This post is a follow up to the one from yesterday My take on the Resurrection
In this post I want to dig a little bit deeper on why I don’t accept the resurrection.
After my post yesterday I was reliably informed of 2 things, that in my opinion are yet another nail in the coffin for Jesus resurrection.
The first problem is of course, that we have reason to suppose, that our sources for the claims made in the Bible are unreliable. This is not only due to the nature of these claims or the fact, that the gospels were written decades later but also due to the fact, that our sources have been corrupted. There are forgeries contained within the New testament books. One such example, that a Twitter user has brought up is the famous story about Jesus rescuing a woman from being stoned to death. 2 of the oldest manuscripts, that we have at our disposal The Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century don’t contain this story, that is part of John 8. The logical conclusion is, that this story was added in later. We have many more examples of this and Bart Ehrman wrote an entire book about it .
Even more damning is the following: The earliest Gospel (Mark) originally ended at 16: 8 with the women fleeing. The original gospel does not contain the resurrection. As you can see here the codex Sinaicitus ends with verse 8. Again I’d like to thank both Twitter users for pointing this out to me.
If the earliest gospel which was written 30 years after the supposed fact doesn’t even contain the resurrection isn’t it therefore reasonable to conclude, that over the years, as rumors got around, a completely natural phenomenon was made into a legend? Can we just all admit at this point, that it is highly unlikely that anything of that sort took place?
Even if we ignore all of which I have presented so far then it still isn’t reasonable to assume that a man resurrected. Even if we had eyewitness testimony a miracle by definition is such, that it’s the least probable occurence of them all. It is infinitelly more likely, that we just got lied to. In the event, that a miracle is asserted by an unbiased truthful eyewitness, we must still assume that he got something wrong. Maybe he hallucinated maybe his senses played a trick on him.
Unfortunately for the Christians we don’t have unbiased eyewitness testimony. We have testimony from non-eyewitnesses decades after the fact with a clear agenda in mind: To convince and convert you.
Last but not least I just want to give a shoutout to a YouTube channel. Paulogia has uploaded a video yesterday concerning the resurrection. I encourage you to check it out.
With that said I wish you happy Easter Holiday regardless of whether you’re an Atheist or a Theist. I hope we all can get something out of these few days. I know I can and did.
Goodbye from yours truly,
Rene von Boenninghausen @Renevelation
I would also note that there is the possibility of hallucinations among his followers. The book ‘The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain’ discusses mystical experiences from a neurological perspective, and was the thing that made me a persuaded atheist. It does not talk about Jesus sightings per se, but the same kinds of things it discusses would apply.
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There are a number of possibilities. A Doppelganger which I also proposed yesterday is one as well. The most likely in my opinion is of course that they all made it up more or less.
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