My last question in the convert me to atheism challenge. Often I hear you have zero evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, well one of strongest pieces of evidences we use in 2016 is the testimony of an eye witness account. Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 15 over 500 people saw the risen Saviour so as C.S Lewis said was Jesus a liar, lunatic or Lord?
heck out the stories of Simon the zealot, James son of Alphaeus, Luke, Barnabas, Thomas, Bartholomew, Jude, Peter, Mark, Andrew, Mattias, James (Jesus’ brother), Philip and Stephen. Real people, who were real eyewitnesses of the resurrection!
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Dude, check your Bible. It claims that 500 people saw the resurrection of Christ, thus proving that the bible is bullshit. Read your bible before you embarrass yourself further. I'm serious, The Bible claims 500 people saw the resurrection. Try to deny it. Your Jesus was either non-existent or not what the bible claims to be. You even claim 500 people, so it's as if you know this embarrassment. Please explain how you know this and still believe Matthew.
Hey there, off the Kirb,
Your standard of evidence here is so low, it's a wonder you ever reject any miracle claim at all. You seem to be saying that "If one person says that there are 500 eye-witnesses, then this counts as 500 eye-witness testimonies."
The Miracle of the Sun was purportedly witnessed by tens of thousands of people: do you accept this as strong evidence that it happened?
Joseph Smith says that literally thousands of Native Americans witnessed Christ appear in the Americas. Do you accept this as strong evidence of the event?
Drunvale Melchizedek says that literally millions of Martians witnessed the sinking of Atlantis. Do you accept this as strong evidence of the event?
0:24 – "500 people said they saw the risen savior."
No they didn't. Paul says that Jesus appeared to 500 people. We don't have the testimonies of any of those 500. I think you're making facts up. It would be easy to prove me wrong: name just a few of those 500, along with where I can read what they said about that vision.
0:30 – "Not only did they claim to see the savior with their own physical eyes.."
Again, no they didn't. We don't have the testimony of any of these 500. Maybe they claimed they saw it with spiritual eyes. Maybe they claimed they saw it symbolically, or metaphorically.
0:35 – "They were put to death, some of them, for what they claim to have seen."
I think you are being deceitful: neither the Bible, nor any early church records that I'm aware of, claim that ANY of the 500 were put to death as martyrs. I think what you're trying to do is (a) rely on early church history to support the idea that some of the apostles were martyred and then (b) claiming that these apostles were in the group of 500. The first claim is arguable in its own right (the actual evidence for apostles deaths are fairly scanty, only a few can be reliably corroborated), but the second claim is simply unsupported by any text.
"It says in 1 Corinthian 15 that there was over 500 eye-witnesses that saw the risen savior. …Why would they make it up?"
They didn't have to. Here are some more plausible explanations…
1. Paul is exaggerating the number of witnesses.
2. Paul is exaggerating what the witnesses would attest to.
3. Paul heard about the eye-witnesses from another source, which was incorrect.
4. Paul is leaving out important details about the vision that would cause us to doubt the eye-witness accounts (just like in so many modern eye-witness accounts).
Yeah, and we've heard claims there were all sorts of people who SAW aliens in Roswell in 1947. Are you willing to give that as much credence as this resurrection story you're so damn certain about?