Cold Case Christianity: Yes, the disciples lied about the resurrection of Jesus

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

The Truth About Easter: Did The Disciples Lie About the Resurrection?

Posted: 31 Mar 2018 07:30 AM PDT

Homicide detectives are perhaps the least trusting people in the country.

That's because they know perfectly well that the only correct explanations for data are purely naturalistic.  If a criminal suspect's alibi is that he was in two different places at the same time, you don't ask the jury to consider the possibility of the supernatural, you tell the jury that because miracles don't happen, the suspect is obviously guilty.

My own experience investigating murders has taught me to consider everyone a liar – until, at least, I have good reason to believe otherwise. I know that sounds pessimistic, but I learned a long time ago that mysteries don’t get solved if you believe everything you’re told. Maybe that’s why I rejected the claims of Christianity for so many years. I was an atheist until the age of thirty-five and like many other non-believers, I thought the claims related to the Resurrection of Jesus were most likely lies on the part of the alleged eyewitnesses.

You had the right attitude.  Can you imagine how horrific the downfall of America's justice system would be if the Courts started allowing defense attorneys to argue to the jury that they are allowed to seriously consider miracles as a way of explaining the Defendant's actions? 

Then I examined these claims using the tools of a detective.

In my years working robberies and homicides, I had the opportunity to investigate (and break) several conspiracy efforts. As a result, I now know what it takes to accomplish a conspiracy.

Actually, you don't know shit about what it would take to succeed in a first-century conspiracy to lie about Jesus.  They don't teach genre-identification at Homicide School.

Successful conspiracies typically involve the following five conditions:

A small number of conspirators – The smaller the number of conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy will be a success.

Generously forgetting the serious problems there are with apostolic authorship of two of the gospels, the resurrection accounts in the NT which come down to us today in first-hand form are Matthew, John and Paul.  That's all.  Since nobody has a clue on what basis Paul could allege that 500 people saw Jesus alive all at once, that's 500 people who were never on your list in the first place.  A small number of conspirators indeed remain.

Lies are difficult to maintain,

Tell that the Benny Hinn, whose live on-stage healings in front of thousands of people testify how easily religious fervor can suspend a person's critical faculties and cause them to automatically interpret anything they see as supporting the religion they've previously chosen to follow.

and the fewer the number of people who have to continue the lie, the better.

We have abundant evidence to support the contention that false religions can start up and become very popular when in fact the cult-leader's claims are total bullshit.  Look at Mormonism.  It's obviously a false form of Christianity, but it still managed to get millions to agree to the bullshit testimonies of the 3 men and 8 men. We know they never saw any gold plates, yet millions of people swear that such testimony was honest.

Mormonism teaches us that a person's desire for the religion to be true, can make them unspeakably forgiving toward the religion's evidentiary shortcomings.  For some reason, most people care more about how the message can change their lives for the better...than in whether the message is actually true.

A short time span – It’s hard enough to tell a lie once; even more difficult to repeat the lie consistently over a long period of time. For this reason, the shorter the conspiracy, the better. The ideal conspiracy would involve only two conspirators, and one of the conspirators would kill the other right after the crime. That’s a conspiracy that would be awfully hard to break.

Read Acts 21:17-24...Paul visits Jerusalem, but James complains to him that the thousands of Jews who have converted, believe in a rumor that says Paul teaches other Jews outside the mainland to abandon Mosaic customs, and James seems to think the situation is desperate because of this rumor (i.e., the fact that a rumor was false in the first century, did nothing to prevent thousands of people from accepting it as true anyway):

 17 After we arrived in Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly.
 18 And the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present.
 19 After he had greeted them, he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.
 20 And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law;
 21 and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs.
 22 "What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.
 23 "Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow;
 24 take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law. (Acts 21:17-24 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Thorough and immediate communication – This is key. One (or more) of the conspirators will eventually be questioned by authorities.

If the authorities give a shit enough about the allegedly false religious claim to bother investigating it.  You only think Christianity bothered unbelievers so much in the first century because you still put stock in that romantic fiction called "Acts".  I only quote it because I know you accept it, not because I myself put any stock in it.  The truth is that if Christianity really was the pacifist crap that Jesus taught, it is not likely that the Romans or synagogue officials would give a fuck about what the apostles were preaching, except in extreme cases.  I'm quite aware of Benny Hinn's alleged history of doing miracles before thousands of eyewitnesses, but I don't lose any sleep at night in my positive certainty that all those witnesses are deluded fools.  Some original Christians may have been arrested due to rumors reaching the ears of the authorities, but it is unlikely that the mere preaching of Christ as risen would create half the fervor that Acts and other NT books pretend it did.

Other co-conspirators had better know everything (and every minute detail) offered in this interaction with questioners. Conspirators need to be able to tell each other what they’ve said to authorities, friends and family members.

Not in the case of the NT, whose 4 gospels were authored by various different persons who obviously didn't have perfect knowledge of the way Jesus-traditions were handed down outside their respective localities...or didn't care.  The tendency of some NT story characters to be open to the incredibly bizarre (2nd Cor. 12:1-4) also throws cold water on your efforts to show how conspiracy cannot explain the rise of the resurrection faith in the first-century church.  When they said they saw Jesus, it was always either 1) only his followers who "saw" him, or 2) they "saw" him in ways that forbid characterizing them as "eye"witnesses.

Conspiracies are greatly helped where the false religion at issue is built upon a garbled conglomeration of vision stories.

Significant Relational Connections – When all the coconspirators are connected in deep and meaningful relationships, it’s much harder to convince one of them to “give up” the other. When all the conspirators are family members, for example, this task is nearly impossible. The greater the relational bond between all the conspirators, the greater the possibility of success.

You seem to forget how meaningful it is that the family of Jesus, including James his brother and their mother, were not impressed by anything Jesus did during his earthly ministry, but either refused to believe him, or drew the conclusion that his claims constituted good evidence that Jesus had become authentically insane, John 7:5, Mark 3:21.  If Jesus' miracles during his earthly ministry were false, kiss your religion goodbye. If the miracles Jesus did during his earthly ministry were real, then the persistent disbelief in them by Jesus' own own family fatally impeaches their credibility for anything else they say, including later changing of the mind and starting to view Jesus as authentically divine.

Little or No Pressure – Few suspects confess to the truth until they recognize the jeopardy of failing to do so. Unless pressured to confess, conspirators will continue lying. Pressure does not have to be physical in nature. When suspects fear incarceration or condemnation from their peers, they often respond in an effort to save face or save their own skin. This is multiplied as the number of coconspirators increases. The greater the pressure on co-conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy is to fail.

I don't see any reason to think the original post-resurrection preaching of the apostles would have created any more "pressure" on them than is felt by Benny Hinn when he goes around preaching his lies and gaining converts despite how easy it is to debunk his miracle claims.  If the book of Acts says the apostolic preaching was resisted actively by secular authorities, I find that to be about as believable as stories about today's secular authorities doing the same to religious fanatics today. As long as they aren't doing anything violent or upsetting the social calm, secular authorities typically don't give a shit.

That’s why I now reject the claim that the disciples of Jesus lied about the Resurrection. The number of conspirators required to successfully accomplish the “Christian conspiracy” would have been staggering.

How many conspirators were involved in substantiated Mormon prophet Joe Smith's claim to have possessed real golden plates?  So many that the number was staggering?

The book of Acts tells us that there were as many as 120 eyewitnesses in the upper room following Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1:15),

It also doesn't name James the brother of the Lord among them nor among the 12 named apostles.  Apparently, this brother of Jesus did NOT just suddenly starting believing Jesus rose from the dead merely because a bunch of followers started saying he did.  Worse, we don't know how it was that James became a leader in the Jerusalem faction of the church, but if we credit certain statements of early church fathers, James was voted into his office, by the others.  Having a brother of Jesus be the leader of the Jerusalem faction has more to do with politics and planning and less to do with what exactly James might have personally believed.

and Paul told the believers in Corinth that hundreds of people claimed to see the risen Christ (1 Corinthians).

And you don't have the first fucking clue whether Paul is speaking from first-hand knowledge or merely repeating hearsay, yet you pretend that this unverifiable bit of mystery is as concrete as the FBI testifying to the existence of cars.

It’s unreasonable to believe the disciples conspired to lie about the Resurrection for the following reasons:

There would have been too many disciples involved in the conspiracy.

False, Acts 21:20 says there were "tens of thousands" of Jews who converted to Christ...and v. 21-24 indicate that they believed as true a rumor that Paul abandoned the customs of Moses when teaching outside Jerusalem.  Apparently, lies could indeed deceive thousands in the first century.

The apostles would have been required to protect their conspiratorial lies for too long (over six decades).

Benny Hinn's miracle claims have been deceiving people for far less than 6 decades, and in modern culture where checking on his claims would be somewhat easier than it would have been in the 1st century.

The apostles had little or no effective way to communicate with one another in a quick or thorough manner, given the limited communication technology of the first century and the geographic distance between the disciples.

Hence explaining the theological inconsistencies and contradictions the NT gave to the world.

While there were pairs of family members in the group of apostolic eyewitnesses, most had no familial relationship to each other at all.

James and Mary are sufficiently close to Jesus, being his immediately biological family members, to justify crediting as truthful their skepticism toward Jesus for the entire 3-4 years that he allegedly worked genuinely supernatural miracles during his earthly ministry.  Don't forget about the famine of 44 a.d. which would have motivated many to join any cause regardless of lack of merit in its claims, like welfare mothers who join the Mormon church today.

The apostles were aggressively pressured and persecuted as they were scattered from Italy to India.

Sure is funny how apostle John allegedly escaped all such travail and lived to a ripe old age.   Sorry, but Acts is mostly fiction, and extra biblical traditions about what the apostles experienced in their preaching is a tangled mixture of legends and truth-stretching.

Don’t get me wrong, successful conspiracies occur every day. But if you think you know of one, it’s because it wasn’t successful.

You are stupid, "success" isn't decided by whether the conspiracy is found out by others, but whether the conspiracy continues to fool millions.  Sure, we both know that Mormonism is a false form of Christianity, but what fool would say Mormonism wasn't "successful"?

If you had salivating delusional followers who continually donated their money to you in spite of how easy it is to prove you to be a fraud, would you really give a shit about a few people in the world who claim to have "exposed" you witih "facts"?  Jerald and Sandra Tanner have been doing an excellent job for nearly 50 years of exposing Mormonism for the lie that it is, yet Mormonism continues to grow and grow and grow.

Apparently, people are not truth-robots.  They will continue hanging onto a religious claim even if they are aware there is heavy and virtually unanswerable opposition to it. Its still reasonable to say that the apostles were successful for much the same reason Benny Hinn and Mormonism were.  People want to join a cause that has something positive to say and more so if the cause feeds them, and if it be religious, they are very uncaring toward outsiders who claim to have evidence against the movement.  So you do not support the resurrection preaching as true by noting that opposition from outsiders didn't slow it down.

Cold Case Christianity: Did the Apostles Lie So They Could Die as Martyrs?

 This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Did the Apostles Lie So They Could Die as Martyrs?

Posted: 28 Jul 2017 01:25 AM PDT

 129A few years back I spoke with Bobby Conway (the One Minute Apologist)

 Nothing spells "shallow research" quite like "one-minute apologist".

What would you think of an atheist bible critic who called himself the "one-minute bible critic"?

 and answered the question, “Did the disciples lie about the resurrection of Jesus?“As a skeptic, I believed that the story of the Resurrection was either a late distortion (a legend) created by Christians well after the fact, or a conspiratorial lie on the part of the original Apostles.

Then that was your error as a skeptic.  Given what we know about religious fanatics, its likely that the apostles felt that they had experienced visions of Jesus, and these subjective beliefs eventually morphed into stories of a bodily raised Jesus in the 20 years between Jesus' death and the writings of Paul.  Many of Benny Hinn's followers are telling stories of his miraculous healings the very next day after his "crusade" came to their town, but you find nothing compelling about the mere fact that the miracles were reported very early after the event at a time when they could be possibly falsified, agreed?

It wasn’t until I started working homicides (and homicidal conspiracies in particular) that I decided an Apostolic conspiracy was unreasonable. I’ve written a chapter in Cold Case Christianity describing the five necessary elements of successful conspiracies, and none of these elements were present for the Apostles. But even more importantly, the Apostles lacked the proper motivation to lie about the Resurrection.

You are a fool to assume that what a person is willing to say in public, always represents what he personally believes.  If the apostle authored gospels and epistles, that's no more indicative of their honesty about their true convictions, than the fact that Benny Hinn wrote "Good Morning Holy Spirit". 

My case work as a homicide detective taught me something important: there are only three motives behind any murder (or any crime, or sin, for that matter). All crimes are motivated by financial greed, sexual lust (relational desire) or the pursuit of power.

No, if somebody in the neighborhood guns down the recently paroled pedophile who recently moved to town, they aren't doing that for financial greed, sexual lust or pursuit of power, they are doing it to achieve a moral justice that cannot be achieved in the legal system.

If the Apostles committed the crime of fraud on an unsuspecting world, they were motivated by one of these three intentions.

Or like when mommy tells her 3 year old daughter to stay close or the Bogey Man will get her, the apostles were lying  to their followers, thinking believing such a lie would likely work more good than evil.  Scumbag homosexual apologist James Patrick Holding believes Christians can be justified to tell "honorable" lies.  From a theologyweb debate no longer accessible online:

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?6136-Does-your-god-approve-of-pedophilia/page68

03-31-2015, 06:49 PM #674

jpholding

    Quote Originally Posted by B&H View Post

  Me:  So....do you have anything to say to defend against my argument that God, by ordering others to lie, as he did in 2nd Kings 22, is no less guilty of lying than the mob boss who orders a hit but doesn't actually pull the trigger?

Holding:  I guess you're too dumb to have heard of an honorable lie? Tell your master Kung Pu to beat you for not doing your social science homework.

 Wallace continues:

Most people will agree that none of the Apostles gained anything financially or sexually from their testimony,

And most people are stupid if they believe this, since while there might not be much sexual thrill involved in ministry, Paul was entrusted with enormous sums of money ostensibly to be conveyed to the Jerusalem church.  I don't have a problem with the idea that he delivered it, but I have a problem with the idea that Paul didn't stick his hand in the cookie jar.  Paul's attempt at fame enabled him to allegedly rent his own house for 2 years merely because his followers donated money to him, Acts 28:30.  I see no reason to classify Paul as any different than the thousands of insincere fakers who start ministries merely for the money.  Paul's stories of persecution are likely little more than tall tales.  And Paul's alleged willingness to cause such a stir that he becomes imprisoned, strongly suggest that yes, he had a naturalistic impulse to be the center of attention and to cause trouble, as can be seen anyway from his own admissions that before conversion he was an extremist Jew, hurting the Christians and imprisoning them.  He really was the type of guy who went to extremes for purely naturalistic reasons.

but some skeptics have argued the Apostles may have been motivated by the pursuit of power. Didn’t these men become leaders in the Church on the basis of their claims? Couldn’t this pursuit of leadership status have motivated them to lie? Wasn’t it a goal of early martyrs to die for their faith anyway?

The Apostles Knew the Difference Between Ministry and Martyrdom

The Book of Acts and the letters of Paul provide us with a glimpse into the lives of the Apostles.

They were also written by Paul's supporters or Paul himself.  I'd be just as impressed if Benny Hinn had one of his ministry partners send me a letter detailing miracles that happened when they were last in Uganda.  You don't care, and neither do I.

The Apostles were clearly pursued and mistreated,

That's what they say about themselves, and it was probably true to a certain extent, but so what?  Stupid people are known to cause trouble for themselves simply because they have a pathological need to stir up shit, despite being aware that they face consequences. 

and the New Testament narratives and letters describe their repeated efforts to avoid capture.

And Mel Tari describes many miracles in his "Like a Mighty Wind", so what?  He was known to be a swindler, and the fact that most of Paul's Galatian churches apostatized from him (Galatians 1:6) opens the door to the possibility that they found out Paul was a faker too.  And the fact that Paul's divinely appointed helper Barnabas (Acts 13:2) also eventually found the Judaizer position better supported than Paul's doctrines (Galatians 2:12-13) opens that door just a bit further.  And that door is kicked off the hinges with Paul's own admission that he would misrepresent his true theologicla beliefs if he thought doing so would make more converts.  1st Cor. 9:20-21.

The Apostles continually evaded capture in an effort to continue their personal ministries as eyewitnesses.

Wallace, are you trying to say something to convince Christians or skeptics?

If I couldn't convince you of Mormonism by quoting the book of Mormon to you, why do you foolishly quote the bible to skeptics who don't believe it? You constantly TALK about refuting skeptics, but your apologetics endeavors blindly presume the inerrancy of the bible despite the fact that this doctrine is not even believed by most Christians.

The New Testament accounts describe men who were bold enough to maintain their ministry, but clever enough to avoid apprehension for as long as possible.

And Benny Hinn says...and Kenneth Copeland says...and these guys have thousands of follows. 

The Apostles Knew the Difference Between a Consequence and a Goal

These early eyewitnesses were fully aware of the fact that their testimony would put them in jeopardy,

I don't deny Christians got in trouble for their faith, but I deny that the NT accounts of persecution are straight historical fact.  Paul knew the value of lying and exaggerating and misrepresenting himself, 1st Cor. 9:20-21 (how could he present himself as under the to the Jews, while not believing himself under the Law, and do this without misrepresenting his true theological beliefs?  Anything less than outright lying would be insufficient to convince the Jews that you really did believe yourself to be under the Law).

but they understood this to be the consequence of their role as eyewitnesses rather than the goal. That’s why they attempted to avoid death as long as possible. While it may be true that later generations of believers wanted to emulate the Apostles through an act of martyrdom, this was not the case for the Apostles themselves.

Have you never read the bible?  John 21:19, if authored by John as you presuppose, shows the first apostles regarded their death by persecution as a thing glorifying God. That's not going to disappear just because the apostles, afflicted with cognitive dissonance as they were, believed this while also attempting to escape death.

The Apostles Knew the Difference Between Fame and Infamy

It’s one thing to be famous, but another to be famously despised. Some of us have attained widespread fame based on something noble (like Mother Teresa).

You are a fool, Mother Theresa's fruits included just as many heartless capitalistic ventures as they did good works. 

Some of us have attained widespread fame because of something sinister (like Jerry Sandusky). The apostles were roundly despised by their Jewish culture as a consequence of their leadership within the fledgling Christian community.

Then apparently you never read Acts 21, or if you did, you never bothered to ask yourself how Apostle James, leader of the Jerusalem faction of the church, could have ended up with a church filled with thousands of Jews, who converted to Christ but retained their zeal to do the law nonetheless.  How do you figure James managed that, given your assumption that he taught the same law-free gospel that Paul did, which said Christ was the end of the law?  Not only was James' church full of legalistic Jews, they trusted in an allegedly false rumor so much that James felt a speech by Paul would not be sufficient, he would have to make a substantial sacrifice of time and money doing what Jews do, to convince them the rumor was false:

 18 And the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present.
 19 After he had greeted them, he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.
 20 And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law;
 21 and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs.
 22 "What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.
 23 "Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow;
 24 take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law. (Acts 21:18-24 NAU)

  Wallace continues:

If they were lying about their testimony to gain the respect and admiration of the culture they were trying to convert, they were taking the wrong approach.

Then Paul was a liar and took the wrong approach, because the Paul of Acts 21 who goes long with a Jewish vow and pays their expenses in doing so, also characterized his own Jewish heritage and its benefits as feces:

 4 although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more:
 5 circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee;
 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.
 7 But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
 8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish (Greek: skubalon, refuse, feces, trash) so that I may gain Christ,
 9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, (Phil. 3:4-9 NAU)

What would you think of the man who goes to a Mormon church, participates in all that they do, but when at home alone, he goes on the internet posting convincing reasons to believe Mormonism is dogshit? 

The Apostles only succeeded in gaining the infamy that eventually cost them their lives. This was obvious to them from the onset; they knew their testimony would leave them powerless to stop their own brutal martyrdom.

So?  Christians of today face equal persecution in Afghanistan, Arabia and North Korea, that hardly argues that their religion is true.  You will say it was different with the original apostles who would have known their claims were false, if they were false at all.  I answer that Paul's propensity to go from one extreme to the other (from jailing Christians to advocating for their cause) and his propensity to have bizarre experiences that left him unable to tell, 14 years after the fact, whether they occurred in his body or out of his body (2nd Cor. 12:1-4), refute you and lay a rational basis for saying at least PAUL was sufficiently delusional that he would not have been able to know whether his belief in Jesus' resurrection was true or false.  When this is combined with the fact that absurd esoteric experiences were allegedly common among the first Christians (Acts 2, tongues of fire, 1st Cor. 13-14, speaking in tongues), this whole idea you have about how the apostles surely knew whether their claims were false, is about as stupid as saying the Mormons, living in the age of the internet, and so capable of researching their own claims, surely know whether their claims are false.  Nope, people have a funny way of thinking the dumber something is, the more likely true it is.  Irenaeus would have not admitted how strong the Marcion and other gnostic heresies were, if humans of those times had some built-in motive to objectively verify things before trusting in them.  And the sins of Paul's Corinthian churches (1st Cor. 3:2 ff, 11:17 ff) support my contention that first-century conversions under the original apostles were no more likely to be genuine than 20th century conversions under Billy Graham at a tent revival.

As I examine the motives and consequences related to the testimony of the Apostles, I still find their martyrdom to be one of the most powerful evidences related to the veracity of their testimony.

The evidence for the martyrdom of each apostle is absurdly weak and inconsistent. Josh McDowell's son Sean wrote a doctoral dissertation evaluating the veracity of the historical evidence for the martyrdom of the apostles, and he acknowledged that most accounts were contradictory, ambiguous and late.  I am therefore singularly unimpressed with his ending comments wherein he finds them to be sufficiently credible to compel trust.

Think about it for a minute: twelve designated eyewitnesses traveled the known world to testify to the Resurrection.

The fact that we don't know jack shit about what most of the 12 apostles did after Jesus died (McDowell's thesis indicating the patristic traditions on them are late, contradictory and ambiguous), strongly suggests they actually didn't do anything worth remembering.  It is not likely that if the later patristic stories of their preaching and martyrdom are, the NT would have neglected most of the 12.   Even if the NT were written before some of these 12 did their preaching work, we'd expect if they were real apostles working real miracles and making many conversions, the NT would include 2nd century accounts about these matters for the same reason Acts mentions successful church planting in the first century.  It is irrational to claim that these garbled fantastic patristic accounts should be accorded our trust, and that those who remain skeptical are willfully blinding themselves. 

Not a single one of them recanted their testimony.

That's an irresponsibly couragous statement given the great problems of veracity and authentity of the sources as McDowell acknowleges.

And failure to recant by those in a position to know the claims were false, proves nothing either. Was Brigham Young in a good historical position to know whether Mormonism was false?  Yes.  Did he ever recant?  No.  You also overlook that the Christian religion provided another reason for people to group together, which would have made the difference between life and death during the famine of 41 a.d. ff.  Sometimes you stay even when you believe it is false, like so many Mormons who secretly know their religion is bullshit, but stay in it anyway beacuse of the enormous social benefits to be had from staying in such a group.

Not a single one of them lived longer because of their testimony.

Then apparently you didn't know that apostle John died as an old man.

Not a single one benefited financially or relationally.

yeah, we can be sure that when Paul took that big bag of money to the Jewish church (1st Corinthians 16:1-3), he surely didn't skim a bit off the top for himself.  Yeah right, and if we see Benny Hinn walking out of a hotel room with Paula White, we have a responsibility as good Christians to assume they were only talking in the room, until somebody can prove otherwise, god forbid that we should ever draw inferences from circumstantial evidence the way jurors do every day when convicting criminals.

These folks were either crazy or committed, certifiably nuts or certain about their observations.

Or they were religious fanatics whose true history, while likely including real persecution, was exaggerated by NT and patristic authors.

You don't think the book of Acts is lying to you about anything?  Ask yourself how likely it is that when the apostles were confronted with the Judaizers at the Council of Jerusalem, they didn't appeal to Jesus' authority.  Nothing in Acts 15 expresses or implies that the apostles attempted to refute the Judaizers on the basis of anything Jesus did, said or omitted to say/do.  How likely is it that Jesus could have had such a huge following as the gospels say (Mark 1:45, "large crowds" mentioned elsewhere), and yet the question of whether Gentiles need to get circumcised somehow never came up? The Book of Acts is having the apostles in Acts 15 answer the Judaizer controversy the way Pual would answer a theological problem (by quoting the OT) because the author of Acts is devoted to promoting Paul's viewpoint far more than in promoting actual historical truth.