Reddit mentions of Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?

>To be fair to myself, I feel that I have to put God aside for a moment, and look at the facts, plainly, and as objectively as I can. And follow the evidence where it leads.

This is good. Start your investigation as an agnostic. Make truth your goal. So often, I hear that Christians doing investigations/research are committed to God no matter what. Well, then their investigation is biased from the start. Now, we're all biased no matter how hard we try not to be, but committing oneself to God before investigating one's religious beliefs seems like, for you, a bias that you're attempting to mitigate, and for that I applaud you.

When I was in your shoes, some Deist writers (like Thomas Payne in The Age of Reason) really got me thinking at first, and helped me to see that while there might be a God, there are some serious challenges to whether that God is the God of the Bible. For a while I started calling myself a Deist. I still flirt with the idea.

One interesting idea I initially learned from Payne is that Genesis mentions a place called "Dan" but the Bible doesn't tell the story of how the city of Dan was named until much later (like Joshua/Judges). Here's a blog post by a prof at a Baptist seminary explaining the issue in more detail.

For archaeology, especially that of the Exodus story, I'd look into writings by William Dever. He's more moderate than Finkelstein. The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible includes some writing by Dever, and also covers some other issues you're interested in - e.g. textual criticism, especially that of the book of Daniel, which is very interesting to me.

As for treatments of the Resurrection from the "other side" I'd recommend Doubting Jesus Resurrection by Komarnitsky.

Lastly, I found it helpful to find areas where consensus arguably exists among scholars of a given area of study. For example, while there is disagreement about the applicability of the Documentary Hypothesis, it's my understanding there's still consensus that multiple authors composed the Pentateuch. Other areas of consensus include late authorship of the latter part of Daniel where prophecies are made (which is relevant to the Christian because Mark, the earliest gospel, interpreted these prophecies as being about Jesus and the 1st century).

Anyway, I hope I've given you some interesting things to look at. Good luck!

>"You agree that we should do good things (which is part of Christianity), but reject the idea that God exists" (which is also part of Christianity).

Sorry, you can't claim that Christianity is the origin of doing "good things". Its absurd to think that no one ever treated people kindly and well before the advent of Christianity, or even its parent Judaism. Here's an excellent summation of this from Doubting Jesus' Resurrection by Kris Komarnitsky.

Empathy in its socialized form – compassion – appears in almost every religious and philosophical tradition, not just the Judeo-Christian tradition.11 For example, Hindus in 150 B.C.E. said, “One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to one’s self; this is the essence of morality” (Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113:8). Confucius in 500 B.C.E. said, “Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself” (Mencius VII.A.4; see too Doctrine of the Mean 13). Buddhists in the second century B.C.E. said, “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself” (Udana-Varga 5:18). Zoroaster in 600 B.C.E. said, “Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others” (Shayast-ne-Shayast 13:29). The Greek philosopher Isocrates in 375 B.C.E. said, “Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.” The Greek philosopher Epictetus in 135 C.E. said, “What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others” (Encheiridion). Mohammed in the seventh century C.E. said, “What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of human beings, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the sufferings of the injured” (Sahih Bukhari). The stated purpose of the world’s first known legal code in 1780 B.C.E. was, “…to cause justice to prevail and to ensure that the strong do not oppress the weak” (The Law of Hammurabi).

Regarding the idea that Christian God exists, I don't reject its possibility. I just don't believe its true due to the lack of compelling evidence, as well as the innate contradictions of the Christian mythos. If we consider a more deistic (not specifically Christian) view, I have fewer issues but still have no compelling reasons to believe even in that sort of a "god", although I'll admit the possibility.

>Kalam cosomological argument: God is the best explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.

Why?

>Teleological argument: God is the best explanation of why the universe is so fine tuned for life.

It isn't. Random chance dictates that, in a universe as vast as ours, there are several worlds that are capable of life. After all, we've found several planets in habitable zones of stars within 300 lightyears of where we are (which is a fucking tiny space in astronomical scales, BTW) and we're in a fairly empty bit of the universe. With enough chances, even extremely long odds will finally pay off.

>Moral argument: God is the best explanation why objective moral values exist.

First you have to prove an objective morality even exists. It appears to be rather subjective to me.

>Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead: The person of Jesus has many written records about him. Using the same historical scrutiny we might use for any other historical document, it seems the best explanation for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is that god allowed it to happen.

None of which were written during his lifetime. And the resurrection has to be proven first. The whole tale is too fishy for me to believe it. As a convicted criminal, it's far more likely that his body ended up in an unmarked criminal's grave and none of his followers actually knew where it was. This is the theory offered up by the book "Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?" (which I'm currently in the process of reading), an in-depth review of which can be found here. And it's a far more likely theory, IMO, as it requires no supernatural agency.

And I suppose I misspoke. It's not that there isn't evidence, it's that the evidence either requires the presupposition that there is a god/supernatural forces (the whole resurrection thing) or is simply not convincing (the moral argument and the "fine-tuned" argument).

Thanks!

> With Christ rising from the dead, my thoughts would be:
> Who made it up?
> What did they have to gain?
> How did they keep the conspiracy under wraps?

This is definitely something I worked through at one point. With where I'm at now, I don't think I would position it in terms of "what they had to gain" or a "conspiracy". I think Jesus's followers genuinely believed he did rise from the dead, but I think they were mistaken and... "fooling themselves" sounds too harsh, but I think that they told themselves a story about what happened in order to rationalize the death of the man they believed to be the Messiah. The Messiah, according to the Jews, could not die. Not for real. So they worked out an interpretation of events that allowed them to believe that he didn't actually die permanently.

Kris Komarnitsky's book Doubting Jesus' Resurrection has what I would say is a very plausible explanation for what happened, and you can read about it in his article here. Of particular interest would be his fourth comparison to the Jewish sect called the Lubavitch, in the 90s. It's very similar to the early Christianity scenario.

I'm not saying I'm married to this idea, and my official answer as to what I believe about it is "I'm not really sure", but it's definitely very compelling, in my opinion.

> Why did the gospels report people's names and where they lived as witnesses to Christ's miracles? The religious leaders killed Lazarus shortly after he was resurrected, so it would be dangerous to admit you witnesses a miracle.
> Why did the apostles endure arrest and death for something they knew was a lie? They never changed their story of seeing the risen Christ despite torture. What did they have to gain if they knew it was all fake?

We actually don't know that any of the disciples or Lazarus were martyred for those reasons, except Paul, and maaaybe Peter, but I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that Peter was definitely martyred. The best evidence we can appeal to for those claims is church tradition, which originates from quite a long time after the deaths would have happened. As well, if we accept the level of evidence we have for the disciples' martyrdoms, and decide to believe that the claims are true, we also need to accept every other claim that has the same level of evidence, and this gets us into some wacky scenarios where we are forced to hold contradictory beliefs because we have equal levels of evidence (which, again, is not much) for both, and so on.

Not only that... but if it was true that the disciples died for their beliefs, that doesn't mean anything for the truth of their actual belief. People die for untrue beliefs all the time. Look at early Mormonism. If our standard for accepting something as true is "the people who were claiming it also died for those claims", we are opening ourselves up to a lot of other things that conflict with Christianity.