts, including contemporary accounts. I think his second volume that he's currently working on will have more contemporary accounts, and I heard he is sharing all types of documentation from personal accounts throughout the world, lots from Africa but also Asia and the United States too.

Sorry for the late reply; been off reddit for a while.

http://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-Testament-Accounts-Volume/dp/0801039525

I'm not sure I agree with your definitions fully first off:

>Religious Faith asks you to, absent compelling evidence, believe in what it asserts to be factual statements regarding not just past events -but past events that would compromise the totality of compiled empirical data (I'm speaking about miracles).

Areas in italics probably should be removed from your definition. A staggering number of people in the past and today claim they have witnessed a miracle, so many that it seems to me like they can't all be explained away. Gary Habermas and Craig Keener do good work on trying to document these miracles, many happen in hospitals where there is documentation (see Miracles by Craig Keener) In fact 73% of doctors believe in the US believe in miracles, many of whom say they've seen them. 73% of Meidcal Doctors is a lot, more than enough to throw your "totality of compiled empirical data" claim into question.

So if you want to pedantically scrum over definitions I guess we can, though it seems a bit silly.

You've given me a few things to research and ponder, so thank you!

For now, I'll just respond to your final questions:

> What is "agnostic"?

I would think that being agnostic on a particular question is simply neither confirming nor denying its validity. e.g. I can neither confirm nor deny the miracle claims of the Quran and Book of Mormon (along with many of the biblical miracles).

> how do you distinguish between an a priori presumption vs a conclusion?

An a priori presumption would be a decision about findings which restricts (or, perhaps, affirms) validity of certain hypotheses, despite the evidence. e.g. a Fundamentalist may have the a priori presumption that biblical miracles actually happened in history, and any evidence contrary to that assumption will be problematic to the fundamentalist. On the flip side, a secular materialist exegete may have the a priori assumption that miracles cannot happen in history, and thus any evidence to the contrary will be problematic. I don't think either of these presumptions are healthy for an unbiased view.

That said, the study of history may not be able to positively confirm a miracle hypothesis, due to the necessary constraints of such research. But there has been some work done which may suggest that historical research can positively corroborate miracle claims (e.g. Craig Keener's work). I wouldn't want to over step my competency, so I'll have to remain agnostic on that point.

Its my view that the historian must work under the constraints they're given: i.e. if a miracle did happen in history, they may not necessarily be able to positively affirm that truth. If it did not, then they can deny it's validity if they have sufficient evidence. If they are unable to deny the historicity of a miracle claim with sufficient evidence, then they ought to remain agnostic (simply allowing the validity of the miracle to remain on the conceptual table with other possible hypotheses), rather than denying its validity because of a priori presuppositions.

Here is an extensively sourced 2-volume work on Miracles:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801039525/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I have it on my bookshelf, ready to start reading after my current book. But I came across it as a reference in another book I read recently, and it looks very worthwhile--and on your exact topic!

As far as knowing what you can trust, I prefer a book like the above precisely because it details its sources. Other website testimonies may be useful, but probably need to be taken with a grain of salt.

• F.F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
  
  
• Richard Bauckman's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
  
  
• Bruce Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
  
  
• Bruce Metzger's The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration
  
  
• D.A. Carson and Douglass Moo's An Introduction to the New Testament
  
  
  
  (Note, these will probably go against or "provide a nice contrast with" captainhaddock's view --the current most popular post in the thread).

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.

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.

>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.

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).

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

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.

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.

Nice! Just picked up another on my wish list, Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

I agree with you, but I think you misunderstood what I was inquiring. There are many atheists or members of other religions that would agree with you that the bible contains a lot of sensible moral teachings (not referring the old testament here); more along the lines of those of Jesus. That being said, why take stock in things like organized religion, belief in eternal salvation/damnation et cetera; rather than just simply appreciating the moral teachings for what they are? Thomas Jefferson did just that when he wrote this.

Minimally, if the effect of prayrer is unverifiable, it would be wrong to say it universally fails (I don't know if you said that but someone did). Prayrer isn't deliberately unfalsifiable, I suppose the nature of prayrer and testing scientifically if prayrer 'works' is . . not really a matter of science, even though I can imagine certain kinds of scientific tests to observe if certain prayrers 'work', and even the term 'work' is difficult to use because of the nature of prayrer. So maybe it would be better to say a significantly better methodology would need to be employed.

If God didn't heal 100 out of 100 amputees, the most you could say based on that experiment is that God said no, 100 out of 100 times. . and then you are assuming there is a God in the first place, and God could have morally sufficient reasons for saying no 100 times.

In regards to the nature of answered prayrer, it is not true theologically speaking that all answered prayrer must happen supernaturally. So answered prayrer could come in the form of a friend meeting a need, and I completely grant that that makes the conversation in regards to science and prayrer even more confusing, which I think supports my point regarding the general untestability of the effects of prayrer in a certain sense.

We live amongst brilliant people so I think something could be done, but the experiments im aware of are either too simple or are based on a superficial understanding of prayrer.

Not that you need to read it, but theirs an incredible book by Craig Keener called Miracles that has significant crossover into the conversation we're having here, more in the region of things like exotic medical ailments being undone. Very well documented. Conclusions aside, it is good work. And its nice to hear what you have to say, too, so I appreciate your conversing :)

You should check out this book

Craig Keener is the only person I've seen attempt some answer to this recently although I'm sure there are others.

It doesn't really matter what my beliefs are, just that, no, not every religion can be disproven, which is what you said.

However, my two big reasons for thinking there's probably a god (or, at the very least, a spiritual realm) are NDEs and documented, modern miracles.

edit: I forgot one: Edith turner and similar anthropologists

God gives us logic, and then occasionally circumvents the rules He established.

It's not blind acceptance of the irrational. It's accepting that God's miraculous intervention in our universe can circumvent known laws of nature. This book outlines hundreds of scientifically supported examples of miraculous events occurring. This is not explained by science alone. Miracles do seem to occur on occasion when situations are charged with religious significance. The acceptance of a rational only universe (according to Newtonian mechanics) is in my opinion, lacking in evidence. It does not best explain the universe I see. I approach the evidence like a jury approaches the evidence in a murder trial - what is the likely event, beyond reasonable doubt, given the evidence we have available. When new evidence surfaces, we can revise our decision.

I consider this a rational approach, and it means accepting that God has circumvented the laws of logic.

I don't know if He hasn't. If you've got a library near you or are willing to shed big bucks, I'd recommend Craig Keener's book Miracles. It's in two volumes and it basically goes through arguments for accepting miracles, then a listing of modern miracle claims. I've not read all of it, but while I was at Uni I got to read a good portion. It's amazing stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525 I think it will answer your question better than I can.

Either way, God is under no moral obligation to do anything but punish sinners. If He wanted He could justly have never came and saved us and just let us all be damned.

I would check out the long amazon review on the book

https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/product-reviews/0801039525/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

Keener takes Pat Robertson seriously.

See a pro-Christian blog

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/07/healing-of-amputees.html

" In other words, Keener isn't giving us much to go by. But he is providing more than Chris suggests. "

" Keener notes that he found more than 25 cases with "something like [healed amputees] " something like it

His evidence is "eyewitness accounts" like in Robertson's book where somebody saw it happen "in Ghana" and cases of things like spontaneous cancer remission.

>There are processes that select for more complexity and rationality.

Again, processes require an agent to set up the initial process. That agent also must be very intelligent if the program goal is to select for complexity and rationality.

Also, an ordered process is not at all likely to arise within this universe. The reason being is that the 2nd Law of thermodynamics states that the universe is constantly becoming more and more disordered: http://www.livescience.com/50941-second-law-thermodynamics.html If such a process has arisen, then it needed an agent to help it.

My point is simple: Name something else, besides what you think of the brain, that uses itself; and that is not designed.

There really isn't anything else. Hammers need carpenters, skis need skiers, planes need pilots, and computer need users. The brain is a computer, and as a computer it requires a user.

We haven't even talked about DNA, which is somehow a code without a writer. How can a code not have a writer? Check out this recent study done with DNA at Harvard:
http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/93/writing-the-book-in-dna
Quote from the article:
"In another departure, the team rejected so-called "shotgun sequencing," which reassembles long DNA sequences by identifying overlaps in short strands. Instead, they took their cue from information technology, and encoded the book in 96-bit data blocks, each with a 19-bit address to guide reassembly. Including jpeg images and HTML formatting, the code for the book required 54,898 of these data blocks, each a unique DNA sequence. "We wanted to illustrate how the modern world is really full of zeroes and ones, not As through Zs alone," Kosuri said."

If the modern world is full of zeroes and ones, and DNA is a code capable of doing this experiment, then that code requires a super intelligent writer that exists outside the realm of the code (so outside the natural world) Same as a software designer exists outside the software.

>There's no evidence whatsoever anything like a supernatural realm exists, which is what my original post was searching for I believe.

Well, I just posted some evidence straight from Harvard.
I would also suggest checking out this book on documented modern miracles: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801039525?creativeASIN=0801039525&linkCode=w00&linkId=ZT4A3RX5O2OMDWSA&ref_=as_sl_pc_tf_til&tag=roalll-20

Also, here's a link to my website: https://www.rocalternative.com/Testimonies.html

If we're going to go by empirical evidence here, then is it really logical to dismiss ALL testimonies of supernatural encounters? Especially when we are talking about millions of them that have happened over thousands of years? Not everyone can be insane or lying.

By the way, the number 2 isn't based at all in the natural world. It is not a material thing. Does this mean that the number 2 doesn't exist?

Btw, the reason I know all this stuff is because I used to be an atheist. It was because of all these things I've laid out, not to mention a few of my own supernatural encounters, that I was forced to change my mind about my former beliefs.

>you imbecile

I can already tell this is going to be fun.

>Jesus has literally ZERO contemporary historical data.

That's not what you asked for. You asked for peer-reviewed arguments for the historical existence of Jesus, of which I said there are thousands, and to which I said you'd have a much more difficult time finding the opposite--- peer reviewed articles and books arguing that Jesus was entirely a myth.

>I’ll wait for those libraries of sources you have.

Where do you want to start?

Probably the best place for you to start is with Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar of on the development of Christianity, and he's also a popular skeptic speaker and writer. In addition to publishing he's written popular books about how many of the books of the Bible were forgeries, and how the belief that Jesus was divine developed in early Christianity, he also wrote an entire book laying out the widely accepted case that Jesus was likely a real historical person, written directly to skeptical lay people like yourself.

If you want a great introduction to the scholarly debate about the historical Jesus, you could start here or here. I also think Dale Allison's work is great critical look at some of the issues at work in the debate. There are lots of historical reconstructions of Jesus' life. Some of the more popular ones like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan tend to sell books to liberal Christian audiences, so I've always thought E.P. Sanders treatment was perferable. I'll spare you the links to scholars who identify as orthodox Christians, like Luke Timothy Johnson or N.T. Wright. It sounded like you specifically wanted more scholarly sources and not popular books, so you could just look at the scholarly journal dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus. Or the Jesus Seminar. Or either of the following Introductions to the New Testament textbooks which are used in secular universities throughout the english speaking world:

Introduction to the New Testament by Mark Allen Powell

Introduction to the New Testament by Bart Ehrman

These are the ones I'm personally most familiar with. There are tons more like Geza Vermes and Amy Jill Levine I haven't read and I'm not as familiar with.

But I'm not telling you anything you wouldn't learn in any basic 101 intro to New Testament Class. The academic consensus is that regardless of what you think about him as a religious figure, it is extremely likely that there was a first century Jew named Jesus who started a faith movement that led to him being crucified. Why do scholars think this? Because by the time Paul started writing his letters 20 years later there was a growing, spreading religious movement that worship a crucified Jew named Jesus as their messiah, and given critical analysis of the texts produced by this movement, some of which are now in the New Testament, there really doesn't exist a coherent argument for the development of this movement that doesn't include the existence of a first century Jew named Jesus who was crucified.

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.

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauchman

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?

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.

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?

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.

>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.

Other reviewers on Amazon beg to differ.

Those passages are in context, would you like to read them in the new international version or a literal translation? I quoted KJV because that is what is seen as a fairly standard bible. If you think that there are different interpretations of them then please say what you think they are. My advice? ignore the whole book, it is impossible to read the whole thing without either ignoring the contradicting parts of the bible or going mad trying to fulfill both parts.

Critical thought applied to the bible gives you this, which is no different than aesop or any other storyteller trying to instill values through the telling of stories.

The big thick one. It's called The Resurrection of Jesus. The section on historiography is especially helpful. It's something hardly any other book goes into in such detail.

https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518996512&sr=8-1

No such thing as a dumb question! And that question specifically is an excellent question! IMO, always ask for the facts and arguments that another person has, rather than asking for their conclusions. That way you can calculate the conclusions yourself from the facts/arguments. IMO, half the stuff you'll google or find on reddit talks about conclusions and not data/arguments (e.g. "Jesus never existed". Okay, well reddituser, could you explain more why you think that?)

• Pretty decent Youtube Series series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAZSz2Yb_8
  
• A thorough book on all of the possible evidence for Jesus ressurection - https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196. I think this book IMO provided the strongest case for Xtianity. C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, and others were riddled with logical fallacies.
  
• http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ vs answersingenesis.org if you are curious on evolution vs creationism
  
• http://wiki.ironchariots.org/ vs. carm.org
  
• I can PM you a a super disorganized list of some talking points I came up with right before I was about to talk to my uncle about quitting the worship team:
  
• Pascal's Wager for multiple religions - http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/files/im/aVSVQ.png
  
• Believers Brain by Michael Shermer
  
• If you look through my comment history you can find other books/sources.
  
  There's a lot to study. I recommend using Feynman's method for learning (https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-model). Can speed up your learning by 4x.

Cool! On evolution, Pete Enns' The Evolution of Adam. He takes very seriously the theological implications of evolution, and makes a strong case for Christianity's ability to not only accept it but gain new insights from it. For more of a textual look at Genesis and why a literal reading isn't the best one, John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One.

On both the non-historicity and cruelty of parts of the OT, check out Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God. This was a huge problem for me in accepting Christianity, probably the biggest hurdle I had to cross, and Stark's book did more than anything else to help me wrestle with it.

On miracles, I'm going to point you at a longer book, but it's well worth a read if you're interested in a strong case. Michael Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus argues that the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead should not only be considered, it's actually the strongest one that's been proposed from a historical standpoint, as long as you're not ruling out the possibility that the universe might surprise you sometimes.

And this book I recommend to anybody even remotely intrigued by Christianity: The King Jesus Gospel. It's like seeing the story with entirely new eyes, and it knocks down a lot of really harmful misunderstandings of what the gospel's actually about.

ME First the above quote is out of context. It is common apologist argument that is cherry picked. I can go through and show the real facts of every one of those "proofs". Whether you are a believer or not evolution is a solidified fact, one that even that catholic church is is agreement with. I can deal with almost any religious stuff but the denial of scientific fact, proven theories, I cannot abide by. That article is full of misinformation and misconstruing of documentation and facts. If you want to believe in god that is fine, but don't pretend to know science and biology when over the past 150 years more and more evidence has come to light proving the theory of evolution. And don't say "it's just a theory" when a theory in the scientific discord is of the highest caliber of proofs so to say. Whatever you wanna believe is fine, but proven fact denial is ignorant.
15 hrs · Like

ME I'll even give you a compromise, god used evolution to create the world we live in. It is a proven concept and you can see it in action if you would like sources. It is a well researched, conclusive theory that explains all the life that has occurred on this planet, including you and me, and the evidence for it grows and grows all the time.
14 hrs · Like

DBAG , that RawStory "Did Jesus Exist?" article is ridiculous propaganda peddled out to credulous suckers. It doesn't speak well for their case that the "scholar" they hang their hat on- David Fitzgerald- isn't a scholar at all, but a self-publis...See More

Did Jesus Exist?
One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our post-modern despisers of established religion. But...
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM
12 hrs · Like · 1

DBAG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlp63Lxrxi0

The Extra Biblical Evidence for the Historicity of Jesus Christ.
Documentary: Evidence for the historical existence of...
YOUTUBE.COM
12 hrs · Like · 2

ME Religion is ridiculous propaganda peddled out to credulous suckers. Was there a hippy running around at the time pissing people off? Maybe, but all the supernatural bullshit did not happen. So it doesn't matter either way.
2 hrs · Like

ME Either way this was about evolution, which if you don't think makes sense you aren't worth bothering with anyway. The Jesus thing is whatever, evolution is facts. End of story.
2 hrs · Like

DBAG Actually, this did start out as a discussion about Jesus. And your assertion that "all the supernatural bullshit did not happen" has not been demonstrated to be true.
2 hrs · Like

ME Demonstrate me some supernatural stuff then.
2 hrs · Like

DBAG Well YOU asserted that the supernatural stuff didn't happen, so the burden of proof is properly on you to prove it DIDN'T happen, but in fact there is a pretty solid historiographical case for the Resurrection.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Resurrection.../dp/0830827196

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach
The question of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection has...
AMAZON.COM
2 hrs · Like · 1

ME Your reasoning is wrong, I have nothing to prove to you. I am done with this conversation, it is boring me and is the same apologetic garbage. Talking snakes, resurrection, people turning to salt, whatever makes you sleep better at night. If you wanna believe in a genocidal egotistical maniac that wipes whole races of people out for no reason, lets people starve and die every day for no reason, and wants you to be ashamed of what you are on your basic human level then good for you. I will live my fulfilling life without the necessity to believe in fairy tales.Good day sir.
1 hr · Edited · Like

DBAG So basically, your mind has been closed from the beginning, and you're unwilling to consider any evidence that might challenge your pre-formed conclusion, since that would involve opening yourself up to possibilities you've already decided were wrong before the discussion began. Do I have that right? Great "rational", "evidence-based" reasoning, bro!
1 hr · Like

ME I have done more reading on this stuff and grew up a staunch believer, I know what they have to say and I keep up with it bro. I've read my bible cover to cover, I've read all these apologist arguments, circular reasoning. everything. I keep up with it. And my conclusion still comes to hogwash. Like I said before :
Joshua Hege's photo.
1 hr · Like

DBAG You obviously know jack-shit about what you're talking about if you uncritically believe an internet puff piece hawking a book by a vanity-press kook, and are completely oblivious to the historical consensus on Jesus. Like most atheists promulgating the Christ-myth garbage on the internet, you've never read a single book on the subject (Whenever I encounter an atheist posing as an expert on the historicity of Jesus, the question "Name a single book you've read on the subject" always stops them dead in their tracks,) and I'm guessing you've cobbled together your information from things you saw in facebook graphics and YouTube videos. Basically, you make a mockery of the evidence-based worldviews you claim to have. Not everything you read on the internet is true, bro. Read a book for once in your life, something that actually gives sources for its claims, it won't kill you!
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ME No Meek Messiah: Michael Paulkovich, there's a book I read. I read consistently. I never said he didn't exist, I said it is unlikely, and very unlikely he existed as he is portrayed today. As for your typical rude Christian attitude when someone questions your beliefs, loving as it may be, go fuck yourself. I'm done arguing with you.
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DBAG Ah yes, "No Meek Messiah", published on that prestigious "Spillix, LLC" imprint. As I said, if a vanity press publication by an author with ZERO academic qualifications is the first and only book you've read on the subject, you obviously chose a book that you felt was going to reinforce your pre-formed judgements on the matter. You're starting with your conclusion, and then choosing your evidence to fit your conclusion. Basically, you're doing exactly what atheists always accuse Christians of doing.

Look, I get it. You're an atheist. You like pretending you're smart. It's kinda your thing. You like looking haughtily down on the views of the great masses and clucking "herp derp fairy tales derp derp santa claus herp derp." Unfortunately, as with all edumacated-by-teh-intarwebz atheists, there's really no substance behind the superior posturing.

Well you've run into at least one guy here you can't bullshit. You know it too— if you were really pleased with your performance, you wouldn't keep responding to my posts after saying you're done.

All I'm asking is that you proceed with a little more humility. You're an atheist!?! Hey, more power to you! Here's the cookie you've always wanted! You believe it's "unlikely" Jesus existed!?! Well you have as much right to your opinion as the people who think it's "unlikely" we landed on the moon, or it's "unlikely" 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust! We're all special flowers, unique in our own way! Just realize that there are people VASTLY more knowledgable and intelligent than you who have arrived at different conclusions than you have, that you're dealing with a 2000-year-old intellectual tradition you can't even begin to grapple with, and that if you go posing as an expert on the interwebz, you're bound to get checked by people who ACTUALLY know what they're talking about.

Depends on what your gonna take as evidence. If you want unanimous, written records that Jesus the son of Joseph was resurrected, there is none(well, Gospels, but you're not Christian, so yeah). That being said here's a [debate from my favorite agnostic-atheist scholar, Bart Erhman, about the historicity of Jesus' ressurection ] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhT4IENSwac) and here's a book. Here's another video too, but I'm really not too fond of it.

Disclaimer, I haven't read the book, the Priest at my local Catholic church recommended it however.

Sure. If you want scholarly resources on the resurrection, then I would suggest The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Licona. You can get it on Amazon for about $35 and it's a long read at 700+ pages.

https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UCOAX5QZYQUY&keywords=the+resurrection+of+jesus+mike+licona&qid=1570211397&sprefix=the+resurrection+of+Jesus%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1

Another good scholarly resource is The Case For the Resurrection of Jesus by Habermas and Licona. You can get it for about $13 dollars on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Resurrection-Jesus-Gary-Habermas/dp/0825427886/ref=pd_sbs_14_1/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0825427886&pd_rd_r=decfba9d-109a-4324-99c9-ba4523d42796&pd_rd_w=TIA6v&pd_rd_wg=EeKYx&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P&psc=1&refRID=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P

I would also suggest getting a general overview of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman is probably the world's leading skeptical scholar of the New Testament. His book on the New Testament, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament Writings, is a great resource and can be bought on Amazon for around $6.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/0195126394/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=introduction+to+new+testament+ehrman&qid=1570211027&sr=8-6

Other books that I would strongly recommend would be:

Early Christian Writings. A short read at 200 pages. A catalog of some of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament. You can get it for $3 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=early+christian+writings&qid=1570212985&s=books&sr=1-1

The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content Bruce Metzger was one of the leading New Testament scholars of the 20th century. You can get it for $20.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

The Fate of the Apostles, by McDowell. An in-depth study of how reliable the martyrdom accounts of the apostles are. A little bit pricey at $35-40.

https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Apostles-Sean-McDowell/dp/1138549134/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JBDB9MJMOVL8&keywords=the+fate+of+the+apostles&qid=1570212064&s=books&sprefix=the+fate+of+the+ap%2Cstripbooks%2C167&sr=1-1

Ecclesiastical History, by Eusebius, a 3rd century historian. Eusebius documents the history of Christianity from Jesus to about the 3rd century. You can get it for $10.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

There's a lot we can unfold from this one question. I want to give you a thorough answer, but that means this will get long. I hope you'll hang with me here. :-)

First, we can still establish some widely accepted facts about the beginning of Christianity (such as the facts I listed for you) even if we consider the Gospel accounts unreliable. Historians can generally tell when Herodotus is embellishing to satisfy his desire for elements of karmic justice in his histories, or when Tacitus lets his pro-Roman bias get in the way of accuracy. Even with bias (which, let's be honest, all historians have) we can still extract facts and assign degrees of historical certainty to them. I think we have good reason to believe the Gospels are reliable (at least by the standards of their genre and period), but we don't have to agree on this in order to discuss the resurrection hypothesis.

Second, the dates usually assigned to the Gospels (between 30-70 years after Jesus's death, depending on whom you ask) are not as bad as you might think when you consider written history at that time. Liberal scholars agree that Mark was certainly written prior to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, at a time when many witnesses of Jesus would have still been alive and thus around to corroborate or refute the stories. We should also consider that some of Paul's letters show up even earlier, with his first letter to the Corinthian church being dated to around AD 55. And in this same letter, Paul preserved in written form a creed that formed part of the oral tradition surrounding early Christianity. It's extremely basic, unlike creeds that developed centuries later, but it does speak of the death, burial, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Most New Testament scholars pin this creed's origin down to AD 35 or so, within a few years of Jesus's death, which means that the Christian belief in the resurrection was already set down as oral tradition decades prior to the actual writing of the Gospel accounts.

(As an aside, I sometimes hear people raise the objection that it's hard to remember what happened last year, let alone 30 or 40 years ago. I would say that for the people who were closest to Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection almost certainly formed flashbulb memories that remained vivid decades after the fact. I can't tell you what I had for lunch last Tuesday, but I can tell you all sorts of details about where I was and what I was doing during the events of September 11, 2001. I remember exactly where I was on the road when I heard the radio simulcast of Peter Jennings announcing that the first tower had collapsed, and I remember the shock and emotion in Jennings's voice. And that was what, 17 years ago? Major events like that have a strange way of sticking when ordinary events don't.)

Third, at this time in history the literacy rates were rather poor. Although the New Testament documents directly benefited from the universality of Koine Greek due to the conquests of Alexander the Great, the number of people who could read or write (according to an estimate I heard recently from Michael Licona) was around 10% and 3%, respectively. For this reason oral tradition was a highly developed skill, and the Jewish rabbinical oral tradition was especially advanced, with sects like the Pharisees priding themselves on being able to quote the entire Old Testament from memory. So naturally the early church, being mostly Jewish, relied on oral tradition when it started. Unlike a game of telephone, however, in which there is no error correction procedure, the oral tradition as used in Jewish and other Near/Middle Eastern cultures had constant opportunities for error correction as it was recited to audiences, and this helped to preserve the core facts accurately.

Fourth, the Gospels bear many marks of authenticity. That is to say, there are things in there you would not expect to see if they were forgeries. For example, take the traditional names of the Gospel authors. Why choose a minor disciple who was formerly a hated tax collector (Matthew), a student of Peter (Mark), and a student of Paul (Luke)? Why not go for the big names to assert your authority? (And in fact the later Gospels that we know to be forgeries, such as the Gospel of Peter, did this very thing.) Also, why include tough verses like Mark 6:5 or Mark 13:32, which make Jesus sound limited and less than omniscient? In a culture where men's testimony was valued far more than women's, why insist that the first people to discover the empty tomb were women? For that matter, why portray Jesus's closest followers as fleeing like cowards while the women remained at the cross? And of course, why leave in the contradictions that people still bring up today instead of taking the time to harmonize the accounts before publishing?

Finally, the New Testament documents are among the most (if not the most) copied documents of their time. Copying was important then for preservation—better to have as many copies as possible so that if some are destroyed you haven't lost everything. Copying is important today for error correction—thanks to the thousands of extant manuscripts, we can tell when verses or passages were added by scribes. The major modern translations either remove these sections entirely or set them off with brackets and provide a footnote indicating that the earliest and best manuscripts do not have that particular section. Despite not having any originals, the textual purity of the New Testament is established to the point that we can be certain that 99% of the words in a Greek New Testament match what was originally written, and the remaining 1% about which there is some debate do not affect any doctrinal issues. Even agnostic Bart Ehrman, who seems to get quoted a lot on this sub, agrees that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants.

There are a few more dimensions we could add to this, but rather than take my word for it, you can get a more complete view from an actual scholar if you read Craig Blomberg's Historical Reliability of the Gospels. (I haven't personally read this book yet, but it's on my to-read list. I'm familiar with Craig's work through his contributions to other books, however.)

There are a ton of great books on this, but the landmark scholarly book is Blomberg's on the Gospel accounts. A really good overview of history of translation is Journey From Text to Translation. These two books are basically the best you can get in terms of thoroughness and research.

Let me know if you want smaller or cheaper alternatives and I can get them to you, a really good intro "fun" style book is TPJ's How we Got the Bible. I personally can't stand that "fluffy and fun" tone, but some people really like it and grooves well for them.

Don't be afraid to bring this up to your pastor or community group and do a study together if they don't know the answer.

>Kalam cosomological argument: God is the best explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.

Why?

>Teleological argument: God is the best explanation of why the universe is so fine tuned for life.

It isn't. Random chance dictates that, in a universe as vast as ours, there are several worlds that are capable of life. After all, we've found several planets in habitable zones of stars within 300 lightyears of where we are (which is a fucking tiny space in astronomical scales, BTW) and we're in a fairly empty bit of the universe. With enough chances, even extremely long odds will finally pay off.

>Moral argument: God is the best explanation why objective moral values exist.

First you have to prove an objective morality even exists. It appears to be rather subjective to me.

>Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead: The person of Jesus has many written records about him. Using the same historical scrutiny we might use for any other historical document, it seems the best explanation for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is that god allowed it to happen.

None of which were written during his lifetime. And the resurrection has to be proven first. The whole tale is too fishy for me to believe it. As a convicted criminal, it's far more likely that his body ended up in an unmarked criminal's grave and none of his followers actually knew where it was. This is the theory offered up by the book "Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?" (which I'm currently in the process of reading), an in-depth review of which can be found here. And it's a far more likely theory, IMO, as it requires no supernatural agency.

And I suppose I misspoke. It's not that there isn't evidence, it's that the evidence either requires the presupposition that there is a god/supernatural forces (the whole resurrection thing) or is simply not convincing (the moral argument and the "fine-tuned" argument).

Thomas Jefferson rewrote the New Testament into a book where Jesus has no miracles, and it teaches his morals.

> Do you think a book written today, about someone living today [etc]

Yeah this makes me think you think there was an actual fellow named Jesus who preached in Judea about 2000 years ago. Which considering the evidence is very unlikely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The first two sources being the best scholarly work on the historicity of "Jesus" reviewing and coming to the conclusion that any positive belief is unwarranted. The other three giving a very detailed description of how the jesus story contains elements from various pagan mythologies popular around that time in the region of wider Judea, concluding that it is likely that the jesus story is a fictional account consisting of a Hebrew substrate overlain with pagan motives.

Right away, a curious observer would find themselves wondering how, if this Theorem is the wonderful instrument of historical objectivity both Craig and Carrier claim it to be, two people can apply it and come to two completely contradictory historical conclusions.  Yet they both use Bayes Theorem to attempt to "prove" historical things.  Something does not make sense here.


Then if we turn to who doesn't use Bayes Theorem to analyse history we find this category includes ... pretty much every single historian on the planet.  Again, this should strike the objective observer as distinctly odd.  After all, if Bayes Theorem can genuinely be applied to determine the truth or otherwise of a historical event or proposition, it's exceedingly strange that thousands of historians all over the world are not applying this remarkable tool all the time.  Richard Carrier maintains that this is because every historian on earth, except him, is too ignorant and mathematically illiterate to understand the wonders of this remarkable tool and only he has been clever enough to realise that it can be applied to history.  Given that Thomas Bayes ' theorem was first published in 1763, our objective observer would be forgiven for finding it remarkable that no-one noticed that it could be used in this way until Richard Carrier, an unemployed blogger (and a person who isn't taken seriously by most scholars), came along.

​

There are two problems here when it comes to trying to apply Bayes Theorem to history: (i) Carrier and Craig need to treat questions of what happened in the past as the same species of uncertainty as what may happen in the future and (ii) historical questions are uncertain precisely because we don't have defined and certain data to feed into the equation.


Bayes Theorem only works in cases where we can apply known information.  So, in the example above, we know how often it rains in a year and we know when the weather forecast is and isn't correct.  So by inputing this meaningful data, we can get a meaningful result out the other end of the equation.


This is not the case with history.


Bayes Theorem's application depends entirely on how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality.  With a historical question, Carrier is forced to think up probabilities for each parameter he put into the equation.  This is a purely subjective process - he determines how likely or unlikely a parameter in the question is and then decides what value to give that parameter.  So the result he gets at the end is purely a function of these subjective choices. 


In other words: garbage in/garbage out.


So it's not surprising that Carrier comes up with a result on the question of whether Jesus existed that conforms to his belief that Jesus didn't - he came up with the values that were inevitably going to come up with that result.  If someone who believed Jesus did exist did the same thing, the values they inputted would be different and they would come up with the opposite result.  This is why historians don't bother using Bayes Theorem.


So what exactly is Carrier doing by applying this Theorem in a way that it can't be applied?  Apart from being incompetent, he seems to be doing little more than putting a veneer of statistics over a subjective evaluation and pretending he's getting greater precision. 


Not surprisingly, despite his usual grandiose claims that his use of Bayes Theorem is some kind of revolution in historiography, his book Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012)   has pretty much sunk without trace and been generally ignored by historical Jesus scholars and historians alike.  His failure to convince anyone except a gaggle of historically clueless online atheist fanboys of his vast genius means that Carrier is most likely to remain what he is: an unemployed blogger and general nobody with a fringe thesis.

Richard Carrier's book addresses this very point. https://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=proving%20history%20carrier&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&qid=1491575037&ref_=mp_s_a_1_1&sr=8-1

I would recommend Nailed by David Fitzgerald, Proving History by Dr. Richard Carrier, and On the Historicity of Jesus, also by Dr. Carrier

And I’ve perused Nailed, and have read both of the books I recommended by Dr. Carrier

I'm mostly on your side, but I'd like to oppose your recommendation of Ten Beautiful Lies.

Fitzgerald (of Ten beautiful lies, published as the book Nailed) is a poor representative of Jesus mythicism. He's no scholar, just an author hanging on the coat tails of real scholars, and some of the inaccuracies in his book show it.

Nailed was my first introduction to Jesus Mythicism and Fitzgerald's video about it is compellingly fun, but the material at the beginning about similarities (born on Dec 25, etc) between Jesus and other deities parallels Zeitgeist in being incorrect. I was sadly disappointed when I later discovered this.

Reputable names in the Jesus Myther field are: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Thomas L. Thompson and Richard Carrier.

On the subject of Josephus and his Testimonium, I enjoyed what this guy had to say on the subject. He's arguing against well known "traditional" Bible historian Bart Ehrman, whose arguments for the historicity of Jesus often devolve into appeals to authority and chest thumping.

Personally, I think the guy to watch is Richard Carrier, whose recent book Proving History proposes using Bayes' Theorem to evaluate the validity of historical claims, and demonstrates that many of the methods used in "traditional" history, especially on the topic of Jesus, are inadequate. I'm looking forward to book 2 in this series, which specifically looks at the Jesus story.

You may enjoy Carrier's video talk, So…if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then? , which summarizes his more important findings.

You can't cite the non-existence of a source, unless you sit down and read every book that's ever been written.

The most popular "source" that Christians cite for the historicity of Jesus is Josephus. However a number of historians have shown that those passages in Josephus (along with some others) were inserted after the fact.

Ultimately, though, the argument from skeptics and atheists is this: There is no historical evidence to back up the claims made in the Bible about Jesus. Being such extraordinary claims, one would expect these startling events to have been recorded by contemporary historians, but they were not. Therefore, until better evidence comes along, we are forced to conclude that Jesus -- at least, the Jesus of the Bible -- did not exist.

Here's a couple of good skeptical sources on the historicity of Jesus:

• Video: David Fitzgerald: "Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus"
  
• Video: Richard Carrier: "You're All Gonna Die! How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Created Christianity Instead"
  
• Video: David Fitzgerald: "Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus" (Skepticon 3)
  
• Book: David Fitzgerald: "Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All"
  
• Book: Richard Carrier: "Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus"
  
  (Disclaimer: I haven't done much research into the question of the historicity of Jesus because I think the nonexistence of deities is so obvious that the question is pointless. So Fitzgerald and Carrier are the only resources I'm familiar with; Loftus, I think, is also good, but I'm not familiar with him.)

No we shouldn't.

The controversy is that the evidence for Jesus is from Christian sources, and none of the evidence is from a time when he was said to have lived. There's also no record that he was mentioned in Roman Court, which is very very strange because 1.) Paul was tried at court, and it was not for following Christ even though he was at that time period. and 2.) Pontius Pilate supposedly executed him, and there would be a very bold record of that.


Currently the best source on these theiries are Richard Carrier, and mind you, he is an actual historian, not some crazy dude on the street. Check out his latest book if you're curious: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

These are theories by actual historians, that are just as qualified and respected as Christian Scholars.

I'm not going to debate you because neither of us are qualified to do so, but please realize that there are other world views than your own, and that doesn't mean they're wrong.

Actually, testing your faith as an outsider is necessary for being able to determine its objective truth and hardly "a waste." For instance, suppose you were raised as a Catholic, baptized as an infant. Ask yourself, how do other reasonable people first become believers, or insiders, if from the outside they can't understand Christianity? Which comes first, faith or understanding? If, as a nonbelieving outsider, someone cannot understand the Christian faith, then how does God expect them to reasonably come to faith in the first place? How do you get from being an outsider to being an insider as a rational, thinking, skeptical adult? If you were raised Catholic from childhood then you know that as children we had not yet developed critical thinking faculties to question what our parents told us. We didn't know any better. Isn't it unfair to bring up a child in that environment? How many Catholic parents have adequately questioned their own faith and investigated its truth content before raising their children Catholic?

How many Catholics would accept Catholicism if it were forced upon them when they were 18 years old? Wouldn't we have asked some questions about what our parents told us? If someone came along and tried presenting you a brand new religious paradigm, for example, Scientology or Mormonism, at your age you would, as an outsider, take a critical, skeptical stance against accepting those views. At some point along the line, as we become adults, we need to critically examine what we were taught as children. Doubt and skepticism are learned virtues and as we learn to question, we become thinking adults. But strangely most people don't seem to question their religious faiths which seem too obvious and have become too ingrained in us, usually because they are a part of the culture we live in. Not only that, your faith has ingrained in you a fear of Hell if you deviate from it (of course there is no evidence for the existence of heaven or hell, either), although if you do deviate from it, you can always return later.

Given the abundance of religions around the globe, the probability that the one you happened to have been brought up in is true is highly unlikely. Basically all religions teach that they are the one true religion. At best, only one can be true, as you pointed out earlier. At worst, they are all false. The only rational way to test one's culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism that a believer already uses when examining the other religious faiths he or she rejects. If you can do that and show how Catholicism is still objectively true, then Catholicism is the one true religion, and all nonbelievers could rationally convert. The problem is that there is just no evidence to support its truth. Again, Richard Carrier's Proving History and its companion On the Historicity of Jesus are the most comprehensive scholarly treatments on the existence of Jesus. Carrier has done a lot of scholarship on the early history of the church and the facts do not hold up the way that the Catholic church would make you think they do. Not to mention that "God's true church" has been involved in some nasty terrible acts throughout history and held some embarrassingly mistaken views about reality, and it is not the paragon of moral virtue that an institution with divine inspiration would exhibit. I would challenge you to question your faith as an outsider. Read those books by Richard Carrier, for instance. Read The Outsider Test For Faith by John Loftus and question your faith as an outsider would. And if you still hold to Catholicism as the one true religion, then you have not lost anything. But if you are convinced by reasonable, skeptical arguments that Catholicism is mistaken at bare minimum or at most totally false, then you have gained a truer perspective on reality.

Ah, ye olde appeal to authority and/or popularity. If that's your opening salvo, you've already lost this argument.

How about we just jump to the end?

Find a single solitary historian who can present ANY contemporaneous evidence of Jesus of Nazareth. One will do.

Because if you can't, and you can't, then their starting assumption that Jesus actually existed cannot be supported by the evidence.

Then, ask yourself why they might hold onto this assumption, in light of a complete lack of evidence?

It really shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

In the meantime, here's a good layman's article on the topic.

http://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/07/jesus-the-man-that-never-was/

And here is the peer-reviewed master's class.

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

A good read.

Yup. It's all made up. Beginning to the end. Here's a scholarly analysis of the evidence, both for and against historicity.

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1566348717&sr=1-1

LOL. Scholars think there's only a 1 in 3 chance that a character of Jesus really existed. Those odds are probably too high.

If anyone is interested in a great back and forth between a mythicist and a historicist, check out this debate between Richard Carrrier and Zeba Crook.

I think Crook ultimately comes out looking better, but they both make some good points.

Richard Carrier has published a peer reviewed book called "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt".

Yeah, I wasn't sure how Amazon links were treated here. Here's the full URL:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason/dp/1909697494

If you want to know what got me into Bayes, it's Richard Carrier and his methodology for proving that Jesus never existed ;)

It seems as though your only source, that isn't the bible, is Bart Ehrman. In fact, almost everything that you've written on the subject is almost verbatim Ehrman's own phrasing, especially this little gem which Ehrman has never provided any evidence for:

> Each and every one of these scholars with a teaching position at a university not only believes that Jesus existed...

So, either you are Ehrman or you've read a single book that validates your viewpoints and have begun a crusade on r/atheism.

I will see your one, single source, and raise you 2 additional doctorates in the field that disagree directly with Ehrman:

On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier, PhD Ancient History

The Messiah Myth by Thomas Thompson, PhD Theology who also was a professor of religious studies at a few universities despite the incessant assertions of both yourself and Ehrman that every single scholar in a teaching position believes the same as you.

The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems by Robert Price, PhD Systematic Theology and PhD New Testament yet another professor of religion at a university.

Jeesuksen historiallisuudesta on loppujen lopuksi todella vähän nykyaikaiset metodit täyttävää tutkimusta. Ja Carrier on kollegasi kun hän on väitellyt historiasta tohtoriksi todella kovasta yliopistosta (Columbiasta New York). Carrierin metodi ja lähdekritiikki kestää päivänvalon.
https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

Uskontoja syntyy ilman, että tarvitsee olla historiallista sankaria kaiken takana. Itseasiassa Jeesusta vanhempia mutta kovin samankaltaisia mysteerijumaluuksia tunnetaan lukuisia ja niitä kaikkia pidetään keksittyinä. Miksi tämä yksi olisi poikkeus?

Tietenkin jos löytyisi yksikin todiste historiallisesta Jeesuksesta niin kysymystä siitä onko Jeesus olemassa vain musteena paperilla ei tarvitsisi käydä vaan voitaisiin miettiä minkälainen henkilö siellä loppujen lopuksi oli.

> how do respond to the claim that Jesus is essentially too unique and revolutionary not to be a God? That his message was so subversive and out of the blue that there's no way he could just be some guy?

Actually, around the time of Jesus there were a lot of apocalyptic preachers going around. He wasn't unique at all. Jesus is just the one whose influence happened to continue to our time.

You might want to search YouTube for "Richard Carrier" or read his book.

On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier

The question of why christianity emerged has a fairly complex answer. It's tied to the roman occupation of jerusalem, influence from mystery cults, societal discontent, a feeling that the jewish leadership was immoral, a constant re-reading of scriptures to search for hidden truths, and a kind of darwinian elimination of other competing sects.

If you're actually interested in the case against historicity, Richard Carrier has a masterful work called On the Historicity of Jesus Christ - Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. This is incredibly well researched, heavily footnoted (i've never seen a book more thoroughly documented), and over 700 pages.

Dr Carrier wrote the book in such a way as to push this discussion into a format that can be analyzed in a scientific way. Up until now, this debate has just basically been a series of opinions. He's changing things by trying to take all of the assumptions and assign them probabilities. All of the evidence and assumptions are broken into the smallest pieces and assigned an "element number" which can allow historians to push this conversation along. Disagree with Dr Carrier? Great - point to the element that isn't right, and we can refine the model.

On the Historicity of Jesus

Its a tome of depth and breadth, but check out Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach.

Very often, I find the popular criticisms fail to stand up to scrutiny because the conclusion they cannot be applied consistently to other fields of historical study. Popularizers tend to not be privy to the theory or method of historical inquiry pertaining to ancient texts. Understanding the theory and method at any level will help, as if we are able to establish the NT documents as an average ancient document for historical inquiry, the question then becomes "What are we to make of the historical facts we can discern from the texts?"

I agree with other recommendations around considering postponing the wedding, but I wouldn't break off the relationship yet... As a former agnostic myself, I used to find belief in the resurrection a bit of a stretch given how long ago it was and I felt like God had basically "been silent" for a few thousand years which didn't seem to make much sense to me. I started reading about miracles at Fatima and other Catholic Marian apparitions and doing my own independent research and realized that there was more than the material world can explain... I've attached a few books I read on my journey that were helpful but have tons more if she ends up having the interest in considering...

Miracle Detective - https://smile.amazon.com/Miracle-Detective-Randall-Sullivan-ebook/dp/B008RZKOFQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=miracle+detective&qid=1572978404&sr=8-1

Fatima Prophecies - https://smile.amazon.com/Fatima-Prophecies-At-Doorstep-World-ebook/dp/B00534J76G/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Fatima+Prophecies%3A+At+the+Doorstep+of+the+World&qid=1572978579&sr=8-1

Resurrection- expensive and long but good- https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LUJDNE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

​

Definitely keep everything in prayer as well, but it sounds like you definitely are being called to the truth of the Catholic faith, and you need to really consider how challenging it will be to raise kids in a "mixed" religious family. We'll be praying for you.

I am also posting this as an apologetic resource for you to use.


Why Christianity?

https://youtu.be/nWY-6xBA0Pk

Why suffering?

https://youtu.be/v6Gl4ao8IzA?t=9m6s

Evolution? Genesis?

Part 1

https://youtu.be/qMU1soRrtJk?t=26

Part 2

https://youtu.be/HZrxogY9Pnc?t=26

Part 3:

https://youtu.be/G7HQzhi8UPM?t=26

Part 4:

https://youtu.be/_3R0bh9LtSc?t=26

Part 5:

https://youtu.be/KJ3IgGYf29k?t=26

Part 6:

https://youtu.be/KCxWhKe1AMg?t=26

Part 7:

https://youtu.be/AyQY5Z3GeG4?t=26

Part 8:

https://youtu.be/eOwA9L0IY3I?t=26

Did Jesus exist?

https://youtu.be/A6uWSoxG_Fs

Jesus claimed to be God?

https://youtu.be/gT2TN6kA5kY

Trinity?

https://youtu.be/LoTSqXY5uhc

The good news?

https://youtu.be/HSNayo631a0

Homosexuality?

• A sin to exist?

https://youtu.be/COIThVReiIo

• A call to love?

https://youtu.be/nPYRXop7aPA?t=9s

Hell?

https://youtu.be/dz2EaQMBS3Y

All You Want to Know About Hell: Three Christian Views of God's Final Solution to the Problem of Sin

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EQE3FJE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_.o7HCb3HS6NG3

Never heard of Jesus?

Part 1

https://youtu.be/RvyzODL4B9U

Part 2

https://youtu.be/ufROkQF8rvg

Where did God come from?

https://youtu.be/RVzeojdXbpQ?t=9s

You might also enjoy these reads below,

Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQFWQHD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_QfzpCbWNBDNS2

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LUJDNE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_QizpCbDR7WP0G

Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYP99J3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_UoApCbAY8N4YN

Jesus Among Secular Gods: The Countercultural Claims of Christ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F1UD66I/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_u6wsCbDS1XXHR

Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EPYPY4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3WypCbW728FHK

This might be overpowering for what you're looking for, but here's a study on the credibility of the miracles of the New Testament:

https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-volumes-Credibility-Testament-Accounts-ebook/dp/B007KOI2PY/

Here's some light reading if you decide to further inform yourself on the topic. Craig Keener - Miracles

I suppose I should caution you not to get your hopes up. I don't know how often God heals people.

But Trent Horn has recommended Miracles by Craig Keener, apparently documenting numerous medical mysteries.

It maybe he didn't exist at all

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QSO2S5C/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_jUYxCb233PSW3

Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00772ZH8Y/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_oVYxCb3MF1Z9J

https://youtu.be/mwUZOZN-9dc

Well technically those records from the mid 100s are saying that christians exist, and they did. The epistles of Paul were written in the 50s, the gospel of Mark written in the 70s, Matthew and Luke written in the 80s or 90s, and John, the revelation of another John, the revelation of Peter, and the ascension of Isaiah and many other Christian stories written in the 100s to the 300s before the ecumenical councils were started in 325 when they decided to narrow down Jesus eventually settling on the trinity by the fourth ecumenical council pushing out Gnosticism like the gospel of Thomas, Marcion, and Origen as well as Aryanism, Nestorianism and other "heresies" leading to the church of the East, Coptics and other early schisms. After the next four councils they came to the idea about iconoclasm where the Eastern Orthodoxy was against the use of iconography and the Catholics stuck with icons such as the crucifix, statues of Mary, and other icons. This was all by the time of the 600s.

Soon after this time the orthodox christians, Coptics, Islam and other sects went their own ways. In Islam Jesus is the chosen human messiah but not the son of God nor was he crucified before his ascension. In some Eastern religions Jesus is sometimes seen as another transcendent beings like the Buddha and Buddha is sometimes seen as a reincarnation of Vishnu in some forms of Hinduism.

Zoroastrianism heavily influenced monotheism and the traits of the supreme god found in most abrahamic religions. It added the concept of heaven and hell. It added armageddon. Many forms of Christianity didn't start out believing in an afterlife but the Catholic concept of heaven, hell, and purgatory was under question by Martin Luther especially the concepts of the church selling something that allows them to skip purgatory and changing the message of the bible from the originally intended meaning. As a result most protestant religions don't have a complicated hierarchy with bishops, archbishops, popes, and such but they'll have a pastor and perhaps deacons and that's about it. The eastern orthodoxy has a few of their ecumenical decisions but the Catholics kept it going up until they went from 7 to 21 with 15 or 16 being related to the protestants being excommunicated and doomed to hell. In the first Vatican council (ecumenical council decision #20) the church rejects rationalism, materialism, and atheism and anything that could cause problems with the church doctrines. More recently (since the 1960s) they have gradually adjusted to science and with the removal of hell and the acceptance of evolution and the ongoing pedophilia the church is falling apart and might again break into multiple denominations.

The protestants went on another path and in the 1900s the rise of fundamental literalism led to a resurgence of young earth creationism and flat earthers while just a few decades earlier the seventh day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah witnesses and Baha'i came out of the various religions holding fast to creationism and the existence of Jesus.

While these beliefs account for the majority of held religious beliefs (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Baha'i, Zoroastrianism) only the abrahamic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Baha'i rely on Jesus being historical. Scholars who hold these beliefs will claim they have evidence that Jesus matches their religious idea such as an empty tomb pointing to a resurrection. The scholars who try to establish historicity on either side will fall back to some random Jewish rabbi, perhaps Jesus ben Annanias or Yeshua ben Yosef who was a preacher mulch life the more established John the Baptist and like John was killed and remained dead while his followers shared their memory of him by word of mouth so that he gradually gets more and more absurd and magical by the time the gospels were written. Others will point out that Jesus was a spiritual being probably hundreds of years before the first century when Paul, Peter, Timothy, and others spoke of their visions (related to gnostic Christianity) and it was another couple decades before a Greek speaker unfamiliar with Judaism and the geography of the region wrote the gospel of Mark. Other stories were also in circulation in the following decades such as the Q document so the authors of Matthew and Luke took the various gospels at the time like Mark, Q, and possibly a couple others and combined them with the contradictory birth narratives I pointed out previously. The kept the same crucifixion but added a resurrection which was later added to mark and gave Judas different reasons for betraying Jesus. Then in the next five decades wildly different concepts of Jesus arose such as an attempt to state he was just an ordinary person that was possessed by the son of God. The gospel of John, using gospels like the gospel of Thomas and a sayings gospel was written so that he became more of a superman character. He left off the birth narrative starting with the popular baptism cult of John the Baptist and this time he wasn't turned in by Judas at all but instead told Judas and his army that he is the one they seek. After this there were various acts of the apostles and revelations about Armageddon and various apocrypha that the early church leaders decided to leave out so that they could say Jesus was born to a virgin, died by crucifixion, and had a bodily resurrection from the dead. They left behind just enough contradictions that they decided upon the trinity so that he could be an eternal being equal to the father and spirit and after the death of the son the holy spirit is released to the apostles to spread to the early church.

Basically by the 300s there was a dominant sect holding to a divine human Jesus and that was the sect that set up the early church considering everything else to be a heresy including Islam when it rose up out of Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity. Throughout the middle ages they produced a lot of hoaxes like cups, foreskins, pieces of petrified wood, and a shroud. As time went on it was just assumed that Jesus was a historical figure and it was the consensus about 100 years ago. Since then the consensus has come under scrutiny so that Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier are at the head of each side of the debate and neither of them hold fast to the gospels being reliable depictions of Jesus nor are the documents that came 100 years later saying that christians exist. There are many people holding many different religions. It doesn't automatically make their beliefs true. Josephus was tampered with by Eusebius and the rest don't really make any claims about a Jesus being real but only relaying what the christians had said about their beliefs such as a messiah who was crucified by Pontius Pilate 100 years ago. By this time everyone who could corroborate his existence had died and while he would have been still alive Philo of Alexandria wouldn't be wondering where he was and Justin Martyr wouldn't be saying that he predated the demigods that were being worshipped by at least 1500 years before Jesus was supposed to have lived.

Here are some books from both sides of the debate:

Richard Carrier: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QSO2S5C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
(Jesus was probably a spiritual mythical being first and a man later)

Bart Erhman: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053K28TS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
(Jesus was probably an ordinary man but we can figure out more about the historical Jesus)

Robert Price: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J0OPUZM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
(Debunking the religious apologetics put forth by Lee Strobel)

Lee Strobel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01863JLK2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
(Defending the divine human Jesus of Christianity)

I'll let you decide.

And then there's Richard Carrier who argues the opposite.

http://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt-ebook/dp/B00QSO2S5C/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421015615&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+carrier

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QSO2S5C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

If the mythical Jesus never actually lived, then no. It's like asking if it is at all true ithat Hermes actually brought messages from the gods. Since probably everything we know about Jesus comes from mythical writings, we have good reason to doubt that he existed. See Richard Carrier's recently released book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt.

Yes it is

Ok.

Tell me about your childhood situation:

parents marital situation

financial situation

siblings

location(s)

Elaborate as much as you feel comfortable

EDIT:

yeah, you are an very conservative mormon, and somehow you think you didn't suffer childhood trauma. Okaaaaayyyyyyy.......

You do realize that parents long-term, consistently lying to their children is broadly accepted, and has been for a long time, as significantly traumatic to a child, right?

https://www.google.com/search?q=parents+lying+to+children+considered+trauma

and do some reading on something called NPD

https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Americans-Confident-Assertive-Entitled/dp/1476755566

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Always-About-You-Narcissism/dp/0743214285

https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Other-Narcissists-Relationship/dp/0972072837

Instead of bottle-ing up your misgivings about devoting your entire life orientation around a gigantic lie your parents forced on you, you might try being honest with yourself and doing some actual research about the topic. Here's a good place to start if/when you summon up enough courage and honesty to do so:

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

Obviously you're intelligent enough analytically to already realize that Mormonism is complete and total bullshit, yet you can't seem to accept it and move on. The problem seems to be you can't accept that your parents subverted your life for their own desires. Again, you'll find reading about NPD's effects on children very enlightening. I'll take a wild guess that there are some addiction and avoidant issues you need to address as well.

Here's a good start:

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/special-reports/new-insights-narcissistic-personality-disorder/page/0/1

Ronningstam, Harvard U., and is considered one of the, if not the, best researchers in the world on NPD. Hopefully that measures up to your grandiose personal standards of quality research.

Btw, ADHD is one of the biggest garbage can diagnoses in modern medicine. Can't focus consistently DOES NOT automatically = ADHD. It's just as worthless a standalone dx as "irritable bowel syndrome". Amazingly, nearly every person with a personality disorder and/or significant addiction could also qualify for an ADHD diagnosis, if their other issues were not taken into consideration (DSM, flawed as it is, actually qualifies this in hierarchical diagnostic criteria, but I'm sure you already knew that from your super extensive personal research into ALL of psychology, psychiatry, and brain science, not just some reading about ADHD, right?).

Case studies are FULL of examples of zombie-fied children of religious-version narcissistic parents. You can plenty of case study books available for purchase online.

Good luck!

> Can you cite to any peer-reviewed historians other than Ray Price for your position? Can you explain why the book is "drivel"?

It's published by InterVarsity. It's a christian apologetics publisher. If I post a book by Dawkins as my proof that he didn't exist, would you accept that? If so here's my equivalent 'proof'. I couldn't make it through the entirety of your book. The authors will say one thing "consistency is what matters" then throw that out the next page, and just accept inconsistent evidence. It's just awful.

> I'm not seeing you provide any reasoning or reference to authority (other than, "there's no evidence because I choose not to recognize any of the evidence"),

If you'd post any that was real, I'd look at it. But there isn't any. Just a few books written 300 years after he died, with so many contradictions that they're useless as a history book.

> so at this point it seems like you are simply stating your opinion.

My opinion is that Jesus did exist. I just walked the Via Dolorosa, and went to the Holy Church of the Sepulchure last month. But I don't delude myself that there's any 'proof', and none should be needed. That's what faith is all about.

>If so, then I can't respond. If your opinion is that chocolate is better, I'm not going to try and convince you to prefer vanilla.

Likewise, it's simply your opinion that he did at this point. You've posted nothing substantial, then ask me to do so. Which I will. Now its your turn to not post something horrible and shitty as 'evidence'

Here - the only peer reviewed work to ever be published on the topic. we'll call this one 'better than anything you can provide'

> Huh? Whole chunks of NT are questionable. Even entire chapters of Paul are questionable. The gospels are a complete mess.

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?

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

> They don't call it apologetics because there's a good solid foundation for Christian beliefs.

Lol, they call it apologetics because it's based on the Greek word "apologia". Nice try though.

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.

Eine ausgewogene Sichtweise kann nur entwickelt werden, wenn beide Seiten gehört werden.

• Literatur:
  
  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
  
  
• Online Ressourcen:
  
  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

Thanks!

> With Christ rising from the dead, my thoughts would be:
> Who made it up?
> What did they have to gain?
> How did they keep the conspiracy under wraps?

This is definitely something I worked through at one point. With where I'm at now, I don't think I would position it in terms of "what they had to gain" or a "conspiracy". I think Jesus's followers genuinely believed he did rise from the dead, but I think they were mistaken and... "fooling themselves" sounds too harsh, but I think that they told themselves a story about what happened in order to rationalize the death of the man they believed to be the Messiah. The Messiah, according to the Jews, could not die. Not for real. So they worked out an interpretation of events that allowed them to believe that he didn't actually die permanently.

Kris Komarnitsky's book Doubting Jesus' Resurrection has what I would say is a very plausible explanation for what happened, and you can read about it in his article here. Of particular interest would be his fourth comparison to the Jewish sect called the Lubavitch, in the 90s. It's very similar to the early Christianity scenario.

I'm not saying I'm married to this idea, and my official answer as to what I believe about it is "I'm not really sure", but it's definitely very compelling, in my opinion.

> Why did the gospels report people's names and where they lived as witnesses to Christ's miracles? The religious leaders killed Lazarus shortly after he was resurrected, so it would be dangerous to admit you witnesses a miracle.
> Why did the apostles endure arrest and death for something they knew was a lie? They never changed their story of seeing the risen Christ despite torture. What did they have to gain if they knew it was all fake?

We actually don't know that any of the disciples or Lazarus were martyred for those reasons, except Paul, and maaaybe Peter, but I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that Peter was definitely martyred. The best evidence we can appeal to for those claims is church tradition, which originates from quite a long time after the deaths would have happened. As well, if we accept the level of evidence we have for the disciples' martyrdoms, and decide to believe that the claims are true, we also need to accept every other claim that has the same level of evidence, and this gets us into some wacky scenarios where we are forced to hold contradictory beliefs because we have equal levels of evidence (which, again, is not much) for both, and so on.

Not only that... but if it was true that the disciples died for their beliefs, that doesn't mean anything for the truth of their actual belief. People die for untrue beliefs all the time. Look at early Mormonism. If our standard for accepting something as true is "the people who were claiming it also died for those claims", we are opening ourselves up to a lot of other things that conflict with Christianity.

Other people have answered this question well. If you're looking for a more extensive defense of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which is what your question is dealing with, then I would suggest Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution by Steve Jeffery et al.. I've been reading through this book, and they offer an amazing defense of the Penal Substitutionary view of the Atonement from historical, philosophical, biblical, and theological viewpoints. They also deal specifically with arguments about "Cosmic Child Abuse", and offer a good apologetic.

In history, especially as it applies to the Christian tradition, you should never go with what the majority says for many good reasons. You should check every bit of work you find and read it for yourself. The majority of biblical studies is a cess-pool of preconceived notions and bad scholarship.

More:

The End of Biblical Studies, Hector Avalos

Online: Ignatian Vexation, Richard Carrier

Proving History, Richard Carrier

One of the first Great examples of using historical methods on theological issues: The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, David Friedrich Strauss (1860)

All of those are old tired arguments thoroughly debunked by Richard Carrier one by one. Who is the only historian in the history of humanity who has papers on the historicity of Jesus actually published on peer reviewed journals. So up to this day, his research on the subject is the only one that can be called scientific.

He shows all the evidence we do have shows there was never a Jesus. No, not even in the sense that the biblical stories were inspired by a real man. There was never that real man to begin with, it's straight made up myth from start to finish.

http://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595

And I suggest you read Richard Carrier - On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. He's an atheist who is upset at folks like Bart Ehrman who he feels have dropped the ball when it comes to this particular subject despite being generally clear thinkers on other subjects.

I will consider it credible when I see evidence that the view has support from critical scholars. Dr Carrier's book is thoroughly academic, but it doesn't make his hypothesis credible.

The Two Source Hypothesis has problems, that much is true. But it is seen as the least problematic theory. We don't have to know exactly how the minor agreements happened, that's not a "weakness" per se. The problems are presented as if they're evidence for an alternate theory, which I don't see as being the case. An argument advancing a different theory should rely on its own merit.

Hi OP, thanks for the insightful post. You did a lot of collecting of good Bible verses to make the point.

Essentially, your argument is a reductio ad absurdem taking the form: "If X, then Y. Not Y. Therefore not X."

1. If the world is full of magic (as the world seems to be described in the Bible), then there will be verifiable, creditable magic to be present in history and in modern times.
   
2. But there isn't verifiable creditable magic in history and modern times.
   
3. Therefore, the world is not how it is described by the Bible -- a world full of magic.
   
   I think you well supported the first premise. And the conclusion follows from the two premises.
   
   The place to look is your second premise. The second premise you simply stated. You said that history and modern times are not replete with miracles (except ones that are "discredited").
   
   If I challenged the second premise, asserting that anyone who cares to investigate miracle claims (from Christians or any other group) will discover that the observable world is indeed full of them, what would you say?
   
   I'd venture that some people (and just wait for the comments!) will mock me. But let's ignore them.
   
   

• Some people will say that many miracle claims have been discredited. That's true! But many historical claims have been discredited, and that doesn't discredit all of history, only those claims. Many historical claims, and many miracle claims, have been credited and verified.
  
  
• Some people will say "Where's the evidence? Prove it to me." To that I say, four things: first, I'd say beware of sealioning. It's not my job to prove to flat-earthers that the earth is round. It's not my job to prove to materialists that reality is material and formal. If you don't know how things stand, or who to trust, that's on you. But if the question is sincere, perhaps start with Craig Keener's book, Miracles (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525) Thirdly, "proof" is completed when the proof has been given. Persuasion is not the same as proof. I can prove things to my five year old son that will not persuade him because he is being unreasonable. So you have to persuade yourself; the proof is out there.
  
  Fourthly, and relatedly, the problem with doubting a thing's existence is that doubt disincentivizes the search for evidence. If I don't believe in sea creatures, I am not likely to go swimming in the ocean looking to "prove" to myself that the ocean is indeed empty.
  
  All that to say, the evidence and proof are plain to most people and readily available unless you are (a) already so sure that you're right that you only mock and dismiss those who could potentially offer you evidence and (b) don't go out of the way to seek the uncomfortable truth about our world.
  
  I believe in science, have a Ph.D., and have personally experienced miracles and know people who perform miracles with some regularity. So, despite skepticism of some particular claims, I credit many of the Biblical stories, historical stories, and modern stories. I don't think that I am weird in this way. Disbelief in the supernatural is a minority report, globally. Most scientifically educated Americans believe in the supernatural. About 50 percent of working scientists are religious and believe in a god or higher power (footnote: http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/)
  
  So there is nothing particularly wild or mysterious about the phenomena you describe as "magic." I've seen it personally, and hundreds of people I know have experienced it personally. So, when I consider the evidence impartially (including verifiable eye-witness accounts), I'd say your second premise needs revisiting.
  
  But like I said, I appreciated the post, and enjoy thinking these things through.
  
  I'd appreciate non-mocking thoughtful responses as well.
  
  Cheers!
  
  Edit: added footnote to verify claim that a slight majority of scientists believe in a god or higher power (51%) according to Pew.

No. On the contrary, I think it can be shown that theism is rationally obligatory; that is, that we deny the existence of God on pain of irrationality.

To avoid the conclusion of the Modal Cosmological Argument an atheist must deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason: He must hold to the principle that a physical object can exist without a sufficient reason for its existence. Schopenhauer aptly dubbed this a commission of, "the taxicab fallacy." The reason is as follows: Ordinarily, the atheist agrees that things have sufficient causes and explanations: headaches, global warming, diamonds, teapots, lightning. Indeed, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a lynchpin of rational thought for theist and atheist alike. But when the atheist is asked to follow the principle through to its ultimate logical consequence (i.e., the universe) he attempts to dismiss it like a hired hack—and not because it is rational to do so but because he doesn’t like where it is taking him.

As we move through the rest of the arguments the cost of atheism continues to rise. Faced with the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an atheist must deny the precept of Parmenides that ex nihilo nihil fit; in other words, he must believe that physical objects can pop into existence uncaused out of metaphysical nothingness. To avoid the theistic implications of cosmological fine tuning, he must (in an extravagant defiance of the principle of parsimony) postulate the existence of infinitely many unobservable universes. To explain the origin of life, he must believe that it self-assembled by chance in the prebiotic soup of the early Earth when on every reasonable calculation this is prohibitively improbable. To reconcile his atheism with the essential properties of human mental states, he must deny those properties—including free will and, with it, the rational content of his own denial. He must, finally, deny moral objectivity since morality, on his metaphysic, arises from evolutionary processes in the service of reproductive fitness. This has the absurd and unpalatable consequence that to first principles of moral reasoning (say, It is always wrong to bayonet babies for sport) he cannot give his unqualified assent. And when it is pointed out to him that his belief that, "Beliefs that arise from evolutionary processes serve reproductive fitness and cannot be trusted," is itself a belief that arose from evolutionary processes and so, ex hypothesi, cannot be trusted, he has no reply.

The entailments of atheism are counterexperiential and absurd. Atheism cannot be rationally affirmed.

On the face of it agnosticism would seem to be a very reasonable position to take. What could be more prudent than suspending judgement in matters about which absolute certainty is impossible?

Note, however, that to be agnostic is to hold that, possibly, atheism is true. And since to affirm atheism is to affirm that all its entailments obtain, to hold to agnosticism is to affirm that, possibly, all the entailments of atheism obtain: It is possible that physical objects can exist without a sufficient reason for their existence; it is possible that physical objects can pop into existence out of nothingness uncaused—and so on. Clearly: If it is absurd to believe that married bachelors actually exist then it is just as absurd to believe that married bachelors possibly exist. Atheism and agnosticism cannot therefore be rationally affirmed and so it follows that theism is rationally obligatory.

Against all this the list of objections you cite have no force whatsoever.

>We would see many religions claiming absolute truth that are incompatible with each other, all with fervent and devout believers claiming all others are misled
>
>Vastly different moral codes among religions, cultures, and nations. And time periods. And...this is what we observe.

Yes. But see posts 20 to 23 here

>Prayers would not be answered aside from what chance would allow. And...this is what we observe.

This is a bare claim made without support.

>Miracles would be locked away in the past and would cease to happen in modern times, when the population is more educated and has recording devices. And...this is what we observe.

Recommended reading. Plot spoiler: This massive tome is an encyclopaedia of well-evidenced modern miracles.

>No religion would have compelling evidence outside of their own holy books (or confirmation bias). And...this is what we observe.

Pish posh.

>Believers would commit the same atrocities as everyone else. And...this is what we observe.

If you are saying that some purportedly-religious people act immorally that is a very insignificant claim. If you are saying that the religious life does not overall conduce to the production and pursuit of virtue that is a more interesting but very controversial claim in great need of support. But even granting it, how does this prove there is no God? Man has free will.

>Believers would not live any more or less privileged lives; misfortune or good luck would befall everyone regardless of their inner beliefs

God is not a fairy god mother. He is concerned with his creatures obtaining higher order goods, not material comfort.

>Faiths would continue to splinter into more and more sects, and argue over interpretations of minutiae instead of consolidating

This is a subtype of the problem of hiddenness which theists have coherently addressed.

>Supposed miracles would be unfalsifiable or proven to be hoaxes or simply natural occurrences

Miracles are unfalsifiable? This is rubbish. The Resurrection could have been falsified if the corpse of Jesus had been produced.

>New belief systems and/or cults would appear and sometimes gain large followings despite seeming ridiculous to everyone else (ie. Scientology)

See the above link on divine hiddenness.

>Religions would often need apologists or lies to keep their followers, and that wouldn't always work. And...this is what we observe.

I came to Christian Theism through Natural Theology. I think that on the total evidence it is far more probable than not that there is a God and that he met us face-to-face in the person of Jesus Christ. You are implying here that natural theology has no force.

Well, sure. Anyone can claim anything about the state of a philosophical field but if you actually do the heavy lifting and lay out your case you would get both my attention and my respect. Will you do it or will you tentatively withdraw your insinuation as unsubstantiated? There is no third option—at least, not one that avoids intellectual dishonour.

>Religious beliefs would often demonstrably contrast with observed reality

On the contrary, see my opening remarks.

>Greater access to information would correlate with growing non-religious populations

Google some stats. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of times and places have been theists. Today religiosity is, if anything, growing.