but the witnesses of the resurrection either knew it was real or knew it was false. If it was false there is no logical reason to keep proclaiming it true with your head on the block. There is nothing for the person who knows it is false to gain by continuing in the falsehood especially if they would be paying for their lives.people die for erroneous things all the time (read Islam),
there’s no logical reason why anyone, outside the early church believers, would bother to write anything about a backwater itinerant preacher. The allegation that the early church leaders falsified the gospel story has no basis either. What would they have gained? The early church was persecuted and anyone belonging was risking their lives. The lowest of the low were the first members so there was no wealth or power to be gained by writing a false story of salvation.Are their any secular sources outside of Christian martyr records?
I think the fact that they were martyred and that there do not appear to be Roman accounts of these martyrs recanting their faith is evidence of this. Romans actually offered a way out of martyrdom, namely going to the temple and making an offering to the pagan gods on behalf of the Emperor. The fact that they were martyred demonstrates that this didn’t happen. Also, you would expect Romans who witnessed such events, and Jewish observers as well, to document incidents of the apostles and their followers recanting their faith as an apologetic against Christianity. You don’t see this however. Lastly, why would you discount the Christian records out of hand? You don’t have to accept all the details of the story to realize that there is a historicity in regard to the fact that they were indeed killed for their faith. So while some martyrology accounts have signs of exaggeration, that doesn’t mean the core historical fact that these men and women faced martyrdom and did not recant of their faith is untrue.One of the most common arguments I hear for the truth of the resurrection is that the apostles died attesting to it. But how do we know that they did? How do we know that Peter and Paul and so on didn’t deny the resurrection and that early church leaders didn’t just make up a noble story of their martyrdom? Are their any secular sources outside of Christian martyr records?
Yes, true, but there is a vast difference between the fact that the apostles, eyewitnesses to the resurrection event itself held their belief to their death, as opposed to followers of Muhammad who were not witnesses to Muhammad’s visitations from Gabriel or to Christ whom he writes about over 600 years later.I’d like to add, I never thought this argument was very convincing…people die for erroneous things all the time (read Islam), so I believe in the resurrection, and I don’t doubt that ancient martyrs held the same belief till their dying breath, I just don’t think that is good enough proof for the resurrection in and of itself…
Not really. Josephus records that Jesus existed. Also we have evidence from other writers such as Pliny who record that a group of followers arose after Christ. Additionally Tacitus and Suetonius are other writers who confirm the existence of Christ. Even apart from the Christian accounts there is more than adequate evidence to prove the existence of Christ. This assumes you mean 100 years from the time that Christ conducted his ministry. Josephus (37-100), Tacitus (56-120), Suetonius (69-122), Pliny the Younger (61-113).I haven’t run into any secular sources that verify this. In fact if you limit your search to secular sources in the first hundred years AD, it’s difficult to prove that Jesus even existed!
This is actually one of the reasons people think that Ignatius writes the way he does in his epistles as he is going off to Rome to be martyred. At one point in his epistle to the Romans he says something akin to, “I know you have influence and can free me from martyrdom but don’t do it, I want to be a martyr.” He isn’t wanting necessarily to be killed, but to be freed would have placed a taint on him as if he had offered the sacrifice to Caesar. He would rather suffer martyrdom than harm the Church by appearing to have bent the knee to the pagan gods.That makes a lot of sense I didn’t think about the fact that if they rejected God they probably would have had to make offerings and stuff to the pagans.