/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

Yes I have a debunking on hand

Luke 24

<2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

<3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

<4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

<5 And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

Operating on the knowledge the Bible is God's word, you and I know that the resurrection happened. The basis for our belief in the event is the Bible's record of it.

Ehrman operates on the presumption that the Bible is untrustworthy, prone to error. He has the need to find a naturalist cause for the historical fact that Christ's tomb was empty.

Can we debunk wild hypothesis with absolutely no supporting evidence just because it's theoretically possible?

>>771116

>Why seek ye the living among the dead?

I gotta be honest, that question still gives me good chills every time I read it.

The idea that miracles are unlikely is a metaphysical assumption backed by no evidence whatsoever. Miracles happen all the time, though Christ's resurrection is the greatest of them.

God's intervention in the world is a constant part of it, it isn't just something you appeal to when you can't explain an event by other means.

>Somoeone spent time making up that garbage

>Someone mentioned it in public with a straight face

>Someone had the nerve to say that it is more likely because it is literally atheist wishful thinking

There is no point in debuking it. This piece of garbage is, itself, a debunking of atheism.

>where within three days these bodies are decomposed beyond recognition.

Beg your pardon? i didn't know 1st century jews had Sodium hydroxide and man sized pressure cookers lying around. It'll take a lot longer than three days to make a corpse unrecognizable without chemical assistance. especially in the exceptionally salty area that is Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

This is an absolute Tigger-tier argument. It's like arguing for the historical assassination of Lincoln in a crowded theater and the opponent simply saying LOL GUNS AREN'T REAL. The entire point of a miracle is that it is a divinely-attributed abnormality within the state of nature. That's what makes it a damn miracle. He is arguing with the presupposition that miracles aren't real and creating a strawman of a miracle that does not match the definition of the word. It is insultingly dishonest. There is no point in arguing the resurrection of Jesus if you have no common language. The argument that should be had should be regarding the nature of miracles because his autism cannot accept the possibility that there is a God and it logically follows that if there is a God, that He would have full sovereignty over creation. This argument is like the (((scholars))) who date Matthew later than 70AD because their pea brains have a cult worship of materialism, so the fact that Jesus prophecied the fall of the temple just cannot be, therefore they need to defend their feminine little worldview by calling Jesus and the writers of the gospel liars.

Would ANY natural explanation be more rational than the resurrection of Jesus? Yes, absolutely - in a world where there is no God. But the argument here is that there IS a God and it therefore follows that Jesus' resurrection IS perfectly within the bounds of reason. The point that Ehrman should be making is that even if there was a God who would have the ability to create miracles, the circumstances regarding Jesus' resurrection are so implausible as opposed to X given the evidence that it is irrational to think that the resurrection, and therefore a miracle, actually happened. What he's doing is saying LOL MIRACLES AREN'T REAL SO IT'S STUPID AND LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE IS MORE PLAUSIBLE. If he wasn't such a dishonest person and this actually were his honestly laid out argument, then the point should have been to prove that miracles are not real, he can't just state something like it's a fact.

This nu-atheist style of argumentation makes me angry at the absolute sheer stupidity and dishonesty, and it makes me feel sad for the world that people actually think it's smart.

>Bart Ehrman

[-]

>historians can't write about miracles because it hurts muh apostate feels

God that debate was literally Ehrman repeating this over and over

>>771220

He ate a piece of fish in front of the apostles to prove he was flesh and not an apparition.

>>771230

Any proof you're real? But

>They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have."

>When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, "Do you have anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence. (Luke 24:37-43)

>>771235

Yes. You are desperately trying to grasp straws. How can you even write these retarded questions with a straight face?

>three days

>bodies completely decomposed beyond recognition

Wow I wonder how the homicides department isn't out of business today.

>>771235

I wonder who's Saint Thomas. Do you actually know the story or something?

St. Thomas was the Jerusalem Sherlock Holmes and he had to put ins fingers inside Jesus wonds to believe. Which prompted Jesus to say: blessed those who believe without having seen.

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes he even admits that when there's no rational explanation the he would consider the supernatural.

A quick bible reading shows all these theories are wrong at lots of points and only would work if everyone in the world was stoned because a meteorite made of weed crashed on the earth.

>>771242

There isnt always, just like there are not for many things. Where does that stupid statement come from? Your delusional mind?

It is no surprise that these fedoras have admitted that even if God himself appeared to them, they would claim it was aliens. There are no limits to the wishful thinking of atheists. They admit they will not let materialism go, and still expect people to take them seriously.

>>771263

lmao so true

>>771111

How could I debunk that within the bounds of what he calls proof anymore than Ehrman could debunk me if I went double ultra skeptic and said that the empty tomb didn't happen at all?

>They throw all three bodies into a common burial plot, where within three days these bodies are decomposed beyond recognition

Oh I suppose I could demand proof that these hyper efficient burial plots existed, seems like something you could acquire experimental evidence for.

>>771273

And never mind the Roman guards placed at the designated tomb, who would have been crucified for failing to do their job. Imagine having to explain that “uh well they never showed up”, I’m sure that would have gone over well.

Is Ehrman just completely historically ignorant?

>>771111

> In the dead of night, these two family members raid the tomb, taking the body off to bury it for themselves. But Roman soldiers on the lookout see them carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets, they confront them, and they kill them on the spot. They throw all three bodies into a common burial plot, where within three days these bodies are decomposed beyond recognition.

Three days for a corpse to decompose beyond recognition? I'll need a citation on that one. Also

< Be Roman soldier

< Assigned to guard a tomb so no one steals the body and claims He resurrected

< A band of brigands show up to steal the body, kill them all as ordered and throw them in a ditch

< Also throw the very corpse you were ordered to guard in there as well for apparently no reason

< Get crucified yourself because you had one job, to make sure the corpse stays in the tomb

Yeah, I don't think Roman solders were that retarded.

It doesn't explain the risen bodily appearances or the origin of such a belief. I think Ehrman has his logic backwards here. People believed in the re-appearance of Jesus because the empty tomb pointed in its favor, not the other way around.

>"His tomb is empty, and he is here with us. He couldn't be here if the tomb weren't empty and His body were still in it"

<"He will be here with us, so if the tomb is empty, that means that He is risen"

Jesus' followers didn't have the resurrection in mind before He appeared to them again. They did not anticipate His near-immediate return, and did not interpret the empty tomb as evidence to confirm their predictions. This theory that Ehrman posits goes against the vast majority of New Testament scholarship; in fact, I don't know of any other scholar, credible, fringe, liberal, or conservative, who argues what Ehrman does here.

Bodily resurrection was not something that Jews believed would happen in the middle of time to one person; they believed that it would happen to many people at the end of time. To say that people were anticipating or expecting Jesus to rise from the dead, and could therefore use the empty tomb of evidence of this, is false. The resurrection was only believed after it happened. If Peter knew that Jesus was going to come back after He died, he wouldn't have acted the way he did. The resurrection was not understood or expected. The return of Jesus after His crucifixion was not something that was on-the-look-out for, and no one would have said

>AHA! Empty tomb! See, I told you guys he was going to rise from the dead!

All scriptural and scholarly evidence points in the opposite direction.

People did rob graves, but it was typically only for the valuable cloths and oils and herbs that were on the body during its embalming. It is incredibly strange that people would steal the rather impractical body, leave behind the expensive sheets in which the body was wrapped (and neatly fold them up), and carry the oily and herbaceous naked body through the streets. If they loved someone enough to steal their body to re-bury, they would have loved them enough to preserve their dignity and not carry their body out of the tomb naked. What Ehrman arguing here is simply not reasonable.

Let's hypothetically accept that the body thieves were killed by the Roman guards and were thrown into a communal burial plot along with Jesus' stolen body. Okay. If the burial plot were communal, then the Roman guards and many local people would know where it was. If there were any doubt about concerning the location of Jesus' body - if Joseph of Arimathea's tomb was empty, then people would look elsewhere for Jesus' body. If the tomb had a rolled-away stone and the body was gone, the logical conclusion is that the body had been removed. Where then would people look for the body? The people would look in the communal burial pits and other burial sites of course.

If such an uproar was caused about Jesus' missing body and His re-appearance, in efforts to keep peace and order, the Romans would have simply said that the body had been moved to X location.

>Fighting and uproar in streets

>Romans see what's up

>"Yo stop your fighting, the tomb is empty because people were stealing it last night and we killed them, all their bodies are in X location"

>Oh, okay then

Bart Ehrman's argument is riddled with holes. What we must accept, as strange as it may be, is that the official Christian explanation is the most complete and solid explanation of what happened to Jesus' body and why people saw Him after He died.

>reposting because errors and formatting issues. proofread your work, lads

>>771111

According to Matthew 28, the first people to go visit Jesus at the tomb were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph (identified by Papias as the aunt of Jesus).

According to Mark 16, it was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

According to Luke 23-24, it was "the women who had come with Him from Galilee . . . and certain other women with them".

According to John 20, it was Mary Magdalene.

The theory that Jesus's relatives were angry that Joseph of Arimathea was the one to bury him is not too crazy in itself. After all, Jesus's relatives didn't seem to be too close to Jesus's new community of disciples, and to be disparaging of His ministry, per Matthew 12:46-50, Matthew 13:53-58, Mark 3:31-35, Mark 6:1-6, and Luke 8:19-21. However, John 2:1-12 and Acts 1:12-14 remember them in a different light - it is shown that Jesus's relatives were in fact among His disciples too.

Regardless of which memory is correct (assuming they contradict each other at all to begin with), it still remains that Jesus's mother and aunt were most certainly among His disciples at least. If Bart Ehrman's hypothesis is correct, surely they would have noticed that several of their relatives have gone missing right after Jesus's burial, coinciding with His disappearance from the tomb.