So What If They Believed It?

Just Jim and Monkeyboy sit down to take apart one of the oldest arguments in the resurrection debate: eyewitness testimony. The question isn’t whether first-century witnesses believed what they saw. The question is whether belief, on its own, counts for anything.

We live in an era of HD cameras, digital forensics, and instant fact-checking, and people still get fooled daily. So what exactly are we supposed to make of testimony from people who had none of that? Sincerity isn’t a substitute for reliability, and conviction isn’t the same as evidence.

If the best defense of the resurrection is “but they really believed it,” that defense has a problem.