Setting aside the rest of what Spidey said, and resting this question on
what do we know then we have to address the accuracy of the key facts of the matter, as you are propounding them, which
evidence, not "what we say" holds in controversy. There simply is no other way to state a true thing.
The Gospels have more eyewitnesses than most historical events - hundreds of witnesses who died rather than recant their beliefs.
If your intent is to state that the legend told in the Gospels alleges itself to be true, and offers a list of legendary characters as eyewitnesses to itself, then that is an honest statement. If your intent is to state that the world knows of any competent witness who left an autograph giving testimony of any substantial piece of the legend, then that would be untrue.
The key here is to try to be accurate.
Over the next three hundred years they transformed the Roman Empire
Ok but that's like saying all Americans who ever lived are eyewitnesses to Paul Bunyon and his giant blue ox. We're still confronted by the nature of legendary stories and the impossibility of connecting them to eyewitnesses. Certainly people who lived in later centuries can't break that logic.
Christianity did not spread all over the Roman Empire and then all over the world. It did work its way to Rome, split into eastern and western halves, setting the stage that it would become the default religion of the Holy Roman Empire that ensued, and of the member countries who eventually went off to colonize the Americas. Most of the world is not Christian.
How? Because some clever, but disappointed Hebrew scholars got together after the destruction of the Temple, stirred up Plato and Mithras and what not and "faked" a new religion?
You will probably get more mileage out of this by inquiring into whether any religious texts have been faked rather than asking if the religion is a fake. Religions begin with oral tradition. Oral tradition is the transmission of myths, legends, and fables that are woven into the story. "Faking" takes place later, after the stories are written down into "scriptures". Here I'm referring to known cases of fraud in which the writer purports to be authentic, but fabricates the text.
The problem with taking umbrage at the suggestion that the text you hold sacred may have been faked, is that, to maintain that honest objectivity we are all striving for -- you must put the shoe on the other foot. Decide for example whether this document is faked. This is the Gospel of Thomas. It was found buried in a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in the 1940s:
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html
Even if that were true, don't you think these fellows must have been awfully clever to turn their Scripture on its head and come up with such an amazing character as Jesus?
From a rhetorical perspective, Jesus is portrayed as a fairly wooden character. His persona is flat and aloof, more mythical in construction than needed to propagate the legend. Odds are, this reflects a long gestation in oral tradition before ever being committed to text.
To illustrate my meaning, consider this introduction to the character of Socrates:
I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration. I thought the procession of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show, made by the marching of the Thracian contingent.
Compare with Jesus, who lacks any persona. He speaks almost entirely in adages:
Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in this world.
:
and so on. There simply is no persona in this character at all. It's simply a vehicle for transporting somebody's list of adages, from who knows what source.
A man who went against everything traditional Jews believed and not only dared to pronounce the name of God (YWH -Yahweh), but called Him his papa (Abba) and said they were actually the same person - that He (Jesus) was The Lord and had been around since the very beginning, and was older than Moses.
Jesus is not the first demigod who claims to be "God and man". There are quite few. Here is a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demigods
Hard to believe pious Jews would write that!
Considering the many factions of Jews who were competing for domination when the Romans nearly wiped them from the face of the Earth, identification with piety would be no different than identification with each person's faction.
In any case, odds are no one actually wrote it, that it persisted as oral tradition before some unknown parties first transcribed the legend in uncial Greek.
Hard to believe any Greek or other gentile would know enough to even think of it,
That's like saying it's hard to imagine anyone in the Levant would ever come up with the works of Homer or Virgil.
and play so freely with the story,
It's that playing with the story which gives variations like you see in the Gospel of Thomas.
and feel confident they had a religion that would take over the world. What genius!
It was armies who took over the western world. They just happened to be Christian. The rest of the world was barely influenced by Christianity--excluding the Orthodox regions and those who were targeted by missionaries.
No, you can't just pronounce The Gospels nonsense without knowing what they say,
We pronounce them legends for that very reason. What we pronounce as nonsense is the conflation of evidence and historical narrative
This is called exegesis
This is called anthropology/archaeology
- and call yourself a "scientist".
It's pretty obvious many members do not call themselves scientists. They do call anthropologists and archaeologists scientists. They call themselves informed, rational--some when pressed will admit to an education. That leads them to the recognition of what the Gospels say, what they mean, and how they come to be as a matter of exegesis, anthropology and archaeology.
I know it's miracles make it difficult to believe, but that's the very reason they have always been and remain controversial. Even in the bit of the John gospel where the Father spoke of the Son directly to the people, some said it was thunder, while others heard God's words. "Father, glorify your name!" (said Jesus) Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and will glorify it again." (John 12:28)
The association of peals of thunder with supernatural intervention is a common theme in the history of all superstition. As we now know, the electric discharges do produce acoustic shock waves strictly as in connection with the laws of electromagnetics.
There have always been doubters even among the potential eye (ear) witnesses.
Facts are on trial every day, in every healthy mind everywhere. Even a lot of unhealthy ones. The challenge for the trier of fact is to be able to apply the principles of geometry, to draw the best conclusions from those facts. Otherwise you get what we see today: the conflation of myth, legend and fable with historical narrative. Yes: more doubt is needed to prevent that logical fallacy from taking over vulnerable minds and denying them the truths which religions would obscure from them.
If you are going to choose a side, at least become familiar with what you presume is nonsense, but may not have studied in depth.
If you are going to address the audience at large you shouldn't presume that there are not readers of both high and low scholarship in such matters. It just depends who's reading. How about yourself? I'm assuming you're familiar with the Apochrypha since you once mentioned you were advocating Catholicism. Are you familiar with the Pseudoepigrapha?
I know it is hard to see past the hypocritical and ignorant people who call themselves Christians,
Watch out for the unusual irony of casting that aspersion too far.
but it is worth it to gain eternal life.
I'm not one to complain about this, certainly not with you. But when you cast a statement in form of an admonition about how to live, according to religious principle, it puts you in the tenuous position of preaching, which goes against site policy.
Jesus said this about them:
Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' Matthew 7:21-23
If someone made all this up, he was a genius and a true prophet, or He was precisely who He claimed to be - you know who I'm talking about.
For those folks who recognize possession by demons as psychoses we would certainly equate exorcisms by licensed professionals--through standard therapeutic intervention--as "doing the will of" the God of the Bible, in the sense that this could count as one of those corporal acts of mercy Catholics famously espouse,in conformance with the mandate Jesus gave you in Matt 25 to render aid to "these the least of my brethren". It's that or be counted as a goat and cast into the Lake of Fire. The rest I would endorse outside of the legendary context. Namely, that people who go around pretending to be clairvoyant are indeed evil. However, I would cut them a wide berth, first sending them to the exorcists, inasmuch as hearing voices and experiencing time-travel are signs of serious disorders which need immediate intervention.
