What does the death of some of the first followers of Jesus’ tell us about what they knew?
Easter is a time of year that seems to bring sceptics out of the woodwork. The proverbial Grinches (wrong holiday, I know) find this to be a natural time of year to rain on the parade of Christians celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. I still recall listening to the debate between William Lane Craig and Brian Edwards on the resurrection a few Easters ago (gosh, has it been that long? The year 2001 or 2000, I forget). You can check that debate out for yourself – Link to the debate.
It’s only fair, then, that Christians take this opportunity to capitalise on the surprising flimsiness of some of the sceptical arguments out there (hence my last post on the supposed virgin birth of Buddha), and also to continue to illustrate the way that the biblical account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus stands up well to critical scrutiny.
So here’s a brief thought to consider for today: Why were some (although not all, or even most) of the early disciples martyred? What was the reason for killing them? That’s something of a no-brainer. They were killed for their proclamation of their religious beliefs in an effort to convert the local populaces where they lived. They proclaimed the message of the resurrection of their teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, and it cost them.
Is Jesus just Osiris with a new face? In Episode 19 I look at the sceptical argument claiming that Christianity was really just a collection of beliefs borrowed from pagan religions, and that Jesus was just a re-hash of one or many other Messiah or god-man figures. As there would be no way to deal with all of these other religions in one episode, I’ve chosen to use the example of the ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. In short, the sceptical argument is not particularly well supported by the facts.
This episode is about Intelligent Design – sort of. I don’t argue here for intelligent design. What I’m doing is looking at a couple of philosophical objections to ID which, I argue, are just contrived for no other purpose than to exclude intelligent design from “science.”
It’s back!
Here’s Episode 13, which is part 2 of my coverage of Plantinga and presuppositional apologetics.
This episode is an explanation of “presuppositional apologetics,” one of several approaches to defending the Christian faith.
Here it is, the second installment of my two part series on the moral argument.