Those who are intentionally trying to undermine the Christian faith…including those here who clearly do so under the false pretense of “sorting fact from fiction” and “open and honest questioning”…clearly want people to get bogged down on the minutiae. It’s a tactic they use. None of that minutiae really matters. It certainly didn’t matter to Jesus’ earliest followers ‘after’ the resurrection, and it shouldn’t matter to Jesus’ followers nowadays either.
None of the big names among the new atheists (like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens) have put a single dent in the historicity of the Christian faith. And the minions of theirs clearly haven’t, nor can they.
Christianity can stand on its own two feet. On its own two nail-scarred, resurrected feet. If the Old Testament had been lost, or if it had so many holes poked in it that it couldn’t be taken seriously anymore ~ that doesn’t tank Jesus. The fact that He predicted the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and it happened exactly as He said it would ~ that’s pretty remarkable.
Then there’s the prediction of His resurrection, the many separate and independent eyewitness accounts of it, and the inexplicable birth and growth of Jesus’ early ekklesia. Even Bart Erhman, an agnostic/atheist world renowned Biblical scholar, admits that there’s no way to get to the 3.5 million Jesus followers that existed by the fourth century if there hadn’t been an explosive growth early in the life of the Jesus movement. Something about their message was pretty astounding and attractive.
And someone like Erhman or any of the big names among the new atheists (and certainly their minions) can dance around that all they like, because it’s clearly uncomfortable for them. But there was something clearly extraordinary happening.
