Could the apostles die as martyrs without recanting because they would rather die instead of being known as liars?

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The point is that this is a situation where things would be checkable - very checkable. People don’t just randomly accept a new, to-their-eyes-horrid religion without some serious reason to do so. And if such is lacking, you get no converts - people won’t just accept hearsay for this.

Comparing this to a modern-day election is just… wrong. Totally wrong. Many people are already Trump supporters and predisposed to accept allegations of election fraud in favor of him (keep in mind that the claims are based on some concrete stuff… even if that stuff is horribly misinterpreted or misunderstood, and isn’t actual evidence of anything - what you’re describing for Christianity is a situation that doesn’t even have that). Try upping the stakes to a president who demands you exile yourself from your family if need be, thinks he’s God, showered in sewage to redeem you of being a liberal, and is a Scientologist - and nobody ever having heard of him and not believing a single word coming from his mouth.
 
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Maybe you could tell me more. I’m open to criticism. I’m the sort of guy who’s always going for the headshot. The knockout punch.
 
NormalBeliever said:
The point is that this is a situation where things would be checkable…
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All that could be checked is Paul’s assertion that some people saw something. And there is no indication of where those people were decades after the event. No indication that they were even still alive (James was said to have been exectued before Paul wrote his epistles).

Where do you go to check what he had written? How do you verify it? It would be difficult enough to do today. Two thousand years ago? Impossible.
 
That’s just your incredulity speaking. Realistically, you can’t just bury consequences like people wanting to fact-check under a pile of “What if?” bricks. If any of those people who saw Christ were alive, the locals would know where they live and what they claim. That would be in the local collective consciousness, and claims related to that (whether or not they even exist) would be able to spread more easily since it’s not just limited to these particular people.

And keep in mind that it’s not just Paul’s claim of the 500 that could be checkable - all of Paul’s miracles and those of others would easily be checkable to the locals close to where they happened. And even if all of the 500 died early or didn’t even exist, then so much the worse for Christianity - it would have been stillborn in the ancient world. People back then wouldn’t have taken seriously appeals to hearsay or conviction.
 
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Well, I don’t really have much advice beyond stating things calmly - don’t be overly sensationalistic, just point out problems precisely and accurately.
 
I see what you mean. In real life there is a circle of people I debate with regularly. Have been doing it for years. Things can get heated and even devolve into emotional outbursts but it’s ok because we all know we are just letting out steam and not to take it personally. Believe it or not I’m actually the calmest one in the group. Haha but online some of that fire carries over and like I said I always go for the knockout punch.
 
NormalBeliever said:
That’s just your incredulity speaking. Realistically, you can’t just bury consequences like people wanting to fact-check under a pile of “What if?” bricks. If any of those people who saw Christ were alive, the locals would know where they live and what they claim. That would be in the local collective consciousness, and claims related to that (whether or not they even exist) would be able to spread more easily since it’s not just limited to these particular people.
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You’re talking about something you already think is true. So it might appear to you to be a simple matter of finding someone alive who was one of Paul’s witnesses. So there’d be someone in Turkey who is interested enough in what Paul wrote who is prepared to give up tbeir job, leave their family and take a dangerous and relatively expensive trip to Jerusalem and live there for who knows how long to look for someone still alive who might exist who Paul mentioned in a throw away line in one of his letters.

And according to you, they’d be undertaking this epic to prove that they don’t exist.

Quite a task if you ask me…and that’s my incredulity talking again.
 
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Forget about long-distance travel - I was specifically referring to the local people close to Jerusalem; if they found out Paul made stuff up and lied that would’ve been known and they would spread this fact so that others know it too. Those who were richer could indeed afford to investigate things themselves, and early Christianity did have an unusual number of higher status folk in its ranks - compared to the fact the vast majority of the population was poor.

Again, you’re underestimating the social connectiveness of the ancient world - finding out who someone is especially if they are associated with a controversial claim would not have been that hard since everyone keeps tabs on everyone. This wasn’t an impossible thing - heck, you could just send out servants to investigate things for you if you were of a higher status.

But we don’t even need servants to investigate Jerusalem - Paul’s own local miracles would have provided checkable material to the local populations close to the event. Checking facts isn’t just limited to the 500 people in Jerusalem.
 
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In those days, people believed or disbelieved claims based upon their impression of the trustworthiness of the teller. If they believed the claims, they had no need to check out the veracity and if they didn’t believe, they would have just walked away.

No one would have “fact checked” any claims one way or the other. Maybe someone did and found the claims false…how would we ever know? Any letter he wrote to that effect wouldn’t have been promoted or copied by the church. His objections would have gone to the dustbins of history. We don’t even have any evidence of anyone fact checking and affirming his findings. All we have are people hearing and believing and passing on by word of mouth, their belief.

People today check out miracle claims because we are more skeptical of miracle claims. Back then, many if not most people believed miracle claims because if it was told to them by someone they felt was trustworthy, they valued their testimony. If someone wasn’t trustworthy, they ignored the claims and went on with their lives…most likely believing other miracle claims instead. They weren’t like us and we aren’t like them. Our skepticism today would have been incomprehensible to them.

Using the argument that “they could have fact checked claims” is honestly absurd. There is no evidence anyone fact checked anything. It would have been near impossible anyway. Christians were few in numbers and scattered across vast territories and no Christian needed to fact check anyway since they already believed it!
 
None of the early Christian preachers would have been considered trustoworthy - most of them were basically country people of low status that preached a shameful and horrid message and would have been dismissed immediately. The negative results of fact-checking wouldn’t have required the Church to spread - the society which is already opposed to Christianity would’ve done that.

The point about other miracle claims is exactly that - people would dismiss Christianity as ridiculous & insane and any claimed miracles would also be dismissed because they had other, pagan miracle claims to cancel those out.

And they could indeed fact-check - at least the local miracle claims done by the early Christians can easily be checked by the skeptical locals.
 
That was just to illustrate that what I’m saying isn’t at all impossible. It’s always useful to consider possibilities and see what is likely and what’s not - that’s what fuels thinking on subjects. You may think this in particular is unlikely and then apply that to the whole thing - in which case I guess communication might not be as profitable, unfortunately, since neither side is willing to let juice through the cracks.
 
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NormalBeliever said:
And they could indeed fact-check - at least the local miracle claims done by the early Christians can easily be checked by the skeptical locals.
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Darn it, I said I had nothing more to add…

So let’s take a hypothetical. Someone makes a claim (as Paul did). But there appears to be no evidence. Just hearsay. So people do actually check it out. And can find no evidence. And the matter goes to local courts. And they say that there’s no evidence. And a group of people who are expert in investigations say there is no evidence. And some people who have been especially employed to check for this type of evidence say there is none. And the head of the legal system himself says there’s no evidence. And it goes to the highest court in the land after, I dunno…lets pick a figure…50 rejections in the lower courts and even they say there’s no evidence.

According to you, if what Paul has said has been investigated to within an inch of it’s life then that would be an end to it. Nobody would believe him

Seriously?
 
Again, it’s not that this is a neutral issue to the ancients - far from it. They would’ve been very biased against Christianity and wouldn’t have given early preachers the benefit of the doubt. Claims of miracles would either be dismissed or looked into - and if those miracles were found to be complete bunk nobody would believe them and people would trumpet their falsity against Christianity.
 
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NormalBeliever said:
Claims of fraud would either be dismissed or looked into - and if those claims of fraud were found to be complete bunk nobody would believe them and people would trumpet their falsity…
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Well, there you go. But there’s a few million people you now need to convince.
 
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You are again missing the key - Christianity would have been a highly offensive religion to ancient people. This is not something you can just get over with - comparisons to election fraud are misguided for several reasons, one of which is because half the population already supports Trump and most of them are willing to believe in electoral fraud.

Such a situation simply didn’t apply to Christianity - you can’t just hand-wave things away by citing modern examples of false belief. You have to deal with the actual context of things - people wouldn’t have just “believed” or been prone to believing in Christianity.
 
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Like seriously - after thinking about it this example you gave of electoral fraud among Trump supporters is just terrible. Ironically I literally just thought of a much better comparison to illustrate how unlikely it was for Christianity to have survived without any evidence and with provable false claims by reversing your example.

Imagine instead that election fraud really DID happen and Trump supporters were a small handful of a minority trying to convince the rest of the world which deeply hates Trump and believes he is a racist, Nazi dictator and thinks every Trump supporter is a horrible human being and is biased against claims of electoral fraud.

And then the Trump supporters actually succeed in convincing enough people to eventually convert most of the country to believing fraud is real - that’s more akin to what happened with Christianity.
 
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NormalBeliever said:
Ironically I literally just thought of a much better comparison to illustrate how unlikely it was for Christianity to have survived without any evidence and with provable false claims by reversing your example.
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You do realize that if your rationale is applied to other religions, we would also have to assume there was evidence to support the claims of Islam, and Buddhism and so forth? Why would evidence of veracity be required for the survival of Christianity, but not for those other religions?
 
What I said previously explains this - Christianity wasn’t perceived well or even neutrally, but was seen as insane, shameful and even dangerous, and was in a very inferior position to start with. People would be heavily biased against it. Religions such as Buddhism didn’t have that problem, and Islam spread through the sword and militarily.
 
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