Steven Carr

Eidor Gudjonsson was a member of the Icelandic Parliament in 1973.

Do you believe me? Fancy getting on a ship to Iceland and trying to find somebody in Iceland who might know for certain who was in the Icelandic Parliament in 1973?

Jesus, of course, lived in an out-of-the-way corner of the Roman Empire, and made so little impact in his lifetime that the silence of anybody to write about him is easily explained.

But it would still have been very easy for people to check all these facts in the Gospels and see if they were true.

You have to believe a lot of contradictory things to be a Christian. The contradictions in the Bible are just another set of contradictory things to be believed.

Steven Carr

NICK
The only other way around this objection is to argue, as William Lane Craig and N.T. Wright do, that visions of Jesus would not have been interpreted as a bodily resurrection because the Jewish culture had no belief in individual people being raised from the dead before everyone else at the end of the world

CARR
Wright mourns on page 31 of 'Resurrection' about modern Jews - ' Some within the Lubavitcher messianic movement have apparently used 'resurrection' language in relation to their Rebbe (who died in 1994) as a way (Marcus suggests, following Dale Allison) of 'speaking of a dead person being alive'. What seems to be happening, rather, is that some have picked up a misunderstood Christian term and used it in a sense that goes against their own ancient literature.'

If Jews of today can think of something new, could Jews of 2000 years ago ever have thought of anything new, perhaps something 'that goes against their own ancient literature'?

Wright spends pages and pages arguing that because he can find examples of a word meaning one specific thing, then when Paul said that Jesus became a spirit, Paul did not mean that Jesus became a spirit.

And yet Wright himself has to lambast Jews for 'misunderstanding' terms and using them in ways he regrets.

AtheistGamer

I really enjoyed reading that. I'll have to pick up your book. On a side note I wish the articles page of that site was easier to navigate.

Switch89

But read my reply to that in my article: "many of Jesus' teachings were heretical. Orthodox Jews at the time certainly had no belief that a man could be the son of God."

Furthermore, the gospels speak of some thinking that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead. If this is false, it severly discredits the gospels. If it is true, then it undermines Craig's point.

brettpalmer

Good read! Enjoyed it.

Have a question/comment. You wrote:


Now I haven't gone into much depth in research what I'm about to say, but it's something I recall reading somewhere long ago. Wondering if anyone else has heard this or has any more details to support/refute. Isn't it true that the early church, among the Gentile community, was largely populated and spread by women? Early followers were women, they held relatively high and respected posts in the church and wasn't there a gospel or a letter or something written by one of Paul's converts: a woman?

If this is all so, why would it be so far-fetched to have women being the first to discover the empty tomb in Mark's story?

show_no_mercy

I'm pretty certain that the title "son of God" wasn't heretical, but being the literal son of god was. If Mark was the first gospel written, then the adoptionist Christology wasn't all that inflammatory. Matthew, Luke, and John seem to have taken the idea of "son of god" literally.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/vi...son%20of%20god

Switch89

Well, Bart Ehrman discusses it in his book "Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene" (p.225-226). Also, Richard Carrier's book Not the Impossible Faith talks about some of the ideas you mentioned.

One more thing: According to Wikipedia, Celsus said about Christians, "Like all quacks they gather a crowd of slaves, children, women and idlers."

Not that Wikipedia is the best source, but I vaguely recall reading something like this from Celsus somewhere else.

Solo

The point to be made here is that there was no Jewish orthodoxy at the time and the designation was not inflammatory at all. One cannot judge the Judaic traditional appelation on the content of the title supplied later by the Christian scribes, or assume it was created directly by them to mimick a pagan imperial title (divi filius). Geza Vermes (Jesus the Jew) shows that the term had some currency in both the Old Testament usage (eg. Psa 2:7 'I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my son, today I have begotten you."') and in the intertestamental texts. Vermes offers his translation of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus (4:10):

Be a father to the fatherless
and as a husband to widows
and God shall call you son
and shall have mercy on you
and deliver you from the pit.

Wisdom of Salomon and the Jubilees use the term in a similar vein.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

Contra Celsum
Andrew Criddle