This particular sermon was quite a good example of the genre, explicitly only leaning on information from non-Christian sources (mostly the Roman historians but also Jewish sources) to provide evidence for the claims 1) there was a guy fitting Jesus' profile who got crucified; b) the Romans were sufficiently competent and motivated to make sure someone getting crucified under these circumstances was very certainly dead; c) the authorities claimed that the disciples had stolen the body instead of producing the body, which demonstrated that they didn't have the body to produce.
They did use Biblical sources (1 Corinthians, which he claimed some research shows was earlier than the Gospels) for the 4th fact they were leaning their argument on (that there were a _lot_ of people who claimed to have personally seen the risen Christ, many of which had known him personally beforehand so wouldn't have mistaken an imposter for him, and who maintained their eyewitness testimony of this even to the point of being tortured to death, and skeptics were being encouraged to go talk to them to check their testimony). But there are also non-Christian sources for some of this (although I think only to the level of 'there are suddenly loads of these Christians everywhere, wtf' rather than specifically being about eyewitness testimony to the risen Christ).
Obviously the other historical sources aren't exactly a repeatable experiment's worth of proof themselves, though...
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Date: 2012-01-16 11:32 am (UTC)From:They did use Biblical sources (1 Corinthians, which he claimed some research shows was earlier than the Gospels) for the 4th fact they were leaning their argument on (that there were a _lot_ of people who claimed to have personally seen the risen Christ, many of which had known him personally beforehand so wouldn't have mistaken an imposter for him, and who maintained their eyewitness testimony of this even to the point of being tortured to death, and skeptics were being encouraged to go talk to them to check their testimony). But there are also non-Christian sources for some of this (although I think only to the level of 'there are suddenly loads of these Christians everywhere, wtf' rather than specifically being about eyewitness testimony to the risen Christ).
Obviously the other historical sources aren't exactly a repeatable experiment's worth of proof themselves, though...