Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• Who among us hath not heard the old drum that the apostles and earliest followers of Jesus would not have been willing to die for their beliefs, if they knew that the resurrection had been a lie? Since we know that the apostles had died for their teachings, clearly they must have been true!
• While they can often include fallacies, I seldom I find an apologetic argument that is the literal embodiment of one: Argumentum ad martyrdom.
• Despite being a logical fallacy resting on the bizarre premise that people cannot die for lies, I will play the apologetic game anyways to show that things become far more problematic for those arguing this point when we actually investigate the circumstances of the apostles' deaths and find that they are virtually all ahistorical legends, full of contradictions, and little more than magical absurdities.
• To borrow an analogy used by Bob Price, it would be like an Oz apologist arguing: "Where else would the Yellow Brick Road lead, if not to Emerald City?" Such an argument distracts from the fact that there is no Yellow Brick Road in the first place. In like manner, apologists want to use the argumentum ad martyrdom to prove the miracle of Jesus' resurrection through the martyrdoms, but, as we will see, one will already need belief in miracles to be credulous towards many of the fantastic accounts detailing the supposed deaths of the apostles.