Michael Jones

they get very magical in how they come up with, well, maybe this happened to Paul, or maybe this happened to the disciples, or maybe they invented the story of the women discovering the empty tomb this way or that way or something.

You make a theory that is so ad hoc, it is itself a miracle.

You're positing group hallucinations, hallucinations that convince skeptics.

And by the way, when people have hallucinations,

like if a dead one who died, they don't think, oh, he rose from the dead.

They think his spirit came in the room and I felt his presence and he's in heaven, that kind of thing.

You don't think he physically got out of the grave.

So they'd have experiences so vivid, so real, they were convinced a body rose from the grave, okay?

That doesn't happen from hallucinations.

So that also happened to skeptics, that happened to groups.

Then you have other aspects like no Jew at the time was expecting a Messiah to rise from the dead.

That's just, the resurrection was supposed to happen at the end of time, the Messiah was supposed to be a conquering warlord basically.

So now you have a belief, the Christian belief, which is unlike the culture, so it's not like it just came out of that culture.

No one was saying the Messiah was gonna die and rise, like they were expecting it to happen.

So you have something unlike the cultural background, have these weird facts you gotta explain away.

At the end of the day, what is the simplest explanation, the most parsimonious?

Jesus rose from the dead.

Anything you're gonna compete with that is gonna itself become a miracle because you have to pause at all these convoluted, once in a lifetime, once in a several generation things that happen and they all just happen at the right time.

And that's the difference between Christianity and other religions.

We have the resurrection argument.