Adam

I've been a Christian for fifty years, and most of that time I agreed with you that the Resurrection accounts could not be harmonized. Even putting aside Mark 16:9-20 as not supported textually, I still regarded most of Matthew 28 as unreliable secondary overlay on the essential story in Luke and John. This thread marks my renewal of interest in Matthew and reconciling it with the other three gospels plus I Cor 15 and the start of Acts.

Not attempting to include Mark 16:9-20, Posts #1 (also add in the remainder of Mark 16:1) and #3 are my harmonization. Mine has the defect of not retaining sequential order (though my commentary explains ways to regain it), but there are others that do. So far, only one defect with mine has been substantiated. Can you spotlight a detail that is wrong? Or if you don't like the arrangement I have made, is it implausible? I'm not talking about inerrancy, though I think it gets around that as well.
Thus I believe that I have met Dan Barker's Easter Challenge--he didn't ask for perfection.

Wayne Delia

I don't think the point of Dan Barker's Easter Challenge was to identify which parts of the Gospels and Epistles you felt were textually unsupported. I can resolve the entire Easter Challenge by discounting all of the referenced verses as mythical bullshit.

Adam

Bewildered update:
It turns out that Barker did shortly afterward in 2009 issue a 69 page refutation to Kingsley 82 page book. This turns up on the web only in one place I have found after some search, and it's on the same web site I cited that where Anthony Horvath said Nielson owed Kingsley the $1000.

Anthony Horvath


A comment on May 29, 2009 applauded him:
Demian Farnworth
This got me looking for Dan Barker's response, but I couldn't find anywhere else on the web either (1) Barker's response, (2) acknowledgment by Kingsley even as of 2011 that Barker had responded
Kingsley blog @2011
or (3) any admission on any atheist (or other) websites about either Kingsley's response or of Barker's response to Kingsley. Atheists go on bragging that for 20 years no one has taken up the Easter Challenge while various Christians claim to have solved it.

John Kesler

Here is what you said regarding the John-21 appearance:

Barker's challenge is to write a narrative involving all of the relevant texts. Implicit in this is that the narrative be coherent. Positing various places that the John-21 appearance could be "moved" or rewriting the text as you'd like it to read--"Or count it as the third time in gJohn--" does not meet this requirement. Taking John 21:14 for what it actually says requires that the Matthew-28 appearance be no earlier than the fourth one, which as I demonstrated is in conflict with Matthew 28, especially v:7, which indicates that Jesus was en route to Galilee on Easter. And I have only considerend one of the discrepancies between the pertinent passages.

This will be my last post on the topic; I think we are repeating ourselves at this point.

Adam

Back in my famous thread still barely assailed here in FRDB
Gospel Eyewitnesses
I tended to honor my audience's sensibilities by refraining from making strong claims for eyewitnesses for the Resurrection appearances of Jesus. I did present the Walk to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) as eyewitnessed by Simon, but acknowledged that this was in the second tier of eyewitness accounts,
Gospel Eyewitness Sources
However, Toto opened up the Resurrection as fair game by citing Dan Barker's Easter Challenge that I took up in the current thread. For my scholarly purposes I have met that challenge, but in this post I am setting myself the more limited challenge of identifying the verses that belong to the largest and probably earliest Resurrection account in the New Testament. Note that the following study does not rely upon any claim to be by an eyewitness. If it is not just fiction (as contended by so many here on FRDB), however, an eyewitness would be the likely author and that most likely author is the adolescent John Mark. For our current purposes, put aside that last sentence. I frankly believe that this properly qualifies for publication in an academic journal (as did my thread that has been serialized here in FRDB): Significance of John
(This needs to be supplemented with the proposed text incorporating the above listings, but I have done enough for this week-end off work with nothing else to do while suffering with a migraine headache.)

The Resurrection Source in John
That Luke 24:12 summarizes John 20:3-7 is crucial in showing the development of Resurrection narratives. At some point before Luke was finalized, the Gospel of John became available to the author of Luke and he added in this verse accordingly. Upon closer scrutiny, however, why did he stop there and not include anything about the “other disciple” who accompanied Peter nor about the following unique (and first ever) appearance of Jesus, the one to Mary Magdalene in John 20:11-18? The verses virtually copied into Luke 24:12 are John 20:6-7, both assigned by Howard M. Teeple (in The Literary Origin of the Gospel of John, 1974)to the E Editor along with verses 2a, 10, and 15. Thus everything was available for use in Luke except the R Redactor’s John 20:8b and 9. Why did he include so little of E (copied right from the Greek) and nothing copied from the Synoptic source, just the gist of it? This turns out to be understandable, and in addition reveals much about the specific writing-down of the Resurrection events.
The greater part of the gospels were written originally in Aramaic. The verbal parallels between John and the Synoptics are too weak (except for Luke 24:12) to trace to a common Greek source. My own research agrees with Teeple that John 20:1, 3-5ab, 8, 11b-14ab, 16-17 and some of 19-27 derives from a source. Verses 1, 12-13, and 16-17 show close ties to the Synoptics. Several questions arise. Why did so many verses not make the cut? Why did some of the later edited-in verses get virtually copied while others were ignored? Why are none of the Synoptic verses verbally close?
The answers are basically in the Aramaic-to-Greek transition. Looking first at the Johannine side, it seems that E wrote in Greek, but left untranslated the verses not found in Luke, namely John 20:3-5, 8, 11b-14ab, 16-17, and pieces of verses 19 to 27. Quite soon thereafter these verses were translated into our John, but not by the same scribe who wrote E. For Luke, however, rather than taking the trouble to translate these verses, he let them stand to the degree they already were present in the text that had come to him as already translated into Proto-Luke. For Proto-Luke the details in the Aramaic text before him were skimmed through and are now found transmuted in Luke 24:1-5. 9, 36-43,47, and Acts 1:5, 8. Luke did not bulk these back with the missing elements—though it is quite possible that some of Luke 24 includes source material now missing from John 20.
Conversely, where the Greek of John 20 was available to Luke, he chose not to focus on any specific disciple except Peter. Nor would Mary Magdalene tend to get back into the story after being cut when Proto-Luke emerged. Presumably Cleopas and his companion (his son Simon by my account) left Jerusalem before Mary had reported back that she had seen Jesus, and where to insert this would be a problem in light of Luke 24:24, “but of him they saw nothing” and 24;11 “this story of theirs seemed pure nonsence, and they did not believe them.”
In the cases where Proto-Luke and John 20 were virtually identical, Luke did not copy in from E in John 20, as he already had both Proto-Luke and Twelve-Source worked in. Luke 24:36 comes very close to John 20:19, but the lack of similar exactitude in following verses indicates mere chance coincidence. All this is reasonable, but it fall short of proving that this is the way the writing occurred—for starters, we can’t be sure that Luke 24:12 was not added to Luke later, with it just being by chance that it copies from E verses in John. 24:12 could even have been from the original text of Proto-Luke derived from John 20:6-7 de

As a consequence of the foregoing analysis, my own analysis of the formation of the Resurrection verses firms up. I don’t have to think of John Mark as having written a bare-bones Resurrection account underlying just the Synoptic overlap being as to John only John 20:1, 3-5ab, 8, 11b-14ab, 16-17, and some of 19-27 or even less (maybe just 20:1, 11b-12, but possibly also with verses 6 and 7 underlying Luke 24:12—notwithstanding my own theory denying this). By that theory I had to regard the other source verses in John as coming in later in my P-Strand I also attribute to John Mark. These verses are John 20:3-5ab, 8, 13-14ab, and various material in 19-27. Now I lump all these together as available for the production of Proto-Luke. The question arises, “Did Proto-Luke incorporate something from this source that is not in our extant John? Is any of this in our extant Luke?” This must be highly speculative, but since many verses did not survive the cut from Aramaic Proto-John to the Greek Proto-Luke, likewise some might have been lost on the way towards John. The most likely would be those verses that make the disciples look bad in Luke, namely Luke 24:11 after John 20:18, 24:37-38 after 20:19, and the corresponding swing to elation with Luke 24:41b-43 after 20:20. The teachings that follow might fit, but they seem too much like the message introduced by the Walk to Emmaus, Luke 24:13-35. As for Matthew and Mark, their texts seem too permeated with the competing Twelve-Source narrative, though Matthew 28:9 and 28:17-18, 20 do seem to parallel many verses we do have in John 20:17-18 and 21-23 and even more so with Luke 24 and Acts 1.

Adam

FOOTNOTE: Because few have access to Teeple’s Chapter 12, here from pp. 244-45are the bits and pieces of John 20:19-27 he assigns to P1:
19 Then when it was evening on that day, the first of the week….Jesus came and stood in (their) midst and says to them, “Peace to you.” 20…Then the disciples rejoiced (at) seeing the Lord.
22.he breathed on them and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven to them; if you retain (the sins) of any, they have been retained.”
26 And after eight days his disciples were inside, and Jesus comes when the doors had been closed and stood in their midst and said, “Peace to you.” 27 Next he says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and put you hand (here)…and be not unbelieving, but believing.

Adam

Here's the text (following Teeple closely for John), with still time left to watch tonight's episode of The Bible on History Channel.
The Resurrection Source in John/Luke
John 20:1 And on the first day of the week Mary the Magdalene comes to the tomb early, it still being dark, and she sees the stone having been taken away from the tomb.
Luke 24:3 but on entering could not find the body of the Lord Jesus.
Luke 24:9 And [she] returned from the tomb and told all this to the disciples.
John 20:3 Then Peter and [I] went forth and were coming in to the tomb. 4 And [we] were running together. And [I] ran faster than Peter and came first to the tomb. 5 And having stooped down, [I] saw lying (there) the linen cloths 8 Then I went in…and saw and believed….
10 and went home.
11…Mary was weeping and peered into the tomb. 12 And she sees two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. 13 And those say to her, “Woman why do you weep?” She says to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 Having said these things, she turned back and sees Jesus standing….
16 Jesus says to her, “Mary.” Having turned, that one says to him, “Rabbouni,”…17 Jesus says to her, “Touch me not, for not yet have I ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father….”
Luke 24:11 And the women told the apostles, but this story of theirs seemed pure nonsense, and they did not believe them.
John 20:19 Then when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week,…Jesus came and stood in (their) midst and says to them, “Peace to you.”
Luke 24:37 In a state of alarm and fright, they thought they were seeing a ghost. 38 But he said, “Why are you so agitated, and why are these doubts stirring in your hearts?”
John 20:20…Then the disciples rejoiced (at) seeing the Lord
Luke 24:41…as they were dumbfounded; so he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42 And they offered a piece of grilled fish, 43 which he took and ate before their eyes.
John 20:21 [but not per Teeple] Then he said to them again, “Peace to you. Even as the Father sent me, I also send you.” 22 And having said this
John 20:22 he breathed on them and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven to them; if you retain (them) they have been retained.”
26 And after eight days his disciples were inside, and Jesus comes when the doors had been closed and stood in their midst and said, “Peace to you.” 27 Next he says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and put you hand (here)…and be not unbelieving, but believing.

jakejonesiv

What happened to Jesus body? Mark's dog ate it, along with the end of his gospel.

Cheerful Charlie

Yes, you do. Strike one.

In Matthew the apostles do not meet Jesus in Jerusalem. They are sent to Galilee.
In Mark Jesus appears to the apostles in Jerusalem. From there he ascends to heaven.
In Luke he meets his apostles in Jerusalem and ascends to heaven on the same day. In Acts, he ascends 40 days later after appearing. In Acts in utter contradiction to Matthew, he tells his apostles not to leave Jerusalem.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

Matthew mentions soldiers guarding the tomb, but there are nno guards in the other gospels.

Luke 24
12 Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

By the way, this verse was a later addition not found in early manuscripts. And still no soldiiers eiither.

Cheerful Charlie