In Rodney Starks ‘The Rise of Christianity, he quoted Origen, a highly respected early Church Father, as saying that during his time, there were only “a few” Christians.

Brady wrote:

As for the Church fathers, you brought them up, not Moreland or me. Why? I don’t really know. They are not part of my or Moreland’s argument.

When I claimed that the early Christian Church was quite small, you quoted the historian Tacitus as saying that Nero persecuted “vast multitudes of Christians.” You also said that the primary sources lived much closed to the time of the Resurrection than people living today, and as such were in a much better position to evaluate the claims of the Gospels and Paul. In fact, we have spent a good deal of time discussing the primary sources. In addition, top Christian scholars often attempt to strengthen they case by quoting some of the primary sources.

The major weakness in your primary sources argument is that historically, the majority of the people who became Christians had little or no knowledge of the names of the primary sources, much less ever read any other their writings. Therefore, you need to tell me upon what rational bases those people chose to become Christians. 

I was a fundamentalist Christian for over 35 years. When I became a Christian, I had never heard of any of the primary sources, and until after our debate started, I had still never heard of the names of the primary sources.

In my closing arguments, I not only by implication demolish Moreland’s entire case in ‘Scaling the Secular City,” by also by implication demolish the entire fundamentalist case as presented by all other Christians as well.  

As you will see from my closing arguments, what our debate all gets down to is a numbers game, not just between you and me, but between all Christians and skeptics as well. The Gospel writers and Paul were well aware of this fact and wrote accordingly, i.e. the feeding of the 5,000, the feeding of the 4,000, the three thousand people who got save after hearing a sermon by Peter, and the entire town that accepted Christianity after hearing teachings by Peter and John. If the feeding of the 5,000 had been the feeding of the 25, the Gospels writers would not have mentioned it. They did imply that only around a couple of dozen people saw the empty tomb, but they backed that up with the claim of the 500 eyewitnesses.

Regarding the 500 eyewitnesses, Farrell Till said, “Now let's make the feat really remarkable. Let's suppose that someone should claim that she had swum 800 meters in only 15 seconds. Who would believe her? Well, what if someone claimed that 500 people had witnessed her alleged accomplishment? Would that make it more believable? Not to rational people, because rational people would realize that it is far more likely that the claim of 500 witnesses was a lie or an honest mistake than that such an extraordinary feat had actually been accomplished. Even if the 500 people should come forward and swear under oath that they had witnessed the feat, rational people still would not believe it, because rational people would still understand that it is far more likely that 500 people would all lie or could be honestly mistaken than that a person could actually swim 800 meters in only 15 seconds.”

My closing arguments:

In ‘The Impossible Faith,’ in parts of Holding’s Factor #16, which is titled ‘Miscellaneous Contrarium,’ I was quite surprised to find the following:

'"So the question to be asked is, ‘Why did the early Christians make such a bold political stand part of their established belief system?' They must have truly believed that Jesus was the Lord of this world, and that His resurrection from the dead proved it. Wright concludes:

‘This subversive belief in Jesus' Lordship, over against that of Caesar, was held in the teeth of the fact that Caesar had demonstrated his superior power in the obvious way, by having Jesus crucified. But the truly extraordinary thing is that this belief was held by a tiny group who, for the first two or three generations at least, could hardly have mounted a riot in a village, let alone a revolution in an empire.’”

Holding has got a lot of explaining to do regarding this obvious contradiction.

In part of the introductory comments in ‘The Impossible Faith,’ Holding says “We have shown why each of these parallels is inadequate, but now it is time to put together a comprehensive list of issues that we assert that critics must deal with in explaining why Christianity succeeded where it should have clearly failed or died out as did these others.”

Well, by Holding’s own admission in Factor #16, he agrees with Wright that during the first few two or three generations following the Resurrection the Christian Church was ‘tiny.’ Is that Holding’s example of “succeeding?”

Consider the following New Testament claims:

1) The feeding of the 5,000, 2) the feeding of the 4,000, 3) the three thousand people who accepted Christianity after hearing a sermon by Peter, 4) the entire town that accepted Christianity after hearing teachings by Peter and John, 5) the 500 eyewitnesses, and 6) Matthew 4:24, which says “And his fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.” Readers, does that sound like a “tiny” church to you?"

If during the first two or three generations following the Resurrection the Christian Church was 'tiny,' as Holding and Wright said, then skeptics can credibly claim that the reason for that tiny size was because New Testament claims of miracles, including the physical resurrection of Jesus, were false, as evidenced by the probability that few people were gullible enough to believe what they clearly knew was false.

When I asked Holding to provide resonable proof as to the size of the Christian Church during the first three decades following the Resurrection, he said that the burden of proof was on me to prove that the Church was very small. Such a comment was patently absurd. In courts of law, while a claimant (plaintiff) is required to prove his initial claims beyond a reasonable doubt, a defendant is not required to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. The Bible is definitely a claimant. It is full of claims from cover to cover, beginning with the very first verse, which says "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Skeptics are definitely defendants, as clearly stated in John 12:48, which says "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day."

Holding attempts to change the burden of proof into the burder of disproof. Christians do this a lot. Holding might as well ask me to travel throughout the entire universe in order to reasonably prove that the God of the Bible is not there. Foillowing his same line of reasoning, if I told him that I saw a mouse pick up a battleship, the burden of proof would be on him to disprove my claim.

Regarding the burden of disproof, I would like to ask Holding to disprove deism. I have rendered Holding’s entire essay titled ‘The Impossible Faith’ completely useless.

Brady, in debates at the Theology Web, posts by both sides are presented unedited. When opponnet A makes a unedited post, opponent B can comment on all or part of opponent A’s post. The good thing about that system is that readers are able read the unedited comments made by both sides, just like transcripts of court trials. So far in our debate I haven’t minded each of us responding only to selected excepts made by the other. However, for the purposes of this post and all subsequent posts, I request that you do as the Theology Web does and post all posts by both sides unedited.

The reason for my request is because due to the embarrassing (for you) nature of this post, you may not want your readers to read some of my comments, but that would not be fair to me and to your readers. If you made the same request to me, I would honor your request.

At any rate, I should get about 200,000 vistors to my web site over the next 12 months. You get only a fraction of that. At the conclusion of our debate, in the upper left portion of the first page of my essay, you will see “Debate challenge.” As I conclude debates with various Christians, I will provide my readers with links to the  debates that can be accessed by clicking on “Debate challenge.”

So far, you have been a very wily and clever opponent, one of the best I have ever faced. However, since my current arguments are based upon comments made by Christians, past and present, you can no longer accuse me of only making appeals to authority that agree with my positions.

Johnny

Round 8 - From Brady

Hi Johnny,

Since this round is our last, I will follow your lead and make a few comments, then add my closing arguments.

Johnny wrote:

When I claimed that the early Christian Church was quite small, you quoted the historian Tacitus as saying that Nero persecuted “vast multitudes of Christians.” You also said that the primary sources lived much closed to the time of the Resurrection than people living today, and as such were in a much better position to evaluate the claims of the Gospels and Paul. In fact, we have spent a good deal of time discussing the primary sources. In addition, top Christian scholars often attempt to strengthen they case by quoting some of the primary sources.

The major weakness in your primary sources argument is that historically, the majority of the people who became Christians had little or no knowledge of the names of the primary sources, much less ever read any other their writings. Therefore, you need to tell me upon what rational bases those people chose to become Christians. 

I don’t know why you are bringing this up again. This was part of our first dialog, the one you begged off and asked that we not pursue. I agreed and we started this new discussion.

But even in that discussion the only Church farther I quoted was Clement of Rome. I quoted him because he was a primary source concerning Nero’s massacre. In other words, he lived in the time and place in which it occurred and had access to information. Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian have nothing to do with what I said. You seem to think that any writing that is old is a primary source, it is not. You also don’t seem to understand that without primary sources (i.e. people who lived in the time and place that events happened and afterwards wrote about them) we could know virtually nothing about history at all.

Your comment about why people became Christians is a complete non sequitor. The historical reliability of the NT does not in any way depend upon why any one person or group of people became Christians. Trying to connect the two is fallacious. I have lost count on how many times I have had to use that word to describe your writings. Can’t you come up with just one argument without committing a fallacy?

Johnny wrote:

Regarding the 500 eyewitnesses, Farrell Till said, “Now let's make the feat really remarkable. Let's suppose that someone should claim that she had swum 800 meters in only 15 seconds. Who would believe her? Well, what if someone claimed that 500 people had witnessed her alleged accomplishment? Would that make it more believable? Not to rational people, because rational people would realize that it is far more likely that the claim of 500 witnesses was a lie or an honest mistake than that such an extraordinary feat had actually been accomplished. Even if the 500 people should come forward and swear under oath that they had witnessed the feat, rational people still would not believe it, because rational people would still understand that it is far more likely that 500 people would all lie or could be honestly mistaken than that a person could actually swim 800 meters in only 15 seconds.”

From our private discussions, I thought you would have learned not to depend on anything that Till has to say. Let’s go through this. If our swimmer has only her own power to work with, we would not believe her. Why? Because on her own, she is not a sufficient power source to accomplish what she said she accomplished. However, if we put her on a sufficiently powerful ski-jet, she could cross the 800 meters in 15 seconds. This is the same thing with the resurrection. If Jesus claim was that he raised himself from the dead by natural means, we would have no reason to believe him. But that was not his claim. He claimed that a sufficient power source (The God who created the heavens and the earth) was involved in his resurrection. There are two different categories involved here. Till would have us look at the resurrection from the wrong category.

Johnny wrote in his closing arguments:

In ‘The Impossible Faith,’ in parts of Holding’s Factor #16, which is titled ‘Miscellaneous Contrarium,’ I was quite surprised to find the following:…

Holding has got a lot of explaining to do…

In part of the introductory comments in ‘The Impossible Faith,’ Holding says…

Well, by Holding’s own admission in Factor #16, he agrees…

When I asked Holding to provide resonable(sic) proof…

Holding might as well ask me to travel throughout the entire universe…

I have rendered Holding’s entire essay titled ‘The Impossible Faith’ completely useless…

I must say that I was very disappointed to see that you used most of your closing arguments to attack a paper by someone named Holding, rather than address the many pages of argument and rebuttals that I presented in our debate. You choose to attack a paper that is not mine and positions that are not mine. I am sure that our audience recognizes this as the straw-man fallacy.

I was also sorry to see that you did not address the proposition that you began this debate with. But perhaps this was an attempt at a red herring, to throw people off the track, so they wouldn’t notice that you failed to prove your point and you failed to rebut mine.

Johnny wrote:

Brady, in debates at the Theology Web, posts by both sides are presented unedited. When opponnet(sic) A makes a unedited post, opponent B can comment on all or part of opponent A’s post. The good thing about that system is that readers are able read the unedited comments made by both sides, just like transcripts of court trials. So far in our debate I haven’t minded each of us responding only to selected excepts made by the other. However, for the purposes of this post and all subsequent posts, I request that you do as the Theology Web does and post all posts by both sides unedited.

Johnny, are you nuts? The content of your posts were published unedited. The only editing I did was to bold and indent quotes, so that the format of our debate would be uniform and easier for the reader to follow and occasionally I corrected your poor spelling (ever hear of a spelling check?). No content of your posts was ever edited out and I have left in the spelling errors in your current post.

Johnny continued:

The reason for my request is because due to the embarrassing (for you) nature of this post, you may not want your readers to read some of my comments, but that would not be fair to me and to your readers. If you made the same request to me, I would honor your request.

Believe me, Johnny; I wouldn’t remove a word of your post. I think everyone should see for himself each and every logical fallacy that you commit.

Johnny wrote:

So far, you have been a very wily and clever opponent, one of the best I have ever faced. However, since my current arguments are based upon comments made by Christians, past and present, you can no longer accuse me of only making appeals to authority that agree with my positions

You are quite right Johnny, in this post you committed all the fallacies yourself and you didn’t rely on anyone else’s fallacies.

Now for my closing arguments:

Your proposition is stated as: “My proposition is that the historicity of the New Testament cannot be trusted.” This is rather vague and even with all the opportunities for equivocation; you still failed to demonstrate your point. The main reason was that you had no methodology for doing historical investigation. Without this inductive, objective methodology all you could offer was subjective speculation and the unsupported comments of others. It should have been easy for you to show that given a criteria and baseline that the evidence for the reliability of the NT and the event of the resurrection was not sufficient to warrant affirmation; that is if it weren't for the fact that the evidence for the historical reliability of the NT and the event of the resurrection wasn't so overwhelming. Concerning the comments of others, you had no clue of how they reached their conclusions nor did you take the step to find out why any of your sources came to their conclusions. I think it is safe to say that your approach demonstrates that you are really not concerned with the truth, but merely with bolstering your presupposition, regardless of the facts. The fact that you were so willing to embrace so many fallacies, even up to the very end of this discussion, speaks to the cogency of this observation.

Another area that shows your contempt for truth when it assaults your presupposition is your reaction to the methodology of Moreland for doing historical investigation. You were the one who initially embraced his position and proposed we use it, until you found out that it devastated your position. Then you eagerly threw it out, not because it was a bad methodology or the conclusions were faulty, but merely because it did not come to a conclusion you liked. To date you have never been able to show that Moreland’s argument was not cogent, or that his conclusion was not strong.

As it stands, we have Moreland’s argument, unassailed on one side of the proposition and your mere speculation and loads of logical fallacies on the other side. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.

I would suggest to you, Johnny, as I have done on past occasions: that you change sides and get rid of all the bad arguments and fallacies. Over here we actually have valid deductive arguments, with sound conclusions and cogent inductive arguments, with strong conclusions. We don’t have to rely on mere speculation and we can actually follow, unafraid, the truth wherever it leads. As I mentioned before, you also get to have a relationship with the God who created this universe and you will have your sins forgiven. Truth, Logic, God, forgiveness, it’s not a bad offer.

It’s up to you.

So, allow me to thank you for your time and effort. I hope we can keep in contact in the future.

Regards,