Jesus Existed as a Historical Person who Started the Christian Movement

Docetists believed that since matter was evil, Jesus could not have a physical body; therefore, what the apostles interacted with, saw die on the cross and appear to them from the dead was in fact an illusion. There would be no need to resort to this illusion hypothesis if there were no witnesses claiming to have seen him. The fact that they resorted to this argument proves that even at that early time [70 CE] there was abundant eyewitness testimony of Jesus' existence to which they were responding. "Joseph Smith…he "died for a lie." Smith didn't die for something he believed was a lie, nor for his belief in Mormonism. He was arrested and killed for the destruction of the paper's printing press as detailed in the Nauvoo Expositor. "The early Christians would not be in a position to know if Jesus existed or the resurrection happened assuming the witnesses and miracle themselves had been non-existent," It is clear from 1 Cor 15:1, 6 that the Corinthians in 55 CE (less than 25 years after Jesus' death) already believed he existed, and believed that many eyewitnesses were still alive. Just imagine someone trying to convince you and people in your community that Elvis Presley came back to life 25 years ago and appeared to 500 people, most of whom are still alive today for investigation! Were these witnesses non-existent, how would this guy convince you and those in your community? Why would Paul appeal to witnesses he didn't have, so confidently? This would put him in a bad fix. His appeal to their knowledge of these witnesses makes it unlikely the witnesses didn't exist. "Their enemies were prone to similar fantastic belief, so the lack of disputation by them is unfortunate but unsurprising" Celsus wrote vigorously to discredit Christianity, He disputes the Gospel record of Jesus' ancestry, conception, birth, childhood, ministry, death, and resurrection, but never his existence; surely he would have attacked his existence as well had there been any proof the disciples had fabricated it. Celsus was a Greek philosopher who was not "prone to similar fantastic belief" and thus, by your standards, would have denied Jesus' existence had such been the case! "right under that Wikipedia lists "passages of disputed historical accuracy" including regarding the Council of Jerusalem" Previous examples from Acts that were once challenged as unhistorical are now proven history, it may only be a matter of time before the Jerusalem council follows suit. "Indeed, not only Josephus but all contemporary historians were silent" Thucydides' contemporaries were silent on the Peloponnesian war; doesn't mean it didn't happen. The gospel authors' contemporaries were silent too, big deal. Luke was a contemporary historian and was not silent. (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-4) He was a companion of Paul, placing the book before 70 AD. (Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16) Acts doesn't mention Jerusalem's fall (AD 70), or Nero's persecution (AD 64). Luke recorded Christian Martyrs: Stephen in Acts 7:55-60 and James in Acts 12:2. Why not write about the martyrs of the Nero's persecution as well -- if it happened before Acts was written? Why no mention of Paul's death? (AD 62-68) This gives an early date for Acts. Luke was written before Acts. "I am not at all sure we have less on the war than Jesus." We have only Thucydides' testimony on how the war happened, without it, we have no details of it; but we have 4 separate accounts of Jesus' life, plus non-Christian testimony and early fathers who confirm most of the Gospel story. "Your own claim is that eyewitnesses to Jesus' resurrection would be still alive in the AD 60s, yet so few were moved to write down such a miracle." Many eyewitnesses survived the Peloponnesian war, yet we only have one historical account of it, Thucydides. The fact that there were many witnesses to an event is no guarantee many of them will write about it or that their writings will survive. Luke 24:10 doesn't say there were "only" 4 women, Matthew 28:1 doesn't say there were "only" 2 women, its possible more were there. I am debating you right now on DDO; this doesn't prove that others are not also debating you on DDO just because I didn't mention them. "If four different persons had sat down to make up a story in collusion of a resurrection that never occurred, they would have made their four accounts appear to agree, at least on the surface. Whatever contradictions there might be in the four accounts would only come out after minute and careful study. But just the opposite is the case here. It is all on the surface that the apparent contradictions occur. It is only by careful and protracted study that the real agreement shines forth. It is just such a harmony as would not exist between four accounts fabricated in collusion. It is just such an agreement as would exist in four independent accounts of substantially the same circumstances, each narrator telling the same story from his own standpoint, relating such details as impressed him, omitting other details which did not impress him but which did impress another narrator and which the other narrator related…. They could not have been fabricated in collusion with one another—the very discrepancies urged prove this. Much less could they have been fabricated independently of one another. Four men sitting down independently of one another to fabricate an account of something that never occurred would have agreed with one another nowhere, but in point of fact the more we study these four accounts the more clearly we discover how marvelously they fit in with one another." (R. A. Torrey. Difficulties and Alleged Errors and Contradictions in the Bible, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1907, pp. 87-88) 1 Cor 15:5-8 doesn't contradict the appearances to the women because it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list of all the witnesses. First century Jewish writers tended to focus more on the males anyway. (Luke 3:23-38) Second-century testimony is unanimous in attributing the four Gospels to the persons that now carry their name. This suggests that they received their titles early; for if they had not, there would have been a great deal of speculation as to who had written them - "a variation of titles would have inevitably risen," as had happened with the apocryphal gospels. [R. T. The Evidence for Jesus. Downers Grove: IVP, 1986] Why were such unlikely characters chosen as authors? Luke is an obscure personage. Mark abandoned Paul. Matthew was also a tax collector (Jews hated tax collectors). Would you pick the IRS man, and an obscure apostle, to author your Gospel? Were obscure persons deliberately chosen as authors to fool us into thinking they were authentic? Nonsense! The Gospels must have received their titles immediately - not in the second century. For an anonymous author to have penned a Gospel, and have it accepted as from the hand of any authoritative person, would have required them to first produce the Gospel, then present it as the work of another; they would have to concoct some story as to how it came peculiarly to be in their possession; get around the problem of why a work by such a person disappeared or was previously unknown; then get the church at large, first in his area and then throughout the Roman Empire (and would not the claimed discovery of such a document cause a sensation, and controversy?), to accept this work as genuine. Can Con explain how these logistic difficulties were overcome? Can he give us the specifics of how X could have managed to pull off such a hoax on the church as a whole? Is there any parallel to this in secular history, where an enormous group at large was bamboozled by (and continued to be bamboozled by) not just one forgery, but four, attributed in a couple of cases to members of an inner circle, in widely separated places and times? I thank Con for participating in this informative debate.