1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts.
I've heard it said that if the apostles were lying, Jews would've called them out on it. And yet, that's precisely what they do ...
I mean, Mother Theresa has been sainted, yes? Despite all the horrible things we found out she did? Clearly, it doesn't take too much time at all to whitewash and glorify people at all.
Tales like those of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill
*gasp* THEY'RE NOT REAL? WHAT ABOUT JOHN HENRY?
3. The Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was highly developed and reliable. In an oral culture like that of first century Palestine the ability to memorize and retain large tracts of oral tradition was a highly prized and highly developed skill.
An intro to memory
Just being emotional can screw up your memories
The problem with eyewitnesses
Credibility of witnesses' memories
Trust your memory?
#realscience
4. There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles’ supervision. Since those who had seen and heard Jesus continued to live and the tradition about Jesus remained under the supervision of the apostles, these factors would act as a natural check on tendencies to elaborate the facts in a direction contrary to that preserved by those who had known Jesus.
Again, if they were lying, they'd be called out, which is WHAT HAPPENED ...
5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability.
LOL.
One of the major problems with the legend hypothesis, however, which is almost never addressed by sceptical critics, is that the time between Jesus’s death and the writing of the gospels is just too short for this to happen.
This can happen within days, if not hours.
and some of his information, for example, what he passes on in his first letter to the Corinthian church about the resurrection appearances, has been dated to within five years after Jesus’s death. It just becomes irresponsible to speak of legends in such cases.
Elvis and Tupac disagree heartily.
These are really one work and are separated in our Bibles only because the church grouped the gospels together in the New Testament.
You mean a work was altered to make things easier to categorize rather than be theologically sound?
The big problem with this hypothesis is that it is inexplicable how monotheistic Jews could have attributed divinity to a man they had known, if he never claimed any such things himself.
Because Hellenization was running rampant ever since the Greeks showed up.
Jesus’s radical self-understanding is revealed, for example, in his parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard.
The "wicked" tenants were being ripped off and taken advantage of and instead of addressing their concerns, the landowner killed them after his "repo men" failed to beat them into submission. Imagine you live in a house or apartment and the landowner wants all your money and your valuables and your rent money, but won't fix the water heater or do anything productive so that you ALSO have to pay for all the expenses. Do YOU feel you could get through that with a happy face?
This is an authentic saying of the historical Jesus because the later Church, which regarded Jesus as divine, would never have invented a saying ascribing limited knowledge or ignorance to Jesus.
Why not? Genesis has God Himself not knowing where the kids are in the ONLY garden mentioned on the entire planet.
edit: God is like Prince Charming from the original Disney classic Cinderella: can't find Cindy even though she was the ONLY blonde at the ball...
Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most sceptical scholars this century has seen, wrote back in 1926:
This may have escaped your notice, but scholarship has continued to exist since the 1920s.
ut there can be no doubt that Jesus did such deeds, which were, in his and his contemporaries’ understanding, miracles, that is, deeds that were the result of supernatural, divine causality. Doubtless he healed the sick and cast out demons.
So did lots of other cool people, both in the bible and outside of it.
The only reason left for denying that Jesus performed literal miracles is the presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, which is simply unjustified.
Why are his miracles convenient? Why can't he rid the entire world of sickness? Why can't John the Baptist wake up? I mean, Elijah was nice enough to give someone (I think it was him, anyway) a food thingie that would never go empty. Jesus feeds people during one or two pep rallies and we never hear if they ever had food again.
Actually, there's hardly ANY follow-through on ANY of the participants in the miracle. What happened to the blind guy? The dead guy? The guy with flaky skin? The bleeding woman? Did they rejoin society? Did they die the next day?
Not only are these facts confirmed by independent biblical sources like Paul and the Acts of the Apostles
How are they "independent"?
From Josephus and Tacitus, we learn that Jesus was crucified by Roman authority under the sentence of Pontius Pilate.
Spartacus has more historical notation and he was crucified too.
act #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb.
And conveniently, not under six feet of dirt.
In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the honorable burial of Jesus is one of "the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus."15
Famous musicians have famous graves. So what?
On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.
Elvis and Tupac.
The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to.
Which is weird, seeing how they were supposedly flat out told, but even Jesus called them morons for not understanding even basic things any kindergartner could understand. Your Jesus experts, ladies and gentlemen...
Why did prophets, people in the past and disciples get to witness amazing miracles, hear God and be in the presence of Jesus but we cannot? Suddenly God becomes shy in modern times, seems fishy.
It starts back even in the OT, with God being a regular if super-powered person who can walk in a garden to sending angels to being a heavenly voice to not saying much at all except (conveniently) for the authors.
What evidence convinced you to go against the Resurrection?
It is a common literary trope of the era and culture, plus as a nurse I can think of a couple of ways this could be handled medically that obviously ancient people would never imagine.
And you can't be biased to truth, it simple is and always will be.
Show us how unbiased you are by finding nonChristian or nonCatholic scholarly papers that show you have an accurate assessment of reality.
And I guess soldiers commit suicide when they jump onto a grenade to save they're fellow men.
They don't usually wake up three days later and then essentially say they're going to come back (didn't they just do that?) only to blow up everyone anyway.
War is not unique to humanity. Other species—including ants, bees, and chimpanzees—wage war, understood as the organized, collective use of lethal violence against external enemies (such as for control of territory).
Then, as Christianity has failed to stop it, it's not nearly as useful as the brochures say.
The main sources which directly attest the fact of Christ's Resurrection are the Four Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.
And were written by which eyewitnesses, exactly? And remember that eyewitness testimony is horrendously faulty at best. I mean, Jesus was executed in part thanks to testimony, so ...
Then why did he send down His Son to die for us and save us from sin?
Because he died thanks to angry Romans. The Way is what saves us, not some random execution.
So your saying that the universe came into existence by itself on its own power, in a very particular order where life is laser pointed to thrive on earth, and was a product of complete and utter chance?
If you read anything remotely related to astronomy, you'd know that isn't what is claimed.
If I have cubes and spheres and drop them into a tray with round and square-shaped holes, I will see that the cubes go into the square holes and the spheres go into the round holes. It is a LIMITED chance, in that only that scenario can possibly work. It doesn't require intelligence for objects to act according to their physical properties only.
The universe displays a staggering amount of intelligibility
The universe also shows a heck of a lot of sheer stupidity, too. God wanna claim credit for that?
There isn't nearly as much evidence on the side of other religions, as there is for Christianity. Both historically and practically.
Troy was found, thus the Greek pantheon exists. Egyptian landmarks exist, thus the Egyptian pantheon exists. I saw a documentary where a coyote teamed up with a badger to hunt prairie dogs, so Native American trickster entities must really exist. Etc, etc....
PROOF..???....Everythign YOU have said comes form WITHIN the catholic religion...!!! Such self refereantial truth is NOT any kind of truth at all - just shows you have fallen for their deceipt fully Im afraid and will not even look outside of the religion at all - they have fully indoctrinated you - BRAIN WASHED you - literally so......
