1 - an agreed upon fact - the tomb was empty. But then were the disciples in any shape to 'steal' the body. No, they were hiding in fear of their lives. Would they willingly die for a testimony that Jesus had supernaturally risen? Hardly kosta because they knew it was a lie.
There was no motive for Jesus' enemies to remove the body. When the teaching of the resurrection began - they could have easily provided the body and killed the new church there and then.
2 - Yet eyewitness testimony cannot be written off so easily kosta - it is considered reliable in our courts today. But it doesn't stop there for you kosta, this same Jesus was observed and spoke to these disciples on numerous occasions and up to as many as 500 at one time. So the eyewitness testimony of the empty tomb must also be matched up with other events.
This is how myths and legends are created, G. In less than a century it can become a dogma.
I don't accept fatima as an actual event - it was most likely a group hysteria imho. But you are correct - 100 years for the development of a myth to dogma. But in the case of the NT kosta - even you know that 1 Corinthians is believed to have been written 50-60 AD, making it less than 30 years after Jesus. It refers extensively to living witnesses. A parallel would be if someone constructing the idea in the 1990's that Kennedy never really died after the Dallas shooting, but the whole thing had been faked by Hollywood. Too many eyewitnesses still living that could contradict it. Myths can't develop into dogma in that short of time under those conditions kosta.
As for "nothing else explains the phenomena of the Church", G, it was Emperor Constantine, not Jesus and not Paul, who is responsible for the phenomenon of the Church.
Old whipping horse time eh kosta. The phenomena of the church predates constantine kosta. Its first century expansion and development in the face of persecution and its maintenance throughout the second century persecutions and external attempts to co-opt and corrupt it. The Church would have continued to exist inspite of constantine.
The number of Christians, contrary to popular opinions, appear not to have been really very high before that.
And that is the phenomena kosta - it grew and prospered in-spite of that.
Again, neither of us are eyewitnesses, nor do we have any definitive evidence one way or another that God exists.
The definitive evidences have been cited - you choose to ignore or try to explain them away.
I see that as a story for public consumption, if you know what I mean, i.e. the "official story." But is there motive to steal a body and bury it elsewhere and proclaim resurrection? You bet. And only a handful needed to know the real truth. In other words, the evidence is inconclusive.
Would they willingly die for a testimony that Jesus had supernaturally risen? Hardly kosta because they knew it was a lie
Again, here we are dealing with inconclusive evidence. First of all, people die for all sorts of ideas. The very act of dying for them doesn't prove them true or genuine. Islamic suicide bombers blow themselves up for their faith every day it seems. is that proof that Mohammad is the prophet? Hardly.
Secondly, the story of Resurrection was the only way for the disciples to survive. They were on the wrong side of the law and they needed followers. And what better way to find followers than to tell them they saw risen Jesus? I am not saying this is what happened. I am simply raising logical objections to the story to show that reasonable alternatives exist.
There was no motive for Jesus' enemies to remove the body
That is obvious. The only people who could profit from an empty tomb were the disciples.
It is by sheer necessity, but the unreliability of eyewitness accounts is well documented and established...which is precisely why in criminal trials "beyond the shadow of a doubt" is the litmus test for evidence.
But it doesn't stop there for you kosta, this same Jesus was observed and spoke to these disciples on numerous occasions and up to as many as 500 at one time
G, some 7,000 people at Fatima "saw" the Sun "dance" and "fall" towards earth; some even reported feeling increased heat from the proximity of the Sun! The only source of such "eyewitness" accounts and numbers is a book that is not unbiased and that has an obvious agenda.
I think the word would have spread about this, and some evidence outside the Bible of such sightings would have been recoded or alluded to. At this point we have no such evidence. We only have Josephus who doesn't list sources and rather uses hearsay, which was the standard method of collecting 'data" in those days, again highly unreliable, essentially a "rumor mill".
I think there is a difference between someone being killed and being raised from the dead. Look at how many people believed the existence of the WMDs. Saddam used them, so a presumption that he had more was not baseless, but evidence showed that he didn't have any.
The investigators came back empty handed. Some where even accused of siding with Saddam. We had to sue a mole who basically fabricated the whole story, and because there was a desire to believe it, people believed it. It turns out the skeptics were right. But now it's moot point. And Fatima became a legend almost instantly.
So did Medjugorje, a site of an alleged sighting of Virgin Mary in Croatian Herzegovina in 1981, that's exactly 30 years ago. The site became a pilgrimage almost instantly. It didn't have to wait for decades.
Again I am not disagreeing with you or call your your arguments invalid but simply showing that the evidence is inconclusive. It's obvious that legends can begin almost instantly. We have no idea how many people were true eyewitnesses. Paul gratingly wasn't, and he preached far away from where events allegedly took place. Capapdoca and Thrace and Greece and Macedonia are quite a distance from Jerusalem.
Its first century expansion and development in the face of persecution and its maintenance throughout the second century persecutions and external attempts to co-opt and corrupt it. The Church would have continued to exist inspite of Constantine
Do you have reliable numbers how big the Church was? Of course not. No one was making a census of Christians. After all, it wasn't something people openly admitted. In the first century Christians were considered Jewish (it was a Jewess sect, after all), and were punished and counted along with the Jews. During the second century the church was in disarray (Marcion, Valentius, Tertullian, and Origen, Ebionites, and so on) due to the emergence of various cults and sects.
There are no reliable figures on the number of Christians because of the preponderance of various sects (all of whihc wewre "Christian"), except that they were mostly persecuted by Romans who considered them "cannibals." There were very few state-organized pogroms of them.
They were mostly underground groups, meeitng in catacombs, with no power of influence, generally considered "effeminate" and characterized as being made up mostly of women, as a faddish movement.
No doubt the church would have continued to live, just as many other religious continue to live. Can you explain the "phenomenon of Islam," and its successful growth with the resurrection?
The definitive evidences have been cited - you choose to ignore or try to explain them away.
The evidence is inconclusive, G. It requires a "leap of faith", no pun intended, to come to a conclusion.