Yes but according to historians "When an event or saying is attested by more than one independent source, there is a strong indication of historicity." This is one of the five criteria for historicity.
That's not "according to historians," it's according to a book called
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, or so says my Google search.
Even if this were the consensus of historians, secular as well as religious, what is the basis for believing that a historian who does follow these criteria would in fact be able to filter true historical accounts from false historical accounts? Has there been some kind of experiment in which historians who used the criteria succeeded, and those who ignored them failed? It's hard to imagine how that would work.
Common sense may indeed tell us that, all other things being equal, an event attested to by more than one independent source is more likely to have really happened than one attested to by only one source. That doesn't mean that some events couldn't be very, very unlikely, even
with multiple sources. Miracles are intrinsically very unlikely events.
I wasnt talking about the Epistle of James but there is evidence he wrote it. I was referring to him not being anonymous we know who he was from multiple sources including an extrabiblical source.
There are multiple sources that say James the Just/James the brother of Jesus did exist. But I still don't understand what exactly you're saying about James as a "source" for the resurrection. If an anonymous person says "the resurrected Jesus appeared to James," that doesn't make James a source. The only source for the appearance to James is still the anonymous person who said it. Again, if I say "the following people -- Ann, Bob, Charlotte, Dennis, Ellen... Zelda -- saw me levitate the pyramids," that does not constitute twenty-six sources for my levitating the pyramid; the only source is me. (And of course I'm lying.)
The law that He broke is most likely blasphemy for believing in the divinity of Christ, and probably what convinced him was the resurrection.
Those claims need support.
Yes, but there is evidence for them being eyewitnesses nevertheless.
There have been many people on both sides of this, of course. They all claim to have the preponderance of evidence on their side. It's not a topic I pretend to any expertise on; all I can say is I haven't seen any evidence on the "pro" side which seems very powerful to me. Of course it's possible this is a function of that very lack of expertise, but I don't plan to take a degree in the topic. (And neither do I claim that I have very powerful evidence on the "con" side.)
Just because they may have copied sections or used the same sources as Mark does not mean that they are not independent of Mark. They both have information that is not in Mark
This is now a semantic argument about what the word "independent" means in this context, so I'll just agree with this summary: they both copied/used some sections from Mark (or from Mark's source) and each added material of their own.
This is another criterion of authenticity according to historians "The closer the time between the event and testimony about it, the more reliable the witness, since there is less time for exaggeration, and even legend to creep into the account".
Again, this is according to Habermas & Licona, not according to "historians," and again, I'd like to see how this criterion has been demonstrated to be valid in practice. I'd particularly like to see how Habermas/Licona, or any historian, has calculated a minimum time after the event in which exaggeration or invention becomes incredible. I've seen exaggerations/inventions about events which took less than 24 hours to circulate. See, for example, the "Ghost of Kyiv." (Again, this is especially true about war, but also about any events in which one side or other is passionately invested.)
Yes, but the big difference is that none of the people that claimed Hillary eats babies were people that actually knew her and had no relationship to her. With the resurrection most of the people that saw Him after His death were friends and family members that knew Him well.
The analogy just illustrates the general point that people can be persuaded of the truth of mind-boggling claims, for reasons other than there being strong empirical evidence for them. Are you saying it's plausible that people can believe in mind-boggling horrors about those they don't know, but it is
not plausible that people can believe in mind-boggling miracles about those they know and revere? Because I see no reason to think the latter case is much less likely than the former.
No, there are accounts written by they themselves that state that they believed in His bodily resurrection.
What are you referring to? There's an account in Luke about Thomas coming to believe in the bodily resurrection when he touched the wounds of the risen Christ. But that is not "an account written by Thomas himself," obviously.
In addition, Generally people that believe in an afterlife are less afraid of death.
This is just completely irrelevant to the claim that the afterlife exists, let alone that Jesus was resurrected. Generally, people who believe their children are the most perfectly beautiful babies in the world are less likely to neglect them, but by definition all but one of them must be wrong. (Sometimes, very, very wrong, in my experience.)
This can be seen in the 60s when atheist protestors of Vietnam used to chant "Better Red than dead!"
Which protests were these, where the chanting was only open to atheists? I'm actually old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam protests, and I don't remember any such chants, atheist-led or not. It's a phrase that sometimes came up in print, along with the flip side "better dead than red."
Anyway, the irrelevance of belief in the afterlife can be seen in the fact that my father, a lifelong atheist, volunteered for extremely hazardous duty in World War II.