Reply to If Jesus wasn’t a real historical figure, where did Christian theology come from?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is “faith” that he existed and “faith” that he was supernatural.

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Anything supernatural requires faith, because there can be no scientific proof.  Belief in Santa Claus and fairies  and God requires faith.  When people grow up - and even when they are older children -  they no longer believe in Santa or fairies, but some of them maintain their belief in God.  This is in part because God promises much more (eternal life) than Santa or fairies (occasional gifts, that keep coming even when belief ends).
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How is Jesus different from faries?

Non-biblical sources confirm Jesus at least died.

Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived in the first century who wrote a history of Judaism around AD 93. In his history he twice mentions Jesus of Nazareth by name. Additionally, as former atheist Lee Strobel writes, "we not only have multiple, early accounts of Jesus’ death in the New Testament, but we’ve also got five ancient sources outside the Bible that confirm his execution. No wonder the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association concluded: 'Clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted.'" One thing that is agreed upon is that a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived and died in the first century.

The news of Jesus' resurrection spread too quickly to be a legend.

Again from Lee Strobel, "Famed classical historian A.N. Sherwin-White of Oxford said it took more than two generations in the ancient world for legends to develop and wipe out a solid core of historical truth." A good example of this the legend of King Arthur, an English king who supposedly lived around AD 500. The first stories of King Arthur didn’t appear until 300 or 400 years after he supposedly lived, long enough for anyone who could have contradicted the legend to die off. So if the stories of Jesus rising from the dead would have appeared 100 years or more after the resurrection took place, enough time would have passed so that church fathers could rewrite history. But the letter Paul wrote to Corinth (known in the New Testament as 1 Corinthians) is dated to the 50s AD, a mere twenty years after the resurrection. 1 Corinthians makes definitive claims about the resurrection, while countless people who could have disproven it would have still been alive. Jesus' resurrection was not a legend claimed centuries later but an eyewitness account documented within the lifetime of everyone who experienced it.

The tomb of Jesus was empty.

The easiest way to disprove the resurrection of Jesus would be to produce a body, but no one ever did. Even the opponents of early Christianity, the Jewish leaders who had so much to lose if Jesus did in fact rise from the dead, could not point to a body. An eyewitness account states, “When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.” The body of Jesus was never produced by the opponents of early Christianity, either the Jewish leaders or the Roman government.

We have eyewitness accounts of people seeing Jesus alive after His death.

Again from former atheist and now Christian apologist Lee Strobel, "While we only have one or two sources for much of what we know from ancient history, we have nine ancient sources –inside and outside the New Testament – confirming the testimony of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus." One thing that is undeniable is that numerous people claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus, including over 500 people at one time. A mass hallucination like that is not possible. Reports of multiple people hallucinating (either from drugs or extreme stress) have been documented, but in every case each person claimed to have seen something completely different. You do not have a mass of people all hallucinating about the exact same thing, yet hundreds and hundreds of people all claimed to have seen the risen Jesus.

The earliest disciples died for their claim of a resurrected Jesus.

If the resurrection of Jesus was a hoax, the disciples would have been the ones to make it up. They would have known (even if no one else did) that the whole thing was a lie. And yet they allowed themselves to be arrested, tried, tortured and executed for their claims about the resurrection. And think about it from what you know about human nature: you'll die for the truth. You'll die for a lie that you believe to be the truth. But you won't die for a lie that you know is a lie. If it was a lie, the disciples would have been the ones to create it and spread it. And yet they endured untold suffering and pain for their claim, and so did hundreds of other eyewitnesses who suffered at the hands of early Jewish and Roman persecution. Their lives and ultimate deaths are perhaps the greatest testimony to the fact that the resurrection of Jesus really did happen.

https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/5-evidences-that-the-resurrection-of-jesus-is-not-a-fairy-tale.aspx

Meanwhile: who has died for faries? Or Santa Claus? [/quote]

This is a bad argument.  Plenty of people died for Julius Caesar or Attila the Hun or Boudica.

You either have faith or you don't.  You're not going to have definitive proof of God.  Either you believe or you don't.[/quote]

Actually it’s 5 great arguments, and I noticed you aren’t attempting to refute any of it.

Atheists want proof. Evidence. Facts. Then switch to “it’s faith only, no facts needed” on a whim in their next comment. They can’t make up their minds.

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There are multiple people posting. 
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