In his article, Why the Resurrection Matters to You, by Bill Bright, he writes:

So why do His life and teachings still generate such interest today?

To begin with, everything about Him was unique: The prophecies of His coming. His birth. His life. His teachings. His miracles. His death. And especially His resurrection.

It is history's most significant event.

The validity of Jesus' claims about Himself rests on the Resurrection -- whether He rose from the dead or stayed in the grave.

Many skeptics say that to believe in a risen Christ is nothing more than a blind leap of faith with little or no basis in truth.

When confronted with the facts, however, those who are intellectually honest have been forced to admit that the Resurrection is an historical event based on irrefutable proofs.

Bright states that the resurrection is the proof “that a bodily resurrection is the only explanation for Christ's empty tomb.” He goes on to state:

· 1st, Christ predicted His resurrection. The Bible records, "From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things ... and be killed, and be raised up on the third day" (Matthew 16:21, New American Standard Bible). Even though His followers did not understand what He was telling them at the time, they remembered His words and recorded them.
· 2nd, Jesus made numerous appearances to His followers. He comforted the mourners outside His tomb on Sunday morning. On the road to Emmaus, He explained things about Himself from the Old Testament. Later, He ate in their presence and invited them to touch Him. Scripture records that Jesus was seen by more than 500 at one time. Some may argue that a few people could have agreed to a deception, but how can one explain the collaboration of 500 people?
· 3rd, the unrelenting faith of the disciples convinces me of the Resurrection. Those disciples who were once so afraid that they deserted their Lord now courageously proclaimed this news, risking their lives to preach. Their bold and courageous behavior does not make sense unless they knew with absolute certainty that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
· 4th, the growth of the Christian church confirms the Resurrection. Peter's first sermon, which dealt with Christ's resurrection, stirred people to receive Him as their living Savior. Luke records the thrilling results: "That day there were added about three thousand souls" (Acts 2:41). And that group of believers has multiplied until now it reaches around the world. Today, there are hundreds of millions of believers.
· Finally, the testimony of hundreds of millions of transformed lives through the centuries shows the power of the Resurrection. Many have been delivered from addictions. The destitute and despairing have found hope. Broken marriages have been restored. The most conclusive proof for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is that He is living within believers today in all of His resurrected life and transforming power.

The Resurrection sets Christianity apart. No other religious leader has broken the power of death and conquered sin.

A totally unprovable statement at best. Surely this man is preaching to the converted but this is the stuff Christianity demands to be judged on. Well then, let’s get to it:

The Resurrection Theory (TRT) tells us that the tomb was empty and this is proof of resurrection. Now, we won’t resort here to saying that the gospel account is hearsay even though that’s exactly what it is. Christians are impervious to this kind of criticism. They believe it and that’s all that matters and nothing you or I offer in the way of this being mere hearsay has any effect. Likewise, being an atheist must be set aside. The Christian is a strong theist and believes in a personal god and no amount of reasoning will produce the tiniest effect via admitting the atheist could be right so there is no point to arguing this either. So when we critique, we must critique with the idea in mind that God exists as the Christian envisions this God otherwise we will be accused of oversimplifying and perhaps we are! By taking God out of the equation, we totally sabotage the Christian position and that’s just too easy. Instead of convincing them of our position, instead they dig in. So let’s get on their turf and see where it takes us.

TRT rests for Christians on the Resurrection Hypothesis (TRH) but TRH is very tautological. Michael Lincona explains it in his book, The Resurrection of Jesus:

“Following a supernatural event of an indeterminate nature and cause, Jesus appeared to a number of people, in individual and group settings and to friends and foes, in no less than an objective vision and perhaps within ordinary vision in his bodily raised corpse.”

May sound straightforward enough but it actually goes in a circle. The reason is that it relies on the so-called facts that it is supposed to explain! We think today of the resurrection as something somehow verified apart from the people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ but it is really only because of their testimony that we know of it! It is because of these post-mortem appearances in which people claimed to see Jesus that they assume there was “a supernatural event of an indeterminate nature and cause,” i.e. the Resurrection. Bright tries to get around this by bringing up that Jesus foretold his death and resurrection but that doesn’t get us out of the circular argument because it may have been Jesus’s words that made them believe that they had seen him alive. If you look for it hard enough, you’re going to see it.

But what if TRH isn’t circular? What if these people had really seen Jesus after he was resurrected? Would that work? No. Bright states “that a bodily resurrection is the only explanation for Christ's empty tomb.” It is no explanation at all. Suppose Peter had gone to the tomb to find it empty. Why was it empty? The answer is because Jesus was resurrected. But that is an inadequate answer. It wasn’t empty because he was resurrected. He might have been resurrected but he had to have left the tomb for it be empty. Where did he go? What was he doing? No answer. Then Jesus appears to the two Marys. What caused them to see him? The answer we get is again, “Because he was resurrected.” No. He may have been resurrected but that wasn’t the reason the two women saw him, they saw him simply because they encountered him. Then Jesus is seen by the disciples. What caused them to see him? Not because he was resurrected, although that’s the answer we’ll get, but because they encountered him. Then some years later, Paul and 500 other brethren see him in some manner that dazzles them and leaves them no doubt that they had seen the risen Christ. What caused them to see him? Not because he was resurrected several years earlier but because they encountered him. We see that Christ’s resurrection doesn’t explain the empty tomb or his appearances afterwards. To explain the empty tomb and the appearances, we have to acknowledge that Jesus was engaged in some type of post-mortem activity, but on that note Christianity is silent. This omission is major. If you ask someone why they drove 500 miles to buy a bag of apples and his answer is, “Because I woke up that morning,” you’ll find that an unsatisfactory response. He may have woke up that morning but that is not the reason he drove 500 miles for a bag of apples. There is no causal connection.

If Christ appeared to Paul in the third heaven, as he claims, we should not be getting bent out of shape over a resurrection that took place several years earlier but instead must assume that Jesus had a way to get to this third heaven and a purpose for being there and we must assume that Jesus picked out Paul for a reason and so had the ability to know what was going on back on earth and knew how to appear to Paul in his vision in order to convince him. That is what we should be concerned with. Once we realize this, we realize just how weak TRH actually is.

Quite simply, TRH explains very little. Once we realize this, we cannot help but realize that TRH is ad hoc—cobbled together for an immediate purpose without any regard for wider application—because we are forced to supplement it with speculation about the post-mortem activities of Jesus but which are not supplied to us by any source and this tells us that TRH is very contrived and is therefore entirely false or very questionable at the least. We have to assume from the gospel narratives that Jesus ascended in some manner to heaven. Whoever wrote Acts realized this and wrote about Jesus vanishing into the heavens and then the claim is put forth that it was Luke who wrote it to make it appear that there was some kind of continuity between Acts and the gospels otherwise the story of the Ascension would be nothing more than something a later writer inserted to account for what the gospel narrative did not. But even the writer of Acts (and there appear to be at least three) does not account for Jesus’s apparent ability to walk through solid matter, appear and disappear, change his appearance to look like someone else his disciples don’t recognize, appear as a ball of light, appear as a walking corpse, to be in many places at one time and stage glorious visions of himself in heaven. The only response we get from Christians is, “Because he was resurrected.”

Okay, so TRH is a little weak but that doesn’t mean the resurrection didn’t happen! Because Jesus appears in human and even corpse form and yet has the ability to change appearance to the point even appearing to be a ball of light, can pass through solid matter, appear in many places at once and rise into the heavens, was he himself made of matter as we know it? Lincona admits himself that the exact process of Jesus’s resurrection was of “an indeterminate nature.” This is a major issue because how can we assign a status of historical occurrence to an incident that rests on a process of “an indeterminate nature”? We must strive to determine what the risen Jesus was composed of. Say it was matter. How does he become a ball of light, a wounded corpse and a person none of the disciples recognize at first, someone who can be in more than one place at a time? How does he vanish before their very eyes? How does he float up through the clouds? He does he appear in the third heaven?

All these powers as well as the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances are not explained well whether Jesus is composed of atoms or of something else. Being composed of matter allows people to touch him and he them, allows him to eat, allows him to be seen simply because being matter means that light bounces off him to the eyes of his beholders. His change of appearance could be explained by hypnotic suggestion. But turning into a ball of light? Vanishing into thin air and floating up through the clouds? Not so much. Moreover, being a raised corpse, can he die again or is he now immortal? An immortal corpse?? Can he get sick or age? Will rigor mortis set in? He wasn’t even a glorious, triumphant messiah figure but merely a resuscitated body. Supposing Jesus to be an extra-terrestrial alien life-form (with the star of Bethlehem being a UFO) actually presents a stronger argument than Jesus being raised in his earthly body.

So Jesus then had to be made of something other than matter, something that doesn’t age, die, get sick or be subject to any forces or laws of this world. But that doesn’t work either. Now he can’t interact with people, they can’t touch him nor he them. He can’t eat. They can’t even see him because not being made of matter, no light bounces off his body to the eyes of those should otherwise be able to behold him. In fact, gravity would have no effect on him, he would just float around or sink right through the ground! He would walk right through people. He could walk right through the planet! In other words, it would be exactly the same as if he were not there at all! So the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances cannot be explained at all in this fashion. A Jesus made of atoms explains the empty tomb and the post-resurrection appearances very weakly but a Jesus made of mysterious non-matter explains nothing at all.

Whether the risen Jesus is matter or some unknown type of substance, he becomes an unknown shadow creature in his post-resurrection state. So the Resurrection Theory is, at its base, the Theory of the Unknown Shadow Creature. And you can’t build history off that!

Bright also writes states, “The Resurrection sets Christianity apart. No other religious leader has broken the power of death and conquered sin.”

But does this uniqueness work in Christ’s favor? How many people in history were ever raised from the dead? According to Christians, only Jesus. So if one considers how many people have died since the human race began (and we won’t bother to count non-human life-forms), the percentage of dead people who have stayed dead is something on the order of 99.99999999999999999999999%. In every one of these cases, God did not see fit to interfere even when it might have greatly benefited humanity. Now, it is true that this type of probability does not disprove the Resurrection, it certainly should give us pause as to its likelihood. God very clearly doesn’t like to violate his natural laws.

The fact that God bringing dead humans back to life has an extremely low statistical probability does not disprove the resurrection is not to say that science can’t disprove the Resurrection. In fact, science CAN disprove it through the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is defined as:

In any real process the entropy of a closed system will increase.

Entropy is energy unavailable for work. It is a measure of the disorder of a closed system. As time goes on, the entropy increases. You see this everyday—if you don’t tend you garden it gets clogged with weeds, if you don’t put gas in your car it runs down, if you don’t eat you will eventually die of starvation. The process is irreversible without the introduction of free energy at which point the system is no longer closed. Some anti-evolutionists have used this law to criticize the concept of evolution. The earth, they say, is a closed system so how could life evolve from simple to more complex life-forms? The answer, of course, is that the earth is not a closed system but gets fuel (a.k.a. negative entropy) from a very powerful and profound form of energy called sunlight.

This tells us that God can have no effect on the universe because God is not a physical being. Being non-physical, God has no mass and since mass is really energy (E=mc2), then God cannot exchange energy with the physical universe. So God can have no effect on world affairs. Some might object that the universe is not causally isolated from God but this makes no difference because the Second Law has been demonstrated to hold true for closed systems even if they are not causally isolated. Thus, if God created the Second Law, it would mean he not only does not but chooses not to interfere with physical systems!

The next problem arises from statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics deals with microstates which are defined thus: In statistical mechanics, a microstate is a specific microscopic configuration of a thermodynamic system that the system may occupy with a certain probability in the course of its thermal fluctuations. Instead of looking at the system as a whole, statistical mechanics looks at every tiny part of it that is a fractal of the total to map out the overall trend of that system. This is useful because since overall entropy is increasing there are more microstates for dead bodies than living bodies and these microstates have equal energy and therefore equal prior probability, i.e. we know what they are going to do before they do it. Unlike the ad hoc arguments that Christianity frequently relies on to make a case, this principle of statistical mechanics—The Postulate of A Priori Probabilities—has a wide range of applications, is empirically verified (and therefore not really a priori) and therefore very likely to be unassailably true. Christ’s corpse had microstates that were of equal energy with those of its surroundings because all they could do in relation to one another was simply trade energy back and forth. So the total energy is constant. But the microstates surrounding the body of Jesus are not particularly organized—just a random assortment of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other atoms. As the body of Jesus starts to decompose, it too breaks down into a more random assortment of microstates. The microstates corresponding to Christ’s un-decomposed body are much more organized (what we call compartmentalized) and so there are far fewer of these in the surroundings that there are for the decomposing body (decompartmentalized). So as a body decomposes and transfers energy to its surroundings, the more it decompartmentalizes the faster the transfer until the total energy stabilizes into constancy. Because these microstates have equal energy then the prior probability that the corpse will not be resurrected is, for all intents and purposes, 100% because there are many more decompartmentalized microstates in the surroundings then there are compartmentalized microstates and this tells us even before we analyze it (a priori) that the corpse cannot resurrect.

Since God must have created the Postulate of A Priori Probabilities, then God has a very strong tendency not to resurrect dead bodies. Since Christ was dead then God had to have a very strong tendency not to resurrect Christ’s body. This is all part of Bayesian statistical analysis which you can look up. The Bayesian approach even applies mathematics to the resurrection and concludes there is no plausibility to the resurrection without prior probability which is entirely lacking. But what about new evidence that should arise in the future that may prove the plausibility? It’s unlikely to be found at this stage of the game because we have so much empirical evidence at this point without having to rely on ad hoc propositions that any evidence being found to the contrary now is extremely unlikely.

Bright goes onto say this about the resurrection:

The Resurrection confirms that Jesus is who He claimed to be. Let us consider the magnitude of this event:

· The Resurrection proved that Christ was divine. The fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross does not prove in itself He is God. Jesus proved His deity by fulfilling the prophecies of His death and by His return from the grave. The Bible declares that "by being raised from the dead [Christ] was proved to be the mighty Son of God, with the holy nature of God Himself" (Romans 1:4, The Living Bible).
· The Resurrection proved Christ's power to forgive sin. The Bible asserts, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). By rising from the dead, Jesus proved His authority and power to break the bonds of sin and to assure forgiveness and eternal life to all who accept His gift of salvation.
· The Resurrection revealed Christ's power over death. The Bible records, "Christ rose from the dead and will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him" (Romans 6:9, TLB). The Resurrection secured our victory over death as well and "lifted us up from the grave into glory along with Christ, where we sit with him in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 2:6).
· The Resurrection defeated God's enemy. From the moment of his original rebellion until the day of the Cross, the devil fought viciously and cunningly to overthrow the kingdom of God. Satan must have thought he had dealt the final and decisive blow in this age-old war. But this was the devil's most serious miscalculation. The Cross was heaven's triumph. And when Jesus Christ arose, the power of sin and death was forever shattered. Because of the Resurrection, Christians need never fear Satan or death again.

But if Christ was not resurrected, and we have examined this scenario very carefully and find it wanting, then where does that leave Christianity and its followers? No resurrection proves that Christ was not divine, that he had no power to forgive sin, no power over death and was defeated by God’s enemies. Much of what Bright says about the resurrection seems to show Christ as a grandstander more interested in proving how great he was than in saving humankind. Why was it necessary for Christ to prove he was God? Why would God find that important? The salvation of humanity should have been his only concern and if he had to die to do it (and it’s not explained why that was necessary much less possible) then that should have been enough. Why come back to life just to prove death cannot conquer him? How can a divine being die? And if resurrection was necessary as Paul states then he didn’t need to appear to anybody. Upon rising from the grave, his mission was accomplished. Was it because by rising and appearing to others, they would tell others in turn and the word would spread? Then what was the purpose of Christ’s dying and rising? To save humanity or to start a religion that barks a lot about saving humanity but has accomplished virtually nothing to that end?

Christians place a lot of faith in their scriptures and yet these scriptures have no internal consistency. Mark places Christ’s resurrection appearances in Galilee (actually the original “short” version of Mark does not even mention the resurrection) but Luke only places them in Jerusalem and the area immediately surrounding it. Again, how can Christians demand that Jesus be given historical treatment on such inconsistencies? The Jesus Christ of the Christian religion is a complete phantom. We do not really know how we are supposed to regard him because Christians themselves do not agree with one another on the matter. The original Jesus was a teacher about whose life we know nothing, the earliest Christian writings—Paul’s and James’s epistles—which don’t tell us anything about the life of Jesus and regard him as either a heavenly figure or an earthly but supernatural figure of no space or time locale, and the post-resurrection Jesus is wholly unexplainable and incoherent. All we have for his life are four contradictory accounts that are nothing more than a mish-mash of myth, Gnosticism, astrology and unprovable assertions.

We can make a case of a historic personage in that someone had to have taught about a Kingdom of God at some point, there had to be a reason that the New Testament was written about this personage. Perhaps he did tell his followers to go to Galilee and meet him after his death and they did. But what they saw could not have been a resurrected body for all the reasons presented here. And if one reads the gospel account, one can etch out a story that this teacher was to be executed but survived the event and then taught in secret. When Jesus hung on the cross, for instance, a sponge was held to his lips. Right after drinking from it, Jesus dies. But could not a drug as curare have been put in the sponge to simulate death? In the tomb, his body is treated with aloes. What is aloes? Here’s what Meriam-Webster says:

b : the dried juice of the leaves of various aloes used especially formerly as a purgative — usually used in plural

A purgative! Why would a dead body require a purgative?? It wouldn’t but a body that is not dead but poisoned with a drug that simulates death WOULD need one! So the drugged body is removed from the cross, taken to the tomb where, out of sight of everybody, is given a purgative to rid the body of the drug. Jesus could then be revived. But what about the Roman guards at the tomb? What about them? All Jesus has to do is don a disguise brought into the tomb by one of his party and walk out with the rest of them. Since the soldiers thought he was dead, why would they suspect anything? Certainly not all the disciples were in on it but some of the top ones closest to Jesus would have been and they would have worked in collusion with the mysterious men in white who appear in the narrative at odd times and whose presence is NEVER explained by Christians who suppose them to be angels but who appear to be people working behind the scenes and who are careful to remain unknown to most of the disciples. Sounds far-fetched? It has greater explanatory power than the Resurrection Theory which simply doesn’t work.

That Jesus survived his crucifixion is certainly not a new thought. Irenaeus stated that Jesus “suffered” in his 30th year but lived to the age of 50. Papias allegedly believed the same thing although his works survive only in fragments. The idea that Jesus was poisoned with the sponge and revived with aloes was my own conjecture but I just found a website that asserts exactly the same thing. This doesn’t mean it really happened, of course, but it does mean that the gospels are worded in such a way as to make a case for it. After all, if Irenaeus believed Jesus survived his execution, there has to be some way to account for it. I don’t care personally if Jesus died at the crucifixion or not. I merely mention it as an alternative explanation that fits the available data better than the Resurrection Theory does.

So the Christian position is a house of cards:
· The disciples would not have stolen the body.
· Jesus did not merely pass out on the cross.
· The disciples did not hallucinate seeing the risen Jesus.
· Therefore, Jesus rose from the dead.

We can revise that to read:
· The disciples would not have stolen the body.
· Jesus did not merely pass out on the cross.
· It not possible that Jesus rose from the dead.
· Therefore, the disciples hallucinated or imagined seeing the risen Jesus.

The other possibility is:
· The top disciples and the men in white smuggled Jesus out of the tomb.
· Jesus was drugged on the cross which simulated death.
· The disciples did not hallucinate seeing the risen Jesus.
· Jesus did not die on the cross.

Sorry Christians, but the last two explain the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances with more power than does your version which is so weak as to be virtually worthless.

You don't need much of a reason to NOT believe in the resurrection, these are all terrible reasons.

Let's see: Jesus predicted it, and his followers really, really believed it. And the Church spread, and lots of Christians still believe it and good things happened to them.

Lots of people in other religions also really, really believe stuff. When people give their lives for some other belief, I don't see people saying, "hmm, I should really look into that doctrine, those dudes ain't kidding around."

We are judging the Christian story from the Christian perspective--by using the scriptures as evidence and taking the statements in them at face value (i.e. we're not going call them forgeries or latter additions or hearsay) and by supposing god exists in the way Christians envision their god (even though envision is all they can do because none of them have ever seen him).

Even keeping ourselves within those bounds, the Christian story does not stand up. We can make a case that the disciples either imagined or hallucinated seeing the risen Christ or Christ did not really die on the cross. Really, we could even add that Jesus was an alien from another world--even that has better explanatory power than the standard Christian story. That's the best we can do. Christians ask that we not simply dismiss the notion of god and dismiss the bible as hearsay and we will see the story is historically true. We've done that here and it's still wanting. The linch-pin of the whole thing is whether or not Jesus returned as a living body, a walking corpse or a "spirit"--the story holds no water. The story must rely on much more than Christ being resurrected which Christians think explains everything when it explains nothing. It's the least important detail of the post-mortem Christ. The more important details are completely lacking. Why? Well, I'd say because the story isn't true.

thanks as always DB. Your post prompted me to listen to three vids on the subject of "the resurrection".

Price on fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITq6Cv-R8JM

Ehrman v Licona
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REj5Ofh62Qw

Carrier v Craig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nmvdfG4sg

very enjoyable and tons of great gems of info.

Thanks youkrist. I agree with Price about "ancient authorities." People, particularly Christians, hold them up as unassailable. The authorities said it so it must be true. The RSV bible uses "authorities" when it means "the oldest known manuscripts." And he's correct in that they shouldn't be considered authorities but merely sources that may be accurate or not.

Even children can see what a load of shit "authorities" are. I asked my youngest daughter, 15, why it would be necessary for Jesus to appear to people after his death as proof that he'd broken the hold of sin when he could have just gone back to heaven and say "Mission accomplished!" And she replied, "How else would they know the difference?" Well, there you go.

excellent! my youngest daughter (20something) is always surprising me with how canny she is, i always remember how back in the day when i was a Dawkins hater she offered to lend me her copy of "the god delusion" knowing i was blind as a bat to the content.

it's so cool when family members can help straighten me out

i was so proud she had a mind of her own and could see straight through dad's BS

i loved Bob Price's TV analogy

you come home flick on the tv not knowing what channel it's on and see a giant monster ripping up a city skyline, what's the first thing you think CNN or Sci-fi channel?

DB Roy wrote:So when we critique, we must critique with the idea in mind that God exists as the Christian envisions this God otherwise we will be accused of oversimplifying and perhaps we are!

This is precisely what you don't do D.B., and all your talk of scientific laws (which originate from God) isolating him from what he created is ridiculous.

DB Roy wrote:We think today of the resurrection as something somehow verified apart from the people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ but it is really only because of their testimony that we know of it!

Of course. Why would you expect those who did not witness the resurrected Christ to testify to this? And we know some suffered and died for their testimony.

DB Roy wrote: Suppose Peter had gone to the tomb to find it empty. Why was it empty? The answer is because Jesus was resurrected. But that is an inadequate answer. It wasn’t empty because he was resurrected. He might have been resurrected but he had to have left the tomb for it be empty.

Why was it empty D.B? You don't answer this apart from a really absurd theory about poisoning,surviving and living on in obscurity somewhere.

http://www.knowwhatyoubelieve.com/belie ... ection.htm

DB Roy wrote:Then some years later, Paul and 500 other brethren see him in some manner that dazzles them and leaves them no doubt that they had seen the risen Christ.

But when you read Paul's account in 1 Corinthians these are separate appearances and this is typical of the sloppiness of your whole post and handling of the N.T. accounts.

DB Roy wrote:We have to assume from the gospel narratives that Jesus ascended in some manner to heaven. Whoever wrote Acts realized this and wrote about Jesus vanishing into the heavens and then the claim is put forth that it was Luke who wrote it to make it appear that there was some kind of continuity between Acts and the gospels otherwise the story of the Ascension would be nothing more than something a later writer inserted to account for what the gospel narrative did not.

More casual sloppiness. The ascension is at the end of Luke's gospel also.

DB Roy wrote:But even the writer of Acts (and there appear to be at least three) does not account for Jesus’s apparent ability to walk through solid matter, appear and disappear, change his appearance to look like someone else his disciples don’t recognize, appear as a ball of light, appear as a walking corpse, to be in many places at one time and stage glorious visions of himself in heaven.

So what N.T. scholars say there were three authors of Acts and on what basis?
http://www.bethinking.org/bible/the-dat ... -testament

And where does it say that after his resurrection he was in many places at one time? A ball of light? Paul saw a blinding light brighter than the noon day sun. But at Jesus transfiguration before the resurrection his face shone as the sun and in John's Revelation vision we have the same description but not that he became a ball of light.
Paul spoke of having seen the risen Christ.He was blinded by the light but it's an assumption to say that all he saw was light.

DB Roy wrote: Not so much. Moreover, being a raised corpse, can he die again or is he now immortal? An immortal corpse?? Can he get sick or age? Will rigor mortis set in? He wasn’t even a glorious, triumphant messiah figure but merely a resuscitated body.

The N.T. answers these questions. Christianity is a belief in a God who is able to create a universe and transform fragile mortal bodies.

DB Roy wrote:Supposing Jesus to be an extra-terrestrial alien life-form (with the star of Bethlehem being a UFO) actually presents a stronger argument than Jesus being raised in his earthly body.

This is the kind of 'reasoning' and theorizing I've come to expect from you.

DB Roy wrote:The original Jesus was a teacher about whose life we know nothing, the earliest Christian writings—Paul’s and James’s epistles—which don’t tell us anything about the life of Jesus and regard him as either a heavenly figure or an earthly but supernatural figure of no space or time locale, and the post-resurrection Jesus is wholly unexplainable and incoherent.

As if I haven't answered this many times already. http://www.bede.org.uk/jesusmyth.htm

DB Roy wrote:All we have for his life are four contradictory accounts that are nothing more than a mish-mash of myth, Gnosticism, astrology and unprovable assertions.

O.K.well let's just look at the Gnosticism part of this bogus claim.
http://www.equip.org/article/the-gnostic-jesus/

There is so much nonsense and inaccuracy in your post,that I've just ignored most of it as it doesn't deserve refutation.

Franky I have no intention of engaging with this level of misinformation,misunderstanding and absurdity, so don't expect it.

DB Roy wrote:Supposing Jesus to be an extra-terrestrial alien life-form (with the star of Bethlehem being a UFO) actually presents a stronger argument than Jesus being raised in his earthly body.

I saw this before and thought it was ridiculous. Now I see the point. It is a stronger argument.

Flann wrote:Of course. Why would you expect those who did not witness the resurrected Christ to testify to this? And we know some suffered and died for their testimony.

The Heaven's Gate group died for their fervent belief in something that was false. This line of reasoning does not justify your belief.

Interbane wrote:Flann wrote:
Of course. Why would you expect those who did not witness the resurrected Christ to testify to this? And we know some suffered and died for their testimony.




The Heaven's Gate group died for their fervent belief in something that was false. This line of reasoning does not justify your belief.

The hallucinations theory is completely untenable. So you believe that those who believed they had seen the risen Christ would have been willing to die for their testimony to this,even if they knew they had not in fact seen the risen Christ?

And all those contemporary people in Jerusalem believed them just like that, even though the tomb had been guarded and the authorities and their opponents only had to produce the body to refute it?

The mythicist line is not taken seriously by historians and scholars for obvious reasons.

Interbane wrote:DB Roy wrote:
Supposing Jesus to be an extra-terrestrial alien life-form (with the star of Bethlehem being a UFO) actually presents a stronger argument than Jesus being raised in his earthly body.




I saw this before and thought it was ridiculous. Now I see the point. It is a stronger argument.

From your worldview anything is more believable than the resurrection. After all miracles can't happen and even if they did you would say there must be some unknown possible naturalistic explanation, so I guess that covers everything.

I know what justifies my beliefs, and time will tell, so we'll all know whose beliefs are justified soon enough.

But I don't resort to the absurdities of astro-theology,christ myth theory,and bunkum about aliens. Why do self described sceptics believe these things?

and time will tell, so we'll all know whose beliefs are justified soon enough.

indeed we will

should i make a down payment on that asbestos suit?

just wanna say that in spite of any differences we may have doctrinally i always think the world of you Flann

i often hate ideas but ideas are not the people who hold them, we're mostly guilty by association.

now, off to look at the yom kippur