I do not share his Faith, but I understand his views to be a Leap of Faith. While science is nice and all but as humans taking such leaps and trusting other people despite evidence to the contrary, is every day business, is it not? Of course it is rather hard to believe that such a vast majority of people take such Leaps on not just ONE person, but a whole chain of people spanning over 2000 years!! But he must have his personal reasons, and i respect those.
Also just to follow up on nocman, you can read "who moved the stone", where the biblical account of final hours of christs life is examined in context of what we know about the time period...does it read more like someone writing an emotional story or someone trying to relate something that actually happened?
My views are not based on any "leap of faith". A "leap of faith" implies that a person is believing in the absence of any evidence -- and that is by no means true of me.
Eyewitness testimony is used every day in courts of law. It is one of the most common forms of evidence used to determine the truth about things that happened in the past. I am convinced that the New Testament contains multiple eyewitness accounts of Jesus, the things He said, and the things He did.
My faith in Him is based on those accounts. I believe it is God who made sure those accounts were recorded. I was convinced by the evidence given in those accounts. I understand that there are many who have either never read the accounts, or read them and were not convinced by them to believe in Jesus.
This is moving quite far from the main topic, but:
Eye witnesses are actually really fallible even in fairly recent cases. You can easily manipulate how people remember scenes and how to interpret what they saw or heard.
Google "eye witness fallibility".
I think you need to go to the original texts to truly grok their meaning in their original context. I believe the King James bible is considered a literary masterpiece - and great literature, spiritual or not usually evokes feelings. The priesthood probably had the brightest literary minds of their time.
Personally I just find it cool ancient literacy can evoke feelings through a span of thousands of years.
I apologize if what I said offended you in anyway, but in my opinion you still need that leap of faith to believe that not only all those eye witnesses were telling the truth, but also that the accounts recorded over 2000 years ago are still preserved the way they were. But frankly all this discussion is moot considering that if you believe in an omnipotent god, all other things should come naturally. I mean if a Being can create the entire universe from nothing (via the big bang or otherwise), then creating a Y-chromosome out of nothing is a very small feat for such a being.
Now on the contrary, if someone chooses not to believe in such a god, then I don't see how you can make them believe virgin births or the integrity of 2000 year old eye witness accounts. Especially considering that history is full of people who used religion to serve their own agenda (recent example: Al Qaeda) thus giving religion as a whole, a bad name.
"I apologize if what I said offended you in anyway"
No need to apologize (though I do appreciate the civility). I was not offended -- I just did not want anyone to think that my beliefs were based on no evidence, because that is not true.
Your point about believing in God as an omnipotent being is important. You said "...if someone chooses not to believe in such a god, then I don't see how you can make them believe virgin births or the integrity of 2000 year old eye witness accounts." I merely suggested that people read one of the accounts. I believe God is omnipotent. I believe those accounts are accurate, because God has protected them, because they are His testimony about Himself and how He has dealt with man's sin. And I believe these things because I read the accounts and was convinced that they were true, and that the accounts themselves were of divine origin.
I'm not trying to argue anyone into becoming a Christian. I'm merely stating my own beliefs, trying to explain the reasons behind them, and encouraging anyone who is interested to read the book that led me to those beliefs.
On the other point, the fact that "history is full of people who used religion to serve their own agenda (recent example: Al Qaeda) thus giving religion as a whole, a bad name" is really not an issue to me. It is cutting a pretty big swath to lump everyone who has some belief in a supreme being into one large group. There are vastly differing beliefs between people which lead them in vastly different directions. There are always people who will use anything they can for their own selfish gain. It think it is a huge mistake to ignore God altogether just because many people have done evil things in His name. My faith is not in other people. My faith is in Christ. I am convinced He is not just an ordinary man, but that He is God in the flesh. The things that He said and did, the way He talked to people, the way He answered people's questions. All of that convinced me of who He is.
Again, if anyone is interested I would encourage you to read the book of John (I linked to it in my other posts on this subject) and to draw your own conclusions.
> "leap of faith to believe ... the accounts recorded over 2000 years ago are still preserved the way they were."
It's not so much a leap of faith as a study of manuscript integrity. The field of study is called "textual criticism". I can't do it justice in a single Hacker News comment, but you can find fairly substantial scholarly books and articles on the subject.
When it comes to the New Testament, one of the keys for analysis is the multitude of spread-out manuscripts. They have subtle differences from each other, like spelling mistakes (which help us trace lineage -- the same spelling error often appears in later copies from the same source), but the core stories are extremely well preserved -- not changing from early to late manuscripts, or from region to region.
It's also worth reading through the other writings of the early church, from the first 2 centuries, which extensively quote/reference those same accounts.
The sum total of the evidence is that the current version of the Biblical accounts of who Jesus was were written within about 30 years of his death and well-preserved from that time period onward.
(There's also what we call "higher criticism", which looks at how the contents of the text correspond to known history etc. That also establishes the gospels as written ~30 years after Jesus' death. My favorite oddball data: statistical distributions of the names in the gospels compared to names uncovered in archaeological digs -- the common names are correct for first century Palestinian Jews, not Egyptian or Greek Jews.)
There are definitely leaps of faith involved in Christianity. "Does my book of Matthew match the first century book of Matthew?" is not one of them.
For those wondering about sources, Wikipedia has a solid article on the dates in the bible, and seem to settle on about 50 CE as the original authorship dates. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible]
Totally ignorant question, but what year is accepted as the official death for Jesus?
> "what year is accepted as the official death for Jesus?"
There's some disagreement, but in the research I was doing this morning the most commonly accepted date I found was April 7, 30 AD. (Other common dates are March 25 or April 25, 31 AD.)
Interestingly enough, this provides the source for the date of Christmas. There's an old tradition that says Jewish prophets always live a whole number of years, so their death and conception are the same date, putting their birth date 9 months later / 3 months earlier. The two dates being celebrated in the 2nd century church were December 25 (based on the March 25, 31 AD date) and January 7 (based on April 7, 30 AD). We now call those two dates "Christmas" and "Epiphany". You can find these dates discussed by Sextus Julius Africanus (160-240 AD), Irenaeus (in Against Heresies, 180 AD), and Hippolytus (commentary on Daniel, 204 AD).
Rumors about hijacking a pagan celebration date started several centuries later, by Jacob Bar-Salibi in the 12th century. He probably got his causation backwards -- the Dec 25 celebration "Sol Invictus" was a result of emperor Aurelius' decree in 274 AD, meaning it took a date Christians had already been celebrating a century earlier.
Even taking the eyewitness accounts in the Gospels at face value, they are highly dubious. Note that the disciples don't even recognize him when they meet the resurrected Jesus (or they guy claiming to be the resurrected Jesus), and have to see and feel physical proof like the wounds before they even accept that the guy is indeed the resurrected Jesus. An then the guy suddenly vanishes again, without any explanation.
The text says (in verse 16) "their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him."
Jesus hides his identity, then asks them what they are talking about (they were talking about Him, including the fact that He had been crucified). Then he goes on to explain to them how all that happened (including his crucifixion) fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament (verse 27):
"And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself."
If you don't believe in the supernatural, then it is extremely improbable that you will believe in Jesus. His miracles are all evidence of His deity. He was not limited to things a normal person could do. That being true, obviously He could hide His identity from His disciples (for whatever reason He chose to do that). Personally I think He did so to increase the impact on the disciples of the things He expained to them while His identity was hidden -- but that is speculation on my part, the text doesn't say.
I guess that makes sense in-story, but if you want to take it seriously as an eye-witness account, it is somewhat problematic that deception-magic is used. They might just as well be under deception magic when they believe they recognize him, right?
