The Four Witnesses - The Sketchy Story Of Jesus, Parts 1-4

Venaloid: If the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, what would this actually tell us about Jesus and his miracles? My goal is not to argue that the superantural claims about Jesus are impossible, or that the historical Jesus did not exist; I simply aim to show that the evidence for Jesus's miracles is no more convincing than the evidence for other miracle claims which Christians reflexively dismiss, and that eyewitness testimony of the sort Christians claim to have, is simply not good enough.
Notes: • Here is another compelling modern eyewitness account, this time about someone actually rising from the dead... which I still don't believe happened, and which I doubt many Christians will believe either. https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... Sources: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22656172/ns... https://nypost.com/2018/08/07/hundred... https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules... Milk Miracle of 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MG64... Sam Harris on Miracles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JI-0... https://www.theguardian.com/world/201... Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles https://www.holykoolaid.com/thedecept... Eyewitness testimony https://news.northwestern.edu/stories... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... https://youtu.be/PB2OegI6wvI https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl... https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/... Satanic Panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic... Timeline of the Gospels http://www.earlychristianwritings.com...

Part 2

In discussions about the historical Jesus, Christians will often assert that there are only three possible explanations for these stories: either Jesus is a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. And, since no liar or lunatic could have possibly generated such a devoted following (ignoring Mormonism and Sathya Sai Baba, of course), Jesus must therefore have been Lord, and performed the miracles that are attributed to him. However, as the title of this video suggests, there is a simple solution to this trilemma, one which *also* starts with the letter L: the miracle-working, son-of-God Jesus, is a legend.

Potholer54’s video, “It's a miracle! ...or is it?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siCEB... The story of Romulus, by Plutarch http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/romu... Persia and Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon... Apocalypticism in Judaism https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa... https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/nicke... https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/docume... Apocalypticism in Zoroastrianism https://www.ancient.eu/Ahura_Mazda/ http://www.iawwai.com/ZoroastrianProp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saoshyant https://www.crystalinks.com/saoshyant... “angels, the end of the world, a final judgment, the resurrection, and heaven and hell received form and substance from… Zoroastrian beliefs” Bowker, John (1997). World Religions: The Great Faiths Explored and Explained. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited p. 13 ISBN 0-7894-1439-2. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie... https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/... 

Part 3

Now that we've established what eyewitness accounts can tell us, it's time to explore who actually wrote the accounts we have, and if they were indeed eyewitnesses. As we will see, not only were these authors *not* eyewitnesses, but these accounts are not even independent. Also, I ended up lying in Part 2 when I said that we'd address the actual evidence in part 3. This video was originally meant to be unified with the *next* video in this series, which *would* dive deeper into the evidence, but I realized that such a video would have been over an hour long, and it would have taken at least an additional month to make. As such, I decided to end this video here, and to explore the changes to the text in the *next* video.

Notes: • Another early manuscript worth mentioning is P137, which is dated anywhere from 150 to 250, and which contains Mark 1:7-9 and 16-18. This manuscript was originally touted as a first century manuscript (the first one of its kind), but this eventually gave way to a later date upon further examination. • Acts “we” passages - 16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18, 27:1-28:16. • On the literary seam in John about Jesus being in Judea: Some modern translations have gotten around this problem by mistranslating verse 22 to say that they went into the “countryside of Judea.” But this, in fact, is not the meaning of the Greek word, “land.” - Dr. Bart Ehrman In the NRSV Bible, Mark 1:5 and John 3:22 both say “Judean countryside”, but they use different words. Mark 1:5 uses the word, “chōra” (COE-rah)[xώρα], whereas John 3:22 uses the word, “gēn” (GAIN) [γῆν]. • Elaboration on 1 and 2 Peter: https://youtu.be/Yor0r6ZvzhY Sources: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com... http://www.earlychristianwritings.com... http://newtestamenthistory.blogspot.c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline... http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/art... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#... https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d... https://www.livius.org/articles/perso... http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/exis... https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/... http://www.thetextofthegospels.com/20... https://youtu.be/5K-AOfj1Axg?t=6524 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_... https://www.amazon.com/Among-Gospels-... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gosp... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-s... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Q-bi... http://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/q.cfm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_... https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion... Many of these sources were originally located based on Dr. Bart Ehrman's Blog, which does an excellent job of summarizing what we know about early Christianity. The yearly membership fees are all donated to charity, but if you'd like clarification on anything, please ask me. https://ehrmanblog.org/historical-acc... https://ehrmanblog.org/problems-luke-... https://ehrmanblog.org/papias-as-an-e... https://ehrmanblog.org/believing-papi... https://ehrmanblog.org/papias-on-matt... https://ehrmanblog.org/the-gospels-ar... https://ehrmanblog.org/papias-and-the... https://ehrmanblog.org/sources-of-the... https://ehrmanblog.org/some-evidence-...  

Part 4

I didn't *mean* to make a 55-minute video, it just sort of happened. Here is an index of the topics covered. I'm gonna go lie down for a while. 0:18 - Oral traditions. Note: I'm not saying that historians are wrong to declare that certain things in the Gospels are independently attested, I just don't think that our level of confidence should therefore increase as much as Christians want it to. 2:08 - Number of manuscripts. 4:25 - Do we know what *any* ancient authors said? 7:04 - Are the original words preserved within the extant texts? 10:30 - Survivorship bias 10:53 - Major changes we know about. 11:10 - Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. 12:51 - When did Jesus die? 13:33 - The Trinity and the Johannine Comma. 16:38 - Various textual assimilations 17:58 - Ending of Mark 20:45 - Competing sects of Christianity and survivorship bias 21:30 - Ebionites 22:00 - Marcionites 22:50 - Gnosticism 24:14 - Nag Hammadi Library 25:50 - Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter 27:23 - Gospel of Thomas 28:56 - Thomas Kuhn and paradigm bias in history 30:36 - Secular writings about Jesus 36:00 - The empty tomb (written sources) 39:34 - The burial of Jesus in the tomb (written sources) 41:55 - The post-death appearances of Jesus (written sources) 43:14 - Women visiting the tomb 46:34 - The disciples' martyrdom (written sources) 52:04 - Jesus predicted his death 53:09 - Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem 53:47 - The Nazareth Inscription

Sources: https://venaloid.blogspot.com/2019/12... My full source list is too large for YouTube's description box, but here are a select handful of them. Ehrman-White Debate, Parts 1 and 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moHIn... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Mp4... Woman Taken in Adultery https://www.wbur.org/npr/138281522/ho... http://www.thetextofthegospels.com/20... When Did Jesus Die? http://www.city-data.com/forum/christ... https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier... Johannine Comma http://www.bible-researcher.com/comma... https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/... http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscri... https://georgehguthrie.com/new-blog/j... https://tinyurl.com/wh8ndk5 Maria/Martha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfy6o... https://today.duke.edu/2019/06/mary-o... Ending of Mark https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d... https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d... http://www.jeffriddle.net/2015/02/the... Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition, (Hendrickson Publishers, 2005), 123. "Clement of Alexandria and Origen [early third century] show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them." "The last twelve verses of the commonly received text of Mark are absent from the two oldest Greek manuscripts (? and B), 20 from the Old Latin codex Bobiensis, the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, about one hundred Armenian manuscripts, 21 and the two oldest Georgian manuscripts (written a.d. 897 and a.d. 913)." Bart Ehrman on the Gospel of Thomas https://youtu.be/8nZFNBTt6q8 List of New Testament Manuscripts http://bibletranslation.ws/manu.html Josephus https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_An... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_An... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephu... Other Secular Authors http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/tex... http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/t... https://tinyurl.com/wjhl8lw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thallus...) Pilate and Crucifixion https://www.britannica.com/biography/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius... https://ehrmanblog.org/did-romans-all... William Lane Craig's videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKRRL... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SbJ4... Resurrection Attestation http://www.divinerevelations.info/pdf... https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writi...