purported "proof" of jesus' resurrection.

[scriabin124]

So basically I'm in this christ-centered drug rehab house, and they were concerned about my lack of belief in the christian faith. The guy who runs/funds it is a retired 82 year old engineer, and they figured he'd be the best person to talk to me about why he's a christian. I have a lot more respect for him than I do the others, for the simple fact that he believes that faith without any foundations of proof is foolish, and that historical proof should be an impetus for furthering and bettering your faith in jesus. Ok so I ate lunch with him one day a couple months ago while he ran through an outline of his thesis. While I have many reasons for not believing in Christianity, I still thought he had something decent going. It's bothered me the whole time that I've waited this long to do this, to get a (hopefully nonbiased) opinion from fellow skeptics on this matter. So i'll do my  best to explain it in this post.

            So it says (on the paper he ran off for me) that Jesus was a historical figure who died on a roman cross. That his existence was confirmed by both believers and nonbelievers. This would incline one to believe that his existence is real and non biased. I've not the scholarly knowledge to go too much into this, but it says on here that among the people who did not believe in his divinity but still knew he was real were Josephus, Eusebius, Thallus (Gentile writer) and Cornelius Tacitus (great Roman Historian).

            It says that according to history the Body of Jesus was never produced (or the tomb was empty on resurrection morning). Historians and skeptics agree this must be true.

              What happened to the body? One of two possibilities
                  A. Enemies got the body. (Romans or Jews) All they would have had to do was to produce the body of christ from the tomb in order to disprove his divinity and put the issue to rest. They never did (according to history, ahem* according to this paper)
                  B. Friends/followers of Jesus stole the body to perpetrate a hoax.
                       "For men to die for publicly proclaiming that a historical event occurred, (without normal human motivations and knowing it is a lie) and that a simple ceasing of this lie would eliminate both persecution and death (they were all believed to have been executed for standing up for what they believed in), would be a miracle greater than the resurrection itself.

                I did find the latter statement intriguing. Wouldn't they have discovered that jesus was lying the whole time if they had had a body to steal in the first place? Doesn't make sense that they would die for a cause they knew was BS.


                  Well there you go theres a really rough sketch of his "proof" of the resurection, and hence the divinity of christ. I'm leaving it up to you guys to pick out the flaws in this whole argument. I'd feel like a pussy for not at least giving the man an attempt at a counter-explanation

[AlP]

Hi scriabin124! I don't think we've met. Welcome to the forum. I don't know all that much about the Christian religion. It seems the story of the disappearance of Jesus' body is of some significance to Christians. Can someone who understands this help out?

[pinkocommie]

Your guy converges onto an unsubstantiated path right off the bat by declaring that the historical existence of Jesus is a fact.  The Josephus passages that specifically reference Jesus have been controversial for a very long time and the evidence that his writing may have been augmented by a christian apologist in a later century is compelling.

By doing a quick search of your other names on google, I found exclusively theist sites claiming these were valid examples of Jesus' historical presence and lots of secular (not necessarily atheist) sites raising questions.  Regardless of whose information you deem more credible, that raises a red flag in my mind.  To consider any more of your friend's argument, you have to agree that in spite of every single example given that proves Jesus existed being questioned for it's authenticity in some way, you believe these examples are acceptable.  

In the event that you feel there is proof for Jesus to have existed, that doesn't make the accounts of his life and death as explained in the bible factual also.  The way the argument reads to me is this:

1 - Accept that Jesus was real based on suspicious evidence.  This also requires that you ignore the overwhelming lack of evidence of his existence even when you consider these few examples as viable.

2 - Accept that the Bible depicted his death and burial accurately even though there is absolutely no substantiated proof of this, suspicious or otherwise.

3 - Because of the acceptance of 2, by proxy accept that his missing body could only be explained in three ways - friendly intervention, hostile intervention, and resurrection.

4 - Accept that the only possible explanation for friendly/hostile intervention is illogical.  In reality, either/or statements tend to exclude a who hell of a lot of other possible explanations.

That's a whole lot of accepting in order to agree with this argument which doesn't make it a very good argument at all, in my opinion.

[scriabin124]

right, I would like to look more into that kind of stuff (the validity of historical "witnesses") it's just really hard to get all the facts straight sometimes. I guess ancient history has to be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe ancient Rome never even existed !

[elliebean]

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/4front95.html

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/marshall_gauvin/did_jesus_really_live.html

http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/appendixd.html

http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

These might help.  

[bfat]

There's also the possibility that he wasn't actually dead when he was removed from the cross, and just walked out 3 days later.  I'm just saying, "doctors" in those days didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground...

Also, he could have been a zombie.  

These arguments are just as substantial as resurrection...  possibly more so.

[Ihateusernames]

There's also the possibility that he wasn't actually dead when he was removed from the cross, and just walked out 3 days later.  I'm just saying, "doctors" in those days didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground...

Also, he could have been a zombie.  

These arguments are just as substantial as resurrection...  possibly more so.

Doctors might have sucked, but the roman centurions charged with execution sure knew when someone was dead or not (killing was sort of their job afterall.)  Swoon theory is so, so silly... but whatever.... Specially if you take the time to think about a bloodied, nailed up, dehydrated, almost dead Jesus walking into the apostles and saying "omg, lets totally spin this as I died and am God, just hide me for the rest of my life... and... can you all go on to die for this lie? sweeet."

To the Jesus not existing posts...

If we are doing purely internet based research which allows anyone who can write a web page's opinion as pseudo-facts, you can basically prove anything you want.  Any sort of academic inquiry will most certainly lead one to the high likely hood that Jesus existed, as almost all the academics of modern day accept he did (this isn't an appeal to authority, its fact... go check it out.)  It was only a scattered handful of academics of the 18th-19th century that denied he existed, but it is only uninformed internet spots mixed with various persons and ideals desire's that keep the idea alive.

-Ihateusernames

[pinkocommie]

If we are doing purely internet based research which allows anyone who can write a web page's opinion as pseudo-facts, you can basically prove anything you want.  Any sort of academic inquiry will most certainly lead one to the high likely hood that Jesus existed, as almost all the academics of modern day accept he did (this isn't an appeal to authority, its fact... go check it out.)  It was only a scattered handful of academics of the 18th-19th century that denied he existed, but it is only uninformed internet spots mixed with various persons and ideals desire's that keep the idea alive.

-Ihateusernames

I learned about the historical  inconsistencies regarding Jesus in college in a religions class.  I would consider that source of information academic.  

[SSY]

If we are doing purely internet based research which allows anyone who can write a web page's opinion as pseudo-facts, you can basically prove anything you want.  Any sort of academic inquiry will most certainly lead one to the high likely hood that Jesus existed, as almost all the academics of modern day accept he did (this isn't an appeal to authority, its fact... go check it out.)  It was only a scattered handful of academics of the 18th-19th century that denied he existed, but it is only uninformed internet spots mixed with various persons and ideals desire's that keep the idea alive.

-Ihateusernames

Come on now, this is hardly rigorous, you can't ask others to go and fill in the facts for your claims, if you want people to believe this, furnish us with some papers, primary sources, contemporaneous accounts of his life. Saying " as almost all the academics of modern day accept he did" rings just like a creationist saying "Many scientists dispute the evolutionist religion", because it is totally unverified, and is not conclusive proof even if it were. Can you point to some extra biblical sources that describe Jesus? Quoting the part may be handy, as I have no ancient manuscripts on me.

[elliebean]

If we are doing purely internet based research which allows anyone who can write a web page's opinion as pseudo-facts, you can basically prove anything you want.

I never tried to prove anything, just pointed to some relevant opinions.

Any sort of academic inquiry will most certainly lead one to the high likely hood that Jesus existed,

You're more than welcome to do any kind of inquiry you want. Shouldn't be that difficult, since you've already arrived at a conclusion.

...as almost all the academics of modern day accept he did (this isn't an appeal to authority,

Yes it is.

its fact... go check it out.)

You go check it out. I'm not that interested.

It was only a scattered handful of academics of the 18th-19th century that denied he existed, but it is only uninformed internet spots mixed with various persons and ideals desire's that keep the idea alive.

Well, then obviously he did exist. Good job.  

[Zyva]

So it says (on the paper he ran off for me) that Jesus was a historical figure who died on a roman cross. That his existence was confirmed by both believers and nonbelievers. This would incline one to believe that his existence is real and non biased. I've not the scholarly knowledge to go too much into this, but it says on here that among the people who did not believe in his divinity but still knew he was real were Josephus, Eusebius, Thallus (Gentile writer) and Cornelius Tacitus (great Roman Historian).

Nice to meet you scriabin!!
If you really want to know more about it, you should check out some of Bart D. Erhman's books! "Misquoting Jesus" was the first that I read.
There are lots of mentions of Christians in early historical writings, those early historians sometimes explained what a Christian was to those who had never heard of them. (They hadn't taken over the world yet. )  To explain what a Christian was they had to mention the founder of the religion, Jesus.  That doesn't mean they knew him or that he existed.
As for the men you mention above,

Josephus lived from 37-100 AD, by the time he mentioned Christ, Jesus had been dead quite some time. He mentioned Jesus twice in his writings. The authenticity of his long mention of Jesus, has been disputed for many years with the majority of the experts saying that it was changed after his death to make it sound as if he knew him. Obviously he didn't.
His shorter mention of Jesus, he says "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ" is relatively undisputed, so maybe he knew James.

Eusebius was a Bishop of the church and was born 230 years after the crucifixion took place. Of course, he mentioned Jesus in his writings, but how could he have possibly known anything about Jesus?

Very little is known about Thallus, none of his writings survive to date. Julius Africanus quotes Thallus as saying that an earthquake and an eclipse of the sun happened in  and around Judea.  That's it. Thallus doesn't mention Jesus at all in any of his writings as far as I'm aware.

Tacticus who lived from 56-117AD wrote about Christians, like I mentioned above he was describing Christians, so he had to give a brief history of who they were. I think it'd be better for you to read what he actually said, so I'll quote him.

Nero fastened the guilt of starting the blaze and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians [Chrestians] by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius 14-37 at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.[83]

Interesting isn't it?

As far as the body of Jesus goes, my guess is that the Romans and the Jews didn't care enough to bother with it and the Jews and Gentiles who had been following and praising Jesus weren't about to admit that his body was rotting in a cave.
People who get caught up in that kind of hysteria and belief will go to any length to prove that what they believe is true, rather than admit that they've been duped, even if it means completely ignoring facts or changing history. Just my opinion.

Hope it helps!