Nope, he hasn’t. At most he’s merely stated that a historical consensus alone would not suffice to convince him. He’s not saying that sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a miracle could not exist in principle.
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I’m not talking about other kinds of evidence. I’m talking about historical evidence.
Please read the passage you quoted, carefully, and you will see how you have misrepresented my claim. Here, I’ll repeat it: “I have not denied that there is a small minority of scholars who believe the Gospels are accurate first person accounts, just as there is a small minority the believes Jesus was completely mythological.”
Do the people you are citing contend that the Gospels are accurate first person accounts?
Historians have determined the best way to determine the truth in their discipline, with good reason. It is not just an arbitrary academic convention. Your only argument against their method is that it does not allow you to claim your faith position as an historical fact. I don’t think they are going to care about your hurt feelings, sorry.
No, it is like pointing out that genuine areas of disagreement are just that. BTW, there is no reason to take Habermas’s claim of 75% agreement on the “empty tomb” at face value. He cherry picked a small group of scholars who were heavily weighted towards supporting his position. And he still couldn’t enough of them to verify this tale of the empty tomb.
The unfortunate fact for you is that the majority of competent academic historians do not even bother with the question of the authenticity of the Gospels because they know it’s a trivial and foolish question to begin with.
Exactly my point. And yet you apologists insist that the resurrection of Jesus would not be believed unless it had been directly witnessed. If that were the case, then Christianity would have been limited to those disciples who believe they witnessed his resurrected person, and died out when they did.
The number of logical errors involved in your creed can never be fully enumerated. You guys just keep coming up with more.
That is not quite accurate. I do hold that we can never demonstrate that a literal miracle has occurred, because that would require a priori knowledge of the laws of nature.
But a claim like that a guy came back to life after being dead for three days could easily be demonstrated if it had happened, and this is what we are discussing.
So am I. The claims that the resurrection occurred rests on some other discipline made up by the religious and which has no name or defined methodology. Its rules seem to be made up post-hoc to reach whatever conclusion one wishes to reach.
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The people I’m citing contend that the Gospels contain enough reliable eyewitness testimony that we can have confidence to say that some key events in them most likely happened, given the religiously neutral standards of history. The Christians in this thread were not claiming any more than that. (Jon Garvey, Josh, and Matt would most likely agree with me.) This position is not a fringe one, and is not remotely comparable to Jesus mythicism.
Why should I bother to respond to these statements when 1) They are entirely unsubstantiated, and 2) You have not demonstrated any substantial knowledge of the issues and the field of NT studies, not even its liberal and skeptical proponents? Why should anyone believe you when you mention “the majority of historians”?
I reminded of the saying (used in creation-evolution debates) that it takes 10 times more effort and time to refute a wild, unfounded assertion.
You’re completely out of your depth here, Faizal. That’s a strawman argument which no one has advanced.
Demonstrated by what means? Not historical, apparently. It seems that for your personal epistemology, no amount of evidence is enough to convince you that a dead man rose again 2000 years ago, because you’ve ruled out history. Maybe if someone rose again today with cameras to record every detail, you could be convinced.
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So true. Especially when people are resistant to gaining understanding for themselves.
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It’s also not what I was talking about.
Exactly what strawman did I commit there? Are you saying that, according to Christianity, no one ever actually encountered Jesus after he was resurrected? If it not part of the standard apologetic argument that the only reasonable explanation for the Disciples belief in the resurrection is that they physically encountered Jesus after he had been killed?
You again misunderstand my position. I don’t blame you, these issues can be complicated.
I am saying that history HAS NOT demonstrated that a man rose from the dead 2000 years ago. This is no accepted by the overwhelming majority of experts in history, and as far as I am aware it is not claimed in any standard university level history textbook.
It remains possible that there COULD HAVE BEEN sufficient historical evidence to demonstrate it had happened. But that is simply not the case.
We also don’t have sufficient historical evidence to determine that Julius Caesar had eggs for breakfast on the morning of his 28th birthday. That does not mean it did not happen, nor is the reason because if he did have eggs it would have been a supernatural miracle.
The only reason people feel the need to determine whether Jesus really did rise from the dead is that there are millions of people who have based their worldview on the belief that he did. The unfortunate fact, however, is that there is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate this, and if the question was no more important to people than that of what Caesar had for breakfast on his 28th birthday, everyone would just concede this point and be done with it.
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Here is where you run into the problems of the internal contradictions of your position.
You deny my claim that the majority of competent academic historians do not even bother with the question of the authenticity of the Gospels. If I am wrong about that, then answer me this: How many historians did Habermas survey? What percentage of the world’s competent academic historians does this represent?
After you’ve figured that out, try defend your position that Habermas is not guilty of cherry picking.
If we were to survey people who have written books about whether Bigfoot exists, would it surprise you if authors who believe Bigfoot exists are vastly over represented, compared to the number of biologists overall who believe it?
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This is in contradiction with your earlier post, where you openly admitted the following:
Have you changed your mind since then?
I now remember that we went through this exact topic back in February. In fact I’m feeling some deja vu here, since your arguments are almost identical to the ones you said back then. Last time, I dutifully chased down Habermas’ claim and listed the scholars he likely surveyed. And you didn’t even engage with that, so my work was for naught. Nevertheless, I’m linking it here for the benefit of any observers to our dialog:
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/daniel-angs-argument-for-the-resurrection/4659/19
As I said a few months ago:
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Close in time keeps them better cultural controls. We want to know the common behavior of people in that time and in that culture. Moving farther from that time and culture makes the inference less reliable.
No, this does not apply to Buddhism. If we understand it as a branch of Hinduism, it was started long before Siddhartha. If we understand it as a distinct religion it began directly with him and his followers. There was no discontinuity, and not historical puzzles here I’ve learned about.
There is an interesting relationship between Buddhism and Christianity. Both are faiths that are well understood as responses to suffering but each gives different answers, and define “good” in a different way: “rise above” vs “enter in”, the lotus and the cross.
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There is no contradiction between those two statements. Please explain what contradiction you think you see.
Good, so you already have the information at your fingertips to make the calculation I have asked for. So please do. Note, however, that I asked for how many historians he has surveyed, not just generic “scholars.” Otherwise, you are just playing the game that creationists play, when they cite “scientists” who deny evolution.
This is again a misrepresentation of my position, which is not that we cannot know anything with certainty about the NT. Rather, it is that we DO NOT know much with certainty about the NT.
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Daniel, can you give me an example of what you consider to be eyewitness testimony in the Gospels?
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