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

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NormalBeliever said:
And love the irony of saying we are “enlightened 21st century thinkers” while then having to deny the ancients were stupid.
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First, I’m not sure what was so shameful about Christianity. Yes, crucifixion was a very dishonorable way to die but is that how it was presented? No, it was presented as being a wrongful death on a sinless man. Plenty of the poor probably also had dealings with the elites where they were treated shamefully while believing they were innocent! They could easily relate to a wrongful death!
NormalBeliever said:
And love the irony of saying we are “enlightened 21st century thinkers” while then having to deny the ancients were stupid.
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They weren’t stupid. They were different in their thinking than us, though. They were very superstitious. They used different criteria in judging a trusted source. They weren’t skeptical like we are. They were different and every history source agrees whether talking about religion or politics or whatever.

You keep presenting Christianity as a religion no one would even look at when that’s obviously not the case. Most that converted did so because they believed the miracles, not because they saw them. Show me where any of them fact checked a miracle? They believed because it was presented to them as a religion that addressed their beliefs and needs. They trusted the source. Those that didn’t, rode off into the sunset and were never heard from again.
 
And that’s where ancient society goes the other way. Since this was a collectivistic society, most people would be susceptible to group think, and accepted the social norms and beliefs of their day - in fact they did so with passion since that kind of collectivism is combined with psychosomatic totality. What you’re assuming about the poor generally presupposes modern tendencies related to introspection, which the ancients lacked (shame was felt instead of guilt for the majority - shame being externally based) - as hard as it is to believe for us, they wouldn’t have looked at a crucified person thinking what he had done to deserve it, but would have seen it as a disgraceful death and the victim a disgraceful person. Issues relating to honor and shame were of primary importance to them, like wealth is to us but more. Yes, since the majority of the people were non-elite and the majority accepted social norms, they would indeed have been offended by Christianity in several ways without just easily dismissing the stigmas - not just by a shameful death, but by a shameful occupation (carpentry), geography (Nazareth as the slums), ethnicity (Jewishness as being superstitious and calumnied), and a host of other things that would’ve been thought of as ridiculous or bad.

The ancients were just different in their thinking than us - it’s not the type of story where you have a noble, misunderstood poor majority siding with a religion promising freedom from an oppressor.
 
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Ok, now I understand. I wasn’t talking about the apostles, I was talking about those they converted.

I think I’ll bow out of the discussion. I seem to approach history a bit different than some Catholics do and neither of us will change our opinions. Thanks for a good discussion.
 
There is a second epidemic: that of the crisis of faith. Such thoughts may occur, but if we entertain them, it may very well indicate an attack on your faith. The entire world now has instant platforms where the faith may be relentlessly assaulted, demeaned, ridiculed, referred to as superstition - you name it. Nothing new, but the ability to gradually beat the faith out of us is the devil’s oldest tactic.

Mainstream media is not Christian. Neither is 99% of cable. FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Yahoo, you name it - all run from mildly anti-Christian to clearly. If we placed a camera which watched us, we might be amazed at the amount of thought programming that is occurring.

At some point, to retain both our sanity and our faith, we must disconnect from the media and reset our priorities to where they ought to be.
 
Freddy said:
The creed relates to a spiritual resurrection. Not necessarily a bodily one.
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Doesn’t matter either way. The Jews had no concept of a resurrection before the End of Time.
Freddy said:
But it’s what he wrote about them is under discussion. I know my neighbour quite well - does that mean everything I say that he said will be true?
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Think about it Freddy. Would you when faced with torture and death insist on lying about what your neighbor said and did? if you were lying you would say “ok i was wrong, he didn’t rise from the dead and everything I said he said i completely made up.” But that is not what Paul or any of the Apostles did. They suffered and died without recanting a single word. So, we can say that they are sincere. They were willing to die for this.
Freddy said:
All we know is that Paul said that he was seen by 500. There is not a skerrik of evidence to back this up in any way.
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Is Paul the sort of man who would “bear false witness” either when he was a Jewish Pharisee named Saul or a Christian Apostle named Paul?
Freddy said:
I don’t know what exactly happened in 33 AD.
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Ok Fred… If you can’t trust the reliability of the new testament then you may as well throw into the garbage every thing we think we know about Plato, Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Aristotle.

When it comes to the events of 33 A.D. there are facts that require an explanation and the best explanation is that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Every other explanation falls apart. (wanted to say more but running out of time. class in 5 mins)

Since you cannot accept that he rose from the dead despite the evidence you just turn up your skeptometer to the maximum and no amount evidence is enough.
 
Duke12VonFalkenburg said:
But that is not what Paul or any of the Apostles did. They suffered and died without recanting a single word. So, we can say that they are sincere. They were willing to die for this.
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Ah. I didn’t know you had access to documentation that proves that. Could you share it with us?
 
Freddy said:
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Zaccheus:
Eleven of the Twelve were martyred for teaching that Christ is God. All of them died by torture. How plausible is it that all of them would rather be tortured to death than save themselves by admitting the lie?
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Details on how they died is sketchy to say the very least. And dying for something in which you believe has no bearing on the veracity of your belief.
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But the quesiton is whether the Twelve would die for their claims if they had lied about the claims.
If they had lied to begin with then they would know their claims were false.
 
Freddy said:
Ah. I didn’t know you had access to documentation that proves that. Could you share it with us?
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as far as I know, no reputable scholar of any stripe denies that he wrote at least some of the books of the New Testament. The testimony of the early church is simply too strong to ignore. Writers from the late first and second century said a lot about Paul. Paul died somewhere around AD 65. We can assume people who had met him were still alive as late as AD 130, after which many of the early church writers had mentioned Paul extensively. It was the unanimous testimony of all that he founded the churches in Ephesus, Corinthians and elsewhere. In order to create a “myth” about Paul in the early church would have required a conspiracy of absolutely massive proportions. Why would the church have made up the existence of Paul? No thinking person could accept this.
 
Zaccheus said:
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Freddy:
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Zaccheus:
Eleven of the Twelve were martyred for teaching that Christ is God. All of them died by torture. How plausible is it that all of them would rather be tortured to death than save themselves by admitting the lie?
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Details on how they died is sketchy to say the very least. And dying for something in which you believe has no bearing on the veracity of your belief.
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But the quesiton is whether the Twelve would die for their claims if they had lied about the claims.
If they had lied to begin with then they would know their claims were false.
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Do you have documentation that supports the generally accepted view that they died as martyrs?
 
Before she married my father, my mother moved for a while to Kentucky where she worked at a cigar factory. Later, my father worried that she might decide to stay there rather than return to her hometown. He was rather slow at romance and had neglected to propose marriage to her. So he made a trip to Kentucky to do just that. In the end they both returned to their hometown where they were married.

I know that because she told me about it, and so did my father. The event is not documented anywhere. It is not written down in a journal or a diary or noted in a newspaper, or written in the pages of a bible. Not posted of course on any social media, since there were none. There are no photos of the episode, no third party confirmations. I would never have known of it unless I was told.

And yet despite the lack of historical evidence, I have no doubt that it happened. It is part of my family history. There are a wide range of events in my family history that are well known and totally undocumented. They are related to the children and grandchildren and cousins at family gatherings using nearly the exact same words at each telling. This is the way of most of life and most of history. The event is passed on generation to generation.

How much of anyone’s history is well documented? Probably not nearly as well documented as the events recounted in the new testament. Especially considering that the Apostles had been preaching the new gospel for a long time before a word of the NT was written–but of course it was spoken much earlier than it was written.
 
Julius_Caesar said:
You can go to Vatican City and see two of their tombs.
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I’ve been to the Vatican. But access to a tomb which is thought to contain the remains of St. Peter is limited. But that was an answer to a question I hadn’t asked. Which was: Do you have documentation that supports the generally accepted view that they died as martyrs?

In passing, I’ve also been to Ephysus and St. Johns tomb is empty.
 
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Julius_Caesar said:
You can go to Vatican City and see two of their tombs.
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I know where the graves of my two grandfathers are. But just because I can point to those graves doesn’t mean either died saving their families from the wreck of a sinking battleship.

I can’t pull up the information where I am now (but will do so soon), but you may want to check out Sean McDowell. You could say he is the guy on researching the “wouldn’t die for a lie” proposal and even he says that of all the apostles only Peter and Paul have any evidence that they died as martyrs. He’s even cautioned other Christians to be careful when using the argument.
 
And here’s one from Ryan Nelson:


The article is replete with comments such as ‘as far as we know…’ and ‘according to tradition…’. There’s even arguments as to how and where each of them died - with the exception of Paul when the details are generally accepted.

I think it’s a case of repeating a claim often enough that it becomes accepted without evidence.
 
If the skeptics wanted to be consistent in their level skepticism towards the New Testament they should throw out everything they think they know about Alexander the Great, Caesar, Plato, Pliny the Younger, and Aristotle.

@Freddy sure cast all the doubt and skepticism you want at the writings of Paul and the martyrdom of the Apostles but that isn’t what Christianity depends on. It depends squarely on the Resurrection of Jesus. The greatest miracle in human history.
 
Julius_Caesar said:
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Freddy:
Which was: Do you have documentation that supports the generally accepted view that they died as martyrs?
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So tombs aren’t documentation.
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What…? What on earth does a stone coffin tell you about the person it’s meant to contain? We don’t need a tomb to confirm that the apostles are dead. What we need is some verifiable details on when, where, how and why they died.
 
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