What Paul was doing was giving a list of witnesses, of whom “most were still alive” to confirm their testimony to anyone who wanted to confirm it with them directly.
My apologies. I didn’t realise there was a list of witnesses. I assumed that he just said that there were 500 or so and that there was no additional information.
And I guess Ephesus isn’t that far from Jerusalem (closer, actually than Dallas is to Chicago). So if someone actually read what Paul wrote (were there many copies?) and assuming he showed it to someone who doubted what he said and could be bothered checking one throw away line of text, all that they had to do was:
First find out who these people were (check Paul’s list I guess. Not sure why he’d feel the need to do it, but wasn’t it good of him to keep all the names and addresses of 500 hundred people for over thirty years. I haven’t got details of anyone that far back).
Then find out if they were still alive thirty or so years after the event (average life expectancy was the mid fourties at the time, so most people who would have been alive would have been teenagers). Although I guess Paul could have helped him out here as he seems to have known that ‘most were still alive’ (I wonder, in passing, how he knew this. The chances are, unless all of the 500 were young teens, that the majority of them would now be dead).
Anyway, then find out if they still lived in the same area (beats me how he’d do this. Not like you can Google the person’s address). But moving on…
Then save a up for the trip of a lifetime. Travel wasn’t cheap and most people never left their own village. No mistake about it. This was a Big Trip. Maybe Paul could lend them the money.
Then give up their job. Well, unless he was independently wealthy, in which case he wouldn’t need to. But who is going to give someone a few months off to look for a bunch of teens from thirty years back and still have the job open when he gets back?
Then leave family and friends and travel 1200kms for a couple of months just to get to the approximate area (plus 1200kms back when he’d finished, of course).
Then spend I don’t know how long looking for someone who was on Paul’s list (are you absolutely sure he had a list?).
If he finds anyone, then he can check to see if they actually knew Jesus or at least knew him by sight and could verify that they physically saw Him (over thirty years ago!) in a situation whereby it was convincing enough to be classed as being beyond reasonable doubt.
Then, eventually, when he gets back, all he needs to do is make sure that his account, whatever it might be, is treated as genuine, recorded in some way and is read by enough people and passed on as a rebuttal of that one throw away line that Paul wrote.
Piece of cake…
Is this what you want to propose, Peter? Seriously?
