Yellow is Really Cool!

It's logic like that which allows many to come to the conclusion that those who claim that they were taken by UFOs are correct because there are so many who claimed it.

Even if 500 was an accurate number, there's no evidence that who they saw was actually Jesus, or someone who looked like Jesus.

Edit: in response to the post below me, it's weird how often people have changes of heart when their words could conceivably not be their own...

For instance, a friend of mine said he was stronger than me, until he died. Now he tells me that I'm stronger and much more handsome. There is nothing he has written and no evidence which can be used to dispute his change of heart (aside from my giving the secret away).

Also, he never existed. Funny, that.

I disagree. We have a letter written by Paul in 55 or 54 AD that say s Christ appeared to 500 people at one time, after he died. Such a claim was so close to the event that the account could be shot down on such a large scale that we wouldn't be here talking about it. All people would have had to say is "where are these 500 witnesses?" and if we can't come up with them, then Christianity goes POOF.

not to mention the fact that he also appeared to Paul(at the time Saul) who was a major skeptic of Christianity and even was going as far as to put people in jail/have them killed for believing it.

That's a matter of "believe what you think is right"... Proving the historicity of the bible manuscript does not prove its content...

I hope that people, in year 3000, finding an original copy of Lovecraft's Cthulhu, won't believe the creature was true (even if we all know things happen in the dark and in the deep of the oceans...R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn).

Then the debate is endless... Have a good day all !

I disagree. We have a letter written by Paul in 55 or 54 AD that say s Christ appeared to 500 people at one time, after he died. Such a claim was so close to the event that the account could be shot down on such a large scale that we wouldn't be here talking about it. All people would have had to say is "where are these 500 witnesses?" and if we can't come up with them, then Christianity goes POOF.

You haven't studied history very much.

In 55 AD, it was fairly easy to make claims like that, because they were inherently hard to verify. Paul would not be able to produce those 500 people on request even if they really existed. Also it would be generally assumed that everyone exaggerates, and by exaggerate I mean a whole lot.

We're talking about a world without modern communications technology here. You'd be amazed how dependent we are on basic stuff like telephones to do this kind of investigation now.

And even now you get weird arguments about things like UFOs, some of which cannot be resolved completely.

JESUS WAS A BLACK JEW

SAMMY DAVIS JUNIOR WAS THE SECOND COMING

We missed our chance

Every word of the Bible is true and it hasn't been tampered with by people who wanted to use it to advance their personal agendas and/or beliefs.

About the OP: Goldie's argument is obviously flawed as the lack of credibility of the gospels isn't in when they were written, but in who wrote them and why they wrote them. Then again if a premise is wrong it doesn't necessarily follow that the conclusion is also wrong.

If the credibility of religions had to be based on what their early followers wrote about what they would have directly seen/heard, and if we had to base our assessment of their credibility only on the time that would have passed between the events and their written account, several of the "mainstream" religions would be simultaneously true.

Which I don't know you, but I find it hard to believe.

If Paul is writing about something that has 500 witnesses, and he is writing it in AD 54 or AD 55. Just around 25 years after the event. This means that many of the people who supposedly saw Christ Alive, after his death, would still be around. Now if Paul was lying, he would have quickly been shut up by the lack of witnesses he describes, and his works would have been immediately labeled as loony toons. There were plenty of people then that would have loved to shut him up and easily could have if he was lying. That's not what happened though. So the most likely scenario is that these 500 were actually around to see what happened.

You obviously never heard of Mr. Berlusconi: he always happens to have all the witnesses he wants. Maybe his claim that he's "Jesus" is true...

(Feel free to substitute SB's name with one of the following: Mr. Putin, Mr. Bush, Mr. Castro, Mr. Blair, <someone else that continously talks nonsense and still has millions of people that swear that what they say is "gospel">)