In many of these other cultures, writing was more commonplace than in the Jewish world, we know for a fact the the New Testament was written 100 years after Jesus death, these other stories were most likely written contemperaneously.
You’re actually speaking in person to a resurrected person. It’s not extraordinary. It just happens to occur at times.
I bet he was an educated guy, I’ll even grant that he could have been as smart as any man living today, which would only make it even easier to dupe the uneducated masses of the time with his stories.
Is marytrdom a measure of veracity? More like a measure of tenacity.
If I were to lay down my life for Bigfoot or a flat earth, would that throw into question the truth of the propositions that such things existed in reality? Or more to the point - should it?
The way that cognitive biases work in humans, and things like “the backfire effect”, is that people tend to double down when a flawed interpretation is challenged or contradicted - whereas I’m sure you’re aware of those conformity experiments like Asch’s 1951 one that shows how people often conform away from the truth when the consensus is different. Perhaps Saint Paul was not one such person, and immune to cognitive biases, but even granting that, given the nature of what he was claiming to be true - is martyrdom the most of his worries? Martyrdom has been a common theme for the religious, and the heaven they believe they would be rewarded with for their staunch beliefs - there’s grounds to argue that they were often seeking it, or at least hardly fearing it. Cult members die for truths they believe even today: dying for something is no evidence for its truth.
Mohammad gained a lot of power for his claims - whether true or false. Joseph Smith got laid loads for getting people to believe in his claims.
The Matrix hypothesis is unfalsifiable. We can’t prove any percent likelihood either way. The same is true for religion: even if Jesus was a real person who really was executed and subsequently rose from the dead, this wouldn’t prove he was the Son of God, or that either Old or New Testaments were true, or that God was true. Out of all kinds of possible explanations, we know that people have been thought dead but actually not been, from exhumed coffins showing claw marks on the inside from the person trying to get out, for example - a horrific fate if there ever was one. But I’m saying even if there was the faintest causal connection between these events and God’s existence, the only real falsifiable proof is have a way to directly test God’s existence empirically. Stories and scholars pondering on their veracity is just as doubtful as whether we live in the Matrix as it is doubtless - I remember an amusing observation that so few historical documents historically and geographically proximate to the stories in the Bible mention the small fact that the literal Son of God was born. Just a small oversight perhaps.
Pascal’s Wager is as compelling as the Heaven’s Gate claim that wearing uniforms and nike shoes, with $5.75 in your pocket will carry you off on a comet to heaven if you kill yourself at the right time. I don’t find such a thing to be brilliant.
Forensic evidence is far more reliable than eyewitness testimony which is very unreliable in multiple ways
Even where witnesses are absolutely certain they can still be wrong and their claims may be hard to falsify
