Quote:
Originally Posted by tarcone
I guess you dont believe eyewitness testimony in a trial then?
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Don't want to derail the thread, but by itself, no I don't actually - and that's if we are talking about a trial for an every day 'vanilla' crime, let alone a miracle that happened 2000 years ago. That's why you corroborate evidence to piece together an image of what happened, rather than rely on one source when possible.
At best the NT is a collection of stories that were probably spoken aloud before being put to paper starting a decade or more after the events described. As you probably know, what we have today as the NT was originally a much larger collection of tales that was selectively trimmed by a council of humans back in 325 AD, a good 3 centuries after the events. I say humans because we haven't changed much biologically in the last 1700 years, and I don't think many today would be happy with a council of anyone re-mixing the NT while claiming to be acting under divine authority.
I don't consider anything within the NT a contemporary source of evidence that can be be corroborated with other sources, which is not to say it's not true, but that's a large reason why I'm not a Christian and why it becomes a matter of faith. If I believed in the resurrection or the NT as a factual historical source, I might feel very differently about religion. As it stands though, you could make an equally convincing argument to me about nearly any religion in the world today.