Half-Life

II. The "No Tomb" Theory doesn't account for or explain the early faith in the resurrection.

Had it been common custom for crucifixion victims to always have been left on the cross for several days and finally to be thrown to dogs, one can scarily see how anyone would not know this. Knowing the fate of crucifixion victims to always been lack of any real burial, who in Jerusalem would be convinced by the stories of Jesus and the empty tomb? The very fact of the contradictory nature of the story would turn off any interest in the group from the beginning. It would have been known to most people that crucified and empty tomb just don't' go together, so who would have believed the story? Than to think that they waited 50 years until Mark wrote his Gospel to try and add apologetics touches such as Jospeh of Aramethia volunteering his tomb, is absurd. Clearly the story had to emerge at a very early period, yet if it emerged very early it would have been know to be a lie. No one would believe something that so violated common knowledge and of which they had never heard a word and knew no one else who ever heard of such events. The notion that these aspects of the Jesus story do not have a basis in historical fact just does not hold water.

http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20.../Tomb_res.html

I strongly urge you to look at this page
http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...es_submen.html

Before you go off and say "Oh no, he's linking to Metacrock again, I'd like to say that he makes some very good points. I am really interested in debating this.

http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...s/versions.htm
This is a good argument

I'm going to bed now and will respond in the morning. Looking forward to it.

hatsoff

The resurrection is a supernatural event that defies the observed laws of nature. It is, quite simply, impossible. All testimony regarding the resurrection is therefore suspect and unreliable. It may have some historical basis--maybe someone stole the body--but there's no way to measure the likelihood of such a basis. Since the resurrection tale became popular only many years after its supposed occurence, there's no good reason to believe it wasn't pure fiction.

Half-Life

http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...s/versions.htm
This is a good argument about how myths grow and change over time but the Jesus story NEVER changes once. They all imply the resurrection. Nobody else offers a different cause of death for Jesus or anything.

I'm going to bed now and will respond in the morning. Looking forward to it.

JoyJuice

Can I ask some dumb questions? :huh:

What makes you so sure that the four gospels accounts that appear strongly to be from a common source, were the only traditions of Jesus? I say this for two reasons. The first is would those who collected the Gospels have certain pressuppositions where collecting anything that may had a different ending as being problematic? The second is seeing that the recent discoveries of writings about Jesus seems as if they were hidden, who would they hide them from and why?

btw, maybe when comes to who would believe such a story first century Jews weren't caught up in this idea of absolute literal history in the Gospels as much as the early Gentiles in whom Christianity flourished. Maybe for them it was rather a theological meaning and not so much anachronism issues?

RalphyS

I'm not a bible scholar or even a good source of knowledge on related writings, but don't both Judaism and Islam consider Jesus as a prophet and they both deny the resurrection, so aren't there different versions of what (supposedly) happened around and I leave the differences between the gospels even out of that equasion.

Zeichman

Half-life, from what I can tell, most no-empty-tombers don't explicitly believe in the dogs theory, but rather think that the disciples probably didn't know what happened to the body of Jesus following his death. Given the heightened stress and whatnot, they believe it is more likely that they had fled the scene alltogether rather than witnessing what eventually happened to his body. The second link, from what I saw, were all addressed by Peter Kirby in his article available on this very site.

Briefly addressing the "points", from what I recall from Peter's article
1) 1 Cor 15 never mentions a tomb, let alone an empty one
2) Raymond Brown (more than a few notches right of center theologically), says that most scholars believe that the tomb narrative was not originally connected with the passion narrative.
3) Apocryphon of James mentions a shameful/burial in the sand, granted, this was near the end of the oral era c 140 CE. Not to mention 1 Cor 15 which makes no mention of an empty tomb at all. It's only not competing with the empty tomb tradition if you come in with a harmonization in mind already.
4) Polemics, iirc, only occur well after those who were around during the tomb died, after the end of the oral era. They certainly do not constitute an "independent witness" to the tomb, and both sides arguments are based on the presupposition that the gospels be taken as history. It probably constituted a lot of speculation from both sides.

Asha'man

Your sources are lying to you again, Half-Life.

The Jesus story changed a great deal, and many variations existed. However, at a certain point in time, all the Christians got together and threw away all the variations, agreeing to pretend they never existed.

However, even that effort failed. Jewish writings exist that imply that Jesus was stoned and hung from a tree according to Jewish law, and then stayed dead. Some NT writings still use the language 'hung from a tree', which is not a euphemism for crucifixion but a literal reference to the Jewish law (Deut 21:22-23). I'm less familiar with them, but there may also be Greek writings that claim Jesus was hanged on a pole (not crucified), which was a Greek form of execution.

To me, it seems quite clear that the story did change over time. An early version probably did have Jesus stoned by the Jews, and pieces of Mark still reflect that. The trial by the Sanhedrin where the crime of blasphemy is pronounced, Jesus was dead on the first day (crucifixion victims took days to die, not hours), and the burial on the first day according to Jewish law. All of these are possible echos of an original version.

Over time, the audience changed. A Jewish stoning was not an effective sales pitch, but a Roman crucifixion was. So the story was changed, to place both the mode of execution and the blame into Roman hands.

More time passes, and the audience changes yet again. As more Romans are being targeted with this sales pitch, blaming the Romans for killing Jesus starts to be a poor choice. The story is altered yet again, but this time only the blame is shifted back to the Jews, not the mode of execution.


We also have evidence of other changes, separate from the crucifixion. How can Davidic ancestry (required for the Messiah) possibly be proved by a genealogy that stops at Mary's husband Joseph? It cant. At one point in the evolution of the stories, the virgin birth didn't exist. Mark certainly didn't mention it. I'm confident it was added to Matthew after the genealogy of Joseph was written, and that genealogy originally went all the way to Jesus. (In fact, we have at least one manuscript where that's exactly the case.) Again, strong likelyhood that the story changed over time.

The only story that we have now is the final product of hundreds of years of this process. All other variations have simply been destroyed by time and the deliberate actions of Christians. But saying that the story never changed is simply laughable.

Zeichman

I think he was saying the emphasis on the ressurection was always there.

Which, given the Q-gospel, Gospel of Thomas, among some hypothetical documents, show no knowlege of the ressurection. Furthermore, even if there was such an emphasis, it in no way suggests or is unified in the belief that Jesus walked around in a resusitated corpse. If anything, Paul's discussion of the spiritual and fleshly bodies later on in 1 Cor 15 is a strong argument against an early understanding of the resurrection as Half-Life understands it.

Doug Shaver

Three questions.

1. Do you have any evidence that the people of first-century Jerusalem were less credulous than people in today's world?

2. When did the stories of the resurrection, as those stories appeared in the gospels, begin circulating in Jerusalem, and what is your evidence for that date?

3. Whenever it was, what percentage of the Jerusalem population believed, specifically, that Jesus of Nazareth's tomb was found empty three days after he was buried, and from what document do you get that figure?

Half-Life

There are sources from as early as AD 52 which to Jesus.
http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...HistJesus5.htm

Now, if we are to assume the empty tomb was simply a myth and it never existed and it was just added into the Gospels at a later date, wou would honestly believe this? Let's say right now soemone comes to you and says that 50 years ago there was an empty tomb and someone rose from the dead, you would not believe this. Even if you looked for older people from 50 years ago they would say they don't remember any such thing and nobody would believe it. What mad epeople start believeing the empty tomb?