What is your opinion of Christianity?

[Kingpoleon]

If the first formal account is 50AD, then it's not contemporaneous. There are a whole manner of reasons to doubt the narrative, but for a thought exercise let's grant some authority to what people said they saw, we still have no reason to favour a supernatural explanation over a natural explanation. Particularly from a people, generally conditioned to see supernatural explanations for all manner of things. Even the 'advanced' Romans. So you are making a concession for this one event and other events surrounding your belief system. You can accept the narrative as you describe it, but the hypothesis is based on belief alone.

By this logic, our sources on Alexander the Great, on Julius Caesar, on the Greco-Persian Wars are not contemporaneous and not acceptable. The overwhelming consensus among New Testament scholars is that the Gospels constitute reliable accounts about Jesus, comparable in reliability and dating to our sources on Alexander the Great.

[Kingpoleon]

Good analogy. Taking the Bible as literal truth is basically the same as believing all of the myths surrounding Alexander, like that his mother had prescient dreams of him conquering the world, or that Artemis herself attended his birth.

Taking the New Testament as being truthful is basically the same as believing in the accuracy of, say, Plutarch’s biographies, which are some of our most accurate pre-modern sources. Your unfamiliarity with Greco-Roman biographies and their unique accuracy when compared to much later sources is not your own fault - even highly educated atheists are notoriously bad at history.

[Kingpoleon]

If the first formal account is 50AD, then it's not contemporaneous. There are a whole manner of reasons to doubt the narrative, but for a thought exercise let's grant some authority to what people said they saw, we still have no reason to favour a supernatural explanation over a natural explanation. Particularly from a people, generally conditioned to see supernatural explanations for all manner of things. Even the 'advanced' Romans. So you are making a concession for this one event and other events surrounding your belief system. You can accept the narrative as you describe it, but the hypothesis is based on belief alone.

Alluding to Hume here. There are no cases where previously assumed and accepted (for want of an explanation to the contrary) supernatural explanations have won out over naturalistic explanations.

If we do not currently have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the resurrection narrative, if that narrative is accepted as a 'truth' it is still more likely that there will be a plausible naturalistic explanation for the narrative in the future, rather than the resurrection hypothesis is true.

But let's assume that there is no naturalistic explanation of the resurrection narrative. We accept it in it's entirety, from tombs to the dead rising from the grave to meet their relatives as nothing more than an accurate historical account of what happened. Consequently, the only possible form of explanation will be supernatural in nature. But that alone wouldn't elevate the resurrection hypothesis as the most plausible explanation.

Paul’s claim, and from that that the assumption from apologetics that 500 people cannot hallucinate the same thing at the same at the same time is itself a naturalistic inference based on our understanding of the physical and naturalistic causation behind hallucination (again, something of no concern or consequence to those conditioned to view hallucinations as supernatural.) But such explanations are not needed if you accept the event as supernatural. We could therefore easily assume that there was a supernatural mass hallucination as opposed to a supernaturally induced physical resurrection.

What's the reason, other than faith, to believe one supernatural explanation over the other?

“So it’s not contemporaneous” … By the standards of the ancient world, in which our first information on people first emerges a century after they die usually, it’s really close. You aren’t really countering any of the historical points, most notably the early tradition of female witnesses.

”Hume’s Abject Failure” is a must before discussing miracles. In short, yes - if you are prepared to accept that natural explanations must be the case because there is no possibility of them not being the case, then one must also accept that at a certain point in human history, it was unreasonable to believe in the existence of ice if one person reported it because it contradicted all of human experience.

Supernatural happenings, when accepted, usually have a theological reason. In absence of an argument for a demiurge - William Lane Craig & Alvin Plantinga notwithstanding - what theological reason is there for this hallucination?

[Kingpoleon]

Sure, the ancient Christian texts are on the same level of reliability as historical chronicles, whereas ancient Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist documents are just fairy tales. Your logic remains as airtight as ever.

Your unfamiliarity with historical scholarship on the New Testament is as baseless as the charge that I reject any historicity to the foundational texts of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. You haven’t really presented any evidence explaining why you think the vast majority of New Testament scholars are wrong to compare the Gospels to our best sources in ancient history, but rather nothing more than a gaping jaw, a raised eyebrow, and a smug smirk.

[Kingpoleon]

I figured it was safe to assume that, as a Christian, you consider the Bible to be representative of actual history in a way that other religious texts are not. Am I wrong?

I am quite prepared to accept textual-historical criticism and ecumenical relationships. I do grant that, largely due to their environment and nature, the Gospels provide better accounts of Jesus than what we have of Buddha or Zoroaster. This is not an unusual view among classicists.

That being said, I’ve never heard any serious Christian claim that we ought to rule out miracles done by non-Christians a priori. Such a Christian would engage in special pleading as much as anyone who rules out miracles regardless of the amount of testimony.