Updated Collection of Resurrection Book Reviews

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I have added my review of Geza Vermes' The Resurrection: History and Myth to the CADRE site's Reviews of Books about the Historicity of the Resurrection article. The article contains reviews of 15 leading books on the resurrection of Jesus, from many different perspectives. It may be one of the most comprehensive collection of reviews of resurrection books on the internet.

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How Many Children in Bethlehem Did Herod Kill?

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the slaughter of the innocents. Therein, I argued that some of the skepticism about the account was unjustified. One argument I made was that the number of children killed in Bethlehem would likely have been no more than 20. Though obviously an act of great evil, the killing of 20 children would be much less likely to be noticed by historians of the time than the slaughter of thousands as later traditions speculated. In response to the post, Peter Kirby asked a few questions. He has patiently waited my response, continuously delayed by work, family, and the completion of my Acts article . Two of the questions had to do with how the amount of 20 was determined. Others with the omission of the account by Luke and the reliability of the tradition recounted by Macrobius. Peter also mentioned that there were other reasons to doubt the story's historicity beyond just the silence of other sources. I ...
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Do you say this of your own accord? (John 18:34, ESV)

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By J. P Holding -
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Resurrection harmony

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The purpose of this argument is merely to establish that the events described in the four canonical Gospel resurrection accounts can be construed as a coherent event. Atheists are always harping on the many differences in the accounts. They seem to feel that these amount to insurmountable contradictions, marking a totally contradictory story. But I will argue that we can pull together the events described in all four Gospels to create a unified harmony which shows that there was a single coherent event taking place.This may not mean that call differences vanish away, but most of them can be explained by the process of eye witness testimony and story telling based upon the accounts of eye witnesses. There may be a couple of loose ends, but I will argue that these are not important when one considers the over all agreement and ensuing harmony, (for harmony table click here) * my model: (1) women go to tomb find stone moved, immediately  they suspect the Romans or Sa...
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On the Prior Probability of the Resurrection

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The Banana: Proof of Atheism!

By J. P Holding -
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Resurrection of Christ  by  Noël Coypel , 1700,  using a  hovering depiction  of Jesus Corinthians 15:  50 Now this is what I am saying, brothers and sisters: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen,29 I will tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound,  and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.  53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 Now when this perishable puts on the imperishable, and this mortal puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will happen, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” 55 “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”  The "no Body" theory comes in two versions: 1) that Jesus was an historical fig...
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Ignatius' Reliance on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians And More

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Do God's Omniscience ,Omnipotance, and free will Contradict?

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An atheist guest comes knocking at the door of the comment section with a string of canned arguments we've answered a million times, hurled lake a gauntlet as though we have never see it before: God is asserted to be all good, all loving, all knowing, all powerful, in possession of free will and having imparted free will to human beings as well as being eternal and uncaused as well as outside of space and time while acting in a time sequence of events within space and time. Sorry, one simply cannot make rational sense to reconcile all these asserted properties. They contradict each other in various ways making the whole package incoherent by it's own theistic definitions. Here is an old answer I put up on Metacropck's blog in 2011, again in 2013: Atheists think it is. I've seen many a knock down drag-out fight, multiple threads, lasing for days, accomplishing nothing. I wrote that dilemma off years ago before I was an internet apologist, ...
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