The Case For Christ - A defence of Lee Strobel's 1998 apologetic book

[T.G.G. Moogly]

What bilby is saying is that the liar accusations against Strobel should be confined to demonstrable facts and counter-factuals - claims which can be empirically proven.

I agree.

When Strobel says there are over 5000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in existence that's either true or false.
When Strobel says 5000 unparalleled in other equivalent ancient historical documents that's either true or false.

Now obviously, Strobel wants to make a cumulative case for the minimal facts about the Crucifixion and his belief that Jesus' Resurection from the grave is the most plausible explanation of those facts - ahead of other alternative theories. But nowhere does Strobel present opinions as facts.

It is true there are in fact many NT documents in existence. And the vast majority were written centuries after the supposed happenings of the gospels. Most are lectionaries, collections of favorite verses for use in sermons. The other that are not lectionaries are copies of copies of documents written a century or so after the facts. Almost no two copies of the gospels agree with each other, there are many variations.

This is a hand wave argument from Strobel and others of his ilk. It all sounds impressive to the less sophisticated reader, but is utterly beside the point. The Gospels contradict each other wildly and cannot be true or written by eyewitnesses or anybody who knew anything worth knowing.

And do dead people really come back to life and then fly around in the sky like Superman?

 

[Learner]

Indeed its not normal.

Believers don't claim such things to be normal.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Indeed its not normal.

Believers don't claim such things to be normal.

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill. The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

 

[James Brown]

Suppose someone writes down, "The sun orbits the earth once per year."

Now suppose 5000 copies are made of that document, and the original document is destroyed.

Of what purpose is it to boast that there exists 5000 copies of the original document?

"It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. They all contain mistakes - altogether many thousands of mistakes. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament.

--The New Testament: an historical introduction to the early Christian writings, Bart Ehrman p. 449

 

[Learner]

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill.

The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

Let me rephrase it as: not the usual, normal everyday thing. And the frequency of claims (which matters here) regarding that bit written in the bible - people coming back to life and "flying off into the skies", IS quite a rare claim throughout the bible - even for those people back then in ancient times.

 

[bilby]

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill.

The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

Let me rephrase it as: not the usual, normal everyday thing. Even the frequency of claims (which matters here) regarding that bit written in the bible - people coming back to life and "flying off into the skies", being quite a rare claim, even for those people back then in ancient times.

These things are not merely unusual, though; They are impossible.

If someone shows you rocks falling upwards into the sky, you know that it's a trick - You may not know how it is done, but you know that it's not possible that gravity doesn't work the way it is meant to. You look for wires, or a catapult, or mirrors, or some kind of trick mechanism to create the illusion. Some stage magicians are very very good at appearing to do the impossible - but none actually do it.

If someone tells you that they saw rocks falling upwards into the sky, you can be sure that they are mistaken. Maybe they saw something unremarkable - such as a distant volcano - but misinterpreted it. Maybe they were fooled by an illusionist or con-artist. Maybe they were hallucinating. But you know rocks don't respond to gravity in that way, so you can be sure that whatever they think they saw, it wasn't rocks falling upwards due to gravity.

People don't come back from the dead; People don't fly around in the sky, or walk in water, or feed a multitude with a handful of loaves and fishes. These things are physically impossible - so reports of them are either erroneous, mistaken, or simply lies.

 

[Learner]

Suppose someone writes down, "The sun orbits the earth once per year."

Now suppose 5000 copies are made of that document, and the original document is destroyed.

Of what purpose is it to boast that there exists 5000 copies of the original document?

There are advantages which is useful to your quote below...

"It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. They all contain mistakes - altogether many thousands of mistakes. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament.

--The New Testament: an historical introduction to the early Christian writings, Bart Ehrman p. 449

Consistency, i.e. that the stories are still very much the same! Putting all the manuscripts side by side including the KJV , 1599 Geneva, both Catholic and Protestant OT and NT, The Ethiopian bible, and the later discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, WILL show that these scriptures are not different at al!. The mistakes you are highlighting are quite minor in regards to having little or no effect to the story narrative - the majority of mistakes are grammatical including perhaps word substitution errors.

 

[skepticalbip]

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill.

The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

Let me rephrase it as: not the usual, normal everyday thing. And the frequency of claims (which matters here) regarding that bit written in the bible - people coming back to life and "flying off into the skies", IS quite a rare claim throughout the bible - even for those people back then in ancient times.

And it is claimed that Muhammad was taken up into heaven by a flying horse. Does the fact that such a claim was rare mean that it must be true?

 

[Learner]

Its true that its rare...

I have faith you can workout what kind of response Christians would give, best ask someone of the Islamic faith.

 

[skepticalbip]

Its true that its rare...

I have faith you can workout what kind of response Christians would give, best ask someone of the Islamic faith.

You are conflating "truth" and "belief".

I have no doubt that a true Christian believes the resurrection tale or that a true Muslim believes Muhammad's flying horse tale but the question was about truth. The argument you have been making is that the resurrection was true and as 'proof' you offer the rarity of such claims. If you honesty consider rarity to be proof then you must agree that Muhammad did his thing just as Jesus did his thing.

If one of the claims is rejected on rational grounds then the other must also be rejected on rational grounds. If one of the claims is accepted as true on rational grounds then the other must also be accepted on the same grounds.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill.

The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

Let me rephrase it as: not the usual, normal everyday thing. And the frequency of claims (which matters here) regarding that bit written in the bible - people coming back to life and "flying off into the skies", IS quite a rare claim throughout the bible - even for those people back then in ancient times.

It's a rare claim in the christian scripture but it isn't rare at all in those middle eastern cultures that spawned christianity. Lots of gods were doing just that, take the time to investigate on your own.

 

[Learner]

These things are not merely unusual, though; They are impossible.

If someone shows you rocks falling upwards into the sky, you know that it's a trick - You may not know how it is done, but you know that it's not possible that gravity doesn't work the way it is meant to. You look for wires, or a catapult, or mirrors, or some kind of trick mechanism to create the illusion. Some stage magicians are very very good at appearing to do the impossible - but none actually do it.

I've not seen evdience that stage magicians could actually do this either, I concur.

If someone tells you that they saw rocks falling upwards into the sky, you can be sure that they are mistaken. Maybe they saw something unremarkable - such as a distant volcano - but misinterpreted it. Maybe they were fooled by an illusionist or con-artist. Maybe they were hallucinating. But you know rocks don't respond to gravity in that way, so you can be sure that whatever they think they saw, it wasn't rocks falling upwards due to gravity.

No disagreement there.

People don't come back from the dead; People don't fly around in the sky, or walk in water, or feed a multitude with a handful of loaves and fishes. These things are physically impossible - so reports of them are either erroneous, mistaken, or simply lies.

All these things described is centred around one individual and unusual for anyone else in the bible. No Jesus involved in the first two quotes above, I say obviosly as a theist. Unfortunately (depending how you take it) I need evidence to stop believing in the story - and that the writers and Jesus were erroneous, mistaken, or telling lies. ( I became a believer by various things other than just the resurection BTW)

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Unfortunately (depending how you take it) I need evidence to stop believing in the story - and that the writers and Jesus were erroneous, mistaken, or telling lies. ( I became a believer by various things other than just the resurection BTW)

So you believe in literal human anastasis, or do you believe in the concept of resurrection.

How do you personally determine when something in your bible is not to be taken literally? Can you give some examples?

 

[Lion IRC]

If it can happen then it's something normal. In those scientifically illiterate times lots of impossible claims happened quite normally. Extraordinary, un-evidenced claims were simply run-of-the-mill.

The event never happened, only the claim happened, something quite normal. And those impossible, normal claims still happen today, though not perhaps with the same frequency.

The frequency of the claim doesn't matter. There could be a zillion normal repetitions of an impossible claim.

Let me rephrase it as: not the usual, normal everyday thing. And the frequency of claims (which matters here) regarding that bit written in the bible - people coming back to life and "flying off into the skies", IS quite a rare claim throughout the bible - even for those people back then in ancient times.

It's a rare claim in the christian scripture but it isn't rare at all in those middle eastern cultures that spawned christianity. Lots of gods were doing just that, take the time to investigate on your own.

The "middle eastern culture" that spawned Christianity is called Judaism.

 

[skepticalbip]

It's a rare claim in the christian scripture but it isn't rare at all in those middle eastern cultures that spawned christianity. Lots of gods were doing just that, take the time to investigate on your own.

The "middle eastern culture" that spawned Christianity is called Judaism.

The first Christians came from Judaism but the religion was spawned from Egyptian religions, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, etc. more so than the Torah.

 

[Horatio Parker]

There is a large Greek influence on both testaments.

 

[Lion IRC]

You mean because they were written in Koine Greek?

 

[Horatio Parker]

You mean because they were written in Koine Greek?

One of many; the entire tradition of religious literacy is probably Greek influence.

Greek philosophy was part and parcel of church doctrine until Lorenzo Valla proved the dates were all wrong.

 

[James Brown]

There are advantages which is useful to your quote below...

--The New Testament: an historical introduction to the early Christian writings, Bart Ehrman p. 449

Consistency, i.e. that the stories are still very much the same! Putting all the manuscripts side by side including the KJV , 1599 Geneva, both Catholic and Protestant OT and NT, The Ethiopian bible, and the later discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, WILL show that these scriptures are not different at al!. The mistakes you are highlighting are quite minor in regards to having little or no effect to the story narrative - the majority of mistakes are grammatical including perhaps word substitution errors.

Well sure. All 5000 documents are entirely consistent. They all say the same thing: "The sun orbits the earth once per year." The last copies made agree exactly with the first copies made. They are all entirely consistent.

And they are all entirely wrong.

Bart Ehrman explores this thoroughly in "Misquoting Jesus." What do we say when we learn that the famous story of Jesus speaking with the woman caught in adultery does not appear at all in the earliest manuscripts? It's not a slight grammatical flub--it's an insertion by a later author who could not possibly have been a witness to the event.

 

[Horatio Parker]

The idea that the Jewish scriptures owe their character and existence to the Hellenistic era, a time subsequent to Alexander’s conquests of the Near East, jars hard against traditional views of the origins of the Bible. Yet Gmirkin shows that many significant laws in the Pentateuch as well as the narrative style of their presentation are indeed closer to later Greek ideas than those found among Israel’s/Judea’s Syrian or Babylonian neighbours.
The key to this close linkage is the Great Library of Alexandria. Past studies exploring possible cultural contacts between the Greeks and Judeans prior to the Hellenistic era (that is, the period following Alexander the Great, from around 320 BCE) have generally shown that exchanges were primarily limited to trade and had minimal impact in the literary and philosophical sphere. On the other hand, we do know that Jews and Greek culture met in Alexandria. The history of the Athenian Constitution was available in the works of Aristotle there; Plato’s reflections on the ideal state and laws were also stored there. And the Hebrew Bible was said to have been translated into Greek there. Moreover, there is no external evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch prior to the Hellenistic era. In an earlier book, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, — see earlier Vridar posts — Gmirkin likewise argued that the Pentateuch was composed around 270 BCE and he introduces his new book as a sequel to Berossus and Genesis.

https://vridar.org/2016/10/16/plato-and-the-creation-of-the-hebrew-bible/