A Priest Challenges Me About Jesus

Damn. Id3like to go, but CA is a loooong drive

Plot twist: he had a secret twin brother

😂

Alex you have slowly become a christian simp.

I’m begging you to come to Denver next time

I like Alex but cmon.. he didn't challenge you. He asked a question.

Jesus has been misidentified as Brian (a very naughty boy) as we saw 30 years ago.

Religious people are soooo cute!

1. A person named Jesus may have existed, but apparently it was not his actual name, the name Jesus was attributed to him

2. We have no evidence outside the Bible of the resurrection

In fact the resurrection violates Roman law for how they dealt with false kings.

They did not bury them in Toms, they buried them in mass unmarked graves so they could never be made martyrs or found

And they never posted guards to tombs of people criticized for treason.

3. The Gospels have three different accounts of Jesus resurrection all of which contradict each other

4. Even if Jesus did exist and was killed, there is no evidecne of the resurrection or the divinriy of Christ.

You're part of a movement that reveres your charismatic leader. You might even think he's god. And the government kills him. This pisses you off. How could they possibly kill your god? You deny he ever died at all. Maybe you believe he's literally alive. Maybe saying he's alive is just a thumb in the eye of the government. Maybe you just heard other people say it and repeat it yourself, maybe kind of believe it, maybe you're just in solidarity with everyone else as a protest against his death. In any case, claiming or believing or just SAYING your leader is alive (when in reality he is dead) puts the government in a tough position. They already killed the guy, and the followers have just denied that he's even dead. You can't kill him again, and you can't change their minds about it. Boom. Explained.

I have thought about the resurrection ever since I was a child, when I first heard the story of Lazarus.

There was always one question that bothered me: Why didn't anyone ask Lazarus where he had been?

I mean, seriously – after someone has been dead for four days and then comes back to life, wouldn't that be the very first question you would ask?

“Lazarus, where were you? What did you experience? Were you in heaven? Were you in hell? Did you see anything? Did you experience anything at all?”

Think about what an extraordinary opportunity that would have been. If Lazarus could have described what happened to him while he was dead, we might have had an answer to one of humanity's oldest and greatest questions: What happens to us when we die?

And yet, the story gives us no such conversation. Lazarus comes back, but we are never told what he experienced during those four days.

That has always fascinated me. Because if resurrection is meant to demonstrate something about life after death, wouldn't the person who actually died and came back be the most important witness of all?

Perhaps there is a theological reason why the story doesn't answer that question. But from a purely human perspective, I can't help wondering:

If I had been standing there that day, the first thing I would have asked Lazarus was, “Where were you?

The success of Christianity is nicely described in "The Darkening Age"

Alex rightfully mentioned Matthew 28:17 Jesus took his 11 disciples to a mountain in Galilee where they worshipped him but some doubted I believe Alex should also have highlighted Luke 24:37-43 thinking they saw a ghost…and even then they did not believe it

If im not mistaken, Peters body was found archeologicaly in Rome. Body was in tomb with writting above it saying here lies Peter and the sceleton was missing feet, implying romans cut his feet after he died upsidedown on cross. The skeleton was from 1-2 century.

So what? Just because a bunch of people fell for it doesn't make it legit. The Mormons have a huge following and they are full of crap.

Alex, how much are you making annually from being a video influencer?

99% of the shit in the bible is just rehashed medieval stories and myths. The small remaining percent is just references to geographical places that are still there.

You have to take my magic god claims and mythology seriously because look how impactful me religion is and look at how you can explain this magic event from 2,000 years ago so there checkmate athiest. Also look at these old ancient people who wrote magic stuff happened. Guys. These athiests are so unreasonable for not taking magic god man claims seriously.

Lightweight experiences someone who actually brought the receipts.

Alex is completely right about one thing here: Christianity becoming huge doesn’t prove Christianity is true. Obviously Islam grew too, plenty of religions and movements have spread successfully, so I wouldn’t use “look how big Christianity became” as an argument for the resurrection.

Where I lose him a little is how skeptical he gets with the actual resurrection material. Even if you don’t think Matthew was written by Matthew or John by John, you still have Paul writing earlier than the Gospels and passing on a tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that he says he received, where Peter, the Twelve, James, etc. are named as people Jesus appeared to. And Paul actually knew Peter and James. So I have a hard time buying the idea that maybe none of the original disciples even believed they had seen Jesus alive again. You can absolutely say they were mistaken, had visions, grief experiences, whatever, but acting like even their belief in an appearance is historically that shaky seems like a stretch to me.

Also, the disciples doubting in the Gospel accounts doesn’t really strike me as evidence that the resurrection was meant non-literally. The writers are going out of their way to say the opposite. Luke has Jesus eating, John has Thomas and the wounds, Matthew literally says some doubted while Jesus was standing there. You can think those details developed later, sure, but they clearly weren’t writing “Jesus lives on in our hearts” or something symbolic like that.

And the alternative explanations Alex throws out are possible in the sense that you can imagine them, but stuff like “maybe the body was stolen” only deals with one piece of the story. It doesn’t really explain why people like Peter, James, and Paul became convinced Jesus appeared to them. On the other hand, saying they had visions might explain the experiences, but then you still have other parts of the tradition to deal with. None of that automatically proves a miracle happened, but I think the evidence deserves a little more than “extremely dubious.”

I like Alex and I think he’s usually very fair, but on this one I think his skepticism ends up doing more work than the historical evidence does.

Going to be a staggering number of people who stand before Jesus on judgment day and plead with Him how they just didn’t have enough credible evidence

In the days when a great deal of the population believed in magic and witchcraft, it was a fairly common parlor trick to claim you'd died and resurrected, in order to get people to believe you had magic powers.
This is just another of many instances of that.