I respectfully disagree. I believe that Jesus is exactly who He said he was -- the Great I Am -- God in the flesh. I have staked my life and all of eternity on Him, and I am fully confident of who He is, and of His faithfulness to His promise to me, that all who believe in Him freely receive eternal life.
This is a genuine question, not snark. Serious claims like this require equally serious evidence (and if you have some, I'm quite interested).
My views are not based on any "leap of faith". A "leap of faith" implies that a person is believing in the absence of any evidence -- and that is by no means true of me.
Eyewitness testimony is used every day in courts of law. It is one of the most common forms of evidence used to determine the truth about things that happened in the past. I am convinced that the New Testament contains multiple eyewitness accounts of Jesus, the things He said, and the things He did.
My faith in Him is based on those accounts. I believe it is God who made sure those accounts were recorded. I was convinced by the evidence given in those accounts. I understand that there are many who have either never read the accounts, or read them and were not convinced by them to believe in Jesus.
Again, to anyone who is interested in knowing what Jesus said and did, I would invite you to draw your own conclusions after reading the book of John: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201%20&ver...
Now on the contrary, if someone chooses not to believe in such a god, then I don't see how you can make them believe virgin births or the integrity of 2000 year old eye witness accounts. Especially considering that history is full of people who used religion to serve their own agenda (recent example: Al Qaeda) thus giving religion as a whole, a bad name.
No need to apologize (though I do appreciate the civility). I was not offended -- I just did not want anyone to think that my beliefs were based on no evidence, because that is not true.
Your point about believing in God as an omnipotent being is important. You said "...if someone chooses not to believe in such a god, then I don't see how you can make them believe virgin births or the integrity of 2000 year old eye witness accounts." I merely suggested that people read one of the accounts. I believe God is omnipotent. I believe those accounts are accurate, because God has protected them, because they are His testimony about Himself and how He has dealt with man's sin. And I believe these things because I read the accounts and was convinced that they were true, and that the accounts themselves were of divine origin.
I'm not trying to argue anyone into becoming a Christian. I'm merely stating my own beliefs, trying to explain the reasons behind them, and encouraging anyone who is interested to read the book that led me to those beliefs.
On the other point, the fact that "history is full of people who used religion to serve their own agenda (recent example: Al Qaeda) thus giving religion as a whole, a bad name" is really not an issue to me. It is cutting a pretty big swath to lump everyone who has some belief in a supreme being into one large group. There are vastly differing beliefs between people which lead them in vastly different directions. There are always people who will use anything they can for their own selfish gain. It think it is a huge mistake to ignore God altogether just because many people have done evil things in His name. My faith is not in other people. My faith is in Christ. I am convinced He is not just an ordinary man, but that He is God in the flesh. The things that He said and did, the way He talked to people, the way He answered people's questions. All of that convinced me of who He is.
Again, if anyone is interested I would encourage you to read the book of John (I linked to it in my other posts on this subject) and to draw your own conclusions.
It's not so much a leap of faith as a study of manuscript integrity. The field of study is called "textual criticism". I can't do it justice in a single Hacker News comment, but you can find fairly substantial scholarly books and articles on the subject.
When it comes to the New Testament, one of the keys for analysis is the multitude of spread-out manuscripts. They have subtle differences from each other, like spelling mistakes (which help us trace lineage -- the same spelling error often appears in later copies from the same source), but the core stories are extremely well preserved -- not changing from early to late manuscripts, or from region to region.
It's also worth reading through the other writings of the early church, from the first 2 centuries, which extensively quote/reference those same accounts.
The sum total of the evidence is that the current version of the Biblical accounts of who Jesus was were written within about 30 years of his death and well-preserved from that time period onward.
(There's also what we call "higher criticism", which looks at how the contents of the text correspond to known history etc. That also establishes the gospels as written ~30 years after Jesus' death. My favorite oddball data: statistical distributions of the names in the gospels compared to names uncovered in archaeological digs -- the common names are correct for first century Palestinian Jews, not Egyptian or Greek Jews.)
There are definitely leaps of faith involved in Christianity. "Does my book of Matthew match the first century book of Matthew?" is not one of them.
Totally ignorant question, but what year is accepted as the official death for Jesus?
There's some disagreement, but in the research I was doing this morning the most commonly accepted date I found was April 7, 30 AD. (Other common dates are March 25 or April 25, 31 AD.)
Interestingly enough, this provides the source for the date of Christmas. There's an old tradition that says Jewish prophets always live a whole number of years, so their death and conception are the same date, putting their birth date 9 months later / 3 months earlier. The two dates being celebrated in the 2nd century church were December 25 (based on the March 25, 31 AD date) and January 7 (based on April 7, 30 AD). We now call those two dates "Christmas" and "Epiphany". You can find these dates discussed by Sextus Julius Africanus (160-240 AD), Irenaeus (in Against Heresies, 180 AD), and Hippolytus (commentary on Daniel, 204 AD).
Rumors about hijacking a pagan celebration date started several centuries later, by Jacob Bar-Salibi in the 12th century. He probably got his causation backwards -- the Dec 25 celebration "Sol Invictus" was a result of emperor Aurelius' decree in 274 AD, meaning it took a date Christians had already been celebrating a century earlier.
Eye witnesses are actually really fallible even in fairly recent cases. You can easily manipulate how people remember scenes and how to interpret what they saw or heard.
Google "eye witness fallibility".
I think you need to go to the original texts to truly grok their meaning in their original context. I believe the King James bible is considered a literary masterpiece - and great literature, spiritual or not usually evokes feelings. The priesthood probably had the brightest literary minds of their time.
Personally I just find it cool ancient literacy can evoke feelings through a span of thousands of years.
The scripture in question is Luke 24:13-35. The two disciples did not recognize Jesus because Jesus hid his identity from them supernaturally:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2024:13-35...
The text says (in verse 16) "their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him."
Jesus hides his identity, then asks them what they are talking about (they were talking about Him, including the fact that He had been crucified). Then he goes on to explain to them how all that happened (including his crucifixion) fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament (verse 27):
"And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself."
If you don't believe in the supernatural, then it is extremely improbable that you will believe in Jesus. His miracles are all evidence of His deity. He was not limited to things a normal person could do. That being true, obviously He could hide His identity from His disciples (for whatever reason He chose to do that). Personally I think He did so to increase the impact on the disciples of the things He expained to them while His identity was hidden -- but that is speculation on my part, the text doesn't say.
One of the classical ideas in epistemology is the justified true belief theory of knowledge [1]. This has flaws (see: the Gettier problem [2]), but it's a reasonable approximation. Obviously what qualifies as justified is a debated topic, but it's generally agreed that "no justification" is not a justification.
What other methods would you suggest?
> Because if you don't require evidence proportional to the claim, your world view can end up including any and all beliefs, which is neither interesting nor useful.
That is only true if you assume that no other belief filter is being used.
This is a reasonable approach, and probably the best universal algorithm we can choose, if we are forced to choose a single universal algorithm. Still it is clearly imperfect, limiting, and guaranteed to lead to false beliefs at some point.
The fact remains, by chance alone, that there are many important things that happened for which we do not have overwhelming evidence to support. Take all such events that have occurred in our history. Let us throw out claims made by individuals and only rely on claims made by groups of people. Let us assume that an overwhelming majority of these remaining cases are organized hoaxes. Even still, we are left with a number of cases where something happened for which we have no explanation, and no evidence, and no way of performing any further testing. These remaining events, by their nature, are guaranteed to be events that would cause a massive shift in world view for large percentages of humanity. The existence of aliens, God, and so on.
I find it somewhat silly that the two groups try to debate each other with any seriousness - those who have put their faith in God for which there is limited physical evidence, and those who have put their faith in the scientific method which requires physical evidence. The scientific method is a great tool, perhaps the greatest we have, but it is not perfect, and is guaranteed to lead us to mistaken beliefs at some point. Both sides are accepting some things as a matter of faith, whether they like it or not.
If anyone is genuinely interested, I would suggest you read the gospel of John, and decide for yourself if you believe what it says.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201%20&ver...
0. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i...
In this case; however, we're talking events like person X gave a speech and said Y. This is much more likely to have been heard by many people, so the likelihood of it have happened in the way it was relayed is much higher.
The Torah claims a million witnesses for the revelation at Sinai. I don't see anyone rushing off to become Jewish.
It occurs to me that "number of purported eye-witnesses" may not be a good evidentiary standard.
Of course, the larger problem isn't the anonymity of the authors. It's why the bible should be accepted over any other text. Perhaps it should, but that would have to be argued separately.
(I'm not being snarky, here. The "with all due respect" phrase in entirely sincere).