There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the New Testament

[Riders]

Wasn't Mary Magdalen and Mother Mary witness to his crucifixion?

 

[ppp]

Wasn't Mary Magdalen and Mother Mary witness to his crucifixion?

In the story, yes. The question of eyewitness is, Are there eyewitness accounts of Jesus. I am an atheist, but I would argue (lightly) that I Peter contains a very brief eyewitness account of the existence of Jesus. The Gospels, not so much.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Wasn't Mary Magdalen and Mother Mary witness to his crucifixion?

According to the story, yes. However, neither one wrote any of the gospels. What they actually saw is unknown.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I suppose we all follow the evidence we see and end up by taking leaps of faith in different directions.

Nope.

I have no use for the kind of faith you're talking about.

That a God is not needed is where skeptics end up after taking their leap of faith.
Have you got "proper" evidence to support the idea that a God is not needed?

It's the same "faith" required to imagine that leprechauns aren't needed. There's just no evidence for it, so there's no reason to include lerpechauns in our explanations.

That's not faith.

No, some things, like what science tells us about the past, cannot be confirmed.

Such as?

Science says "Ah we know that chemicals and physical laws might allow for this to happen in the right circumstances, therefore that is probably what happened unless you can come up with something better using only natural methods".

That's not what science "says."

God of course is not given a look in when it comes to science.

Where is (s)he? That's the problem.

And no, I'm not complaining about that, I'm just pointing it out because so many seem to have forgotten what science is and it's limitations.

It seems that you are projecting.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Yes I suppose some people have a very strong faith and/or have experienced things that make them certain.
That might be different than having an intellectual certainty before you are willing to say that you believe however.



No, not all religions can be correct.



You would, but you would also say that atheists outperform 99%of theologians.



That sounds like wild generalisations. People of faith imo usually have evidence for their beliefs and skeptics imo usually believe things that have not been proven.

Not in my experience they don't. Just look at the conversations between the two of us on this subject.

Why you think that "skeptics believe things that have not been proven" is beyond me. It sounds like projection, tbh.

Believers also use what is evident and memory and reason.
If you have already decided that you need God to be proved through the methods of science then trust in science is your faith.

There is no need for faith when you've got evidence.
This kind of faith is antithetical to the scientific method which is evidence-based.

No I was just pointing out that science cannot show that God does not exist and that also science cannot show that God was not needed to do things in the past.

You're just trying to shift the burden of proof. Yet again. It's as though you've not taken in anything said to you on this subject, to date.

Maybe everything I say is a compelling argument that God exists, but that does not mean it is going to convince people who have closed their eyes to anything but the science of the physical universe showing that spirits and a creator spirit exists. For those people, any alternative is a better explanation.

What you've shown us time and time again, is that faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason/evidence. Otherwise they'd just give the evidence. And therefore it is an unreliable pathway to truth, because anything can be believed on faith. You've confirmed this many times over in your posts. (I've pointed that out every time.)

 

[SkepticThinker]

When you rely on "the results" that some scientists share from their experiments,
when you accept that the interpretation of these results should align with what someone tells you,
when you choose to believe one group of scientists over others who hold different views,
when you trust in events that cannot be substantiated with solid evidence simply because you trust the narrators

... then you require faith much like believers.

That's not how it works at all.


I'd suggest signing up for a basic science course.

 

[Valjean]

Eli G said:
When you rely on "the results" that some scientists share from their experiments,
when you accept that the interpretation of these results should align with what someone tells you,
when you choose to believe one group of scientists over others who hold different views,
when you trust in events that cannot be substantiated with solid evidence simply because you trust the narrators

... then you require faith much like believers.

Basic science relies on attempts to disprove hypotheses, and on inviting others in the field to criticize and disprove them. Scientific hypotheses are not accepted until all attempts to disprove them have failed.
Science absolutely rejects authority. Unless a hypothesis can survive all criticism and attempts to disprove it, it doesn't matter where or from whom it originated.

You seem to be conflating science with religion. Religion is not a hypothesis. It's not based on objective, verifiable observation or fact. Religion discourages questioning and skepticism. Unlike science, it doesn't criticize or try to disprove its claims.
Science is a whole different, self-correcting methodology.

 

[Muffled]

You are missing his very good point. Even when someone IS an eye witness, their memory is not very reliable. When DNA testing became a thing, a LOT of people in prison, some of them on death row, were released when the DNA proved that they were innocent. The verdicts had been based on EYE WITNESS accounts.

The problem is that human memory can be altered by suggestions and leading questions and many other things, sometimes just a little, and sometimes a whole awful lot.

Just last week, I discovered that one of my own memories had been altered. I was discussing one of the scariest movies I had ever seen: The Changeling. In my memory, it was an old black and white classic horror movie, like maybe from the 1950s. After the conversation was over, I thought it would be fun to rewatch. But I couldn't find an old black and white by that name. I finally DID find the movie (and watched it! ), but it was NOT a black and white. It was a 1980 movie. Honestly, I would have SWORN it was black and white.

I'm sure you are familiar with the police procedure where a witness is given a photo array or a lineup to see if they can identify the perp. The problem here is that human biology has a certain innate bias. The witness ASSUMES that the perp WILL BE one of the photos or person in the line up. Thus, when the actual criminal is NOT there, the witness will often pick the person most similar to what they saw. THEN the face of the person they chose replaces the original memory. And so they will go into the courtroom and testify with incredible confidence that the defendant is the person they saw, when in fact he is not.

Even the vocabulary that is chosen for a question or statement can subtly alter a memory. A popular experiment demonstrating this used questions about a car accident, but using different word that would reflect the speed of the car: "smashed," "hit," or "collided." This subtle change in phrasing significantly altered their recollections. The estimation of the speed for "smashed" was a good deal higher than for "collided."

I believe fortunately the eyewitnesses had the Holy Spirit to guide them in their memories.

 

[Muffled]

Could you clarify this for me?

John says he is an eyewitness, Matthew talks like an eyewitness, and Mark is most likely writing for Peter who is an eyewitness.

 

[Muffled]

That is not quite accurate. The council of Jerusalem determined that Gentile believers in Jesus did not need to become Jews, meaning to be circumcised and come under the law. It never said anything about Jewish believers not needing to observe the Law.

I believe the Jews are under new managment.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

John says he is an eyewitness, Matthew talks like an eyewitness, and Mark is most likely writing for Peter who is an eyewitness.

[the anonymous author of] John says ...

[the anonymous author of] Matthew talks like ...​

[the anonymous author of] Mark is most likely ...​

Isn't it amazing that so many scholars, despite years studying volumes of peer-reviewed scholarship, have failed to achieve anything approaching your level of perspicacity?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

I believe fortunately the eyewitnesses had the Holy Spirit to guide them in their memories.

Based on what? Your blind faith that the gospels are historically accurate?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

I believe the Jews are under new managment.

You can believe as you wish. I've no problem with that. My only point here is that your belief knocks head with Acts.

 

[Truthseeker]

The New Testament was written by people who were not eye witnesses to Jesus.

There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. The four gospels were written and circulated anonymously and the traditional authorship was secondarily assigned towards the end of the second century CE. There is not a single first person claim to being an eye witness to Jesus' life.

Given what I said above, which is explained in the video below, what logical reason would anyone have to believe that the Gospels are an accurate depiction of the life of Jesus? Why should we believe that what these anonymous authors wrote about Jesus is true?

That is really good to dig that one up. I didn't know this information.

 

[Truthseeker]

Jesus in the Talmud - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I see hard to follow different points of view there in Wikipedia.

 

[GoodAttention]

I see hard to follow different points of view there in Wikipedia.

The purpose of referring to the Talmud was that it *could* have made reference to Jesus, but if it did it was then reviewed and removed.

Adding to the point that references to Jesus, whether it be the Christian scriptures or Talmudic writings, are not "eye witnesses", even if they are written to appear so.

 

[Truthseeker]

The purpose of referring to the Talmud was that it *could* have made reference to Jesus, but if it did it was then reviewed and removed.

Adding to the point that references to Jesus, whether it be the Christian scriptures or Talmudic writings, are not "eye witnesses", even if they are written to appear so.

Okay, I see what you are saying now.

 

[Muffled]

[the anonymous author of] John says ...

[the anonymous author of] Matthew talks like ...​

[the anonymous author of] Mark is most likely ...​

Isn't it amazing that so many scholars, despite years studying volumes of peer-reviewed scholarship, have failed to achieve anything approaching your level of perspicacity?

I believe too much study can confuse a person.

 

[Muffled]

Based on what? Your blind faith that the gospels are historically accurate?

I believe that is what Jesus says about it.

 

[Muffled]

You can believe as you wish. I've no problem with that. My only point here is that your belief knocks head with Acts.

I believe I knock heads with a lot of false interpretations.