People die for all kinds of delusions. The brain is very good at being fooled. Even if Jesus and the 12 apostles actually existed and one of the heavily contradictory stories of the events after the crucifixation of Jesus is accurate this is no indication that the man Jesus actually did rise from the dead. The Bible also recounts the story of Lazarus rising from the dead after three days of “death”. These people could not tell the difference between coma, unconsciouness. They also bought the story about epileptics being “cured” by casting out the indwelling devils which were then thrown into a herd of startled animals. They were ignorant uneducated fishermen who had abandoned their family responsiblities to follow an itinerant preacher who lived like a hobo and who, like them, was illiterate.

In this day and age they would probably believe that they had been abducted by aliens or been one of the “witnesses” to Joseph Smith’s golden tablets.

Although it is central to the Christianity that developed in later centuries, it is doubtful if the first Christian’s believed that their Master had risen from the dead. The first New Testament gospel to be written (Mark) ended with the death of Jesus. Apparently the gospel writer thought that he had written down all the things that really mattered. The story of the magical resurrection of Jesus and its aftermath was not added until much later, probably to make the narrative conform to the others and improve its chances of being included in the biblical Canon as the committee-designated “inspired word of god”.

Except it doesn’t even do that. Has no Christian ever heard of Joseph Smith? He was martyred for his religion which was almost certainly a fraud he was perpetrating (presumably because there are quite a lot of perks associated with leading a religion). When a mob is lynching or a political leader executing a man who claims to be in contact with the Divine but who is really a fraud they don’t generally give him the opportunity to recant and, if he does, send him on his merry way. They just kill him.

Too many in this discussion (including Ingersoll in the quote) have mistakenly assumed that martyrdom is evidence of sincerity but not truth….in fact, its neither.

I don’t believe cosmic plurality because Giordano Bruno died at the stake for promoting the idea; I believe it because it’s statistically unlikely that only one world in the whole universe has life. Trying to prove the existence of god because people died for their faith is like trying to prove cosmic plurality or heliocentricity by saying that it’s true because Bruno died for it; conversely, the falsehood of the existence of god says nothing about the faith or lack thereof of the martyrs.

I don’t recall reading any convincing evidence for this event in your posts. It’s all based on hearsay removed a thousand fold from the supposed event.

There is no solid evidence for eye witnesses to the central Christian claims. The best evidence comes from a persecuting Jew who never met Jesus until he “saw” him during what appears to be a fit of temporal lobe epilepsy on the road to Damascus. He was the only person in the entourage who saw the vision or heard the voice. Ergo, it was an hallucination stemming from the things already in his mind.

The earliest gospel writers were several generations removed from anyone who could have witnessed the events first hand. Even so, eye witness accounts are extremely unreliable testimony and frequently come apart during cross-examination or the production of CSI-type evidence which disconfirms what the witnesses were convinced that they saw.

The best evidence the Bible can provide is extremely weak.

There is no solid evidence that the Apostles were killed (if they were) because they believed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

The earliest copy of the first written gospel, Mark, does not include a resurrection story. It ends with Jesus despairingly asking his version of god why he had forsaken him.

There is reasonable doubt that Jesus was actually dead when he was removed from the cross. Pilate was very surprised to learn that Jesus had died much earlier than is usually expected in cases of crucifixion. In those days of primitive “medicine” there was no way to clearly differentiate coma from death. It is possible that an unconscious, but not medically dead, body was removed from the instrument of torture and buried in cave. If someone came to embalm him several days later it would be a terrific shock to find out he was not quite dead. He may have been able to move around a little before the serious nature of his wounds resulted in his actual death. Urban myths arise from less fantastic happenings in this day and age. In that day and age the culture would have provided all the material for supernatural embroidering of the such events.

In other words, there are other plausible explanations.
1.The apostles may not have believed that Jesus was resurrected but tried to continue spreading his ideas, which got them killed like their Master before them.
2. The apostles were not killed for their beliefs, but for some other reason.
3. The apostles died natural deaths and the tales of their martyrdom are urban myths.
4. The apostles did believe that Jesus had been resurrected, but for poor reasons. They were simple folk, after all.