On 2024-03-28, the cubing Youtuber Tingman posted a video titled
“This One Simple Trick DESTROYS Christianity! // Easter 2024”.
In it, he makes several claims in support of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which I find wholly unconvincing.
I wrote a lengthy comment in the comment section detailing my specific objections to his points. I decided to post it here for posterity, and in case anyone else is interested in my take on the matter.

My Rebuttal to Tingman’s Video

1. “it is well documented.”

Well, yes, it is, and he mentions the two points most apologists bring up: the Josephus and Tacitus documentations. He mentions that these are from writings really close to his life. This isnt entirely true. In the case of Josephus, the scholarly consensus is that while mention of Jesus is original, some elements of the text show signs of later Christian emendation. Tacitus’s and Josephus’s mentions of Jesus are actually quite scant. They are not accounts per se; Tacitus writes about the great fire in 64 AD, and mentions the blame put on the Christians by Emperor Nero of the Roman empire. About all that Tacitus tells about Jesus is that he “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” (Annals 15.4)

I do agree that Josephus’s accounts are fairly reliable for the most part. The specific overlap with Christianity occurs in three passages. One refers to the death of James the brother of Jesus. A second refers to the death of John the Baptist. The third is the most disputed, and based on internal and external evidence, seems to have been altered. A reconstruction of his longest passage omits any suggestion that Jesus was more than human, the Messiah, or the resurrection. This is a common thing you will notice when going through the original gospels, the earlier ones do not mention that Jesus claimed to be divine, despite how important such a detail would be for his followers. In fact, they tell us no more than you would expect someone like Josephus to know and believe about Jesus — a charismatic leader who performed some kind of signs, was crucified, and left a significant group of followers of both Jewish and Greek descent. I don’t doubt at all that someone like Jesus existed. But to say he actually came back to life and was the divine son of god is definitely a stretch based on the textual evidence we have.

2. “the romans could not disprove it”

The crux of his argument is that because the Roman executioners were really good at their jobs, and the Roman officials had heard rumors beforehand that he may come back life, and that they wanted to prevent an uprising, they were highly motivated to disprove such a claim of his reserrection. However, he seems to be operating under the assumption that the only reason why the early church came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead was because they did not find the body. But that hardly seems to be the origin of the belief. Besides, just a missing body would hardly be a good enough reason to construct an entire religion around the idea that a person had risen from the dead.

The earliest written account of the resurrection is found in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. This account makes no reference to the idea of a missing body. Instead, the belief in the resurrection is apparently based on appearances of the risen Jesus — that is to say, of personal experiences of the presence of Jesus after he had died.

The story of a missing body only appears a few decades later in Mark 16. But even there, the missing body is not really seen as a proof of anything. The disciples are rather encouraged to go to Galilee and to experience the presence of the risen Jesus themselves. (v. 7)

Another note is whenever they crucified someone (which would be for crimes against the Roman Empire, not blasphemy against the Jewish religion for example) they kept the person on the cross for weeks after they died as a warning to anyone else wanting to do what said criminal did. The Romans allowing Joseph of arimathea (who most likely is a fictional person) to take Jesus down from the cross is laughable. They would never allow it.

3. “the resurrected Jesus was seen by a lot of people”

That claim for appearing to 500 people at once is a laughable farce.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”

Here, Paul is claiming that at some time after Jesus rose from the dead and before he ascended into Heaven, he appeared before a crowd of more than 500 men and women. He does not state where this happened or who was in the audience, but he does assert that some of these people remained alive at the time he was writing the letter, about 25 years after the alleged event. Because Corinth lies about 800 km from where this event supposedly occurred, it would have been difficult for anyone living in Corinth to investigate the claim.

What we do know is that none of the gospels, all written after Paul wrote this letter, discuss Jesus appearing before a large crowd after the resurrection. This is curious, because this would have been the most impressive evidence for the resurrection, the one event that would have been able to convince skeptical potential converts. This is including Q, the hypothetical source that Matthew and Luke were thought to have been based on.

Also, none of the other Biblical epistle writers mention anything about it, even those alleged to have been written by the apostles. To add to that, no historians living in the time and region mention it. And none of eyewitnesses, five hundred strong, wrote anything about it, at least anything that has survived for posterity. Christians often use this verse to support their belief in the resurrection of Jesus, claiming that five hundred people could not have been hallucinating the same image at the same time. This is true, but what is also true is that if this event had actually happened, it would have led to such a fantastic rise in the followers of Christianity in ways that were not observed in the first Century, and it would have convinced the Jews living in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas that Jesus was the true Messiah.

This is because the eyewitness testimony would have definitely spread virally across the land. As a result, it is likely that there would not be the division we see today between Judaism and Christianity.

But this didn’t happen, and further, there is no supporting documents to back up this claim. It is clearly something Paul made up to impress likely converts to the faith. It raises a question of Paul’s integrity and causes an objective person to question everything else that he wrote.

4. “the sudden and unstoppable birth of christianity”

In the first three centuries, Christianity grew at a rate of 2-3% per year. This means a group of a hundred Christians had to get 2-3 net new converts per year to hit that. I’d hardly call that “sudden”. The numbers come from Ehrman’s The Triumph of Christianity, which cites Rodney Stark.

When it comes to causes of popularity, there’s the “4 Es model”, based on e.g. Dodds’ Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety:

  • Christianity was exclusivist
  • Christianity was evangelizing
  • Christianity was eschatological
  • Christianity was egalitarian

It was the only religious system at the time which had all four of these features. Every other religious system only had some but not others. It’s the combination that did the trick. Additionally, Christianity was adamantly monotheistic. So as a heathen, you are willing to listen about the new god and as you are convinced you are encouraged to stop being pagan all together. So it’s evangelizing people that have no defensive reaction to new info and once you are in you displace their old religion.