Ty Nienke tries to argue the resurrection case in his YouTube video here.
I was apparently the first to reply, and I replied as follows:
Barry Jones
Not sure why it would matter whether Jesus rose from the dead: making Jesus relevant to modern people requires you to do something biblical authors never do: make the NT "apply to" modern day people.
I don't see how any Christian has any hope of showing the bible's applicability to modern people, to such a degree that it would render today's skeptics foolish. The bible doesn't talk about itself and doesn't talk about what people living 2,000 years after the authors wrote are supposed to do. Yet today's Christians fallaciously put just as much stock in a non-biblical claim like "the bible applies to us today" no less than they put stock in clear biblical claims such as John 3:16 (!?)
A skeptic could cite Christianity's in-house debates about dispensationalism, to justify saying not even spiritually alive people can be reasonably sure whether anything in the NT "applies to" people today, thus they are being unreasonable to 'expect' spiritually dead unbelievers to recognize biblical "truth".
If Jesus' miracles are supposed to mean he was approved of by God, why don't today's apologists stay consistent with that reasoning, and insist that if miracles happen in any modern church, god is similarly manifesting his approval of that church's particular theology? Does the bible provide criteria for knowing when the working of a true miracle signals god's approval of the miracle-worker's theological viewpoint, and when the working of a true miracle leaves that question unanswered?
I overcome the "early" nature of the 1st Corinthians 15 "creed" with Mark 3:21 and John 7:5, which under the conservative view are facts that occurred before Jesus died and thus are far earlier than the Corinthians "creed", supra. According to Mark 3:21 and John 7:5, Jesus was incapable of working genuinely supernatural miracles. If your brother or son was running around town raising people from the dead, what are the odds that your disagreements with him about points of theology might blind you to the obvious implications of God's working through him in such an undeniable way?
No, if Jesus' family found him decidedly unconvincing, it wasn't because he dashed their dreams of a military messiah, it was more likely because they checked out his miracle claims and found them false, and therefore began to view him the way most people today view Benny Hinn and other faith-healers....a very popular charismatic charlatan.
And why did the original eyewitnesses to the empty tomb expect it to continue being sealed three days after Jesus died? Can we be reasonable to deduce that these women must not have found Jesus' prior miracles very convincing, and therefore didn't put a lot of stock in his prior predictions that he would rise after three days' being in the grave?
Skepticism of Jesus' resurrection is very reasonable, and in actual daily life, reasonableness always trumps accuracy.
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