Peter Kirby

Humanist Association of Los Angeles

Sunday, Oct. 2, at 11 am in Santa Monica

Peter Kirby, Internet Infidel, presents,
"The Empty Tomb."

Kirby's essays appear on the internet, and in the book, The Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave, edited by Robert Price and Jeff Lowder.

Did Jesus rise from the dead? Although 19th- and early 20th-century biblical scholarship dismissed the resurrection narratives as late, legendary accounts, Christian apologists in the late 20th century revived historical apologetics for the resurrection of Jesus with increasingly sophisticated arguments. A few critics have directly addressed some of the new arguments, but their response has been largely muted. The Empty Tomb scrutinizes the claims of leading Christian apologists and critiques their view of the resurrection as the best historical explanation.

What did the authors of the New Testament mean when they said Jesus rose from the dead? What historical evidence is needed to establish the resurrection? If there is a God, why would He resurrect Jesus? Was there an empty tomb? What should we make of the appearance stories? Apart from historical evidence, is belief in the resurrection justified?

(Above two paragraphs from the book description on Amazon.com)

Peter Kirby is the moderator of the "Xianity" email list for discussing the truth
or falsity of Christianity, and the webmaster of
< http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ >. The web site contains texts of
sometimes forgotten early Christian writings, plus links to scholarly discussions.
He also writes a blog on Christian Orgins at < http://www.christianorigins.com/ >

Colorado Center Community Room, 2500 Broadway, Santa Monica (near
corner of 26th Avenue and Broadway).

This meeting is free and open to the public. We are a chapter
of the American Humanist Association, and we cooperate with the
Ethical Culture Society of Los Angeles. HALA is the Humanist
Association of Los Angeles (hala.org).

Contact:
Larry A. Taylor
1850 S. Colby Ave. Apt. 8
Los Angeles, CA 90025

Home phone (310) 479-2236
email: larry-a-taylor :at: att.net

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That's the 'press release'. What do you think I should cover in my speech? The themes are the Empty Tomb book and the debate over the resurrection of Jesus. What points and arguments should go in; what can or should be left out?

As an odd case of rarity, this is not a debate but simply a speech. I suspect that most of the audience will be secular humanists, but there is nothing to prevent Christians or other non-humanists from attending.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

spin

Good luck, Peter. Have fun and sock it to 'em.


spin

Toto

Your audience will probably be composed of people who find the idea of a resurrection not worth taking seriously. Some of them will wonder why you have spent so much time on it.

Most of the group recently saw (or heard about) Brian Flemming's movie on mythicism, The God Who Wasn't There. ( www.thegodmovie.com )

krosero

Will there be a transcript, video or other record of the talk? And will there be a Q&A session?

Peter Kirby

There will likely be a Q&A session. What questions would you like to see answered?

I am not aware of any video equipment being there. I can share my notes, but I don't know whether or how the Q&A would be recorded.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

krosero

I'm not familiar with your essays and the issues you've been hitting, or how you've been hitting them, but here are two questions I personally would like to see asked:

How does the interpolation at the end of Mark, the absence of a Resurrected Jesus in the original text, figure into your treatment of the Resurrection?

How would you map out, however speculatively, the steps by which natural events ended with traditional belief in a literal Resurrection and Christianity as you define it? (Obviously there's a lot of wiggle room in defining both early Christianity and the Resurrection). This has been tried before but I'd like to hear your version of it.

Chris Weimer

Congrats Peter. As speculations on the "Empty Tomb" are out of my area of interest, I have only one question. How is this pertinent to the modern scholarship on Christian Origins?

Peter Kirby

Paul writes, "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 10:9)

In this way Paul chooses to sum up Christian faith. Two great problems in Christian origins, therefore, are what it means to say "Jesus is Lord," and why it is said, and what it means to say "God raised him from the dead," and why it is said.

The concrete effects of "God raised him from the dead" as expressed in the Gospel story are appearances to the disciples and the discovery of an empty tomb. Hence one popular theory goes that people believed that "God raised him from the dead" because of these events.

Another theory is Wright's "dominant paradigm," according to which what it meant was spiritual resurrection and why it was said was, if anything, because of the appearances and not an empty tomb.

Focus on the origins of apotheosis and resurrection belief are rather at center stage in the study of Christian origins.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Christians and those who follow the Christian view of their origins seem to want to use the empty tomb to explain why the disciples started the new religion. The underlying premise seems to be that Christianity would be inexplicable if it were not for some extraordinary set of events, combined with an extraordinary charismatic personality for Jesus.

However, it seems to me that no extraordinary events on the order of an empty tomb are required to explain the origins of Christianity. We see in history and current affairs that new religions are a dime a dozen, and are happy to make up founding myths whenever needed; Christianity is the religion that happened to survive from the stew of religions in the Roman Empire.

I suspect that the Humanists of Los Angeles are going to be more inclined to follow the theories in the second paragraph of this post.

krosero

Somewhere E.P. Sanders says that Christianity survived because of the Easter belief. Out of all the failed or historically brief movements within Judaism, would Christianity have survived without the Easter belief? "I suspect not" is the quote as I remember it; can't remember, though, which book it's in.

A lot of movements have charismatic or powerful leaders, and they fail. A Sanders quote going around the current Josephus thread may be relevant here too:

"Jesus became such an important man in world history that it is sometimes hard to believe how unimportant he was during his lifetime, especially outside Palestine. Most of the first-century literature that survives was written by members of the very small elite class of the Roman empire. To them, Jesus (if they heard of him at all) was merely a troublesome rabble-rouser and magician in a small, backward part of the world. . . . When he was executed, Jesus was no more important to the outside world than the two brigands or insurgents executed with him -- whose names we do not know." -- The Historical Figure of Jesus, p.49.