I assume that you are referring to that special category of eyewitness martyrs, since there would be nothing remarkable about non-eyewitness martyrs - who gullibly believe in a fantastic myth without extremely reliable and convincing evidence (see my tagline!) - dying for their supposed "belief."
Now, how many eyewitness martyrs of the miracles of the Gospels were there in actuality? What where their names, and when was their eyewitness testimony transcribed and thus documented?
Consider those "Heaven's Gate" cultists who died (committed suicide) for their beliefs. Couldn't they likewise be regarded as martyrs? Don't their voluntary deaths "prove" that their beliefs could be true. And it the "Heaven's Gate" suicides had occurred in an earlier age, before t.v. and the Internet, you can be sure that the stories surrounding them would be far more colorful (the bodies would have been mysteriously "incorruptible," or the comet would have changed course, etc.).
In reality, the measuring stick you propose using to determine the validity of a belief-system is severely flawed.
Regards,
You are mixing “known: fraud and “unknown” fraud. The Heaven’s Gate and Jim Jones crowd died for something they thought was true. The Disciples would have been killed for something they KNEW was not true if Jesus was not who He said He was.
Huge difference to die for what you believe is true rather than what you know to be false.
Your reasoning is faulty. It is one thing to die for a belief system...it is another to have walked, talked and lived with someone for three and a half years, see him brutally tortured to death, run for you life and hide because you fear the same will happen to you...and then a mere few weeks later, be out in the open declaring that your “belief system” is alive again. And not only that, but to then face a horrific death yourself and refuse to recant what you know to be true, because you have personally witnessed it. Would you, personally, die for something you knew to be a lie? Ten of the apostles died horrible deaths because they refused to say that what they were preaching was a lie. Paul was beheaded rather than recant, and John was banished to a penal colony.
Your heaven’s gate cultist allusion is not weighty at all, due to the fact that their fatuous fantasy does not tap into Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, etc, in any way. If you dismiss those, you dismiss Israel, the Jews, and everything about them, because Jesus is/was of that milieu, in it, from it, and meshed with it.
And you throw Herff freakin Applewhite in alongside that, as if it were even remotely analogous???
The apostles’/disciples’ lives and deaths are matters of at least as solid record as anything else from that era. The fact that you choose to dispute them is hardly my problem.