That someone explicitly claimed to have directly witnessed the resurrected Jesus, and then was killed specifically because he refused to renounce this claim.
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If you contact him Iâm sure heâd be willing to have a live discussion with you, that might be a good way to clear things up.
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It seems to me the whole martyrdom argument is essentially worthless in the first place.
There are people today, 2000 years removed from Jesusâ purported resurrection, who didnât see it happen and didnât do any actual historical investigations, who are still willing to die for events they genuinely have no idea whether ever occurred.
They believe it and it is important enough for them to be willing to die for it. These people arenât eyewitnesses to anything, so the mere fact of being willing to die for a belief canât be particularly good evidence for the claimâs truth. It is only evidence for their level of conviction.
Infamously, about a dusin people flew planes into buildings in 2001 out of sheer conviction that theyâd go to paradise according to a religion most people on this website are quite certain is false.
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@Rumraket thatâs a different issue.
What we can all agree with is that the apologetic argument of martyrdom has been overstated in the past.
It also seems overblown (even quote mining) to argue that McDowell thinks Loke is overstating the facts of the martyrdom argument.
That of course is a separate issue from the strength of the argument itself, which is not even where @Andrew_Loke is focused.
So Iâd just request we keep this discussion focused where it needs to be.
I would suggest that details given in (contemporaneous) martyrdom reports are sufficiently vestigial as to rule out the second part.
The first part would appear to require a surviving work, of generally-agreed authorship, in which the author claims to have âdirectly witnessed the resurrected Jesusâ themselves (which would, I presume, exclude Paulâs vision). As far as I know, no work meets these standards.
The problem would appear to be that we have far too little detailed information to do more than speculate as to the fears and motivations of those involved. And such speculations are not a solid basis for arguing for historicity of the Resurrection.
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As I said in my previous post, Iâm very busy right now so I encourage people to read my book carefully. One of the greatest tragedies of this age is that many people do not seem to read and listen carefully, especially to those whom they disagree with. Paulogiaâs misrepresentations of me is one example. Your comment provides another example. You wrote âI looked through that passage. It was mostly about persecution , not martyrdom.â
*It is about BOTH. The very first consideration on page 70 states
First, these disciples knew that their leader (i.e. Jesus) was already vilified and brutally CRUCIFIED, and yet they chose to proclaim him knowing that a similar fate could well befall them for doing that. After all, it was usual to EXECUTE the followers of insurgents alongside themâŚâ
The book is available for free download here and readers of our exchange can check the above for themselves: (PDF) Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ | Andrew Ter Ern Loke - Academia.edu
The other objections you raised are already answered in my book. Iâm sorry I donât have time right now to repeatedly copy and paste what I said there to this post. At this point in time I can only once again encourage people to read my book CAREFULLY for themselves. Iâm sorry but Iâve no time to reply to you further to repeatedly correct your misreadings of my book, so bye for now.
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I think he is taking the complaint seriously. He is preparing a detailed reply to Paulogia and @Andrew_Loke is not obligated to respond to every objection on this thread. He is an academic, and itâs a privilege to have him here, even if we disagree on any particulars.
Just give him some time and space.
Do not make demands like this.
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I understand youâre busy and I hope your book is coming along well. If/when you have more time on your hands, I would encourage you to have a conversation with Paulogia to talk about this video. Heâs a very chill person to talk with, and Iâm sure he would be more than happy. I donât know if youâve seen his and Seanâs conversation on Unbelievable, but they both seem to have really enjoyed themselves.
As far as the martyrdom issue goesâI donât know about the rest of the videoâbut as far as I can tell, I donât see a problem setting up you vs Sean in the way he did. Obviously you and Sean share lots of overlap, such as in the disciples being willing to suffer and die for their beliefs, so in that sense you arenât actually on opposite sides. But I think you two may have relevant differences. Hereâs a quote from your book, pg 71:
The apostle James who was one of the Twelve was executed by King Herod according to the author of Acts (Acts 12:2), and Dunn notes that no one doubts the historicity of this report (Dunn 2008, p. 406, n. 114).
This is something you and Sean seem to differ on. At one point on the Unbelievable podcast with Paulogia, Sean says the only ones we have very high confidence of being martyred were Peter and James the brother of Jesus. On an interview with Frank Turek (which I did not watchâPaulogia has a clip of it in the video, though), he notes that, as for the rest, heâs not sure at what point history ends and where legend begins.
If thatâs an accurate conveyance of Seanâs view, and it appears to me that it is (though I could be wrong), it doesnât seem entirely inappropriate to put you across the table from Sean on this.
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Is it overblown, Joshua? The main disconnect seems to be that Loke is speculating about willingness to die (âearly Christians were prepared to give up their lifeâ), whereas Paulogia was wanting to ground it in hard evidence of who we know actually died (âwith very high confidenceâ), for which he relies on Sean McDowellâs statement.
I donât think that an edifice of tremendous willingness to die can be robustly constructed, lacking a solid foundation of hard evidence of much in the way of actual, verifiable-with-high-confidence, death. Therefore I donât find Paulogiaâs concentration on this surprising.
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To say you âdisregardedâ it is not to say you were completely unaware or made no mention of it. As someone who works in a field related to the issue of memory, I can say with confidence that you have not adequately considered it as an explanation for the alleged post-mortem appearances of Jesus and your attempts to dismiss this explanation are very ineffectual.
If you want to just debate the semantics of the word âdisregardâ, go ahead. I wonât participate further in that discussion. It does not pertain to the more significant failure of your argument.
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