Joseph Smith's plates had zero contemporary archaeological corroboration unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls confirming Isaiah's prophecies centuries before Christ. Your 'anonymous sources' claim collapses when Luke names eyewitnesses like Cleopas in Luke 24, detailed enough to include roadside dust and baked fish consumption. Acts' conversion accounts aren't contradictory but complementary. Paul tailored his testimony to different audiences like any competent witness. The Sanhedrin couldn't produce Christ's body because Romans sealed the tomb under penalty of death, their silence screams historical corroboration.

Isaiah 53's precise crucifixion description predates Rome's invention of the method by 700 years, statistical impossibility without Divine Inspiration. Your Josephus forgery claim ignores Arabic versions preserving the original James reference untouched by Christian scribes. Tacitus wrote within living memory of events, closer to Christ than Plutarch was to Alexander. The Ebionite red herring fails. James' ossuary bears the Nazareth inscription confirming early Christian veneration sites. Your 'symbolism' dodge can't explain why Roman historians like Thallus recorded crucifixion darkness or why Jerusalem's destruction precisely fulfilled Christ's Olivet prophecy within forty years.

"I doubt you believe in all of Islam's claims to miracles and what they say about God just because they mention historical places and potentially historical exploits." you say. Yet Islam's supposed miracles crumble under scrutiny, the moon-splitting claim leaves zero geological or astronomical evidence while Christ's resurrection triggered seismic cultural shifts documented across Roman, Jewish, and pagan sources. Joseph Smith's fraud was exposed when his 'reformed Egyptian' hieroglyphs proved gibberish while the Rosetta Stone confirmed Biblical archaeology's accuracy. Your 'anonymous sources' argument implodes under legal scrutiny. Paul names over 500 witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15, many still alive when circulated, making false claims legally actionable under Roman libel laws.

The Shroud's 3D bloodstain patterns match forensic wound mappings unavailable to medieval forgers, with pollen traces placing it precisely in Judea. Your 'different wrapping' claim ignores John 20:7's specification of a separate face cloth, confirmed by the Sudarium of Oviedo's matching blood type and traumatic stains. While you can point out that throughout the Bible there are historical places in it, and also that it may reflect some actual historical events, it doesn't mean that the specific claims made by the texts or people involved in the texts were accurate. you say. Yet Roman census records confirm Quirinius' governorship overlapping Herod's reign. And many religions have their martyrs who refuse to recant the beliefs of their religion." you say. But no other martyrs died for historically verifiable events they personally witnessed. Peter could have saved himself by recanting the resurrection he saw with his eyes, touched with his hands.

"Paul's alleged conversion only comes from him." you say. false again. Luke documents Paul's blindness healing in Acts 9, confirmed by Ananias' contemporaneous testimony. "In Acts the story changes each time." yet courtroom testimony varies in emphasis, not substance.

"Luke 24 presents the ascension of Jesus as happening on the same day of the resurrection. In Acts 1, the ascension is portrayed as 40 days later." Luke 24:50-53 describes a blessing gesture before Christ's final departure. Acts 1 expands the timeline just as Exodus expands Genesis' creation account. "That's symbolic play on the number 40, and 12 guys all speaking in tongues is symbolic." Archaeology confirms Pentecost's multilingual crowds while Josephus records exact priestly courses matching Luke's Temple details.

Your "Talking snakes, talking donkeys" dismissal ignores that evolutionists think animals evolved, so mabye these were evolved forms! "The Gospels crucifixion and resurrection accounts differ in such a way that makes them non-compatible with each other." No, they align perfectly when you realize John supplements synoptics' morning events while Matthew focuses on guard details.

"Your stuff about the Sanhedrin not being able to find a body and Roman guards abandoning their posts presupposes that a man named Jesus was crucified and buried in the manner stated across those texts." What? Even atheist historian Bart Ehrman admits Jesus' crucifixion under Pilate is "the most certain fact about the historical Jesus." "Texts that were not written down at the time, but decades later." 1 Corinthians 15's creed dates within five years of the resurrection while Papyrus 52 confirms John's early composition.

"Claims that did not go over well with Jewish people, and could only gain popularity in people of a different culture and society." Acts records thousands of Jewish converts including priests while Ossuaries prove early Judean Christian burials. "Those like James, were not Christians like you think they were. They were Ebionites, and the Christians rejected the Ebionites as heretics because they believed very different than they did." Jerome records Ebionites using Matthew's gospel affirming Christ's Divinity while James' ossuary inscription "James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" confirms familial recognition.

"The Josephus account is a forgery and the Tacitus account was written almost a hundred years after the alleged events." Scholar Louis Feldman shows Josephus' James reference remains untouched in Arabic manuscripts while Tacitus accessed official Roman archives. "Even with mass media many people still believe the fictional story about Washington chopping down a cherry tree." Parson Weems fabricated that tale 20 years post-Washington's death while Christ's resurrection had multiple eyewitness accounts circulating within months. Christ's core miracles withstand scrutiny.

"The symbolic nature of the Gospels can easily be seen in Matthew 1. Three sets of 14 generations, that wouldn't be historically accurate. That's symbolism." Luke's divergent genealogy proves selective recording, not fabrication. "The Gospel of John placing the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the ministry...blatant changing of the narrative." Ancient writers often arranged events thematically. John highlights Christ's authority while synoptics focus on chronology. "A virgin birth is just symbolic." Isaiah 7:14's 'almah' specifically meant virgin in context while Matthew quotes the Septuagint's 'parthenos', a term never used for married women.

"The texts in the Bible are in line with the mythological accounts of what people did back then." Dying and rising gods like Osiris never had single eyewitness accounts or transformed skeptics like James. "Only when we go home do we ever meet God." Christ promised "I am with you always", impossible if He only meets us postmortem. "All that a cabal seeking to assert tyrannical authority over religious people who believe the word of God is found in texts is to control the production and translation of those texts. Passages like Romans 13:1-2, and 1 Peter 2:14-15,17-18 look pretty obviously inserted by a tyrannical cabal to give themselves as an alleged God-inspired authority that has to be followed." Early Christians like Polycarp defied authorities unto death while Nero's persecution disproves your power-grab theory.

"The second half has God promising that if people don't obey what it allegedly said, then it's going to rejoice over bringing destruction upon them." Yet Christ's Olivet Discourse predicted Jerusalem's destruction within forty years, precisely matching Josephus' records of cannibalism during Rome's siege, while simultaneously promising salvation through Himself alone. Your 'tyrannical God' caricature ignores Christ bearing suffering on Calvary.

Your 'cabal' conspiracy ignores that most apostles died horrific deaths defending eyewitness accounts, hardly the behavior of power-hungry schemers. At every point, manuscript evidence, archaeological confirmation, sociological consistency, Christianity withstands scrutiny that vaporizes competing worldviews. Your objections rely on double standards no historian would apply to Alexander or Caesar. The resurrection remains the best-attested ancient miracle precisely because it erupted into documented history. That's why former skeptics like Strobel and Turek became Christians after following the evidence where it leads.

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on these because they have been well-handled in the 200 years during which such quibbles have been unduly raised, and their explanations are very salient and straightforward.

When it comes to 500 witnesses, there is only a claim and nothing to back it. Anonymous sources with unverified claims.

Not really, the 500 are clearly an extension of the 120 counted in Acts 1, and scores of these are known from the contemporaneous accounts, and church tradition preserves names for all 120 of them even if some layers may have been added. Therefore the demonstration that there was a core of families around the named 12 and their many known associates was a significant proof via the fact that nobody controverted the account with any success. We have much less proof that Caesar was killed with 23 wounds than that Jesus was killed with 5 wounds, and yet every historian accepts that Caesar was killed by those stab wounds at the hands of known people.

Your stuff about the Sanhedrin not being able to find a body and Roman guards abandoning their posts presupposes that a man named Jesus was crucified and buried in the manner stated across those texts.

If you sincerely believe the Shroud of Turin is real, that tells me all I need to know about you. They've found an actual burial shroud from that time frame and the manner of how they'd wrap people up was completely different.

That didn't contradict the actual shroud, nor did it prevent the shroud from being the outer cover of a body that was more tightly wrapped by inner covers now lost. I was skeptical about the shroud until I read the reporting of the unique burning effects noted on both sides (even though they are nigh-invisible on one side) that have never been fully reproduced by any attempt to duplicate all physical aspects of the shroud at one time. If someone added a little medieval paint later out of misplaced piety, it doesn't contradict the actual core problem that the phenomena jointly contained in one artifact are highly anomalous and not satisfactorily explained to many researchers. I did indeed once dismiss the shroud as you do, as easily debunked, but I learned that it's not safe to debunk things out of hand that (literally) have many more layers than meet the eye.

In Acts the story changes each time.

Not true, this is like the other higher-critic 19th-century skeptical objections, a feint from uncontextual uncultural assumptions that started from rejection and then fortified that foregone conclusion with manufactured interpretation of evidence and rejection of alternatives. That is, the blind-faith unscientific method.

Luke 24 presents the ascension of Jesus as happening on the same day of the resurrection. In Acts 1, the ascension is portrayed as 40 days later.

Not true, another assumption thrown onto the text that doesn't do justice to the next text intended to be read together with it. The word "And" in Luke 24:50 does not require immediate subsequence but has the force of "Also" (at a later date). It would have been very silly of Jesus to have led those dozens all out to Bethany that same night several hours after sundown after both dinner and "fourthmeal".

That's symbolic play on the number 40, and 12 guys all speaking in tongues is symbolic.

No, it properly fits in the fact that the distance between Firstfruits (the Resurrection) and Pentecost (Feast of Weeks) was always 50 days by command, so it would be eminently fitting to the historical narrative for the Ascension to have happened short of but close to 50 days. The fact that numbers may also be taken as symbolic doesn't prove they're necessarily false. In fact, Luke is regarded by some as the greatest historian of the era, the most exact with numbers, and who has dozens of times been vindicated by later archaeological discovery that proved him right and the less-informed skeptics wrong.

Talking snakes, talking donkeys, and many other stuff are obviously not to be taken literally.

It's not obvious at all unless you were sold a bill of goods by materialists, who are incidentally chewed out by Peter in his epistles for believing there can be no supernatural. In the entire era of the Bible they didn't have "scientific" and "unscientific" categories as we pretend them today, they had "known" (understood) and "mysterious" (unexplained), and all accounts of the mysterious were in the same category, whether they were later proven as lies or later proven as natural but subtle phenomena described by later study of physics. Because physics has become so overarching lately, we forget that all modern theories of physics leave room for the unexplained somewhere, and we act like physics really has explained everything; and that is what Peter ridicules when he tells people they forgot that the Creation and the Flood (known to all) were never fully explained by the modern uniformitarians.

The Gospels crucifixion and resurrection accounts differ in such a way that makes them non-compatible with each other.

False, they agree on all significant historical points, and when they give divergent testimony it's compatible (e.g. one leper vs. two lepers means two were present and one was active). All historical inquiry from plural sources has this same problem and the solution is to find why both accounts were written and only then to judge whether an account is truly mistaken or lying, only in the even that they are truly irreconcilable. But all alleged incompatibilities in the gospels are easily reconciled by those without an axe to grind.

The differences don't add more credibility.

That contradicts all historians' methodology. If two sources were flatly contradictory then we'd need to test credibility; but if all favorable sources agree in essentials and only diverge in minors, and if all unfavorable sources agree with essentials as hostile witnesses, credibility is at its highest level. I wrote about this very process with links to even deeper discussion.

Your stuff about the Sanhedrin not being able to find a body and Roman guards abandoning their posts presupposes that a man named Jesus was crucified and buried in the manner stated across those texts.

The fact that Jesus was crucified and would have been buried in accord with Jewish law need not depend on the gospels as primary witnesses at all because there are so many secondary and hostile witnesses to that fact that it gives credence to the gospels. When you get to the details of Judea and Rome it still isn't necessary to assume the gospel description of it as the primary to establish the significant historical points.

1. Historians agree that within 2-5 years of the resurrection there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people circulating (memetic) statements such as "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again", and (1 Cor. 15:3-4) "that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures". They agree that this indicates some irregularity about the death of Christ that caused the empty tomb to be upheld as an unsolved fact of history. There is no scenario of Christ's death that follows complete materialist assumptions that explains all the facts: the closest you can come is to imagine that their either wasn't such a person or their wasn't such an empty tomb and yet a group of people created an empty-tomb narrative that was so compelling and truthy that it spread like wildfire among the Jewish and Gentile people despite institutional rejection. Because the historical narrative of some kind of empty-tomb anomaly is reported already in the 30s with Pilate being deposed in 36, and we know the Sanhedrin's power and interest and limits at that time, when we take these foundational facts attested by many favorable and hostile witnesses and test one other fact against them, namely that the Sanhedrin who had great interest in pointing to an occupied tomb of Christ but never did, we find that that theory as presented in gospels that were written a couple decades later (i.e. when eyewitnesses could still have contravened them) is more likely true than any other hypothesis holding. There would be no sense for the writer of Matthew to have been lying in 60 or 70 about an embarrassing empty tomb if the actual state of affairs had been that the Sanhedrin knew full well there was an occupied tomb. That's an example of how the less essential facts are verifiable with reference to the more essential and more widely founded.

2. Though Guy slightly overstates the case because it wasn't stated that the Romans explicitly abandoned their posts, the issue is still handled the same way. We know how troops were assigned and ordered and that they were at Pilate's disposal for suppression of traitorous claimants to kingship (messiahs) that were also historically at a peak in those decades; everyone remembered the rebellion of 6 AD as one of the most serious, but uprisings were regularly repeated in Judea and Pilate naturally thought the Christian problem was just another such one. It is not necessary to assume that soldiers guarded the tomb, but it is certainly reasonable that for any executed rebel the remaining followers and their likely bases would be watched by such soldiers in the immediate aftermath. Further, hostile witnesses are given as testifying in court that Jesus was associated during all his ministry with a claim of a 3-day resurrection narrative: with his other claims to uniqueness it's one of the most salient things that all accounts agree about him. He began with it in reference to the shock-value thought of destroying the Temple, and he continued it with application to Jonah's 3 days and to a taunt to be reported to Herod (i.e. widely) about what we could call "the day after tomorrow"; and as I just showed still in the late 30s the oral claim, transcribed in the 40s by Paul to Corinth, that he was still associated with a 3-day wonder is one of the most certain things about him. So when we take that foundation and then test the additional claim, namely that the soldiers encountered some unexpected disturbance at the (occupied) tomb, we find that within that claim there is also stated an appeal to then-circulating hostile testimony that a narrative had circulated that the guards slept and the disciples stole. Obviously the claimant has no fear of controversion because he himself is putting forward the other story and explaining why it is false compared to his own (i.e. because it was motivated by censorship of truth). But when we investigate history we find an even more corroborative detail, namely that such a report circulating would already be suspect because sleeping soldiers could be summarily executed and would certainly have lost face by such a story being circulated, even if it had to be so as to suppress a competing narrative. Therefore once again the nonessential claim fits squarely in the essential claims and all the historical witnesses taken together.

Texts that were not written down at the time, but decades later.

Most histories even today are written 10-30 years after they happen. But historians that go back that far are happy to have histories 100-300 years after the fact, and they base their inquiry very solidly on those sources. The objection that Matthew and John didn't keep diaries and immediately circulate them in the 30s (when they were under severe persecution and organizational stress) is facile and fights systematic history; and, to me, Matthew and John read like they relied in part on contemporarily drafted handwritten notes anyway. It is completely plausible that the disciples did once or more create "sermon notes" as Jesus was speaking and then later developed these with other sources into the gospels. So your bold statement as if you know the texts were not written down at the time is not even provably true.

Those like James, were not Christians like you think they were. They were Ebionites, and the Christians rejected the Ebionites as heretics because they believed very different than they did.

Whoa! Suddenly you accept historians who say of course James existed because he was Ebionite and heretic! You doubled down on your selective bias. Actually James tells you who he was when he says "be a Doer". The Hebrew for Doer is Oseh (James uses Hebrew thought) and the transliterated Greek is Essene. So he was Essene, and wasn't an Ebionite. However, those two, and the other Qumranites and Naassenes and Quartodecimans and some others, were closely allied groups in the Messianic movement that were more favorable to Hebrew roots than others. When James was written these were all formative and not regarded as separatist titles, nor were there any heresies extant about the case (there were two recorded cases then that would be regarded as declarations of heresy, the Judaizers that were heard at the Jerusalem Council, and the Simonians as judged by Peter personally; but the pre-Ebionites were never heretical in the time of James). So I see that you're throwing together strands of rejection both new and old, which indicates methodology problems in the first place.

The Josephus account is a forgery (https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437), and the Tacitus account was written almost a hundred years after the alleged events.

No, but I appreciate that the link is not just a random drive-by shooting. Historians have had two views, the whole paragraph being Josephus, or the core facts being Josephus with the pro-Christian parts being interpolated. On a quick skim I'll be happy to review the evidence but (1) its polemic indicates that it is likely to have been written from bias wholly to suppress the whole testimony (as if that debunks every other testimony) and (2) the case isn't based on any single testimony but as stated upon a massive number of sources much more contemporary than usual. Tacitus is 83 years later, which I wouldn't call almost 100, but it's clear that Tacitus was speaking of both contemporary Christianity and the account he believed of its originator based on his fully Roman beliefs. We can't say Josephus and Tacitus were wrong because we 2,000 years later know so much better that they were deceived, that their reliance on documents we don't have totally misled them and there was no such person as Christ who died in a time and manner as they testify (which is about the only key point of their testimony). When I looked into the reports of Simon Magus, as a control figure, to see what they were like, historians make many assumptions about him based on testimony much later than 83 years and yet they clearly agree on the figure and his time and locality without needing total consensus on all details. That's what we do with Jesus.

The Deistic perspective that God put everything in order and doesn't intervene is the one that follows the setup of the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Um, the father raised the prodigal son and gave him all his substance, so he was theistic in accord with continuing providence, not deistic. During the interim period where the son had cut himself off from his father (because demanding an early inheritance is culturally wishing death upon one's father), the father didn't intervene out of respect for the son's wishes, but the father did position himself waiting to anticipate the son's return so he wasn't inactive either; so theistic again. Thank you for playing.

The son had to lift himself up out of the misery and go home with no help from the father.

Actually, he lifted his eyes toward heaven. Now there's a nice Christian debate (dunno if you're interested, being against objective morality and all) about whether God acts "first" or man acts "first", and it's not necessary to resolve because they both act together and inseparably in the lifting from misery. When you lift yourself up, God is lifting you up, and vice versa, they are identical. Theism again, but not in the persona of the earthly father but in the persona of heaven instead. (If you combine the two, which could be within the intent, lifting the eyes toward heaven is lifting the eyes toward the father's estate.)

all you have to do is become the religious authorities that reserve the sole power of interpretation

I'm so glad the Protestants discovered private interpretation then. All the same, holding a false interpretation because you can doesn't mean it isn't false; it's still to be tested, objectively if you will (otherwise you'd have no ground to declare other interpretations false).

you've written that God wants them to obey you

It's true that authorities bottlenecked Bibles for some centuries so that the masses thought Romans 13 meant Obey At All Costs. It actually says to obey "to whom tribute is due" (not to those to whom it isn't), and those "ordained of God" (not those who abrogate that ordination). I think Ephesians says "Obey in the Lord", obviously not obeying commands not given in the Lord. These teach that conscience trumps force. I'm so glad that we have continuing open-source research on original texts and their proper translation so that we've gotten past that error of authoritarianism.

look pretty obviously inserted

Not inserted, the history shows that they were translated with extra bias and then interpreted and gatekept with additional bias. The argument "inserted" is not about those texts, but about those that your 1800s atheist friends found easiest to pick at, and you're extending "insertion" to protest whatever you don't like. Just admit you don't like it so we can get on with finding something else other than the contradiction I demonstrated at the core of your thought. It doesn't help to dance around the outskirts.

That's how a cabal of tyrants gets people to obey them.

How did your parents get you to obey them? Wasn't it by showing natural consequences of good and bad behavior, i.e. reward and punishment? The child reaching for the flame gets rebuked and grabbed for safety because that punishment is better than the actual natural consequences. If a child keeps reaching for a flame many times, a parent may well decide to allow the child to experience the effects of being burned a little more closely to continue the power of natural consequences. Even adults are not always able to be reasoned with in all emergency circumstances and sometimes need natural consequences such as restraint for their own protection. Deut. 28 is about natural consequences of good and bad living. Sounds like your college professors aren't educating you in how morality actually is promulgated from one person to another via encouragement and discouragement: you're certainly failing to promulgate your own morality to us, but whatever source you're using did convince you that its dogmatic proclamations should be followed by you without question or alternative. So your sources are doubly problematic, enslaving you to their thought, and then refusing to share with you how you could enslave others. Free inquiry and objective morality is so much better.

forcing them to cannibalize their young

No force in the passage at all, it's the natural consequence. You quote God's part, and man's part (the sin) is also in the fore, and I separately explained that those two flow together. People in your position should just come out and say they think the God character is tyrannical. Then we'd be able to talk about how you can propagate good morality without being truly tyrannical; and (since anyone can accuse at any time) how to disprove claims you're being tyrannical, objectively. In relativism and situationalism you have no power to escape charges of tyranny yourself.

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