Damn this is why you can’t take them seriously, just read Mark 9:2-13 its clear Mark is no eyewitness account…

>>7 Then a cloud appeared and covered them. A voice came from the cloud. It said, “This is my Son, and I love him. Listen to him!”

>>Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone what they had seen.

Also surprised to see that he didn’t vouch for total authenticity of TF lol.

I interpreted “we” as meaning the leaders of the movement at the time, the original 12 plus the how ever many claimed to have revelations along with Paul, but perhaps all you can really infer from the “we” is Paul, Silas and Timothy.

We can’t press that so far. Because Paul means “we” as in all Christians, and all Christians did not see him die (indeed, by the Synoptic account, no apostle saw him die…they had all run away and booked to Galilee before he was even crucified). Moreover, that he was risen (and actually died, rather than was only seen to) could still be a question of belief, since it hangs on whether you believe the post-mortem visions authentic or not. So one can’t really challenge historicity with his language here. Though it sounds a bit confessional rather than reportorial, there are already good reasons why that might be here.

In regards to 1 Thessalonians 4:14, especially if written by Paul, if he knew of a historical Jesus’s existence, death and rise from the dead, would he use the word “believe” to convey that this occurred? Not sure if it was a common method to use the word believe to express a “fact” during the era of this writing, but I would think one would say something more like , “Since we know or saw that Jesus died and rose again” rather than “since we believe”.

Tors is a fundamentalist. So, no, he does not care what the scholarship says. In fact, he burns several hundred words lambasting the entire academy for being filled with liberal rubes who have no arguments and just keep repeating this wishy washy nonsense and that we should only listen to crank conservative fundamentalist scholars.

It’s also illogical to say anything Jesus is said to have said that isn’t what we now imagine his first followers would have liked must therefore be what he actually said. Not only would that make the Infancy Gospels true (and thus the argument is refuted by Reductio ad Absurdam), and all sorts of crazy shit in the Gnostic tradition, and not only is it a circular argument (we have no access to what early Christians thought except what they wrote, and the first Christians wrote nothing, and the Christians who did write varied enormously from each other in what they thought, and weren’t even representative of all the different things different Christians thought, so we can’t reconstruct what “Christians liked” except by appeal to what they preserved, therefore their preserving it cannot ever be evidence of their not having liked it), but it also betrays a failure to do basic chronological math: if a saying wasn’t liked by his first followers, no one would have preserved it for decades for it to even be known when the Gospels were written, and even if by some inexplicable magic it was still preserved somehow (why? by whom?), the Gospel authors wouldn’t have used it. Unless they liked it. Which refutes the premise. (I explain in detail these points in PH, see index “Criterion of Embarrassment.”)

He could have saved himself a lot of time by saying the bible is inerrant and it says Jesus existed, so we know he did.

Yeah, these responses to Adultery are strange. Like its impossible to invent story that matches the character of Jesus in other stories. It is weird that these people don’t seem to even consider that maybe someone just read all the Gospels, invented story where Jesus’s character matches to those in other Gospels, and placed it where it is now. How is it more reasonable to assume hypothetical sources and unprovable oral traditions, I don’t know.

Just seen your debate Dr C A Evans
at: http://ksutv.kennesaw.edu/play.php?v=00030027 [to be put on youtube presently – says the organiser]
And licona brought up ‘wreck of the titan’! purely coincidental.
Dispite poor moderation. Great wurk.

Wonder what the relationship is between Paul (‘s writings) and John.
I know Pervo makes case for Matthew being contra Paul and no one weaves in the saying of Jesus at 2 Corinthians 12:9 in their gospels….