The Death of the Apostles: Sean Responds to a Skeptic
In this video, I offer a point by point response to YouTuber Paulogia who critiqued my claim that the willingness of the apostles to die for their belief in the risen Jesus provides evidence for the resurrection.
VIDEO FROM PAULOGIA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb4w4xoei2o
READ: “Do the Deaths of the Apostles Prove Anything?” (https://bit.ly/2VnXyYe)
BOOK: Fate of the Apostles (https://amzn.to/2KjBbg8)
SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Seanmcdo…
*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)
*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)
*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)
FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell
TikTok: @sean_mcdowell
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/
source
Paul was stoned to near death, whipped, flogged, yet he continued preaching the gospel.
Acts wasnt written 20 years after the letters of Paul. Acts is abruptly ending, while paul is in home arrest. Thats an evidence, that acts was written while Paul was still alive.
And also if Sean how do I know that I could trust the skills of Detective Wallace?
But Sean how do we know for sure that they truly were eyewitnesses?
James was almost certainly executed for preaching the gospel…
Not so much for saying jesus is lord, more likely for saying theft is bad.
Your whole life and career centers around trying to convince people that a religious myth called Christianity is true. What a waste. All Abrahamic religions are built on superstitious conjecture, false claims and exaggerated ancient stories. Christian schools and Christian bible colleges are worthless.
Does Matthew 18:6 apply to apologia ?
The 303 persecution was the tenth and lasted a decade. Thousands died. The historian “Pliny” implies those complied were spared those who did not were put to death. I also find it difficult to explain how Christianity a challenged, local movement, exploded across the known world, so quickly.without a vigorous evangelical army.
all apologia does is bring forth false narratives, and create problems where there are none. they have no interest in truth, as they have already made up their minds. it's the kind of craziness you get from mormons or jehovah's witnesses. this is the kind of nonsense I've come to expect from video's that attack christianity. I'm amazed that sean can put up with it.
I don’t believe you necessarily need to show that the apostles refused to recant. Instead, I think you need to show that they had no possible reason to invent it and were still willing to endure all that persecution, fully understanding that they would be in Heaven after being martyred.
Oscar Wilde" "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
Awana? As in, "Awana" try to convince people of something for which there is no valid evidence.
Arm-wrestling. So funny.
Even the phrase "These books are years after the fact." Since the Resurrection isn't a fact…
The timing of the books is worth considering, but even if they were written the day of Jesus's death, there is no credible evidence that they're claims of "magic" are true. A person could be interviewed today mere moments after, say, an accident or some event, and their perceptions would be suspect unless there was, say, video evidence. I'm astounded that people claim there's evidence for such an outlandish claim.
I think I'll choose to believe that Orpheus descended to Hades to retrieve Eurydice. It's just as likely as the Resurrection.
It is easy being popatheist. All you have to do is read your bible and deny every verse There was no beginning. God did not create the heaven, God did not create the earth. There was no first day. God did not create….There was no John the baptist, Jesus did not exist, the apostles made it all up, the apostles did not write the gospels, their associates did not write the other gospels, we do not know who they were, but we know it was not them, christianity and canon were sponsored by Constantine the first. The inquisition killed more people than the black plague. My critical thinking at 13 years old made me leave the church.
The martyrs died of old age.
Unfortunately it is also possible to make a career answering this no effort sallad, without asking the pop-atheists why they are not blushing.
Evidence of persecutions are not only found in the Bible but also in the letters of Pliny the younger, a roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus (now in modern Turkey) who wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan around 112 AD and asked for counsel on dealing with Christians. He writes that he interrogated Christians about their faith and he would ask them under threat of capital punishment. If they were Christian he would have had killed, if they were not they had to make an offer to the gods and curse Christ. At the end of the letter he explains that this new "superstition" has to be eradicated because is spreading both in city and in villages. And I'm sure that if I keep looking I'm going to find a lot of other proofs like these that come before the fire of Rome. Even immediately after resurrection those who preached this new creed were persecuted by Jews, like Saint Stephen. Saint Paul is also a witness of these because he was one of the persecutors before his conversion.
Christians in some countries could answer the question "Are they willing to suffer" for their beliefs.
It seems to me most unlikely that we have a ‘creed’ in 1st Corinthians. Most people, including scholars, simply take it on authority that there is a creed. It’s far to shaky and sybjective to use as a valid link in a chain of argument.
Three quick points. 1. Acts ends with Paul still alive. He talks about having run his race, but there is nothing that specifically about to be executed so we don't know. 2. We don't know why Herod beheaded James(if indeed it happened). It could well have been because James was, in Herod's eyes, engaging in sedition by proclaiming a different King than Herod. 3. This wasn't the Inquisition where people were offered a chance to recant heresy. Is there anything explicitly written in the Bible that says they were given a chance to recant, and, if they did recant, would it have been written about by people who had a point to prove? The bottom line is that this "evidence" raises more questions than it answers.
I have to admit that this Paulogia guy gets me angry. I can't tell if he's deliberately lying or if he's just not interested in the truth and merely interested in Youtube views. Either way, the things he says are way off base.
Sean,
you and Paulogia are two of calmest voices on these topics throughout the social media space, and you two seldom sneak in underhanded cuts to make or emotionally enhance a point. However, when you dumped on Paul’s use of the jingle, “So the Bible tells me so”, I believe that you being quite unfair. You claimed that he completely discounts the accuracy of the Bible, whereas I’m sure you know that he only uses that jingle when the Bible is the single source . I was surprised at your approach.
Paulogia is consistently quite careful in the statements he makes, particularly within his pre-recorded segments, and seldom has long convoluted arguments like many apologetics.
Greg Booker responds to Julian Konkan part 1:
"I'm sorry. I'll just be frank here. This is a debate after all. I don't mean to insult you, but I'll just write down my honest thoughts. Mark was an apostate? What have you been smoking?”
————Please just answer my main claim. I’ve been smoking Acts 15:38 and Eusebius, Church History, Book 6, ch. 14. Maybe you should back off your tendency to draw definitive conclusions before your opponent has even started to make a case? I only argued from Mark 3:21 so early because you appear to be about 12 years old and cannot last two seconds in debate before you start mouthing off and losing focus. I wanted to make sure you took a few hammers to the head before you buried your head in the sand.
Now don’t reply like a juvenile delinquent as if you need less than two lines to refute my interpretation of Acts 15:38 and Eusebius, supra. Respond like an adult as to why you think I am unreasonable to interpret those texts to mean Mark was still an apostate at the time he wrote his gospel.
“This is an obvious waste of time.”
———–If you are somebody who thinks up clever ways to talk themselves out of debates before their opponent has started to make a case, then yes.
“I have debated countless atheists and Protestant heretics. They are all the same such that I no longer waste time on them.”
———But I have to decide for myself to what exact you’ve debated them, and whether you seriously think they are too stupid to justify dialoging with, or if you got your ass kicked royally so much that you now simply lie to yourself about why you refuse to engage them in debate. That decision is not yours. It’s mine.
“I am pretty sure that there are smart highly intelligent genius atheists like Graham Oppy, J. Howard Sobel, Paul Draper, etc, who can make ingenious arguments and shut me up, but that is not true for you and 99.9% of the atheists in the internet who are just rebellious 20 or 30 something ignorant simpletons who have jumped into the latest philosophical bandwagons with their heads shoved up their asses.”
———The only person around here who shoved his head up his ass is the guy who talked himself out of an agreed debate before his opponent started making actual argument on the topic intended.
“I know you think you are, but that's just wishful thinking. As expected, your post reeks of ignorance and conceit.”
———–Nothing to refute here, this is just insulting.
“And even after being refuted, you are just going to deny it and make ignorant baseless claims and further waste my time.”
———–But you knew I was an atheist before you accepted my debate challenge, and I havent’ even started to make a case yet, all I did was show that you are headed for serious problems if you try to overcome my Mark 3:21 justification for unbelief.
“So I'll end it with this one post. This is the problem with Protestant self-interpretation of scripture by untrained amateurs. This is because you are from a heretic Protestant country USA, so your thinking and mindset is warped by subjectivism and personal interpretation of facts and a lot of presumptions and assumptions in gross ignorance of objective facts, rather than accepting what objective facts state.”
———–You appear very practiced in the art of convincing yourself that rhetoric equals substance. Why don’t you just say I encourage children to sky dive without parachutes? After all, the fact that you are dead wrong in the ignorance you spew doesn’t seem to slow you down from impressing yourself with your own words.
“This is a mental illness to be frank, because no rational sane person operates this way.”
———–And yet it is the atheist who need sto repeatedly remind you to stop engaging in the fallacies of argument by assertion and ad hominems, and just answer my interpretation of Mark 3:21 on the merits.
“But this is the norm among Americans (liberals, atheists, and Protestant heretics) because of your Protestant liberal culture. Unfortunately with the demise of Catholicism, schools no longer teach reason and logic as it used to be before the 1960s.”
———–Dismissed. Next?
“For example, you say that Jesus' family didn't witness miracles. Then what about the miracle of Cana where His mother was present?”
———-You are horrifically confused, the very basis of my argument from Mark 3:21 was that his family DID see his “miracles”…and I appealed to the miracle in John 2 as a case in point. Wow, you are so interested in blasting me out the door, you blame me for missing things I told YOU about.
“What about the fact that Jesus' family hung out with his entourage in Galilee while he was preaching and performing miracles?”
——–That’s another good reason to say his family saw his “miracles”. And in light of Mark 3:21, they must have concluded those miracles were fake.
“What about the miracles witnessed at Pentecost by His family after His resurrection?”
———-The NT doesn’t record anything about his family seeing his miracles after his resurrection? James the brother of Jesus was neither of the two Jameses among the original 12 apostles, and Mary is given barely a mention at the end of Acts 1. Try again.
“Why did James – His brother – become the leader of the Jerusalem Church after His resurrection?”
———-Sure, you have an unqualified “James” who appears to be leading the church in Acts 15, Acts 21 and Galatians 2, but there aren’t enough contextual details to justify ruling out the two Jameses who were among the original 12 apostles. I’m not saying you are wrong. I’m saying my view that James the brother of Jesus never became a church leader is reasonable, because the contrary case cannot be demonstrated with any degree of reasonable certainty. No, it doesn’t automatically follow from the specification of James the brother of Jesus in Galatians 1:19 that surely this must be the same person James who is mentioned in Galatians 2. That only means you are reasonable to assume it is the same person. It doesn’t mean those who disagree with you become unreasonable.
“Why were Jesus' relatives – The desposynoi – the leaders of the Church in Judea such that Emperor Domitian had many of them arrested towards the end of the century?”
———–Because Jesus apparently called himself a cosmic savior that would free the Jews from Roman occupation (the discples even after 3 years of living with Jesus still hope this is the case, Acts 1:8), and the Roman authority naturally viewed Jesus-followes as likely to erupt in an insurrection.
“What caused the conversion of the Jews in Jerusalem like Stephen – the first Christian martyr whom Paul killed?”
———–I don’t believe everything asserted in the NT, so you’d have to first convince me that any Jews DID convert in the context you speak of, before I’d have to answer as to why they converted. My view is that the conversion stories in Acts are embellishments upon possible kernels of historical truth.
If you compare the "creed" of 1st Corinthians 15:3-4 with 11:23, you immediately find that Paul talks that way when he is talking about receiving from the LORD., not when he is talking about receiving historical facts from other people For some reason, Paul does not want to admit he received any bit of the gospel from other humans. And in Galatians 1:11-12 he explicitly denies that other humans had anything to do with how he received the gospel.
You cannot trifle that he is merely saying he got the "general" gospel solely by divine telepathy and he got the resurrection narrative details from other apostles, because Paul's "gospel" infamously stays away from the words of the historical Jesus, which is the polar opposite of what we find Matthew and John doing iin their respective gospels.
We are reasonable to conclude that Paul intended to convey that he got absolutely NOTHING from other apostles, he got the ENTIRE gospel from divine telepathy. As an atheist I readily agree that Paul got ALL of his gospel from the prior apostles, but for Christians, they are stuck with what Paul meant. If he meant to convey that no other humans were involved in how he received any of the gospel, then that is what the Christian is stuck with. They are not allowed to say Paul was lying.
The bible makes it clear that none of the apostles were "martyrs". So why would it matter what later church fathers said?
Go get em tiger!
Claiming there was some kind of monotheist and polytheist conflict makes no sense. Jews were for the most part allowed to worship freely around the time of Jesus with the exception of localized expulsions as you state. I agree the early Jewish sec that followed Jesus claimed he was the Anointed One, Messiah, or as the Romans took it the King of the Jews and this would have been seen as a political crime/opposition and that would have gotten one crucified or persecuted in Rome. I agree the evidence for the apostles are not weak. I agree with you that it is an an argument from silence and the Pauline letters were of a different intended purpose. Very valid claim to say he uses the bible when it validates his position but doesn't when it invalidates his position. This is a similar position when the theist claims science proves their god but deny it when it doesn't. You and Paulogia just have differing opinions or definitions on what martyrdom is so this won't be resolved those though response videos. You're pushing the monotheist claims too hard when Jews were monotheist. It was the political claim that Jesus was the Messiah that would have made the political difference. The claim someone died for their beliefs is not swaying. Roman soldiers fought and died for the glory of Rome and for Caesar this doesn't mean the Roman Gods were real either or that Caesar was a god either.
One thing I think you should have mentioned is that reliable Acts doesn't equal resurrection is true. Demonstrating that Acts is reliable by using the standards that we would use for other works like Tacitus or Josephus would lead us to thinking that Acts is reliable on the events that are not supernatural. Thus, we could still use information in Acts to help a case for the resurrection.
If you properly do some in depth research, you will found out how bad Paulogia is. 90% of his videos are biased and based off his own conjectures. He's another Internet Atheist who is too lazy to do some research
It almost feels like Pualogia just doesn't want to accept the evidence no matter what. But I pray that someday he will be open to it.
Great job Sean you did a very good job in this video. BTW I lean more on your side because I think you have better arguments than Paulogia.