The Gospel of Jesus is a patchwork of plagiarized material from non-Judeo-Christian sources

I will start by responding to some of my opponents statements and then explain why my opponents case falls short of winning this round. "Martyrs. All religions have had martyrs. A person can sincerely believe in something, even if it is false, and even die for that belief. History has shown this repeatedly." There is a huge difference between any of the disciples of christ dieing and being martyred than their is for anyone else in history, this is because they were all dieing for one simple event. They all said they saw Jesus rise from the grave they were dieing for something they were certain they saw. They had no promise of wealth except for in the afterlife unless someone can prove otherwise. History show's us that people will not just die for a lie they will confess they were lieing especially when it's over an event not a faith. The Christian faith wouldn't of been strong enough to brainwash anyone in fact I want to point out the disciples sadly were cowards when it came to Christ being crucified. Why all of a sudden are they willing to die if Christ never came back from the dead? *"The Gospels. The problem with using the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) as evidence of Jesus' existence as a real person is that that involves circular reasoning. To say a character in a story is true because the story says it is so is circular logic and thus without merit. Was Alice historical because the story Alice in Wonderland says she existed? No." We must in order to be fair literary critics: Aristotle's dictum that "the benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself...One must listen to the claim's of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualified himself by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies." The New Testament claims to be history and provides no contradictions, Alice in Wonderland doesn't claim to be history. ---------------------------------------------------------- Okay so the pro has provided a lot of examples of people who never wrote about Christ. For starters let's say a guy is responsible and is only going to write about the history of the city of Rome. Only if Christ walks in to the city of Rome is he going to possibly end up in that report of history. That does not mean a historian recording events further east cannot write legitamitely about Christ. One thing we never took time to look at was Christs family and there reports but the reality is, is that their is no source as accurate as the New Testament. This brings me to my next point that I still have three people who lived for a while after Christ and attest to the credentials of Luke, Mark, Matthew and John in their recording and they account for the accuracy of the recording in the Gospels. My opponent has failed to attack those evidences, thefore he must agree or can show no flaw in them. Also none of his sources ever directly contradict any of mine. In fact he has a few sources that beg the question of Christ potentially being a real person when his case his about saying he christ never existed so the pro's evidences hurt the pro a little bit. (In fact if we used Aristotles dictum in this case we could from my opponents case give credence to the existence of Christ and consider my opponents case to be to some degree factually inaccurate by never showing certainty in his information about "The historian Tacitus lived two decades after the alleged death of Christ, so anything Tacitus wrote of Christ was secondhand and very postdated. Tacitus mentions Christians being persecuted under Nero; but this passage is considered by many to be a forgery, since it was never mentioned by the zealous defender of Christianity Bishop Eusebius, and no other christian writer mentions it prior to the fifteenth century." "A passage in his historical writings mentions Jesus, but this passage is considered a forgery by even many Christian apologists. The passage mentioning Jesus is believed to have been added to Josephus' writings by the early Church Bishop Eusebius. Josephus was alive when Jesus supposedly lived, and yet nothing is mentioned about Jesus Christ by Josephus except for perhaps one forged passage" Also the pro fails to say how we know these are a forgery, all he says is "considered by many to be a forgery". Consider is defined as "to think about carefully" it is not enough for the pro to have me just think that the story of Christ is true so why is it enough for the pro to just think my information might be a forgery. Should we not require proof of forgery. Again none of his information directly contradicts mine. So according to Aristotles dictum we actually must give my information the benifit of the doubt initially. However I have sources to allow anyone to follow through and check my accuracy. Finally. The pro has not attacked any of my information in this first round about the accuracy of scripture and I just want to do some comparison to other pieces of history we consider reliable that have less accuracy. In comparison to other works of text in antiquity we have the Illiad by Homer with the second most mss at 643 mss in extant, In the case of Caesars Gallic wars there are only 9 or 10 good mss. There were 142 books of the Roman History Livy and only 35 survive, these are know to us from not more than 20 mss of any consequence. The NT has 20,000 lines with only about 40 lines or 400 words in doubt while the Illiad has about 15,600 lines, where 764 lines of the Illiad are questioned. This 5% corruption compares with one half of one percent of similar emendations of the NT. Why do we consider Roman texts reliable when there is less to account for their accuracy than that of the New Testament this is incredibly intellectually dishonest. Well that's about it for the case thanks for the debate. Also I would again just like to say my information for the reliability of the bible only scratched the surface I have about 30 sources worth of information on the Archaeology. However good debate.