[@Bishop]

Super fair question. The main issue with the trickster hypothesis (I made up that name) is that, save perhaps one or two fringe cases I am not aware of, nobody will willingly die for what they know to be a lie. When the apostles are being hunted or tortured to death by the Romans, they still contend that what they say is true. They could have escaped persecution by admitting their own lie or (if they are telling the truth) lying and say that what they wrote is false. But the fact that they never gave it up shows that they have a deep conviction that what they write is accurate. To answer the question regarding them using their own flaws to appear human, the issue is that the Bible is [i]extremely [/i]negative about some of the acts and thoughts of the apostles. The reason that this is such a widely accepted method by historians is because they did significantly more harm to their own case through both their faults and the way they said events occurred (such as the women at the tomb) than any help that they could have gained from this is overshadowed by the damage that would be done. Plus, people in this day and age weren't exactly too keen on human psychology, so it would have been difficult to be [i]that[/i] cunning.

That being said, it leaves two real possibilities. Either the apostles were totally crazy, as well as everyone cited as sources, and anyone who was also an eyewitness as well (the Jesus=elite hypnotist idea), or they were telling the truth. But the issue with the idea that Jesus was the real fraud behind it all is that he also died for what he taught, more severely than any of the others. So is Jesus some super-magician who can hypnotize thousands of people into seeing things that weren't there and then being tortured to death for what he knows to be false (something that nobody does) or is totally crazy himself but is at the same time cunning enough to commit this huge ruse? Perhaps, but it's also a complex and unnecessarily more intricate explanation with a thousand points of failure than accepting the historicity of the New Testament (even if you reject the miracles). Plus, the uber-magician hypothesis ends up collapsing under scrutiny when you consider all of the people who never met Jesus or any of the apostles directly but were still able to verify the non-miraculous events (since you have to be an eyewitness to affirm these) as they are depicted.

 

The answer to this question is much shorter. I believe in Hell because I believe the Bible is true.