Today's post:
Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Another very poor showing from Kreeft. His response assumes from the start that everything in the Gospels and Acts about who the disciples were and what they did is unquestioned historical fact; it discounts the probability that the Gospel stories did not originate in the original circle of disciples (assuming for the sake of argument that this existed) but were at least a generation later; it assumes that those original disciples would have needed to make easily-controverted claims in public and in such a way that the Jewish authorities would have had to take note; and so on.
Kreeft even claims that no-one confessed under torture that it was a conspiracy—but we have absolutely no reason to suspect that anyone in the original group of disciples was ever tortured for any reason! We know nothing about the circumstances of any of their deaths; the “traditional” martyrdom accounts accreted over time and were never credible.
And who does he use as authorities? Blaise Pascal, Aquinas, and William Lane Craig...
