Belief in Christianity is rational

Thanks Pro. I. Preface So this debate has taken a different tack to my usual debates, which is refreshing, anyway time to tie things up. II. Overview I have attacked the rationality of belief in Christianity by attacking the historical reliability of the New Testament, from which I have come from several angles. I have argued that the New Testament does not qualify under the criteria set by the Historical-Critical method, and is a long way from being close to ideal as good, substantiated sources of information for regular historical events, let alone supernatural historical events for which there are further philosophical considerations (which have and will not been discussed in this debate). To summarize, the New Testament fails on numerous levels: 1. The authors were not eye-witnesses 2. The authors almost certainly could not be eye-witnesses 3. The documents were not contemporary 4. The earliest original Gospels were written nearly four decades after the latest events (resurrection), and seven decades after the earliest events (birth of Jesus) 5. The mode of information transfer between these periods were oral tradition, which is completely unreliable in the circumstances described 6. The Gospels are not independent, with the important events (resurrection, baptism of Jesus, immaculate conception etc.) not independently attested. As such we have far fewer sources for these 7. The Gospels were not disinterested, and the contents not corroborated by the dozens historians that lived during that time period in that location 8. The Gospels are not textually preserved, we do not have the originals and our earliest complete Gospels are over 200 years after they were originally authored This is certainly not a complete list, but this is exactly what I have argued for so far in this debate. To accept Christianity one needs to accept the religion based on evidence that fails spectacularly to meet even rudimentary historical standards. The standards by which the New Testament is attested is far lower than those that would be accepted for the events of other historical figures such as Socrates, Alexander the Great, Julius Caeser, etc. Because of just these facts, belief in Christianity is plainly irrational. III. Final Rebuttals Textual transmission: Pro pretty much ignores what I said about the manuscripts, where I listed the earliest manuscript (P52) which was at ~50 years after it’s original authorship and the fact that the earliest complete manuscripts are over 200, nearly 300 years after they were originally written. In fact Pro grossly overstates and fails to mention just what the earliest manuscripts look like, here are some pictures of the earliest manuscripts P52 P104 P90 As you can see, our earliest manuscripts contain barely a fragment of a fragment of the text, and it isn’t until centuries later where we have manuscripts from which we can construct a Gospel from. To quote Bart Erhman, a New Testament textual critic: “"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...."” Indeed Pro ignores the enormous number of errors that are clearly contained within the manuscripts, which gives abundant evidence that the scribes can and do make mistakes, more mistakes than there are words in the New Testament (!), which numbers over 200,000 from the ~6,000 manuscripts (including the tiny fragments like I have already shown). Pro’s quote is rather laughable and misrepresentative of the facts. Pro moreover mistates the types of errors, yes many do not affect the reading of the script, but many indeed do affect how it reads, and I provided 2 major examples of forgeries or major changes that is known by the Scribes. Oral Traditions: Pro again provides completely irrelevant information regarding oral traditions, his argument: “There have been cases of people reciting poems lasting several days from memory” Excellent…. What about 40+ years?! The most likely chain of events are that multiple people lie within a chain of oral traditions, akin to the telephone game or Chinese whispers. Moreover the stories can and do change. The fact that the four Gospels themselves hardly agree on many facts is plain evidence of this. Different times, days for Jesus’ , three kings/wise men, how many blind men besought Jesus, was there one angel or three at the tomb, etc. Hundreds of such contradictions which would at the very least attest to the unreliability of the sources from which the Gospel writers were obtaining their information. http://www.evilbible.com... http://infidels.org... Authorship: Pro didn’t actually present any positive evidence that would lead us to believe that the apostles actually did author the New Testament, and therefore he has spectacularly failed to fulfil his burden of proof here, much less managed to refute my multiple points against the possibility of them authoring them. He has left my points regarding literacy and commissioning unrefuted, and the timescales involved making such even more unlikely. Interdependancy: “Most scholars accept the four-source theory as a solution to the synoptic problem” Exactly, The Gospel of Mark, the ‘Q’ Gospel, and Mark & Luke’s independent sources (oral traditions most likely), which I gave a diagram and pie charts in my opening round. The core points regarding Jesus, the resurrection, baptism, crucifixion and immaculate conception are all part of Mark, and as such we do not have independent attestation of these events, we just have copies of the same attestation, which we already know is not first hand. Pro essentially concedes this point. 6) Jesus Existence: Again nothing concrete provided by Pro. Tacticus only mentioned Jesus in passing, and only what other Christians were saying at the time. IV. Conclusion: As attested to in the overview, belief in Christianity can only be irrational, in the face of what I provided. And Pro has simply not met any burden of proof to demonstrate otherwise. IV. References