Bill Pratt | May 9, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Every once in a while, you may hear from hyper-skeptics that Jesus probably never existed, or that if he did exist, we cannot know anything about him because the historical evidence is so poor. Mike Licona, in his book The Resurrection of Jesus, provides a sampling of quotes from scholars who [...]
Bill Pratt | January 16, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Let’s briefly cover some historical background. The Roman emperor Vespasian ruled from A.D. 69 -79; his reign ended with his death. Writing about Vespasian some 25 years later, the Roman historian Tacitus reported a famous incident where Vespasian is said to have miraculously healed two men – one blind and one lame. This miracle [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, Tim Keller presented historian N. T. Wright’s analysis of Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward an individual resurrection. Would the ancient world have accepted the story of Jesus’s resurrection without serious skepticism? According to Keller, Wright’s research indicates that the Greco-Roman world would not have been [...]
Bill Pratt | August 1, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common claim of resurrection skeptics is that the people who lived in first century Palestine and the surrounding Roman Empire would believe just about anything. They would have easily embraced the story of Jesus’ resurrection without thinking twice. So, for the early proponents of Christianity who thought they really saw [...]
Bill Pratt | July 29, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona locked horns once again over the resurrection of Jesus on the Unbelievable? podcast last April. The two scholars discussed various elements of the New Testament that historians could use to reconstruct the life of Jesus for much of the radio show. In the final segment of [...]
Bill Pratt | July 1, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Vampire novelist Anne Rice announced in 1998 that she was converting to Christianity after having turned her back on it for thirty years as an atheist. She then announced in 2010 that she was leaving organized religion, but still believed wholeheartedly in Jesus Christ. In essence, Rice struggled with some of [...]
Bill Pratt | December 28, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recently I was in a discussion with a skeptic of Christianity, a man who had been Roman Catholic for 55 years, and then decided that he couldn’t believe Christianity any longer. During our conversation, he asked what historical evidence I could provide that Christianity was true, so I immediately went into [...]
Bill Pratt | November 15, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Some of the atheists that have commented on the blog have expressed skepticism at the existence of Jesus, claiming that there is very little or even no good evidence for him being a real historical figure. My response has been to point out that Jesus is the most well attested historical [...]
Bill Pratt | August 26, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most compelling apologetic arguments for the truth of the resurrection of Jesus is the fact that most of his closest followers were martyred for their beliefs. Since these followers would have had first-hand knowledge of whether he actually did come back from the dead, their willingness to be [...]
Bill Pratt | March 22, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt In parts one, two, and three of this series of posts, we discussed the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, who are both non-Christians. They each provide historical confirmation of key components of the history recorded in the New Testament. Before ending this series, I want to look at one more writer [...]
