No because apologetics is psuedo-science.
Did I not point out 2 examples of "it's true because the Bible says it's true"?
Why would a non-believer be of any use as evidence to you?
In the paper he's calling believers "conservative" and non-believers "skeptic". The ratio is skewed towards believers.
Yes people who have no interest in exploring if these stories are actually true may accept what they say. How does this help as evidence?
No he said it was 3 to 1 in favor of believers. This paper says "believers believe". See how apologetics is just a waste of time if you care about what is true?
I showed he's using believers 3 to 1.
I showed 2 times were the logic in the paper was " it's true because it says so". I think we found the flaws.
some good apologetics to debunk:
"Christian apologists are confusing the word “independent” with the word “different.” A hundred different sources attest to the existence of Hercules. But they are not independent sources. They all derive, directly or indirectly, from the same single source, a myth about Hercules. Who never existed.
There is in fact only one explicit source for the historicity of Jesus: the Gospel of Mark. All other sources that mention the crucifixion of Jesus as an event in earth history derive that mention from Mark, either directly (e.g. Matthew, Luke, John; Celsus; Justin; etc.) or indirectly, as Christians simply repeat the same claims in those Gospels, which all embellish and thus derive from that same one Gospel, Mark, and their critics simply believed them because they would have thought it was too self-damning to make up, and because there was no way for them to check."
The author writing fiction was incorporating themes, one of the big ones was the least shall be the first". Hence the woman (the least) were the first. Not history, a story.
There were at least 5 other religions combining their ideas with Hellenistic ideas while the Jewish religion was also combining with Hellenistic ideas.
There are other dying/rising savior gods who through baptism into their cult you gain entry into the afterlife
There is a blackout period of 80 years where all criticisms, refutations and other versions of Christianity were blacked out. When we found the Dead Sea Scrolls along with letters from Bishop Ignateus we now know that at least 50% of Christianity was Gnostic in the 2nd century. They all considered the others to be heretical and had completely different theologies about Jesus and Yahweh. Elaine Pagels details all this in The Gnostic Gospels.
Even in scripture 2 Peter 1:16 speaks of other Christians who were calling Jesus a myth. Then he goes on to create a fictitious account of meeting Jesus. So we know there were people claiming it to be fiction.
The gospels are the first accounts of an earthly Jesus, decades after the fact, wildly fictitious, every story has allegorical or propagandistic intent and Mark looks like a meta-parable (outsiders told a story while insiders are told what it really means) Mark 4:11-12.
Plus Mark is using OT narratives line by line as well as using Paul to create earthly stories. There are several papers on this.
So any content in the gospels is probably fiction. The tomb is no exception.
Empty tomb myths were not uncommon and had a direct meaning:
"For 1st-century Jews and
Greeks an empty tomb was a sign that the dead person had been taken into the
divine realm.
[40] These
rapture stories, told always from the point of view of witnesses left behind, described the subject taken body and soul into heaven at the conclusion of life and following the appearance of a heavenly being, whether an angel or God himself,
[41] and any serious rapture claim needed at least the absence of a corpse and preferably an empty tomb.
[42] In the gospels Jesus is presented as resurrected in the body, but it is clearly not the everyday body: he is not recognised by the disciples on the road to Emmaeus in Luke (the episode follows immediately from Luke's empty tomb narrative), and in John
Mary Magdalene fails to recognise the "gardener" until he speaks to her.
[
And resurrection myths were already big in Greek culture, early Church Fathers said it was the work of the devil or some apologetics that has now been abandoned for pure denial:
"
The Greeks and Romans also believed in the reality of resurrection, and Christians knew of the numerous resurrection-events which had been experienced by persons other than Jesus: the early 3rd century theologian
Origen, for example, did not deny the resurrection of the 7th century BCE poet
Aristeas or the immortality of
Antinous, the beloved of the 2nd century CE emperor
Hadrian, but said the first had been the work of
daemons, not God, while the second, unlike Jesus, was unworthy of worship.
[36]
Emphasis on resurrection after death permeated throughout the
Greco-Roman world through the Hellenic
Mysteries of Isis, which were themselves modeled after the
Eleusinian Mysteries.
[37] Carl Jung considered the rebirth in the Osiris myth and Isis mysteries as the precursor archetypes for the
resurrection of Christ and afterlife beliefs of Christianity.
[38] The ancient Eleusinian Mysteries beliefs centered on the rebirth of
Persephone as the mythic image of the
eternity of life and initiation was motivated by a reward in the
afterlife."
