THIS argument is weak. No wonder Joe Rogan and Alex O'Connor are NOT convinced

Our job as Christians is to plant seeds. God gives the increase. We cant convert anyone we are to share the gospel. It is up to the other person to receive it or not. That's between them and God. The problem isn't intellectual, it's moral.

People reject the things of God because there's still sin in their life that they want to still hold on to.

The Bible says that God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

Those that are boastful in their own knowledge will see the Gospel message as foolishness (1 Corinthians).

If you want to get the know the Lord God the start by reading his word and call out to him in humbleness for revelation. Otherwise, keep it moving.


Jesus performed many miracles but there were still those that chose unbelief. Its a heart problem, not a head problem.

I am sort of agnostic, but the message of Christianity really speaks to me and I believe it could truly be from God, and I think it changed the world for the better whether it is true or not. But in the interest of truth and of maybe refining some Christian arguments, I'm going to push back against a few of them here:

The 500 people supposedly seeing him risen from the dead should not be considered "corroborated" like that guy said, because we do not have the testimonies of 500 people, we have the testimony of ONE person (Paul) claiming that 500 people saw him, so I am never impressed by that argument very much.

Also even if 500 people did claim to see him risen, they could be delusional, contrary to many who say "group hallucinations don't happen". It is possible for many people to experience the same delusion whether they hallucinated or not. All it takes is for one person to convince the others they saw something different, it's not a hard thing to do, don't underestimate people's ability to delude themselves and others, especially when it comes to cults and religions. Rita Marley claimed to see stigmata on Haile Selassie's hands when he visited Jamaica, and if I'm not mistaken many Rastafarians now use that as evidence that he was the Second Coming and say he had stigmata as if it were absolute fact lol.

I also want to bring up how people making the minimal facts argument always seem to make "the disciples stole the body" and "the disciples were delusional" mutually exclusive, as if both of those things can't be true at once. Like they have to either be charlatans who are out for personal gain, or they are tricked and delusional and there are no other possible motives they could have. This again underestimates people's ability to delude themselves and others imo. If you look at how cults behave, you'll see that even people like Jim Jones who knew all of his miracles were staged was still willing to die for the religion he established.

And for anyone who says the body couldn't have been stolen because of the Roman guard that was placed at the tomb, look further into the historicity of the Roman guard, many scholars question the authenticity of that claim made in Matthew (the other gospels have no Roman guard). The Roman guard is "widely regarded as an apologetic legend" even according to William Lane Craig.

You are taking Alex o connor words out of context.

The only "witness" we potentially have is Peter. All other claims of witnesses are suspicious.

Your final argument is circular. If we assume Jesus is lord... then he is lord. A circular argument should not be convincing.

I can see how Jesus being crucified by the Romans is a minimal fact. But the idea that there was a tomb and 3 days later it was open and five hundred people saw Jesus. How is this a minimal fact? Where is this tomb? Who were these 500 people? Such a nice round number 🤔

nice channel deleting comments that don't agree with your religion...

@John lannister345 ah ok so you're one of those new Christian's who likes to go online and show up on Christian channels to get likes and validation by simply saying "hey everyone I used to be a hard headed atheist but then religion x made me see the light, now everyone can like my comment and validate my experience even though I havent said one single thing of substance"...

generic empty vacuous comment that could have been written by anybody... congrats. And then you have the neck to lecture me about showing up on comment sections 😂😆. While using the "just Google it argument"! also how smug and christian of you to tell me i have no place here.or im spending too much time here.... what an enlightened child of christyou are

I dont believe for a second that you ever were an actual atheist because you don't know what it entails, and I think you're full of sh*t to be honest.... but anyways... all the best now. enjoy your attention and validation, hope that helps.

I find the argument that a worldview based on matter is somehow "limited" extremely strange because the world we live in is quite frankly marvelous and awe-inspiring even on a materialistic sense, who can look at planets, stars, galaxies and solar systems and not feel that wonder?

What is your evidence that a person can rise from the dead?

Knowing what we know now about eye witnesses is it possible that they just were wrong in what they think they saw? Did people get crucified in the time period you believe Jesus was crucified? Is it moral for a father to sacrifice his son or daughter?

The 500 isn’t a minimal facts…it’s a claim by Paul who wasn’t even there. Not a single person from this 500 wrote about it…give me one name from the 500…anyone can write 500 witnesses something…doesn’t mean the 500 was true

Wow this guy is hard to listen to. The Bible is a book of claims…that cannot withstand two words…prove it

I agree with the determination of conclusion from perspective. BUT, I do believe also that with logic AND the absence of pride(humility) you can find the truth regardless of perspective!

The fact that ANYONE is talking about something other than the fact that the Bible and everything in it IS THE CLAIM.. not the source of the evidence is infuriating. It doesn’t matter what the details of all the different verses point to in terms of illustrating a coherent story.. All that proves is that whoever wrote it had a sufficient understanding of language and logic.
It’s this simple: show why anyone should believe what the Bible (which is the claim) says.

The best defense is that NOBOÐY has ever been raised from death in modern history or ever recorded in a demonstratable context.
Biology show's no evidence of it's possibility.
Also sociology and psychology show these myths easily persist in our mind's due to various reasons none of which are because it really happened.

All his arguments are fallacys 🤦. Indoctrination at it's best I guess.

And who cares about them for anything, or anyone ?

I find the Gnostic christianity far more plausible than the Roman-Imperial version.

Make no mistake...if you think you're going to go toe to toe intellectually with Division 3 college basketball legend Chrissy Chaos, you've got another thing coming.

JOE mentions
Occam's Razor

Hey JOE,
Why not apply that to science? We are told the EARTH ROTATES by "science". There is NO TEST to prove this and Occam's Razor would provide the EARTH DOES NOT MOVE IS BEST EXPLANATION BECAUSE:
We don't "feel" like we are moving because........
The earth is NOT MOVING.

You are kinda dumb JOE:)

If Jesus is Lord, then of course he rose from the dead ... but doesn't the Bible often go the other way: He rose again, therefore he is Lord - Acts 17, Romans 1? Or is the resurrection here confirmation/culmination of what has already been established in the incarnation?

Such wilful misrepresentation and blatant quote mining, O'connor is so careful to honestly represent and steel-man your position, please afford him the same courtesy.

Why do you think there was every incentive to prove Jesus wasn't risen from the dead in the time right after? You're talking about a time where these sorts of beliefs were incredibly common and people weren't going out of their way to prove each other wrong. Why would they care if a bunch of people believed something false? Even if they did care, how would they prove it? If Jesus was born in a mass grave like everyone else, how would they know where to find him? If he was buried in someone else's tomb, how would they know which tomb? Or how would they know he was buried in a tomb? If they did find his body, how would they prove it was his when it was already rotten and decomposed?

Chances are that nobody cared, but even if they did, would they care enough to dig up a decomposed body and try to convince people who it was? Would the people who didn't get shown the body be more likely to believe that they were wrong? Psychology tells us they're more likely to double down even if they were shown the dead body, let alone told that someone else saw it.

Talking about the way people saw the world 2000 years ago. They could except a story full of meaning without the need to do scientific research. There was no scientific researchers. Did people believe people could walk on water? Or is there more to that story than just a man perfoming a miracle, to show he had magic powers?

So to believe the resurrection you already have to have to believe Jesus was god? But the ressurection is also evidence that Jesus was god and the only other evidence for Christs divinity can be found in the Bible that can't be verified by other sources. Like you wanna trust a dude who said it fine I believe that he believes it. But if that's the case I need to bring those 500 in for questioning.

What a bunch of shit

I think we know by now in this age, you can market any business to a global position..especially in a word where knowledge is scarce

Experts on hallucinations actually claim that 500 people having the same hallucination is a greater miracle than the resurrection itself.

I still dont understand the "he rose in 3 days" thing. Friday to Sunday is not 3 days🤔🙄

the Romans didn't put Jesus in the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea did. The books are pretty clear about this.

Is the main source of your evidence a book with a talking donkey?

It’s not a fact that there were 500 witnesses. We have no testimony from these witnesses. All we have is someone saying there are 500 witnesses.

It's just amazes me that the only counter argument to the resurrection is more absurd than the simple assumption that a man raised from the dead---a group hallucination.

Everybody forgets to say the obvious: we know nothing abot the 500 people, they can be just an invention, and the rest is taken from the gospel. No roman documents attest the death of christ, they say just that they were christians around, and the ones that attest for the existence of christ are fake made in the middle age. Also evaluating the contest we know that romans crucifixes lie on a cross till rotten, and then they bury the body in a common grave. If someone had the permission to take the body from the cross that will be an unicum in roman history. In conclusion all that we can say onestly about the entire history of christ is that there could be someone at this time in this place called Yehoshua, and he could be a jewish preacher like many others in this time. No more than that can be proven logically.

Why have I heard of Jesus? Is it because his story is truly miraculous or because in a mono polar world the only superpower/empire co opted it and claimed with its mighty authority that it was the one true religion?

Most folks have heard of Osiris the Egyptian God or Dionysus the Greek God, they too have resurrection stories, but given our cultural heritage we learn that these stories are merely myths believed by a simpler people during a simpler time, even though their stories are still around today.

Im not athiest for any deep reason. I just never found it convincing. It all sounds like mythology to me. And ive never experienced anythjng super natural. Maybe im an idiot, i admit, but naturalism seems to make more sense to me. If i go to hell simply because i wasnt convinced, id say thats not a very moral god. If theres a good god, its in my heart that ill be fine

There are many millions of people in India who believe the same thing about Satya Sai Baba, who died in 2011. Nobody in the Western world believes that proves anything about the divinity of Satya Sai Baba. By the way. Sai Baba also performed a lot of miracles during his lifetime, exactly like those attributed to Jesus in the Bible.

Is there documentation of each of the 500 individuals that saw Jesus after he died, and if so, where? Names of the individuals as well.

you're taking the book of claims and saying its the facts.

Do you believe a criminal when they say "I didn't do it!?" No.

This is what you're doing. You're reading the claim, saying "yeah that's true."

is there even evidence of a tomb?? i don’t think so

ok, so the empty tomb, the distressed early christians who’s god-in-flesh was just killed… no sources for any of this? you are just acting as if this is well accepted history but there is absolutely no historical evidence of any of this.

it blows my mind that there's always something glaringly flawed about these type of arguments and theists don't discuss it often. And that is whether or not a resurrection is actually possible? We don't have evidence in science that resurrection is possible.

But we have evidence that people can be fooled and can see supposedly saw 'dead' people. This is like the Elvis Presly case, where hundreds of people saw Elvis Presly were alive after his death. But that doesn't mean people actually saw Elvis Presly or it doesn't mean he ressurected.

Shouldn't we first establish that a resurrection is possible before positing it as an explanation?

I'm an agnostic and I'd like to believe in some of these things. "500 people have seen the dead Jesus...", well, thousands of Romans saw the Emperors souls rise to heaven... back in Ancient Greece thousands claim to have seen divine entities and even had s** with them. Who should be believed?
About morality and Christianity, have you read Deuteronomy 13, Deuteronomy 32, Numbers 31, 1 Samuel 15, Exodus 21, 1 Timothy 2, just to name a few?
Some people think that if you don't believe in a god you have lesser morals. I believe I've became a better person after turned into an agnostic, I feel more empathy and love for others because we might just have each other and only 1 chance to make it right. It also made me more in peace with the concept of death, which I never felt as a Christian. I also believe religious people tend to commit the most heinous acts because in their unconscious they believe that in the end everything can be forgiven by a way or another.

The answer to your question about how Christianity could have come to conquer so much of the world when Jesus was just some random, powerless guy is simple: Constantine became a Christian.
Jesus may not have had lots of money, or political or military power, but the Roman Empire certainly did. And we don’t need Jesus to have actually resurrected in order for a single, powerful man to have joined his cult.

Also, you keep saying Christianity died and came back much like the Christ they believe in, but that’s just not true. At no point did the cult of Jesus ever die. But it was mostly inconsequential for several centuries — until a Roman emperor decided to make it the official religion of his empire.

Within minutes, this video is pure BS. Scholars do not even agree that Jesus was buried in a tomb much less that it was empty. Most scholars believe that Joseph of Arimathea was all literary construction and never really existed. Jesus did not appear to 500 people, one person claimed that 500 people saw him. This is not corroborated evidence. It’s a claim by one person. It’s like me saying “I saw Elvis in central park, and 500 people in China saw him too”

Thank you!

I think the single most important question in life is what Jesus asked:
WHO do you say I am?

So be wary of claiming Christianity is special because it rose from the dead. Most religions had periods of being almost extinguished, but exist today. The same can be said of them. Its much like natural selection in nature.

The bit you go through at the end about prior probability is the bigger summary of why it seems compelling to so many but falls flat to others.

One note that's definitely worth mentioning is the 500 witnesses is used as a strong point of this quite often, and if it's true would be good evidence. But what we actually have is 1 witness saying there were 500 witnesses. If we had 500, or even 50 independent witness testimony of the event of the 500, then the 500 becomes a pretty useful piece to the story. There are a few witness testimonies that are independent and of independent events. That's something, but it's not 500. I think this is one of the facts that's often called s fact everyone agrees on that just is not a fact. We have a few witness testimony, but these are of disciples.

Another thing to remember is that while most won't go to death for what they know is a lie, people have went to death for writing a lie that they later recanted. How would we know if after writing and during their "trial" if they had confessed?

These are just a few reasons that even while I was Christian, I wasn't particularly fond of this type of argument for God. It seemed to try to bend several aspects beyond what we would call a fact to persuade those who weren't convinced that it was the likely explanation. That's not the foundation youd isn't to begin someone's journey into Christianity with. If I was not a Christian (well I'm not but I were becoming one) and I became one based on this argument then later on found out that thr 500 isn't reliable as a fact, etc., it might make me question it all. That's not what you want to build on.

The body wasn't robed by apostles, but by Jesus's relatives. They buried Him in a family tomb, together with Mary and other siblings. The tomb found by Cameron is most likely the one Jesus was buried in.
By the way no one was visiting Jesus's tomb as a pilgrimage, until the 4th century, so the question about whether tomb was empty or not, didn't bother anyone for 400 years. Jews didn't care much about Christians in the first century, and they didn't have a headache to prove whether there was a body or not. It wasn't a concern at all, and it's not a concern today as well. Ask any Jew, how much the are concerned about whether Jesus is the Messiah or not. For them this is so unimportant issue, they never debate or talk about it. In their teaching Jesus doesn't exist. Christians on the other hand are concerned about His body, and they think that jews are concerned too, but they aren't.