The Four Witnesses - The Sketchy Story of Jesus, Part 1

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.

Sources:

Milk Miracle of 1995

Sam Harris on Miracles

Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles

Eyewitness testimony

Satanic Panic

Timeline of the Gospels

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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

[regalrayquaza]

This series is awesome, definitely the magnum opus of your channel! I revisit it sometimes. Thanks for putting it together.

[jtveg]

Excellent.
I can't wait to see the next parts.

[BernardAnlageIV]

If memory serves, Luke wasn't an eye witness, but gathered together stories he had been told.

[necko]

Thank you, . Sketchy Jesus, for a new Venaloid vid!!!

[bdf]

Very, very nice. You give Christians every possible advantage: those books really were written by four independent eye-witnesses (and one hallucinating witness); you don't mention that two of them derived from one of the others; you don't mention the contradictions (especially those between John and the Synoptics) and then you show why those fables *still* do not meet evidentiary standards.


Excellent!

[stevenbyers]

This is a great video. I can't wait to see the rest of the series.

[dimbulb]

1. You must believe God is real, else you won't believe He had a book published.
2. Then pick up His Book and believe all the stories in it.
Any other approach may lead to doubt and thinking.
3. If doubt happens remember : Faith is virtue.

[PaulTheSkeptic]

Haven't been here in a while. So we're back to atheism I see. Nice. I'll stick around then. I was a fan way back. This channel goes back a long time.

[ChrisMusante]

2:33 - You wanna know how many missions we flew in the Corps that 'didn't exist' ?? Every last one that we didn't get in trouble for.

[dienekes]

The thing about the human mind is that there is very little value in recalling memories accurately as an animal. Sure, it's handy, and much more value _now, _ being in the information age, but even 100 years ago, as long as you remembered the gist of something, that as good enough.

Think about how animals function. If they get into an area where there is food or water, they need to remember that general area. If they are hurt by something (say, a bramble bush), they need to remember the basic description of that thing. They don't need to remember exactly where that bush was or the circumstances around getting hurt, just the general concept that this type of bush is painful when you rub up against it or this type of creature is dangerous when you both it. There is almost no need for the details that we pretend to recall throughout our lives. Therefore, there is no natural mechanism to regurgitate these memories as clearly as we like to believe we can.

Sure, there are methods that we can employ to _trick_ our minds into recalling things and there are methods that we can use to strengthen certain memories and _some_ minds have mutated to the point where they are able to recall memories pretty accurately, but those are the exception, not the rule. And none of these techniques were available to the laymen 2000 years ago.

[malignor]

God is like Spider Man.
He's a fictional character whose stories take place in real locations.
The character has super powers.
The character is in many stories which touch on various aspects of philosophy, culture, and the Human condition.

That said, I happily admit God exists... much in the same way as Spider Man, Aphrodite, and Darth Vader all exist (as concepts and characters).

[johnfaber]

What are these estimates for the age of the gospels based on anyway, especially considering the earliest scrap of written document of the gospels ever found was dated as 100 years after the events?

[joshuadgoldberg]

That elephant statue do be getting vitamin D doe

[rationalmuscle]

Funny how quickly this is forgotten when a MeToo moment arises.

[Lucroq]

Fucking finally. Seeing this in my subscriptions but not being able to watch it was driving me crazy. You are one of those insta-click channels. New video? Insta click.

[michaelsommers]

Just because Mark is the earliest surviving gospel does not mean that it was the first ever. For all we know, there were dozens that didn't survive.

[tlrlml]

The "historical" Jesus, Citation Needed!


(j/k, you do you)

[timwilson]

Good video but there’s a flaw in the logic of the timeline argument.... it’s assuming that Jesus was born on year 0 and died around year 30. I had a quick look at the sources and the dating of some of the gospels seems to be based on referenced historical events, while the dates of other relevant text is based on a narrative timeline of years after Jesus’s death.
Assuming there even was a historical cult leader called Jesus then there is no reason to believe his birth 2000 years ago can be accurately dated by the modern calendar. So hypothetically if the historical Jesus was born several decades after year 0 then the timeline might make more sense. This would push the dating of some text forward while moving other dates to line up better with what we would expect.

[AMPProf]

You went to Mass after posting this video ...right? ? OMG not my sin lol!

[TylerDurdentyler]

*Venaloid* you ok if I copy this video to my channel?