Protestantism

» Brian Tubbs - Standards of Evidence

Migisi, only the MOST radical critics of Christianity apply the kind of outrageous standard of evidence that you're making here. You are WAY TO THE LEFT of even LIBERAL New Testament scholars.

For crying out loud, I could rip off name after name of LIBERAL, anti-evangelical NT scholars who reject any claim of divine or supernatural inspiration for the Bible - and YET even THEY - even THEY! - wouldn't just arbitrarily throw out religious evidence as unworthy of consideration!

You are saying that you won't consider any writing by a follower of Jesus as evidence. That means you're tossing out Christian letters NOT part of Scripture as well. Not only that, but you're saying the writer has to be SECULAR. My goodness, Migisi! That rules out Jewish historians like Josephus. It even puts out pagan Roman historians, because they believed in the Roman gods. (Unless you're picking and choosing with that word "secular" - which wouldn't surprise me about you, I suppose).

You also have this extremely distorted sense of a bunch of priests getting together about 100 or so years after Jesus - and saying: "Hey, we need to start a religion. Here, you write a Gospel which we'll name after Matthew. You write Luke. You write John." And on from there. It didn't happen that way!

Finally, there ARE some fundamentalist Christians who are self-serving and extremist. Certainly, but if you would take the time to read from a WIDE variety of New Testament scholars - not just the radical leftists and atheists - then you'd see that a decisive majority of them RESPECT the New Testament even if they don't venerate it as "Scripture." That you don't shows just how outside the mainstream your views on the NT are.