First off, the world in Jesus' day was populated by few persons with the money or education to enable them to create, own or even read books.
It was considereded impractical and unnecessary to possess a library at home. It was an oral society. In Judaism, attending synagogue and watching the Rabbi heft the ponderous scroll open to a particular passage an read from it was enough to convince your average Jew that "holy"was
was for formal settings.
Which doesn't really negate anything I said about the NT documents having been circulated widely right from the time they were written. We have thousands of manuscripts, some dating from within decades of the originals. It seems only logical to conclude that, in a time when persecution was common, there were far more copies that have not survived than those that have. The issue is not whether the copies were made for liturgical purposes or for home libraries; the point is that they were made, and that they were made because those making them saw them as valuable, right from the beginning.
As far as martyrs dying for something as PROOF of legitimacy---you have to be kidding right? Those Arab terrorists who flew airliners into the World Trade Center must have proved the Muslim religion is true---by that reasoning!!
Not at all. They were dying for something they had been taught was true, not for something they had personally witnessed. The apostles of Christ were in a position to know whether what they were preaching was true or not. They were present for the events in question. If Jesus was a phony, if someone had stolen the body and faked the resurrection, they were in a position to know about it. Someone might well be willing to die for a lie that they didn't know was a lie, but it would take a lunatic to be willing to die for a lie he knew to be untrue. Unless the Muslims who flew the planes on 9/11 knew Mohammad personally, there is no parallel. That's why I inserted the parenthetical expression in my comment - because I knew you might "parrot" (to use your term) the stock answer to my statement from various atheist writings, and you didn't fail me.
You need to sit down and THINK about what you are regurgitating straight out of Lee Strobel's Case for Christ before you parrot it aloud.
I've never read Strobel's book, so I'm not sure how I could be "parroting" anything from it. I have heard the argument about the Arabs flying planes into the tower from lots of other sources, though, so apparently I'm not the only one capable of parroting.
There is NO HISTORICAL SUPPORT for the fact the autograph copies of the scriptures DO NOT EXIST?
Um, no, that's not what I said. There is no historical support for your assertion that the only possible reason that the autographs do not exist is that they were seen as valueless by those alive when they were created, and were therefore somehow discarded. That position is not only without historical support, it's illogical. If the autographs were not valued in their time so as to be discarded, why would anyone have valued them enough to make copies of them? If your assertion were true, we should have no manuscripts, no copies, no record at all that they ever existed.
Furthermore, there are better reasons to explain why they don't exist, especially in the light of historical accounts that tell us that Christians went to their graves as martyrs rather than give up their manuscripts of Scripture. The Roman government, at times, attempted to wipe out Christianity, and certainly this would have included destroying as many of their documents as possible.
The oral society in Jesus day which embraced the Jesus story as miraculous had come to the end of their rope as Jews. The Jewish religion was on its last viable leg under the corrupt Hasmonean dynasty of Herod and was being torn asunder by the Sicarii on one side and Apocalyptic mystery cults on the other. Accepting Jesus as THE Messianic answer to the problem was practically a no brainer for these persons "willing to die" for their beliefs. The stories they heard purported to represent supernatural miracles as attending the ministry of Jesus. How low or how high was each person's threshold of acceptance of such a statement? How logical, how skeptical, how investigative do you think the average Jewish peasant really was??
An interesting theory, but it strikes me as being ad hoc. It certainly fits the position you wish to advance. Have you any historical evidence for this process among the Jewish Christians? Because all of the early church history with which I am familiar tells a very different story.
