My reply to Lee Strobel's YouTube video about Jesus' resurrection

 I posted the following comments in reply to one of Lee Strobel's videos about Jesus' resurrection and the allegedly "early" nature of the "creed" in 1st Corinthians 15:3-4.   That video is here.  I had to post my reply in two parts because it was too long as a single message.

First, even assuming the skeptical theory of legendary development is wrong, the reasonableness of resurrection skepticism does not require that the resurrection accounts be late legends. How many people who attend a Benny Hinn crusade testify just a few days later about how Hinn healed people? How soon after the alleged appearances of Mary in Fatima were they first reported? Very soon, And yet you couldn't care less, the early nature of the miracle testimony doesn't sway you in the least, you are STILL skeptical. So you have no right to pretend that if the late-legend hypothesis is refuted, this forces the conclusion that the reports are truthful. AS IF THE ONLY TIME TESTIMONY CAN CONTAIN LIES IS WHEN IT IS LATE (!?) You will say the rumor about Paul in Acts 21:18-24 was false, so apparently, thousands of Jews within the mother church CAN screw up the truth within the lifetime of the person in question. The ending of John's gospel admits that a misunderstanding of Jesus had prevailed among the "brethren". So apparently, testimony being "early" does precisely nothing to intellectually obligate an unbeliever to be more trusting that the testimoy is true. And Irenaeus says John wrote a gospel to refute Cerinthus, which logically requires that Cerinthus' more gnostic version of the gospel was even earlier than John's gospel...yet Christians today insist that Cerinthus was wrong, no matter how early his version of the gospel was. So stop telling yourself that "early" means "truthful". YOU don't even believe that.

Second, the truths in Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 are earlier than the "creed" of 1st Cor. 15:3-4, and those gospel texts show that Jesus' own family didn't find his miracles convincing. There is nothing unreasonable in saying, on the basis of these texts, that Jesus couldn't do genuinely supernatural miracles, and so, like with so many other religious fraudsters, Jesus might have been able to wow large crowds, but they were stupid and gullible. A messiah who cannot do real miracles, probably wouldn't be selected by God to rise from the dead, nor to die for anybody's sins.

Third, even assuming Jesus rose from the dead, Deut. 18 warns that even false prophets can possibly perform true miracles. Of course the test is whether the prophet spoke consistently with Mosaic law. Jesus did not, he forgave sins often in contexts neither expressing or implying he wanted them to obey the Mosaic ritual. You will say Jesus was god and could change the rules, but I deny he is god, so your presupposition of Jesus' divinity does not impose an intellectual obligation on a skeptic in any degree. I call Paul a liar, so I don't really care whether he was calling Jesus god in 50 a.d., Paul's word is not the end of an argument, but the beginning.

Fourth, if we cannot find fault with ignorant teens who accept Christ and thus make an ultimate judgment call about Jesus' resurrection before they even know about, much less have any ability to refute, all the skeptical arguments, then fairness demands that YOU cannot find fault with ignorant skeptics who reject Christ and thus make an ultimate judgment call about Jesus' resurrection before they even know about, much less have any ability to refute, all the apologetics arguments. Is it written in the stars that only Christians are allowed to benefit from ignorance? No.

Fifth, the NT portrays James as a Judaizer leading a large church of legalistic Christians (Acts 21:20), and Josephus reports that the more scrupulous Jews were angered when James was put to death, which would hardly be the case if James had been preaching to them things they considered blasphemous, such as "Christ died for your sins" or "Jesus rose from the dead". And this legalistic church shows by their dumbfounded response in Acts 11:18 that they would never have guessed God granted repentance to Gentiles unless Peter revealed his vision story to them. And contrary to Christian scholarly trifles, apostle Paul is a liar, the rift in Acts 15 and Galatians 2 wasn't between him and some ultra-conservative faction of the Jerusalem church, it was between him and the entire Jerusalem church, period. So since it is reasonable to say the original apostles were Judaizers, who therefore continued seeing divine significance in Temple ritual and animal sacrifice, would never have viewed Jesus' death as an atonement, therefore, we can be reasonable to say the first part of the Corinthian creed (i.e., "Christ died for our sins") wasn't given to Paul by the original 12 apostles during the critical early period.

Sixth, Paul, using language identical to the "creed" in 1st Cor. 15:3-4, says in 11:23 that he received "from the Lord" actual words of the historical Jesus at the last supper. That is, even if Paul really did get gospel facts from the original 12 apostles, he was not willing to properly credit these human sources, he just characterizes these as facts which the "Lord" revealed to him. So the issue is not the actual historical truth, but merely what Paul meant with his words, since you as a bible believer are stuck with whatever Paul meant, you don't have the option of saying Paul got the gospel wrong, or lied about which sources he got it from. So Paul is being somewhat dishonest in 1st Cor. 15:3-4, if by "received", he means "from other apostles". But see next argument for why that's probably not what he meant.

Seventh, Paul in Galatians 1 speaks about how he "received" the gospel, and in vv. 11-12 explicitly denies that the method involved the input of any other human being. It was SOLELY by divine telepathy, at least according to Paul. So there cannot be anything unreasonable in the skeptical hypothesis which infers on the basis of Galatians 1, that when he says "received" in 1st Cor. 15:3, he does NOT mean "from other people", but rather "solely from God". All attempts to make the Corinthian creed originate from apostles earlier than Paul, are abortive.

Eighth, that the NT texts are too ambiguous to justify Christian dogmatism is clear from the fact that even Christian apologists disagree with each other about how reliable the sources are. Lydia McGrew denies bible inerrancy, but says a resurrection case should include the witness of all canonical gospels. Licona, on the other hand, explicitly refuses to characterize the resurrection testimony of Matthew and John as "historical bedrock", because he thinks apostolic authorship of the gospels is "fuzziest" when it comes to Matthew and John.

Ninth, Paul cursed other Christians whose gospel disagreed with his own (Galatians1:6-9), which means "accepting Jesus" is nowhere near as safe as you pretend when you do apologetics or evangelism on unbelievers. According to Galatians 1, and Jesus' similar warning in Matthew 7:22-23, lots of sincere people who thought they were Christians will be getting a nasty surprise on Judgment Day despite their ability to truthfully say they performed many wonderful works in his name. The Galatian churches Paul founded obviously knew him personally, yet STILL abandoned his gospel in favor of the legalistic Judaizer gospel. So the atheist is only being reasonable by refusing to do anything that might cause him to commit the additional sin of heresy. And yet doctrinal divisions in Christianity for the last 2,000 years makes it reasonable to infer that the NT text is fatally ambiguous as to meaning, and therefore, remaining an unbeliever is an evil that is less serious than the idiot who take a chance and finds out he didn't accept the right Jesus, and ends up in hell forever.

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Tenth, you preach that God wants a personal relationship with me, which means you are committing the fallacy of equivocation. You intend for us to define "personal relationship" normally but in fact you mean a relationship with an invisible man who never interacts with his followers except through writings of dubious text, origin and authorship from 2,000 years ago, and who apparently seems to think that leaving his sincere followers in the dark about important aspects of their daily lives is best...which must mean that Christian apologists are more eager to promote divine/human relations than God himself. A skeptic could not possibly be unreasonable to demand that if God wants me to make a radical commitment to Jesus, he first show me radical authentication of the relevant evidence. The arguments of apologists do not "radically authenticate" that evidence, they merely show that the evidence often conforms to rules of historiography.

Eleventh, you will insist that all skepticism toward Jesus' resurrection is unreasonable, but you are simply overstating how wonderful your "evidence" is. Reasonableness can be consistent with accuracy, but by no means demands accuracy. Not all jurors who convict an innocent person were necessarily stupid, blind, drunk, biased, bribed, etc. So even assuming skepticism is "wrong", that doesn't automatically mean skeptics are "unreasonable".

Twelfth, it is acceptable to say that this or that skeptic was unreasonable, but it is illogical to jump from there to "skepticism is unreasonable". Just like if I hear stupid arguments from stupid Christians, i should not jump to the conclusion "Christianity is unreasonable". One particular skeptic, myself, has very strong arguments showing the reasonableness of doubting Jesus' resurrection. You'll probably never know how Lee Strobel would hold up under cross-examination, because he refuses to debate informed skeptics. At my blog I've been challenged resurrection apologists for years. Aside from a few anonymous YouTube know-nothings, nobody has dared accept the challenge.

Thirteenth, more and more conservative Christian scholars are rejecting the eternal conscious torment view of hell for Annihilationism, which says God will extinguish your sense of self-awareness. Since it is reasonable to adopt that interpretation, you are deprived of the ability to use "hell" to scare the skeptic into heaven: the skeptic has already accepted that nature will extinguish her consciousness, so that rejecting Jesus is about as dangerous as rejecting Mormonism. Therefore, the skeptic cannot be said to be ignoring any serious danger "warnings".

Finally, Given that your god is hidden and allegedly infinite in his ways, you don't have the first clue what he wants me to study first, nor for how long. So you forfeit the right to balk if I answer those questions for myself. I've decided that studying Christian apologetics for 20 years justifies me to draw ultimate conclusions about the reasonableness of Christianity.

I've challenged Christian apologists for years to produce the one miracle they think the most impervious to falsification, and they never respond.

Come get you some:

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-questions-to-dr-craig-keener.html