Judy, your delusion is causing you to lie to yourself. Nothing you said in this comment is true.

Yet you are forcing yourself to say it so you don’t have to confront what we actually said. Which references abundant evidence, and logical paths from that evidence to our conclusions. You are choosing to ignore all this.

And you need to ask yourself why.

Two plus two doesn’t equal five.

Your conclusion doesn’t have a logical path there. It’s a false equivalent.

It’s not damaging to me at all. I know my Savior lives because I have a personal relationship with Him.

It’s hard for you to understand because you seek “proof”. You can’t prove your premises either.

I’m not trying to convince you and don’t want to argue, which is pointless. It’s good to respect others views. I can respect your belief but not agree that you’ve debunked anything or that things I stated earlier have ever been disproven.

It looks like you used to claim to be a believer then changed your mind.

Did God not live up to your expectations somehow? Did life circumstances cause you to come to a wrong conclusion?

Evasion is a standard response to cognitive dissonance.

So you have hereby just proved to everyone that your belief is irrational.

Which is why you will never convince rational people this way. It’s just you trying to reassure yourself that your delusion is true. Which is unhelpful to us and damaging to you.

Hi Judy

The consensus amongst scholars both Christian and secular, is that the Gospels were written by authors unknown and were attributed to certain persons much later.

The Gospels dod not record how many people saw Jesus. In 1 Cor: 15:5-8 Paul asserts that 500 saw the risen Christ, but that is an assertion and we have no way of knowing if it is true or not.

The Tomb was empty. OK, what do you want to assume from this? That the person rose form the dead? Have you ever heard of grave-robbers in ancient times?

The Gregorian Calendar makes no assertion about Christ. It proves nothing. It is a calender.

If you feel Jesus lives in you, then that is great. May you live a life worthy of that.

Best wishes

Jones

You are certainly entitled to believe as you do.

I stand by what I have written.

There are dozens of errors in your comment, too many to parse.

It seems you are very new to this and don’t know all of these claims have been refuted or deflated.

If you want to catch up to where the rest of us are, and not remain naively seduced by all this disinformation someone sold you, I recommend you start somewhere basic like The Christian Delusion (start with my chapter on the resurrection; but every other chapter is illuminating and will catch you up to the rest of us on a lot of things you seem not to know about).

The tomb is empty.

And when did our years begin for the Gregorian calendar??

Time itself is kept in our culture by when Christ died and rose again. Besides Lee Strobel other notable minds have examined the evidence as skeptics or atheists and come to believe.

See also J. Warner Wallace (a cold-case homicide detective), Sir Lionel Luckhoo (British attorney and diplomat, recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most successful advocate), and Simon Greenleaf (founder of Harvard Law School).

I’m no scholar but I know Jesus is alive because He lives in me. If you seek Him, you will find Him.

He died to save us from our sin and from eternity without Him. He died to save us because He loves each and every one of us. He died to restore us to relationship with our Heavenly Father. Believe on Jesus and you will be saved!!! Saved from the power of sin and death. Saved – God will fill you with His Holy Spirit to guide and teach you and give you power to choose and do rightly. Saved to spend eternity with our Savior.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures

Romans 10:9-10

…that if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart you believe and are justified, and with your mouth you confess and are saved.

2 Corinthians 5:17

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, the new has come into being.

You aren’t making any sense now.

I already answered you on first century historians. Thallus wasn’t a first century historian; and he never mentioned Jesus. Neither did Josephus; the two passages there are interpolations by later Christians—and even if they had been authentic, he’s just repeating the Gospels and post-Gospel Christian lore, not corroborating them. Useless. And there are no other first century historians who mention Jesus.

The earliest lectionary was written in the 800s AD (800 years after Christianity began; and 1200 years ago), and only a handful; most are centuries later than even that (e.g. 13th-15th century, 1300-1500 years after Christianity began). They are highly derivative of the aftermath of long chains of copying and heavily edited to “agree” with what Medievals wanted or expected the text to look like then. They are of minimal use in reconstructing the text (and yet, fully used in my work, as I rely on the Aland text which employs them in its reconstruction). And of no use in establishing anything in the Gospels is historical.

The author of 1 Clement says he knew Peter and Paul. But he never says they told him Jesus was a person on earth, as opposed to a celestial being who only communicated by revelation. To the contrary, 1 Clement uniformly writes as though that’s all Jesus ever was. The author of 1 Clement also has no knowledge of the Gospels or any story in them. See my analysis in OHJ. Like I told you to.

Thallus never mentioned Jesus. That’s a modern myth. Nor was he a first century author (that is also a modern myth). See my peer reviewed article proving both points in Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

Josephus never mentioned Jesus either. The paragraph on Jesus is a forgery and the line about Jesus later is an accidental interpolation. See my discussion of the scholarship and evidence on both points in Ch. 8.9 of On the Historicity of Jesus. That section is devoted entirely to Josephus. And see my summary of the latest scholarship on Josephus here.

But even if we are gullible and believe Josephus wrote those things, the paragraph comes from the Gospels (as has been proved under peer review), and all Christians were brothers of Jesus (in fact Brothers of the Lord appears to have been the original word for “Christian”: OHJ, Element 12, Ch. 4), so we can find no evidence in Josephus that he had any other source of information than the Gospels, and unsourced Christian lore. Neither of which gets us to a historical Jesus.

There are no other first century historians that even allegedly mention Jesus. Zero is not “many others.” Second century and later historians also only have the Gospels as a source. So they are useless too. All we have are the Gospels. All they had were the Gospels. And the Gospels are unreliable. Full stop.

And “Christian” just means “Messianists,” people who follow or believe in a messiah. That doesn’t get us anywhere. Least of all because that’s not what Christians originally called themselves. Paul implies they were originally called Brothers of the Lord (all becoming a brother of the Lord by adoption by God through baptism, as Paul meticulously explains). Acts says they were originally called Nazorians (a word we don’t actually know what it means; it is not the word for a person from Nazareth, for example) and that they acquired the name Christians from outsiders decades later. But Acts lies about chronology repeatedly and fabricates probably most of its content so it’s not a reliable source on these points (see Ch. 9 of OHJ). If 1 Peter is authentic, he uses the word, and may have coined it, but we can’t tell when. But since all it means is “follower of the messiah,” it doesn’t help us determine whether that meant earthly or celestial messiah. 1 Peter never mentions an earthly messiah.