It’s not those tenets that could ever convert later generations, no - instead, it must be a magic trick in a tomb. And in the way of intentionally deceptive apologists everywhere, this “reason” also manages to be deeply insulting to the actual tenets of Christianity. Reason #6 is “Only Jesus’ Resurrection Convincingly Explains the Conversion of People Not Previously His Followers,” and again this is nonsense on every level, not only directly – people convert for all kinds of reasons – but also inferentially, since one of those reasons for 2000 years has been overwhelming social pressure. The resurrection story of Jesus isn’t so much as mentioned by any contemporary documents that aren’t these religious texts – and of course fifty such mentions or five thousand wouldn’t constitute any kind of proof that one particular dead body magically came back to life. There is not a single archeological source, obviously, that supports or even indicates any kind of resurrection mythos, and the written sources only support that mythos if you take as 100% of those sources … the New Testament, which is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity. Reason #5 is “Written and Archeological Sources Overwhelmingly Support the Gospels’ Resurrection Narrative,” and the reader hardly needs a nudge at this point to know how an allegedly educated author could make such a preposterous claim. Readers who see that the New Testament is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity won’t have much trouble imagining a motivation for giving that character a resurrection narrative – or four different ones, as the case is. Reason #4, “No Motivation to Invent Jesus’ Resurrection Narrative Is Evident,” is so hallucinatory that it can only make sense if the reader, like Johnston, treats the New Testament as a series of annotated biographies and contemporaneous dispatches, which it certainly, demonstrably is not. Also, needless to say, Person X demonstrating Ability Y on other people doesn’t in any way prove that Person X ever used Ability Y on himself. Even a high school sophomore should be able to see that this does not constitute “proof” of anything except the marginal (it doesn’t happen in every Gospel) internal coherence of Christian mythology. Reason #3 is “Jesus Demonstrated Resurrection Power.” Jesus only “demonstrates” this power in a collection of writings designed to exalt Him as a deity. If you remove the New Testament from Johnston’s book, you’re left with a handful of typos and a couple of semicolons. Since those claims aren’t attested anywhere else in ancient literature, the conclusion is obvious: the New Testament cannot be used as any kind of “proof” for the veracity of its own contents. The New Testament is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity – it could not be accepted uncritically as documentary evidence even if its central claims were attested anywhere else in ancient literature. Reason #2 is: “Jesus Called It – #OnTheThirdDay” – which, apart from the use of a hashtag unfortunately declaring that the author is an imbecile, indulges in the central problem of this book’s 170-something pages: taking the New Testament as documentary evidence. But obviously Christianity is a social and governmental ideology – its ability to transform a society is completely unconnected with the subject of this book. Reason #1 is the most jaw-dropping of all: “Society Is Transformed Everywhere Christianity is Introduced and Embraced.” Leaving aside the back-door the author has left himself (if he doesn’t see the transformation he wants, well, they mustn’t have really embraced the faith), this claim is entirely true: Christianity does indeed transform societies where it becomes dominant – usually by making that society more fearful, more xenophobic, and infinitely more prone to sectarian violence. The things Johnston proposes as his seven reasons to believe in the resurrection of Jesus are instead a collection of assertions and non sequiturs that are very nearly astonishing in their borderline incomprehensibility. The most important thing the reader notices after finishing Jeremiah Johnston’s Body of Proof: The 7 Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus – and Why It Matters Today is that it includes nothing even remotely approaching proof of its central subject, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Body of Proof: The 7 Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus – and Why It Matters Today
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