zog

This may not be the most scholarly point to be made on this forum but none the less i feel it is relevant.

I feel that it is impossible for Jesus to have been ressurected physically because he would be a rotting corpse!; his brain would have been mush and the connections severed meaning that he was literally beyond any sort of possible repair; he would not have control over his body and his whole personality would have been gone; even if you subscribe to the idea of a spirit the brain still plays a pretty crucial role in moving limbs etc.... His internal organs would have been rotting away very quickly, there would have been a possible infestation with insects and no doubt he would have smelt quite bad (which when he has a very long theological conversation he would have noticed) I cannot see how even God without turning back time could have restored Jesus to life as presumably he had the body of a man. Or did Jesus have some special non rotting body (TM) He could not have walked out of the Tomb or pushed the boulder or anything in his condition he would not be able to control his rotting muscles (ok i think i have said the word rotting enough now )

The same thing goes for Lazarus (oh i just shudder thinking about it!) But for me beyond the comical element of this it does seem to raise a point that unless God put Jesus into a suspended animation (and Lazarus for that matter) the physical body of Jesus would be no good at all.

Magus55

Um, Jesus wasn't buried in the ground, and He was only dead 3 days - doubt His body decomposed much. And second, God is omnipotent - He could take someones cremated ashes on the bottom of the pacific and restore them to a full body again.

keyser_soze

Do you expect that hercules REALLY killed the hydra? No, because it is mythology. Trying to force reality into the bible is identical. It's what happens when arid living goat dwellers get TRULY bored.

Secular Pinoy

Uhm, how about a deceased person's carbon that has been integrated into another person's body?

Steven Carr

Paul was aware of these problems, which is why he writes that God gives each of us a new body, not made by human hands.

He uses the analogy of a plant emerging from the inside of a seed, leaving the dead case of a seed behind. (1 Corinthians 15)

zog

Magus, Irreversable damage to the brain occurs in minutes after the heart stopping; within hours bacteria begins breaking down the stomach and other internal organs.

After three days a body is pretty useless

And as for the whole seed metaphor i would ask what exactly happened to Jesus's body in the empty tomb and i fail to see how a quasi spiritual body could have wounds still with blood etc

Magus55

Irreversible to whom? Humans may not be able to reverse the process, but its hardly a challenge for God.

NOGO

Your point is taken. God can do anything.

But your statement of "dead only three days" is meaningless.

Blood takes oxigen to the cells. When the heart stop beating it takes three to four minutes and every cell in your body dies. They turn from living organisms to just a collection of molecules.

Three days, three months or three thousand years makes no difference. Anybody that can reverse the four minute effect can reverse any of the others.

Paul claims that Jesus resurrected with a different body than the one he died with. If this is true than we cannot really speak of resurrection rather we must talk about transformation. This is how Paul puts it.

1 Corinthians 15- 51:52
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

Note the "we will be changed" but the dead will be changed too.

What is the point of pretending that something of the old body will be preserved when in fact the new body will be completely different.

Myth, nothing but myth.

Basil

Hello, I'm new to these forums. I share an abiding interest in the myth of the Resurrection. I think we should not phrase our disbelief (in my case, suspension of belief) in terms of "impossible" - this can only be argued philosophically, and as you know there are apologists out there who are pouncing on this as a manifestation of scientistic bias. Rather, we can claim that a bodily Resurrection is extremely improbable, given all we know about the physical and esp. the biological world. This raises the bar of evidentiary standard over any claim for a supernatural rescusitation of a decomposing corpse. (BTW in the Gospel of John it is said of Lazarus that in four days, "By this time he stinketh." Precisely what happened to Jesus body.) It can easily be shown that the NT accounts (+ apocrypha) in no way establish a critical mass of evidence in favor of Resurrection.

Invoking God is no use - God (as a supernatural Intelligence) does not as a matter of fact intervene in the natural world, as far as we can observe using the same evidentiary standard.

The Resurrection probably started as an "appearance" vision (see Stephen's and Paul's statements in Acts) that got transformed over time into a fantastic narrative involving an empty tomb, earthquakes, angels, terrified guards, Jesus eating, Thomas poking his finger in the open wounds, etc.

mark9950

An illusion you know like a mirage

(I doubt at that time they did not know the difference between a mirage and reality,do not forget these are people who believed the earth was flat because God said so without any proof otherwise)