I’m making the claim that it’s reasonable to say that they died as martyrs, I’m not making the claim that we know with absolute certainty that they weren’t given the option to recant their faith. Saying that they were most likely given the option to recant and didn’t is compatible with the historical data in our possession, much more than the affirmation of the contrary (which seems an ad-hoc explanation).
Now if you want to continue to deny the obvious go ahead, I won’t stop you.
You are (mostly) correct, at least based on what I have read about the first centuries of Christianity. During most of the time, the persecution appeared to be local and mostly not active - ‘punish if you are faced with a Christian who does not repent but do not actively search’ -policy. In many places, there were periods of several decades when there were practically no persecution or the occasional persecution targeted just the leaders.
The periods you mentioned were severe persecution but how eagerly the commands of the emperor were obeyed varied in different parts of the empire. Less important Christians far from the capital were apparently just killed, while the leaders were sent to Rome for punishment. It is not known how many were killed because there are no general records but the bits of information available hint that the number was fairly high relative to the total number of Christians living in those regions where the persecutions were intense. Some part of the local Christians probably emigrated to areas were the persecutions were not as intense.
There were also an unknown number who denied Christ to save their lives. After the persecutions ended and many repented, what to do with these apostates became a topic of heated debate within churches.
The policy of persecutions changed after some time because the emperors noted that the executions increased the number of believers more than were killed. Apparently watching how the Christians approached their death showed to the spectators that these Christians had something they missed.
The kill orders changed into trying to make the Christians deny Jesus, through threats and torture.
Depends on what you mean by ‘willing to die’. I assume that they did not want to be killed but chosing between denying their faith or being killed is a choice where there is only one correct choice. I also assume that for some, it was not an intentional choice to be killed. If there is a violent attack, there may not be a possibility to chose at that moment. The choice was done earlier when they decided to make the risky decision to follow the Lord.
You are correct in that what we know about the fate of most apostles is dependent on orally told tradition, there is no ‘hard’ written evidence. Yet, orally told tradition is more than nothing. Claiming something else has no support (nothing).
That’s what I meant. And since we know that Christians were given the option to repent is reasonable to affirm that they had been given that chance as well.
Historians as I have shown largely recognize the historicity of the martyrdom of Paul, Peter and James, they cannot “prove” that they had the choice to recant their Faith but it’s certainly reasonable to assume they indeed had said choice, for the reasons I have already outlined
Waterboarding is slow drowning. The same mechanism of killing as drowning, except that there is an attempt to stop the waterboarding before the person has suffocated to death - and then repeat the process of slow killing as many times as needed. Sometimes the waterboarding goes too far and the person dies by drowning. No Pom Pom girls or prosecco…
I was obviously joking, but I would still take waterboarding over imperial Rome-style “interrogations” any day of the week and twice on Sunday. 
Now you’ve gone from “they reported that He raised from the dead and were willing to die to testify it.” to “we simply don’t have enough evidence which doesn’t mean they were not actually martyred” to “that they were most likely given the option to recant and didn’t is compatible with the historical data in our possession”.
Without at any point admitting that you are changing your claim.
You are just doing semantic tricks . They have been killed, historians agree with that, they they don’t see it a mere pious tradition.
And from the historical accounts in our possession we know that Christians were given the choice to recant, which brings us back to my point: it’s absolutely reasonable to affirm that even Paul, Peter and James had that choice, because that’s what happened from the historical sources in our possession, which also means that it’s absolutely reasonable to believe they have been martyred. On the other hand, to say that they weren’t given the choice to recant is an ad-hoc explanation based on nothing.
Now you can keep on playing semantic games if you want, the substance remains the same.
And the substance is that historical evidence points at them being martyred, whether you like it or not. Which doesn’t mean that it’s “proven” without a shadow of a doubt. It just means that it’s more resonable than the alternative.
P.s: the fact that they were willing to die for their beliefs is affirmed by Paul himself in his letters, what happened later is just consistent with what they said and the life they were living.
I’m not claiming something else.
I’m only claiming that we have no evidence, only stories of unknown origin, that any of the apostles who saw the risen Jesus were given the choice of recanting rather than being executed; therefore we do not know that they were willing to die to testify to the resurrection.
@1Cor15.54 is still affirming that they were given the choice of recanting or execution and chose execution, even though there is absolutely nothing to show that to be the case.
To say that there is “absolutely nothing” is a lie. Christians back then were given the choice to recant so it is reasonable to affirm that the apostles were given that choice as well.
I cannot say “it’s 100% proven”, I can definitely say that it’s reasonable to assume it, given the treatment Christians received back then.
And saying that we have “absolutely nothing” is a lie . Pliny’s letter is not “absolutely nothing” at all.
I see no reason whatsoever to believe that because Christians were given the option to recant their faith by Pliny the Younger in Rome, James must have been given the option to recant by the Sanhedrin in Judea decades earlier.
As for Peter and Paul, I’ve just looked up Pliny’s letter. Despite the repeated claim that Pliny was probably following earlier practices and therefore Peter and Paul would also have been given the same choice to recant that Pliny gave his prisoners, Pliny states[1]:
I have never before participated in trials of Christians, so I do not know what offenses are to be punished or investigated, or to what extent. And I have been not a little hesitant as to whether there should be any distinction on account of age, or no difference recognized between the very young and the more mature. Is pardon to be granted for repentance, or if a man has once been a Christian is it irrelevant whether he has ceased to be one?
So Pliny wasn’t following earlier practice, and even though Trajan confirmed that recanters should be released, there is nothing to suggest that the same applied 40 years previously under Nero.
Too bad that other historians think differently and think that that was a much older practice.
“The onus is on those who deny the early importance of this long-lasting element to produce reasons why it should have arisen only after Pliny’s day, when all that we know of Roman religion would lead us to expect its appearance very soon after Christianity first attracted the attention of the government.” - G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 150.
As you can see there are actual historians who say that what we have is not “absolutely nothing” at all.
You are correct in that we do not have ‘hard’ evidence. Yet, I would be surprised if they would not have been willing to die. The history of Christianity has been a continuous testimony of a willingness to sacrifice everything, even the life, for Christ.
Even this very day, many Christians are probably killed because of their faith. In the current situation, 300-400 million Christians face serious persecutions and the number of confirmed killings is almost 5000 per year, based on the statistics of the Open Doors organization. These Christians rather suffer and die than deny their Lord. The reason for this willingness is their experiences that confirm to them that Jesus lives and God answers.
All true.
But… if Christians who definitely didn’t see Jesus resurrected (because they lived centuries later) are willing to be martyred rather than recant, the apostles being willing to be martyred rather than recant (if they even had that choice) cannot be used as evidence that they saw Jesus after he died.
This is another rethorical trick: Christians from This is another rhetorical sleight of hand: later generations of Christians had no direct way of knowing whether what they believed was true. The apostles, by contrast, knew whether they had in fact seen the risen Jesus. To choose to live a life of suffering, only to die an early and painful death for something you know to be false, would be utterly preposterous.
Which was my point, we don’t have “hard evidence”, that’s true, but to say that we have “absolutely nothing” is absolutely wrong as well.
We know that Christians were given the option to recant, we know it from Pliny’s testimony, and it’s certainly reasonable to say that it wasn’t a novel practice. Certainly more reasonable than the alternative which is also possible but it’s much more an ad-hoc hypothesis. And reasonable doesn’t mean “proven without a shadow of a doubt”. It means exactly that: reasonable.
I don’t disagree but this says very little about the veracity of the claim “the apostles all died for their faith.” Reconstructing exactly what happened in the period between 30-60CE is notoriously difficult. Apologists, per their usual when talking about science or history, overstate, understate, beg the question, specially plead and so on. Do we even know that Peter had the option to recant and be saved on the day he died? He may have been executed merely by virtue of being a Christian on that fateful day.
As I have articulated, the mere belief in a crucified messiah to me indicates their faith was quite serious whether or not they would recant under torture. So if the goal is just to say many of the original apostles of Jesus really believed he rose, hardly anyone disputes that anyways. People crash planes into buildings and also blow themselves up over lies they genuinely believe are true. I’ve also never been tortured but I’m going to go out on a limb and say people don’t always make clear decisions when being tortured and their moral culpability is going to be severely diminished just as a woman lying to save her children from a murderer with a gun is not as morally culpable for violating natural law here compared to someone premeditatedly defrauding the elderly out of their social security benefits.
Maybe someone can tell me what we are trying to show by this belief? I feel like apologists are trying to say something else. Well Mark is from Peter by proxy and thus everything in it is probably accurate. Peter would have investigated all the details he couldn’t know. We want too turn an unlettered fisherman into a master logician and Sherlock Holmes.
It is quite possible Jesus was buried in a common tomb with many other bodies and the disciples didn’t know where his body was or couldn’t identity it. Maybe Jesus appeared to them 3 days later or maybe it was a year or two later and the gospel accounts are embellished. Maybe the women went to the tomb a month later out of grief when they thought it was safe and maybe history was scripturalized (to the third day). There are plenty of ways to explain the gospel narratives and details we think are most certainly true without a wooden literalism .I am not saying any of this is true, my point is all these things have to be established one way or another.
The disciples really believed that Jesus had returned to them and conquered death. Putting the atheist or skeptics hat on. Okay, so what?
Vinnie
He may have been, but since other Christians were in fact given the opportunity to recant, claiming that Peter specifically was not, or that we have absolutely nothing to say that he was granted the option to recant, is merely an ad hoc hypothesis. Perhaps it is true, but it is not on the same level as saying that the apostles, like the other Christians, were given the chance to recant.
But let’s reverse the scenario. Suppose that, based on the historical sources we possess, Christians were not given any opportunity to recant.
In that case, how would we regard someone who said, “But Peter and Paul may well have been given the choice to recant”? Would that not seem like a rhetorical sleight of hand, an attempt to weaken the evidence we actually have by placing two opposing hypotheses on the same footing when in fact they are not?
The thing is that we have been conditioned to see any reconstruction that is not contrary to faith as “apologetic” and “unreliable”, while opposing hypotheses are granted the upper hand even when there is no need to.
This is a sign of how much the spirit of the age has prevailed.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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