Hard to fake the whole "put your fingers in the holes in my hands and feet" bit. Additionally difficult to then explain the ascension.
Sort of. But me and my mates continually remember to each other the particulars, and it's not like we've lost touch. If, 10 years from now (about the right time length between the first books of the New Testament and the Crucifixion), several of us decide to write about the event and then
send those stories to each other, it's not likely that we all make the same major mistakes as to who died, how, or on what deployment.
The Christian Community believed immediately that Christ had risen, and
hundreds of witnesses attested to that, which is why it exploded as rapidly as it did in Judea.
Well,
1. It didn't rely solely on a handful of testimonies - the authors made their claims pretty easily falsifiable (you can check with the 500 people in Jerusalem who saw Him after He was risen, etc.), and furthermore, you have the difficulty of explaining the empty tomb a few days later. Jesus went
somewhere, and the idea that 11 cowards overpowered a company of Roman soldiers without any of those soldiers being injured is fairly implausible. Had the early Church's claims been false, it would have been easy for the authorities to have simply pulled out the body of Jesus from where it was buried. See - there he is. Now shut up. But they never did this, because they couldn't.
2. The New Testament accounts describe the Apostles as stupid, self-centered, cowards who were unable to maintain the most basic discipline and failed Jesus at their assigned tasks. Peter, the leader, was once addressed by Jesus as "Satan". The account pictures
women of all people (in first century Judea. Women's testimony wasn't considered admissible in court) proving braver than the disciples, and it is to them that Jesus first appeared. Most of them, if not all of them, were repeatedly physically beaten, impoverished, starved, and finally executed for refusing to recant that Jesus was Risen. How in the
world do you look at that and say that they had "every incentive" to do as they did, unless they believed what they had said was true?
Incorrect. The early writing down of the Bible appears to have started in around the 9th and 8th Centuries BC.
The flood of Noah is not the basis of Judaism. The Mosaic era and law, but more importantly, the intervention of God in the history of the Jewish people is the basis of Judaism.
:shrug: fortunate it is, then, that not only is there more evidence for a risen Jesus than any other ancient event, but that you live in a world with
millions of people who have met Him
no - see above: that is the
opposite of magic.
