Jesus is the Son of God who Died on the Cross

Rebuttal to Con's round 2 con't: Mohammed wan't an eyewitness to Jesus and was in no position to know who he was or if he died as the Gospel writers were. We have no witnesses to validate that Mohammed saw an angel. How do we know he wasn't lying? We have Matthew, John, Paul, Peter, and James, five witnesses who saw Jesus and wrote about him; plus 500 eyewitnesses whom Paul cites to support his case; I'll take their word over Mohammed's. "we have very clear proof that the pieces of the Koran were almost immediately transcribed and by a team of scribes by Mohammad's side." Who were they? I can name all the Gospel writers and show when and where they lived; I challenge Con to do the same for these mysterious scribes who wrote the Koran. Also, did they see Mohammed talking to the angel? If not, how do they know Mohammed wasn't making it all up as he shouted out of the dark hole in that cave? In contrast, the events of Jesus life were public, not hidden in a cave, so when the Gospels were written there were eyewitnesses around who would have repudiated them if they did not tell the truth about Jesus. "I cannot offer a direct counter to my opponents claims of "intentional embarrassment" in the gospels. It was irregular during the time period to be sure," There you have it, vote Pro. "Resurrection, as it currently stands, is not possible by any modern means." But it is possible by supernatural means, true? "too much decay had already taken place in the body of Jesus for it to be viable for resurrection." Surah 75:1, 3, 6, 40 supports the resurrection even people long dead, so is Con disagreeing with the Qur'an? "I ask my opponent why I should believe the testimony of 11 men, who lived in an age where any sort of natural phenomena was met with a fear of God, that a man rose from the dead." (1) Because if you distrust them based on the time period in which they lived, to be consistent, you have to distrust all historical writers of that time, and (2) the Qur'an commands you to follow the Gospel. (Sura 5, Al-Ma'ida [The Table], verses 46, 47) "they did not even examine the body of Christ. What they had experienced in the hours after Jesus' supposed resurrection was an apparition of the man, a ghostly image of their savior." Thomas did examine the body in the presence of witnesses. (John 20:24-29) Hallucination? there were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective. Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the 11 disciples, the two disciples at Emmaus, the fisherman on the shore, to James (his "brother" or cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3-8). Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses -- he could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true. Hallucinations usually last a few seconds or minutes; rarely hours. This one hung around for forty days (Acts 1:3). Not only did the disciples not expect this, they didn't even believe it at first -- They thought he was a ghost; he had to eat something to prove he was not. (Lk 24:36-43) Hallucinations do not eat. The resurrected Christ did, on at least two occasions (Lk 24:42-43; Jn 21:1-14). The disciples touched him (Mt 28:9; Lk 24:39; Jn 20:27). They also spoke with him, and he spoke back. Figments of your imagination do not hold profound, extended conversations with you, unless you have the kind of mental disorder that isolates you. But this "hallucination" conversed with at least eleven people at once, for forty days (Acts 1:3). The apostles could not have believed in the "hallucination" if Jesus' corpse had still been in the tomb. They would have checked for it; if it was there, they could not have believed. If the apostles had hallucinated and then spread their hallucinogenic story, the Jews would have stopped it by producing the body. A hallucination would not explain the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the inability to produce the corpse. No theory can explain all these data except a real resurrection. The hallucination theory breaks down on the fact that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Lk 24:13-31; Jn 20:15; 21:4). If you hallucinated seeing your best friend would you not recognize him? "Also, determining which holy book contains the true word of God is paramount to this debate." No, it isn't. My claim is simply that the New Testament is reliable because it is eyewitness and contemporaneous testimony from people who give evidence of honesty, and is supported by external testimony and other historical proofs of reliability. Doesn't have to be God's word for this debate, just accurate history! This Con hasn't refuted. "the Koran, which was transcribed from the mouth of Mohammad and a team of scholars offers a more solid basis for evidence." Mohammed and a team of anonymous scholars who never saw Jesus or lived in his time is solid evidence of who Jesus was and if he died? Don't be silly Con. It doesn't matter how acuartely they recorded the Qur'an, if they were not there to see Jesus in the first century CE their testimony is mere HERESAY! Hearsay isn't evidence! Rebuttal to Con's round 3 "The gospels are not related to Acts" How can that be when Luke was continuing in Acts from where he left off in the Gospel of Luke? (Luke 1:1-4; 24:44-52, 1-11; Acts 1:1-14) "since my opponent is drawing his own rules up as to determine the validity of a source material," I'm not, I'm using the same rules historians in general use for all ancient documents. I'll make brief points on a few of them: (1) There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. the time between Jesus's death and the writing of the gospels is just too short for this to happen. This point has been well-explained by A. N. Sherwin-White in his book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament ((Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 188-91) Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is a professional historian of times prior to and contemporaneous with Jesus. According to Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman and Greek history are usually biased and removed one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence the course of Roman and Greek history. For example, the two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than 400 years after Alexander's death, and yet classical historians still consider them to be trustworthy. The fabulous legends about Alexander the Great did not develop until during the centuries after these two writers. According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be "unbelievable." Unfortunately I am again out of space, but I will finish this rebuttal in the next round. I thank Con for his thought provoking remarks.