rizdek

To me, not even implicitly.


I think this is reading more into it than is justified just to maintain a position.

As I said, without someone "adding to" what they actually said and putting words in their writings, they don't say it. Where do the epistles of John say anythin about alying down his life for us? I went through it but didn't see it...I freely admit I may have missed it, so perhaps you could tell me.

Paul yes, but Jude, John and James...sorry no. Hebrews mentions Christ's sacrifice, but does it mention Jesus' resurrection? It talks about resurrection in general, but not Jesus' specifically. In fact from my quick scan, it kind of talks about ressurection as something lots of folks can/will do.

It is here or there. IF the supposed sighting of Jesus after he RFTD were just a handful of hallucinations (where one person dreamed/hallucinated that they saw Jesus and in the dream there were other people, 1, a dozen, 500, whatever), then those aren't real sightings and these poor schmuck disciples wouldn't even know they were supposed to be believing that Jesus RFTD. How would they know, those accounts surfaced decades after Jesus supposedly died.

Like I said, the books written by James, Jude and John don't. It's only with some special interpretation, ad libbing and addition, that one gets to say they do. Do we have any other information on what, exactly, the disciples of Jesus preached after Jesus died? I realize Paul and his followers preached Paul's vision of a risen Savior and I could well imagine that somewhere, somehow the other disciples got this idea and ran with it, but do we have anything that says that?

And there it is, lore and extracting ideas, rightly or wrongly from the OT that makes folks today think the apostles preached a risen savior.

Why say that, it's sounds incoherent. Someone can "pay the price" which is what most Christians believe Jesus did, and they can py the price without "getting his money back," so to speak. In fact, that's kind of how we pragmatically view "paying the price" today. If you pay for something you don't still have your money. If Jesus volunteered to give his life, then he ought not to have gotten it back. At least that seems to me to be a coherent line or reasoning.

That may well be, but as you say, that's neither here nor there. It still doesn't mean it was necessary in a Biblegod's eyes or that it was part of these apostles' message. That's all hindsight reasoning. SO WHAT if it would have been forgotten. In the eyes of biblegod, that would be humankind's problem wouldn't it? Just as it has been our problem since the Fall in the GoE. It's always our problem. We disobeyed, we sinned, we are born in our sin, without a substitutionary sacrifice, per Christianity, we'll all die in our sins.

I kind of belierve that if it weren't or Paul and if it just depended on Jesus' disciples, it WOULD have all been forgotten. Christianity is Pauls baby, so to speak. It's his interpretation and view that makes today's Christians think that without the ressurection, faith would be in vain.

I could say that if the Romans hadn't picked up on the idea and persecuted/killed everyone that got in their way, it would have all been forgotten. That, to me, seems more relevant to the success of Christianity.

Let's look at the short letters of John Jude and James again. IF they were the only writings we had of Jesus, how likely would it be that we would interpret that to mean he rose from the dead? Or even that he was crucified at all? All they seem to preach is that one must believe on Jesus to be saved...and that's what Jesus preached BEFORE he died.

Finally, I wonder if you, or any other Christians, believe that IF some hypothetical person JUST believed that Jesus died for our sins and accepted/had faith in that and that Jesus (as part of the godhead) was in heaven at the right hand of god, could they be saved? IOW can someone just believe on the lord jesus christ and his sacrifice and be saved? Or does everyone HAVE to believe he, in his human form, physically rose again to be saved?

sotto voce

In that case, maybe they were martyred for believing that following Jesus was something less demanding than complete commitment to him. Perhaps they died for a man who had not died for them, or had died, but not risen. Perhaps they just asked the Romans to kill them, for no particular reason.

rizdek

Thanks, this answers part of the question. There is obviously quite a lot of variation in what one finds when perusing the internet. EG this site suggests most were martyred. Not that I think it's credible, just saying.

I was also wondering if anyone had written from the perspective that some of Jesus' disciples were martyred and whether those that were, were martyred BECAUSE they claimed Jesus RFTD. Do we even have any hint what Jesus' disciples claimed regarding Jesus, his death or his alleged resurrection beyond the scant epistles James, 1,2,3 John and Jude?

rizdek

Well maybe they weren't martyred at all, but regardless, is there any info on what they preached beyond the epistles we've been talking about? I know what you think, and thank you for your input, but I was hoping for something a little more than just a reinterpretation of what I can already read in hose epistles.

Huon

From Acts :
12:1. And at the same time, Herod the king stretched forth his hands, to afflict some of the church. (Herod Agrippa)

12:2. And he killed James, the brother of John, With the sword.

outhouse

the never would have preached the epistles, paul was their blood enemy.


it is completely unknown what they would have taught, they were a movement strickly in judaism that failed.

rizdek

This comment got me to thinking. Except for Peter, and as far as we know, Jesus disciples hardly "reached for a quill" at all, to put it in your words. I mean their epistles are very short. Lurkers, please read them. None mention any of Jesus' acts, miracles or sayings and they don't mention his resurrection at all. As I understand it, the epistles were all written before...decades before the gospels, so it wasn't because these disciples "knew" the events of Jesus' life were already recorded in the gospels. They simply did not seem to care that much to tell anything about this "human" Jesus.

Diogenes the Cynic

Just FYI, all of the Apostolic Epistles are pseudoepigraphical. None of them were actually written by Apostles. Peter did not write the Peters, John did not write the Johns, James and Jude did not write James and Jude.

We actually do not have a single word written by any of the putative 12 Apostles, or from anyone who ever met Jesus. The traditional authorships ascribed to the New Testament are late, 2nd Century traditions assigned to books of unknown provenance and unidentified (or occasionally blatantly fraudulent) authorship, and almost the entirety of NT authorship traditions, with the exception of a few letters of Paul are now regarded as spurious by contemporary scholarship.

aa5874

In fact, ALL authors of THE ENTIRE CANON are falsely attributed to ficititious 1st century characters.

The supposed Apostle called Paul wrote NO letters at all in the 1st century based on Acts of the Apostles and other Apologetic sources like Justin Martyr, Aristides, and the Muratorian Canon which is also compatible with the DATED NT manuscripts.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Huon,

How do we evaluate this for its truth content? This is coming from an unknown writer, writing for an unknown audience, at an unknown time, with an unknown motive.
Is he relating well known facts? Is he relating something that he overheard or read and accepted uncritically? Is this something that he actually witnessed? Is this something that he is making up because he wants to impress people with knowledge he does not have? Is this something he is making up because he is a story teller and making up fiction is a source of enjoyment to him, or helps him maintain some kind of status among his peers?

We have no way of knowing. Even the relationships among the characters are fuzzy. Is he talking about John the Baptist when he references John. Herod had John the baptist killed by a sword, so killing his brother James with a sword makes sense. Or is this the James that is mentioned as one of the disciples in Acts 1. Why is there no indication that John and James are brothers there?

There is no explanation of why James was killed. We are told that it pleased the Jews, but why did it please the Jews? Would Herod had killed him if it did not please the Jews?

What we are getting is information that is not even coherent enough to call a story, let alone a history. It seems impossible to get a story from it. It seems to be a pseudo-story. It is more like a throwing together of meaningless sentences rather than a narrative:

Here is just sentences put together without telling a story that resembles his material -- Allexander conquered. Jesse James stretched out his hand and had Tom Chaney killed. When he saw this, he was arrested.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin