FatherMithras

he wouldn´t get anything, since he was supposed to be god. It´s like tempting the guy who makes all the donuts with one donut hole, that he made. If he´s tempted he´s a stupid dumbass, since he can eat it, and all his stuff, anyways.

BALDUCCI

Jane H, of course I understand all that. But it was still perfectly possible that Jesus survived and the disciples decided to announce that he had arisen from the dead (not actually that unusual an event as the NT has a number of people popping up from the dead). In fact, common sense would suggest that this is the most probable explanation. It seems very strange that Jesus would go around telling people he had arisen from the dead. That is a bit like answering questions no one has asked...it arouses suspicion. Sounds to me as if the resurrection was an explanation developed by a committee. And Jesus could have stuck around...no need to go up to heaven (twice, I think, a bit like the half-time show at the Superbowl). But he either died, or ran like hell because if there was news that he escaped death on the cross, the Romans would have been after him. My favorite is that he went to India, where his tomb can still be seen today.

www.sol.com.au/kor/7_01.htm

Jane H

Thank you for your replies. Double post for readability!

FatherMithras- the fact someone never in a million years is going to give in, doesn’t mean they’re not subject to a particular temptation. Right now I really fancy chocolate, but that would be gluttony (just had some!) and I’m not giving in. In any case, I would think the actual content of the temptation conversation has been heavily simplified, and was very much stronger in many senses than the gospel was able to convey.

Jane H

Balducci- follow your argument further, and you come to why this resurrection event was no ordinary event. People came/come back from the dead in all sorts of circumstances. Later they die. It doesn’t alter what you believe about death, and that event doesn’t start religious movements, precisely because it is so ordinary. It wouldn’t lead anyone to declare Jesus the Messiah and start to develop a concept of Jesus as divine. Also:

Firstly, resurrection is on the debated outside of thinking in C1 Judaism; but in C1 Christianity it moves right to the centre and becomes the key issue.

Secondly, this event clarified and standardised the conception of resurrection in Christianity from what in C1 Judaism was a very wide spectrum of belief. Despite the early Christians coming from very different backgrounds that believed very different things about resurrection, in C1 Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of beliefs.

Thirdly the nature of belief about the resurrection body becomes modified and defined. Where before it was little understood, now it is seen as having continuity with our present bodies, but also several different properties such as incorruptibility.

Now you simply don’t get these sorts of changes from an ordinary event.

Minimalist

Actually the most probable explanation is that none of it ever happened and it was all invented later on.

BALDUCCI

Jane: I really dont agree, sorry. The argument about the fact that such a major religion came about must prove the extraordinary nature of Jesus or his death ignores the facts on the ground. The reason why Christianity developed the way it did has nothing to do with Jesus. It was the result of the Roman Empire adopting Christianity because it provided the Emperor with greater credibility in his claim to have divine power, compared to the discredited Roman faith of the time. It was the extraordinary nature of the Roman Empire that ensured that this religious institution would grow and spread the way it did.

Resurrection was in no way a Christian innovation. From time immemorial there have been faiths that rely on the death and resurrection of a god. Christians later may have made some special claims about the phenomenon, and many of those are pretty unintelligible (which is why faith is such a necessary component of Christianity). But the fact that theologians, after the event, choose to interpret earlier events in mystical or supernatural ways, does not imbue the event itself with those characteristics. You can choose to believe they do, if you want, but that is a personal choice, not the result of any kind of rigorous consideration.

There has never been a time when Christianity had no "spectrum of beliefs". To begin with, it was a religion synthesized from many different sources, and as the conversion process took place within the Roman Empire, it continued to incorporate beliefs from the various pagan faiths it encountered. Then it went through periods of sharp dispute that were always argued theologically but settled politically. There was never a period of natural consensus, only periods of forced consensus. And following that there was one schism after another, until we arrive at today, when (as in America) anyone can make up anything they want to serve their (and their group's) vested interest, attach the label Jesus to it, and call it Christianity.

Your final point doesnt make the event extraordinary, it simply points to the ingenuity of theologians who chose to interpret an event in ways that would make it compelling.

Jane H

Balducci-thanks again for your reply.

My argument isn’t based around the spread of later Christianity; you’re absolutely right that the conversion of Constantine was a vital moment in the establishment of Christianity. However my argument looks way, way before that to what was being said in C1 Jewish-Christianity, and what were the massive developments of thinking in a very short space of time subsequent to the resurrection events.

Resurrection wasn’t a Christian invention. The C1 Jews had a spectrum of ideas about it, and it was in that context that resurrection theology was developed after the resurrection. Gods came back to life, but not in a human bodily sense, in contemporary pagan culture. The claim of C1 Christianity was that this resurrection involved human bodies. This wasn’t a good message to be spreading in the Greek world; Greek culture viewed bodily resurrection as being rather silly and unpleasant. None the less, resurrection in the C1 world meant bodies, both to the pagans who denied it, and to the Jews, some of whom hoped for it. There was never a sense that resurrection meant some move to some form of disembodied existence. It meant bodies, whether you believed it or not.

Now why did the C1 church regard as non-negotiable the idea of a bodily resurrection, and stick to it? Even develop it, so that things about the nature of the resurrection body were now claimed to be known? The early church was constant in what it said about bodily resurrection- just look at the consistency between the writings of Paul, the non-Pauline writings, the Gospels, and the early church fathers. The same message. Later on, after a couple of centuries as you identify, variations appeared, and we can track these historically.

The only reason that works for this mutation from fringe uncertainty about resurrection in C1 Judaism to centrality and non-negotiable consistency of belief, is that extraordinary events occurred that required a particular line be followed.

Libanius

Jesus performing miracles all over the place, then rising from the dead, hanging out with friends, and ascending in full view to, well, heaven, but I guess he just kept going up until he got too far away to be seen...


I tell you right now that if Jesus was performing miracles while alive, there would be no need for faith. Someone who can turn water into wine and feed multitudes by making food appear out of thin air (or a couple of loaves of bread, whatever)? Everyone in Israel would have been behind him. The Old Testament would have been seen as the disgusting thoughts of superstitious nomads that it is and discarded post haste, or we would be in a Jewish world now instead of a Roman. Jerusalem would not have been razed a few years later, etc. Even people as dumb as Christians make Jews out to be would have known that a man that can feed multitudes from the barest of raw materials, produce wine at will, raise people from the dead, blah blah blah, would be invincible and they would have followed him unquestionably anywhere and prevailed over Rome and anyone else for that matter.

I think it makes all the difference, how many people viewed any miracle, much less resurrection. Seeing is believing.

Jane H

It’s a good point I‘ve not seen before. Why did the miracles not make more impact? It’s probably a matter of what each person knew. The majority of those at the feeding were probably completely unaware of where the food came from. The water into wine thing would have impressed the servants at the time, and the few others in the know, but that’s about it. Just a mystery at the time. Life moved on. They didn’t live in the modern age, where the stories can be tied together with a Google search or one can watch mobile phone footage on Youtube.

Even so, stories were going around and a reputation was being established. The whole thing was building up a head of steam, according to the gospels, when Jesus failed an important test for a would be Messiah. Staying alive. There were a lot of would be Messiah’s around in C1 Israel. They generally got executed. On the whole, dying was reckoned to be a pretty convincing argument that this person wasn’t the Messiah, but was a very naughty boy for claiming to be. When the would be Messiah dies, everybody goes home, was the usual procedure.

So Jesus died, and everybody went home. Which is where my argument comes in. How can what happened next be explained sensibly?

Johnny Skeptic

Regarding "How can what happened next be explained sensibly?," how can it be explained sensibly that Jesus gave the disciples the Great Commission, and yet hundreds of millions of people died without hearing the Gospel message because God refused to tell them about it?

Maybe Paul was the best false advertizing executive in history, and the social advantages that Christianity offered far exceeded the social advantages that were offered by pagan religions. In "The Rise of Christianity", Rodney Stark places great importance upon the social advantages that Christianity offered as compared with pagan religions, and contrary to what many fundamentalist Christians claim about persecution, Stark says that Christianity was "a bargain". He says that Christianity:

".......must have yielded an immense, shared emotional satisfaction. Moreover, the fruits of this faith were not limited to the realm of the spirit. Christianity offered much to the flesh, as well. It was not simply the promise of salvation that motivated Christians, but the fact that they were greatly rewarded here and now for belonging. Thus, while membership was expensive, it was, in fact, a bargain. That is, because the church asked much of its members, it was thereby possessed of the resources to give much. For example, because Christians were expected to aid the less fortunate, many of them received such aid, and all could feel greater security against bad times. Because they were asked to nurse the sick and dying, many of them received such nursing. Because they were asked to love others, they in turn were loved. And if Christians were required to observe a far more restrictive moral code than that observed by pagans, Christians--especially women--enjoyed a far more secure family life."