Our next step is to set up our methodology and produce the evidence.

I will not attempt to rewrite pages upon pages of evidence. I will refer you to an online document that we can both reference during our debate: “THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS are they Reliable?” By F. F. BRUCE. It can be found at: http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/ffbruce/ntdocrli/ntdocont.htm. Most of the evidence we will use is found in this document. I believe this will save us both a lot of time. You may want to skim through this and review it before we continue.

Regarding our methodology, I will allow you to choose that. You see I have found that any methodology that I pick is usually attacked by the person I am discussing these issues with as being prejudice. So, I have learned to allow you to choose the historical methodology we are to use. I only require that the methodology adhere to four elementary guidelines that I don’t think you will have a problem with:

1) The criteria must be able to be met, at least in principle. Sometimes people will make demands for evidence that cannot be met. The Atheist/Skeptic may ask for evidence that will prove with 100% certainty that Jesus rose from the dead. If you are unable to provide such evidence, the Atheist will then consider his unbelief justified. What the Atheist/Skeptic doesn't realize is that he has committed a categorical fallacy!

There are two types of reasoning that we use to determine truth deduction and induction. Deduction deals with formal logic that produces necessary conclusions; conclusions that are 100% certain. Induction deals with informal arguments and yields probable conclusions. These are conclusions that rational people adhere to, because the rational person goes with the evidence and not against it. When dealing in the areas of law, science and history we need to use inductive reasoning. All of these areas can only yield probable conclusions. As you can see, if the Atheist/Skeptic demands 100% certainty, he is asking for a deductive argument. But historical investigation is an inductive process. Here the Atheist/Skeptic is demanding a deductive conclusion to an inductive argument. He is asking that the characteristics of the one category (deduction) be applied to another category (induction). This is fallacious. This type of criteria cannot even be met in principle. If the tests cannot be met, at least in principle, then it is not a real test.

2) The conclusions of the criteria cannot conflict with known fact. It is also improper to have tests that not only falsify the issue at hand, but other issues we already affirm to be true. For example, let's take David Hume's tests for the miraculous, which are found in his "Treatise on Human Understanding." Here Hume set up a battery of tests. In the end these tests show that no one can affirm that a miracle ever took place. However, in Hume's own day it was shown that, given these same tests, no one could affirm that Napoleon had been Emperor of France, or that he had ever lived. This was an intriguing idea since Napoleon was still alive and living in exile.

3) The criteria must be objective. In other words, the test should yield the same result, regardless of the personal opinions of those applying it. If the test only disproves the resurrection when an Atheist/Skeptic applies it, or only substantiates the resurrection when a Christian applies it, the test should be rejected.

4) The criteria must be one that has been used in historical research and has been demonstrated as a reliable way of determining history. I was recently reading a paper written by an Atheist. In the paper he admits that there is more evidence for the reliability of the New Testament than any other book of ancient times. However, he still rejected the resurrection because he felt there was not sufficient evidence for the reliability of the documents or the event. He listed what he considered to be sufficient evidence. At the top of the list was videotape of the event. If we could produce videotape of the resurrection of Jesus, this Atheist would be tempted to believe. Besides the obvious absurdity of this criterion, this criterion is not now, nor ever has been a criterion used by historians to determine ancient history. It is an instance of the logical fallacy "Special Pleading." It is a criterion that is set up with the sole purpose of disproving the event at hand, an event the Atheist does not like, but it is never used to evaluate other events of the period.

Once again, I want to keep this short, so I will stop here and look forward to your comments.

Regards,

Brady

Round 2 - Johnny

Dear Brady,

Thanks for your second post. I will be somewhat easier to get along With than many other 
atheists and agnostics. I am an agnostic. I don't ask Christians for anything near absolute 
proof. All I ask is for them to provide sensible reasons for believing New Testament claims 
of miracles.

Regarding F. F. Bruce's essay titled 'The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?' 
 I've already been studying parts of it, and I think that it is an excellent basis for our debate, 
especially Bruce's topic on New Testament miracles, most notably the Resurrection.

So, I will begin by quoting and commenting on some of Bruce’s writings.

Bruce writes:

One very popular preacher and writer has dealt with several of the miracles from the 
psychological point of view in a very able way, without always carrying conviction, as when, 
for example, he traces the trouble of the man possessed with a legion of demons' back to a 
dreadful day in his childhood when he saw a legion of soldiers massacring the infants of Bethlehem, 
or another dreadful scene of the same kind. If this sort of argument helps some people to believe 
the Gospel record who otherwise would not believe it, so far so good. They may even be willing to 
accept the stories of raising the dead, in view of well-authenticated cases of people who have been 
technically dead for a few minutes and have then been restored to life.

 Regarding people who have technically being dead for a few minutes and being restored to life, we have 
here the same type of claim that a Christian writer made about the parting of the Red Sea. I mentioned this 
in my essay at askepticalapproach.com in my topic on the plagues in Egypt. The gentleman said that scientifically, 
there is good reason to accept a naturalistic explanation for the parting of the Rea Sea. If that is true, then why 
claim a miracle when the parting of the Red Sea many have occurred for naturalistic reasons. You can't have it 
both ways. Either the parting of the Red Sea was naturalistic or miraculous. The same goes for the coma example. 
Even if a person were to technically die for 30 minutes and come back to life, such a scenario could not be logically 
claimed to have been a miracle.

One woman was in a coma for over 10 years, woke up and started talking to people. As rare as that case was, no 
credible case can be made that such an occurrence was a miracle.

I remember reading many years ago when a man fell into the Potomac River. He was trapped under some ice in 
near freezing water for 10 or 20 minutes. He was rescued and recovered. There are other cases of situations in 
various parts of the world where death should have occurred, but didn't.

It is one thing to claim that a particular event happened, but it is another thing entirely to claim the cause of the event. 
Subjectivity can easily creep in, especially when the followers of various religions are evaluating such claims, often 
being influenced by their perceived vested interest, in the Christian case, the perceived vested interests regarding heaven 
and hell.

Bruce wrote:

These may make it easier for some people to believe in the raising of Jairus' daughter, or even of the young 
man of Nain, but they will hardly fit the case of Lazarus, who had been four days in the grave.

Such a claim is not logically defensible. Calling upon the Bible to be its own witness won't do. Only external, 
independent corroborative sources uninvolved parties disinterested parties will do.

In my essay topic on miracles, I said "If in the year 1500 A.D., a jet plane from the future flew over the city of Rome 
in the daytime and was observed by hundreds of thousands of people with varying world views, everyone viewing the 
jet plane would have agreed that they had seen something spectacular and unexplained. Most of those people would 
have believed that they had observed a miraculous event, but fully 100% of them would have agreed that they had seen 
something spectacular and unexplained. What Christians lack regarding claims of Biblical miracles is testimonies of 
spectacular and unexplained events from people of varying world views."

What it all gets down to is the necessity of having multiple testimonies given by disinterested parties having various 
worldviews. Christian have never provided even a single such scenario.

Bruce wrote:

George Moore treated this theme imaginatively in The Brook Kerith, but when we read it we realize 
that such a situation could have had nothing to do with the historical rise of Christianity. Other 
suggestions are that it was the wrong grave that the women went to; or that the Jewish authorities 
themselves had the body removed, lest it or the grave should become a center of devotion and a cause 
of further trouble. Or the disciples all with one consent became the victims of hallucination, or 
experienced something quite extraordinary in the nature of extrasensory perception. (The idea that they 
deliberately invented the tale is very properly discountenanced as a moral and psychological impossibility.) 
But the one interpretation which best accounts for all the data, as well as for the abiding sequel, is that 
Jesus' bodily resurrection from the dead was a real and objective event.

Regarding suggestions that it was the wrong grave, I will concede for the sake of argument that it was the right 
grave and that the body of Jesus was initially buried there. However, in my essay topic on the Resurrection, I 
offered the following hypothetical scenario:  Fundamentalist Christians claim that there are not any credible alternate 
hypotheses regarding the New Testament accounts of what happened at the tomb of Jesus. Of course, such is not the 
case. Here is one possibility: Joseph of Arimathea got Jesus' body from Pilate. He then prepared the body, put it in his 
tomb, had a large stone put in front of the entrance and went away, just as the texts say. That night, the day before 
the guards arrived at the tomb, the body was stolen and the tomb was left open. When the guards arrived at the tomb, 
they saw that the body was gone and immediately went to Pilate to report their findings.

Some Christians will ask who might have stolen the body and why. Although there are a number of possibilities 
pertaining to who might have stolen the body and why, I will offer only one possibility: The people who possibly 
stole the body could have been a few followers of Jesus who wanted to make it as certain as possible that the 
body would not be touched or defiled in any way by grave robbers. They could have wanted to re-bury the body 
in a secret place that was not a cemetery and therefore would not have been a place normally considered to be a 
place for burials.

Humans, grave robbers included, often do very strange things for very strange reasons, and since Christians claim 
that heaven, hell and eternity are at stake, they need to do much more than claim that is was not likely that the body 
of Jesus was stolen. They need to reasonably prove that it was next to impossible for the body to have been stolen, 
and that is something that they cannot do.

Regarding skeptic claims "the disciples all with one consent became the victims of hallucination, or experienced 
something quite extraordinary in the nature of extrasensory perception," for the sake of argument I will discount 
the possibility of hallucination or something quite extraordinary in the nature of extrasensory perception.

Regarding "But the one interpretation which best accounts for all the data, as well as for the abiding sequel, is that 
Jesus' bodily resurrection from the dead was a real and objective event," since the claimed events at The tomb prove 
nothing in and of themselves, (even some Christian apologists admit this), the key words here are Bruce's words "as 
well as for the abiding sequel," implying various aspects of the growth of the early Christian Church in the first few 
decades following the Resurrection. In James Holding's Internet essay titled 'The Impossible Faith,' which can be found 
at www.tektonics.org., to the best of my recollection, Holding never made any references to the events at the tomb, 
choosing rather to build his case by implication, the same thing as Bruce's "the abiding sequel." A word commonly used 
by Christian writers is the word "aftermath." The problem for Christians is, as I covered in my essay topic on the growth 
of the Christian Church, there was no reasonably provable aftermath regarding the growth of the early Christian Church 
prior to Emperor Constantine's endorsement of Christianity around 400 A.D. Among other things, I mentioned a book 
by Rodney Stark, Ph.D., sociology titled 'The Growth of Christianity.' Stark estimated that in 100 A.D., there were 
about 7,530 Christians. That number is smaller than the sizes of four good sized U.S. high schools. Rodney Stark is a 
respected sociologist in the opinions of most sociologists.

Sociologists are imminently qualified to conduct research regarding the beliefs and movements of ancient peoples. I 
know of no credible sociological research that Christians can provide to refute Stark's research. I mentioned in my 
essay that the Microsoft Encarta 2002 dictionary defines sociology as "the study of the origin, development, and 
structure of human societies and the behavior of individuals and groups in society."

Well, I've already taken up a fair amount of space. At least my comments are easy to read and understand.

Sincerely,

Johnny Skeptic