So here I am, faced with multiple Biblical scholars who have spent years studying this, they all have multiple texts written about their fields of specialty, they are so well regarded that even you accept them as experts and they all have intensive education and qualifications in the field...
...and there's you who disagrees with them.
Do you have anywhere near the same level of experience as them in this field?
Tell me, why should I not side with the experts here?
Honestly, it's like if there's a dozen doctors who claim you have a particular condition and you need Treatment X, but you remain unconvinced because some celebrity appeared on a talk show and said that waving crystals around your head will fix it.
Nah. Any valid science will show the working, and show the raw data, making it possible for people to see the exact method and results. So people can point out if there was any inaccuracies introduced by a poor method ("When you did this, you failed to account for such and such, and that could bias the results in this particular way") and they can point out if the results were reached through miscalculation of the data.
No need for trust, you can go and see for yourself.
And that right there is the problem. How can you know you've reached an accurate conclusion if part of your decision making process is, "It's what I want to believe"?
If the evidence is incomplete, why not just admit it and say, "There's insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion about this yet."
Hey, if there's one source that claims that in year X so and so was king, and we find that there are coins with that king's name on it from around that year, the enemy of that king wrote about how he battled that king, there are tax records about taxes paid to that king, historians of the time wrote about that king, how is that not verification?
After all, it's saying, "If this source's claim that so and so was king is true, we should find other contemporary sources that fit in with that," and then we find other sources that fit in with that. Seems fairly straightforward to me.
Right.
So, "Here is the evidence, and it supports position A, position B and Position C, and I'll therefore conclude that it supports Position C because that's what I already believe," is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to you?
I was very clearly talking about the performance of miracles as being an extraordinary claim. And let's not forget that according to the Bible, it is such a miracle that causes Peter to follow Jesus.
So it's not a claim about someone who had followers. It's a claim about someone who had followers because those followers were convinced by the miracles he performed. And that is indeed an extraordinary claim.