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 there either wasn't such a person or there 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.

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.