The point isn’t about people being willing to die for their beliefs. (People are also willing to die for non religious reasons, too) The point is that they would not have been willing to die for something they knew was a lie. Thus, they believed they saw the risen Jesus, they were not just trying to build a movement by making up a false new religion
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Really?..its the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…but those can’t be believed because they are Christians, and the accounts have been found to be accurate enough to be canonized, so they must be false, right? How could they possibly be accurate if the writers were followers and they were there documenting everything as it occurred. They must have made it all up in exactly the same way to fool everyone into believing a fake God. That has to be the only possible explanation.
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On a sidenote…as I was thinking about this, how does science view instinct in animals? It seems that the spiritual experience could be likened (at least for me) to hit on an animal instinct level. To the extent that I would follow that instinct blindly knowing that it was God. So, my question is in regard to similar instinctual characteristics of animals…knowing when to flee, knowing when to swim up river…how are those accounted for in the scientific realm? Do we just note them as natural phenomena and move on or is there some sort of study or classification that explains why?
I wouldn’t assume that. People do interesting things. And as untrustworthy as the gospels are, the subsequent folklore of martyrdom is even sketchier.
I wouldn’t assume that this is what they believed. It’s rather hard to discern what they might have believed and I suspect that there is not a single modern Christian church they would not consider grossly heretical.
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The founders of the religion, not the followers. Did they back down significantly under pressure of death or persecution, or continue on with their cause in spite of it?
I get the impression that you haven’t met the founders of small religious groups. I have, a few times. They’re an interesting bunch, as are the early followers. When one meets these people in real life, they generally have an interesting relationship with reality and some really profoundly strange ideas about all manner of things. Do they die for what they believe? They sometimes do, and they do it while being in the position to recant or abandon the faith. But I’m not going to start following John Africa of MOVE just because he fervently believed in the truth of his religion and died for it.
In other words, it’s unusual only in the sense that most people aren’t like this. Historically it’s not unusual at all, and it doesn’t attest, in the slightest way, to the truth of the strange things these people believed or said they believed, especially when we have only a general idea, due to the lapse of time and the vagaries of the folkloric processes that bring the stories down to us, what it is they actually did and did not believe and did or did not say about it. There’s more than a little difference between an Ebionite and a Baptist, you know, and one thing that’s very clear is that the early faith was always somewhat in flux. So what do we have? Dubiously grounded stories, passed to us by folklore, about how various people died, coupled with dubious statements about what they may or may not have believed. In John Africa’s case, at least, we have a pretty doggoned good idea about how he died and what he believed, and it’s obvious that this has no bearing at all upon the merits of his beliefs.
Seriously, you cannot get there via historical evidence. The possibility that someone long ago may have fervently believed in some set of paranormal occurrences just is not a ground for accepting those occurrences yourself. Historical evidence cannot be of any use in establishing claims of paranormal occurrences – for that you need something very different, bearing directly upon the questions at issue.
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I was already aware of the existence of Josephus, Tacitus & Suetonius.
The Josephus evidence relies mainly on the Testimonium Flavianum, which contains fairly blatant Christian interpolation. It is widely argued that there may have been some authentic reference to Jesus underlying this, but we can have no certainty what it originally said on the subject.
The other piece of Josephus evidence is a mention of the death of “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James”. Whilst not as heavily disputed as the Testimonium, it still has issues, and given how passing a mention it is, may well be based upon hearsay, rather than a more substantive report.
Tacitus was writing 80-odd years after Jesus’ purported death, and principally about events in Rome during the reign of Nero (30 years and three emperors later). It is not clear whether his passing mention of Jesus’ death is the product of hearsay or a more reliable report, but he does get Pilate’s rank wrong. Wikipedia quote:
Charles Guignebert argued that "So long as there is that possibility [that Tacitus is merely echoing what Christians themselves were saying], the passage remains quite worthless".I wouldn't go that far, but would at least require that, at least on balance of evidence, it was more likely than not that an official report on the death survived in Rome 80 years later, for what would have originally been a fairly minor and routine execution, in an outlying province, which province had since seen a rebellion, and its brutal suppression (all of which making it less likely for the report to survive).
The rest can be dismissed as fairly brief, vague and/or contradictory hearsay. Suetonius, for example, claims that “Chrestus” was alive and agitating Jews in Rome during Nero’s time.
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I looked this up. This is not a religion; it’s a social movement. I do not see any claim about a particular god.
The difference is it’s not “someone” - it’s more than a dozen people. There was no one founder of the religion; obvious historical evidence about the early reach of Christianity makes that clear. The documents of the New Testament were copied and passed all over before the canon was finalized. That’s why there’s more copies than any other book in the world.
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Suffering points to evil in the world. Jesus offers salvation by grace so that you may spend eternity with him without suffering and evil. The miracles point to the spiritual need of our hearts as well as our physical bodies.
This is similar to the passage I quoted for you where the Paul says preaching is foolishness. @david.heddle believed because of attending church. That’s the general pattern the Bible lays down that God wants to follow lest anyone think the faith is not from God because it doesn’t make rational sense.
But I think God especially prepares some people intellectually before they are converted (hence why we’re (at least I’m) also arguing to look at the evidence), and I think He saves in extraordinary ways outside of church when He can still be glorified or attending church is impossible.
Are you confusing Christianity with Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, the Cathars?
Explain how you think my explanation is confusing Christianity with other religions.
Here’s a passage similar to what I was saying:
Ephesians 2:4-10
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them…
Réification of “evil”. I don’t have to reconcile “evil” with a good god. Dualists resolve the paradox by personifying evil. You were giving me the impression that you take the dualist approach. Heresy! 
Right. I don’t believe they were lying. They really believed Jesus rose from the dead, just as the early Muslims really believed Muhammad was talking with Allah.
The scholarly consensus is that those gospels were not written by the people whose names they bear, and that they are only compendiums of written and oral traditions that already existed.
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That was a theory 100 years ago, but that is NOT the scholarly consensus of today.
Its a bit off-topic for this particular thread, but I assume @AllenWitmerMiller and @jongarvey and @Eddie could comment
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Despite the traditional ascriptions, all four are anonymous and most scholars agree that none were written by eyewitnesses. (A few conservative scholars defend the traditional ascriptions or attributions, but for a variety of reasons the majority of scholars have abandoned this view or hold it only tenuously.)-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Composition_and_authorship
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I don’t think Wikipedia is the place to gain the scholarly consensus on any field of scholarship, because it’s not edited by scholars, but by Joe Public, often posing under a pseudonym.
In fact, it’s pretty hard to get a scholarly consensus in any broad field like New Testament studies, and as Michelle rightly says, any close consensus on the composition of the gospels evaporated decades ago.
However, I have known, met or corresponded with quite a number of NT scholars personally, and a good number accept authorship by the ascribed authors, and the whole field has moved on from the outdated ideas of authors ignorant of the events entirely dependent on some vaguely defined “traditions” from long before.
Put simply, books were never, and could never be, written that way, and certainly not within the short time-frame almost universally agreed for the gospels. To add a little more detail, the source critical methods were devised on the assumption of several generations of transmission. There is near universal agreement now that all four gospels were complete within a single lifetime from the events they describe.
An equivalent might be that I could easily write an eye-witness account of seeing Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival 50 years ago, but if I were writing a book about him I would have to use a “tradition” by interviewing, or writing to, someone who saw him at Woodstock for that event. There would be a world of difference between the reliability of that book, and one conveying the “tradition” of Mozart playing in Salzburg.
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I’ve been around Wikipedia long enough to check that statements are well cited. In this case, I was able to get the following confirmation off Google Books:
The authors of the Gospels, or at least the persons responsible for the final form of the Gospels, were almost certainly not eyewitnesses; and the Gospels themselves are the end products of traditions that were transmitted and preserved in various forms, both oral and written.
P13. Reddish, Mitchell (2011). An Introduction to The Gospels. Abingdon Press. ISBN 978-1426750083.
https://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/mitchell-reddish.php
This is part of the citation for the first statement (it also refers to p42, which Google Books did not havev available).
I don’t think that Prof Reddish is “Joe Public”. Your mileage may vary.
I’ll continue to look around to see if I can find any more information.
Addendum, further citation check:
We start from the fact that the Fourth Gospel has always been known as the Gorspel according to John, and this goes with the the traditional view that the evangelist was the apostle John. Although this tradition continues to have supporters among modern scholars, the majority cling to it only in the most tenuous form, or abandon it altogether. It is thus important to see the reasons why the traditional identification is regarded by most scholars as untenable.
p41, Lindars, Barnabas; Edwards, Ruth; Court, John M. (2000). The Johannine Literature. A&C Black. ISBN 978-1-84127-081-4.
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One scholar does not equate to “scholarly consensus” Many other scholars have different opinions. There are certain other scholars cited by that wikipedia page with whom many other scholars would vehemently disagree.
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My explanation is simple: Sometime after Jesus’s death, early Christians (not necessarily limited to or even including the original disciples) came to believe that Jesus has risen from the dead.
The Gospels that have survived to our day were written after stories about Jesus and his first followers had been circulating by mouth and in writing for years to decades, and are based on these stories. It is impossible to determine how much of these accounts are factual, except for the things that are physically impossible such as the stories of people walking on water or coming back to life after being dead. Those we know are not true, because they are physically impossible.
That’s it.
Suppose I claim I can fly across the Atlantic Ocean just by flapping my arms. How would you falsify this?
You know what else can be tested? Whether dead people come back to life. As a doctor, I can tell you what the research says on that subject, if you are interested. 
Is that really the best resource you can recommend? Seriously?
Allow me to explain why I will not read that book. Wallace is a retired policeman. That’s it. He is not a historian or a New Testament scholar or, indeed, a scholar or expert in any field remotely related to the topic we are discussing. And the book you keep championing is not even published by any academic or scholarly imprint. It’s just a trade paperback. It’s the equivalent of some book claiming the Elvis never died or that aliens built Stonehenge.
I repeat: He has no qualifications or expertise regarding things that may or may not have happened in the distant past. That is the purview of historians. When Wallace was investigating a murder, did he call on the expertise of historians and New Testament scholars? If not, what makes him so arrogant to think he can intrude onto their turf?
I’m 55 years old. I already have a llst of books I hope to read that will take the rest of my natural life. I don’t have time to waste on garbage, sorry. As I said, I am already familiar enough with his other writings and speeches to understand the main thrust of his argument, and to judge it as a failure. I really doubt he has lots of good stuff that he kept hidden just for people who want to read his book.
If the experts in the relevant fields of scholarship (but what would that be?) arrive at a consensus that Jesus actually rose from the dead, then I’ll pay attention to that. Until then, I will go along with @david.heddlein that this is just a matter of “faith.” And I don’t do faith.
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