What would change our mind
A case that cannot state its own losing conditions is not a case; it is a mood. Here are ours, in writing, held to the same standard as every exhibit in the file.
And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
The standard is not ours; it is the file's oldest exhibit talking. Paul names the condition under which the whole claim fails (no resurrection, no case) and stakes everything on a checkable assertion. This page keeps that ledger current.
- 01
Produce the body
A first-century ossuary or grave demonstrably containing the remains of Jesus of Nazareth (established with the same custody standard this file demands of its own exhibits) ends the claim. Christianity is the only major faith whose founding assertion is a physical, checkable event in a known city within named lifetimes. That cuts both ways, permanently.
- 02
Date the creed late
The case leans on the 1 Corinthians 15 creed being early (Exhibit 2). Manuscript or documentary evidence pushing its origin generations after the crucifixion (rather than the few years accepted even by atheist scholarship) would collapse the "no time for legend" argument, and this file would say so on that exhibit.
- 03
Show the witnesses knew it was false
Evidence of knowing fabrication (a confession, a coordination document, a credible ancient account of the disciples producing or hiding the body) would be fatal. People die for false beliefs they think are true; they do not, in numbers, die for what they know they invented. Show the knowing, and the psychological core of the case is gone.
- 04
Break the hostile attestation
Demonstrate that Tacitus, the Josephus James passage, and Pliny (Exhibits 4, 6, 7) are wholesale forgeries (not disputed clauses, but the passages entire) and the non-Christian frame of the file falls. Note the standard: it must be demonstration, of the kind that moved the Testimonium (Exhibit 5) down to USABLE CORE. The same rubric that demoted our own exhibit applies.
- 05
Explain the data better
A naturalistic account that explains (with fewer assumptions, not more) the early creed, the movement’s survival of its founder’s public execution, the persecutor Paul’s reversal, and the enemies’ explain-don’t-deny pattern in the record, wins. The vision hypotheses of Lüdemann and Ehrman are the strongest current entries, and they are quoted at full strength inside the exhibits they address.