Hi @dga471,
Thank you for your response. I’d like to address the points you raised, although I’ll be varying the order in which you wrote them, somewhat.
I certainly don’t ascribe to the Resurrection based on faith alone. Rather, the question is whether it is rational and reasonable for any person to hold to a conservative view of the reliability of the Gospels (among other things).
No. The question I sought to answer in my OP was: is it irrational for a person that’s prepared to grant the existence of a personal God Who is able to work miracles and reveal Himself to people (as the Jews do), to reject the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus as too weak to warrant his/her assent? I think the answer is no. The apologists’ case for the Resurrection is full of holes that you could drive a truck through. Over and over again, the same bad old arguments keep getting recycled.
I certainly don’t think it is possible to show that it is irrational to disbelieve in the Resurrection based on historical evidence alone. Bayesian analysis depends ultimately on your priors.
That’s true. But the question I’m asking is whether it’s irrational to disbelieve in the Resurrection based on historical evidence alone, if you’re a believer in God who is open to the possibility of miracles and Divine revelation. And I would answer that it’s not. The apologists’ case is simply too weak - especially with reference to the alleged burial of Jesus in a new rock tomb, owned by Joseph of Arimathea. Historically, that’s unlikely - and yet it’s pivotal to the case for the Resurrection.
It is far from clear that the NT authors would record every miracle they saw.
You are quite correct. When I wrote that P(Evidence | Story 1) is high, I didn’t mean that it was over 50%; I just meant that it wasn’t low, that’s all. But the real point I was making was that even if P(Evidence | Story 1) were high, it wouldn’t follow that P(Story 1 | Evidence) is high.That’s a mathematical point, and it’s vital to the current debate.
I also alluded to the fact that the “Evidence” (from the New Testament) is several decades later than the events reported in Story1. You objected:
You are not taking into account the role of oral vs written tradition.
Some years ago, Professor Bart Ehrman wrote a book on how the early Christians remembered Jesus, and on latest scientific findings concerning the fallibility of human memory. On the Amazon Web page, there’s an interview with Ehrman. What follows is a brief excerpt:
Q: How have scholars traditionally explained the gap of time between when Jesus was alive and when the Gospels were written, and why is that problematic?
A: Many scholars have somewhat unreflectively maintained that the Gospels ultimately go back to eyewitness testimonies to Jesus’ life and that they are therefore reliable; or that oral cultures preserve their traditions with a high degree of accuracy. I realized several years ago that these views can be tested by what we actually know, based on modern detailed studies, about eyewitness testimony (psychologists and legal scholars have studied the subject rigorously), about the reliability of memory (psychologists have delved into this question assiduously since the 1930s), and about the ways traditions are preserved in oral cultures (as we now know based on anthropological studies since the 1920s). As it turns out, what many New Testament scholars have assumed about such matters, in many cases, is simply not right. Many of their assumptions are not only unsupported, they have been shown to be highly problematic in study after study.
Ehrman concludes his interview with a take-home message:
The Gospels we have are not stenographic accounts of the things Jesus said and did. They contain stories that had been passed along by word of mouth decades before anyone wrote them down. If we understand what psychologists have told us about memory and false memory, and about how we sometimes actually invent stories in our heads about the past; if we understand what sociologists have told us about collective memory and how our social groups affect and mold the ways we preserve our recollections of past events; and if we understand what anthropologists have learned about how oral cultures not just cherish and preserve but also alter, transform, and even invent their traditions, we will have a much clearer sense of what the Gospels are and of how we should understand the stories they tell about the historical Jesus.
Even today, in my native Indonesia, it is common for people to claim that they witnessed miracles or saw supernatural phenomena.
I would like to hear more about this.
I’ll address more of your points in my next post to you. Stay tuned…