Hi all guys, discussing with an atheist he told me that while he believes in the historical existence of Jesus he didn’t believe in his Divinity and that him and the apostles were liars. I pointed out that the apostles resisted immense torture and even Death all while proclaiming that Christ is God. Now i need to prove that Jesus was actually God and not simply a liar who deceived both the masses and even his own apostles. Thanks in advance for the answer
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Before we get deeper into this topic, don’t be discouraged if you can’t change a person’s mind on the spot. More often than not a person’s opposition to God is rooted in emotion. Untangling that will take time and patience.
We’ve had this topic before on discord but from here on you can shift the topic to the miracles he performed. Like the time he fed a huge mass of people by creating food out of nowhere. It is almost impossible to say that out of thousands people nobody was left skeptical about this, nobody gave a different account to what happened.
But I am just grasping at straws here as I am ashamed to say my level of apologetics is no better than yours. I am sure @Mozalbete is a whole lot more knowledgeable on the topic and can deliver some heavy arguments to help you. But at the end of the day, you will have to study up (like me) and learn to defend yourself on your own. Here’s a book that is good on the topic. It might be big and hard to read, so you might have to start out on simpler material, but all Catholic apologetics is usually derived from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles: https://legiochristi.com/static/lit/summa-contra-gentiles-LC.pdf
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The point in pointing out the things that the apostles went through is to show that they weren’t lying. Therefore, there is no reason to reject the 4 contemporary biographies that were written by said apostles and similar about what Jesus did, involving many unmistakable miracles and His eventual resurrection, which is the final proof of divinity. There is no way to deceive the masses in 3 years of miracles. There is no way to be crucified and killed by the romans and then magically resurrect. And there is no reason to do so, when Jesus precisely gained nothing.
The historical Jesus is the one described by the many historical documents tat narrate his life. There is no other Jesus. These documents are of well known communities, authors, and dating. Though liberal retards will deny it, the case for the rejection of the legitimacy of the gospel is rather pathetic and sad to see, with blunder after blunder, such as claiming that Matthew couldn’t write his gospel because it refers to Matthew in the third person.
You should treat whoever spewed insanity of such magnitude as a perverse person who hates Christ with a passion. Keep in mind that such person is not interested in the truth, or virtue, or in being a good person, since any of those would prevent anyone from being like that. Considering this, adjust the tone in your arguments.
Let me know if you want expanded comments on some topic, or let us know how everything goes.
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When i discuss with atheists, i dont try to convince them about the “facts”, i rather try to tell them stories about how people discovered christianity for themselves and also use a few stories from the bible as example that might suit them for any current situation. Then i always like to hear what they say about that so we can have an open discussion. Then sometimes it happens, that they start to be a little interested in it… but only sometimes…
The problem with that is that you have people who discover every religion under the sun, as well as endless poetry, myths etc that can suit whatever situation. So if the same applies to those, and they are false, why should Christianity be different?