Jon Topping

Since Bart Ehrman doesn't want to have to explain the empty tomb, he has to deny a lot of elements of the crucifixion of Jesus. For starters, he has to deny any evidence that shows crucifixion victims were buried at times. One great example is Josephus, who gives us historical evidence that the Jews would bury crucifixion victims. Ehrman simply asserts (without evidence) that Josephus is lying.

Archeology shows us the remains of a crucifixion victim, during the first century, in Israel, that was buried, in a tomb. This completely destroys Bart Ehrman's complete denial of crucifixion victims ever being buried. How does he respond to this evidence?

Bart Ehrman ripped into me, telling me I'm not doing good history, all because I critiqued his argument against the empty tomb and Joseph of Arimathea. Ehrman is demanding evidence, however, I already gave the evidence in the full video (which he didn't watch). Ultimately, Ehrman is ignoring the historical evidence, so that he can justify his skepticism about the empty tomb.

Because Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the council of the Sanhedrin, he ends up strengthening the historical reliability of different aspects of the story of the burial of Jesus Christ. However, scholars like Bart Ehrman try to downplay his importance, even to the point of denying the story altogether. But this type of skepticism doesn’t match with what we know about history.

Skeptics will argue that, if crucifixion victims weren’t buried, then Jesus probably wasn’t either. We’ll look at the historical sources showing the fate of crucifixion victims, the sorts of exceptions that were made, and whether Roman and Jewish history lines up with how the Gospels describe what happened to Jesus’ body after He was killed.

The earliest critics of Christianity admitted that Jesus did miracles, and they seem to have assumed the tomb was actually found empty.

Why couldn't God forgive humanity without Jesus' death? Why was Jesus' crucifixion needed in order to forgive sins?

Capturing Christianity has posted videos arguing that the apparitions of Mary at Zeitoun are better evidence for Christianity than the resurrection. I go through the data to show how ridiculous this is.

Alex O'Connor challenged Wes Huff's argument for the resurrection by appealing to Marian apparitions. He thinks the appearances of Mary are just as good of evidence as the appearances of Jesus. To evaluate, let's look at the actual data.

Why did Jesus have to die for us to be saved from our sin? Why can't God just forgive us, without a sacrifice?

Marian apparitions are a major way skeptics try to argue mass hallucinations are possible, in order to counter the resurrection appearances.

How do hallucinations happen? What exactly are they, and are they predictable? These questions will help us evaluate hallucination theory.

One of the main counters against the resurrection of Jesus is the claim that the disciples were merely hallucinating the risen Christ.

A counter against the resurrection is the the disciples hallucinated. A specific form of this argument is that Christianity was a drug cult.

Here we go into what is probably the best secular explanation for the resurrection of Jesus Christ: that the disciples stole Jesus' body.

The empty tomb is a difficult historical fact to make sense of. In this episode we explore theories behind Jesus' missing body.

There is a group of secular arguments against the resurrection that all try to claim that Jesus' body went missing. They state it was...

After showing exactly what kills a person in crucifixion, we'll be able to definitively say that, yes, Jesus did in fact die on that cross..

Here we'll look at one of the best arguments for the idea that Jesus never died on the cross, so there was no resurrection.

One major counter to the resurrection is the idea that maybe Jesus only passed out on the cross. We dig into this topic, and why it's wrong.