TimBowe

Many people today believe the resurrection never occurred, and that they are the product of religious imagination and legend. That they require no historical explanation.

Why do they believe it happened?

They believe it as a matter of faith, they want it to be true. It has nothing to do with history or evidence, or what really happened.

On historical grounds, we can affirm that Jesus' body rotted away in the tomb.

On historical grounds we can explain the origin of the belief in the resurrection by the fact that the early Christians had visionary experiences.

The Gospels were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus' death, not by eyewitnesses, we are dealing with ancient texts of a specific time that were not written by eyewitnesses.

We can not, on historical grounds, argue that God raised Jesus from the dead. That is not the most plausible explanation, it is not an historical explanation.

aa5874

There is no way you can affirm that Jesus' body rotted away in the tomb. There is no such story in the NT, a source for the Jesus story, and no external source to support such affirmation.

It is recorded that the body of the supposed Jesus was NOT in the tomb when the women and Peter went to visit the burial site.

The body of Jesus had vanished while the disciples were in hiding.

And further there is no actual historical evidence of Jesus believers in the 1st century or that Jesus believers really had visionary experiences at that time.

There is evidence or information from sources of antiquity that in the 1st century, early Christians worshiped Simon Magus, the Holy one, since the days of Claudius.

See "First Apology" by Justin Martyr.

TimBowe

The tomb of Jesus was not empty, but full, and his body did not disappear but rotted away, dead bodies do not simply disappear.

spin

OK.

Nomads move where they can get advantage, but it doesn't help stem the flood of leaks in the exodus story. What would you like to do? Arbitrarily save some of it for some reason? How could one ever check the validity of whatever it is you are willing to save?

It's not hard to think that there may have been an ark or chest. If there was a covenant between tribes you'd think that perhaps some financial agreement was reached in which a sum was placed in it for safe keeping. But allowing an ark of the covenant in the early history of the Jews, how does it get you any closer to Moses?

The inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud that talk about Yahweh and his consort also talk of the Yahweh of Teiman, a nomadic center in the far south. Of course it points to a stable cultic center, rather than a wandering bunch of pseudo-escapees from Egypt.

You certainly have to be more substantial than that. You are saying nothing at all about any historicity....

... unless you believe that you can subtract enough accretion to end up with history??

I guess you'd have difficulty explaining away Alan a'Dayle or the fight between Little John and Robin Hood. After all there's just too much you have to explain away for no reason to deny Robin Hood's historicity.

Pu-lease! Literary criticism is not very helpful for historical research. There is the possibility that none of the material in its current state is based on a real past nexus.


spin

aa5874

No such thing can be found in any story of the NT. You are making stuff up.

You are not allowed to guess your own history, and then want other people to believe what you guess must be true.

You must state exactly what the authors wrote about Jesus just as your obligated to say exactly what Homer wrote about Achilles.

Once Jesus did not exist his body could not have been in a tomb.

Now, people who did not exist do not have real dead bodies to be found in real tombs.

And you know that burial sites have been desecrated.

TimBowe

The Gospels are not historically reliable, they were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus' death, by Greek-speaking Christians living 30, 40, 50, 60 years later. You can't just keep going on and on about what can or can't be found in the NT.

aa5874

So, how in the world can you affirm that Jesus did exist and even died or was buried if as you now claim that the Gospels are unreliable?

You can AFFIRM NOTHING in the Gospels about Jesus and his disciples. The Gospels are UNRELEIABLE.

The existence of Jesus as found in the NT is therefore likely to be unreliable. Hence, his conception, birth, life, his death, his burial, resurrection and ascension are all likely to be unreliable.

Your affirmation is baseless.

I can repeat everything in the Gospels about Jesus and his disciples but I do NOT affirm anything unless there are external corroborative sources.

spin

So you shouldn't be saying anything here as you disqualify yourself from dealing with facts. As I said, if others do the digesting for you, you will get no nutrition.

Are any of them historians??

On what grounds do any of them accept the new testament literature as historical raw material for the reputed time of Jesus? If you can't answer that for your scholars then you should stop using them. In the end I fear you'd have no scholars left to use.

Who said that Grant was "the only secular historian [you] could quote along similar lines"? I indicated his mention is endemic of (apologetic) tokenism. I've already indicated that Grant missed out on the philosophical shake-up the study of history has received over the last thirty years. So you go back to Sherwin-White who was of the same era as Grant. That makes sense, doesn't it? And what do you want to make out of Fox and his trying to earn pocket money with popular books?

Who is "E Judge"? And where did you find him/her mentioned?

Here's the thing: can you find contemporary historians (as against biblical text scholars) who hold the views that you desire stated in peer-reviewed publications?

If you call the need for scholarly rigor in the field of religious studies pessimism, then I'm sure that'll help you accept religious studies as it is today without too many qualms.

There is nothing wrong with skepticism. There is something wrong with committedness. You must be prepared to change your analyses based on evidentiary developments. That cautions one against either positions based on religious opinion (either pro or con) or those based on naive reliance on source materials whose value cannot be established.

A lot of weird stuff has been written on dead religions (in which no belief exists to get in the way), such as much of Fraser's "Golden Bough", though scholarly efforts in the genre tend to be quite old and views today are much more cautious, as can be seen in the historical analysis of Mithraic beliefs. You can imagine the same for live religions such as christianity. There has been a qualitative improvement in approach with the materials of those dead religions.

It's good to see modern christian scholars making some concessions, but it is certainly not enough. They so often seem to draw lines beyond which they will not cross, which is of no use in scholarship. Everyone is happy to go to print with opinions like "Jesus really existed", "Jesus did more than just exist", "Jesus did exist", and "The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good", but try to get beyond the opinions into the hard evidence.

Then there's the totally unimpressive Craig Evans: "Research in the historical Jesus has taken several positive steps in recent years. Archaeology, remarkable literary discoveries, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and progress in reassessing the social, economic, and political setting of first-century Palestine have been major factors. .... the persistent trend in recent years is to see the Gospels as essentially reliable, especially when properly understood, and to view the historical Jesus in terms much closer to Christianity’s traditional understanding". Of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls are absolutely no help in establishing any historicity to christianity. It's just a red herring. His talk of "the social, economic, and political setting of first-century Palestine" is as convincing as "the social, economic, and political setting of first-century" Italy for the Satyricon, so I guess he'd argue for the veracity of that work as well. It's good that he makes his money through christianity, he just doesn't seem to be up to doing history (but then real history doesn't pay these days: universities are finding less funding for humanities, except in the case of religious studies -- and perhaps a few other departments).

Just have a look at his CV:

D. Habil. - Karoli Gaspar Reformatus University, Budapest (2009)
Thesis: Jesus and the Fall of Satan: Studies in Demonology and the Early Christian Movement
Ph.D. - Claremont Graduate University, California (1983)
Thesis: Isaiah 6:9-10 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation
Advisor: William H. Brownlee (deceased)
M.A. - Claremont Graduate University, California (1980)
M.Div. - Western Baptist Seminary, Oregon (1977) [Baptist ordination, 1979]
B.A. - Claremont McKenna College, California (1974)

Do you really need to wonder why he's not strong on history? And how can you expect him to be? Hopefully, you can see why history should be left to historians.


spin

tripoli

What is a "true" historian?

No Robots

The likelihood of a literary figure's historicity is in proportion to that figure's impact on history. Robin Hood has had only a minor impact on history, whereas the impact of Moses is immeasurable. Thus we leave the historicity of Robin Hood an open question, whereas we affirm the historicity of Moses. Here is Constantin Brunner on this subject:

For if we were acquainted with significantly unique and inspired deeds under the names, for instance, of Sargon, Romulus, Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, Siegfried and Tell, then I would have to believe, if I were not to betray my fundamental notion of resultant phenomena having a cause (for every cause must produce its specific result, and every result must have its specific cause). This would follow even if I had never so little to show of the causes involved, of the originators of such works; for, in cases like this, the minus in terms of the kind of experiential certainty which is supplied by sense-data and other external information is outweighed by the plus of inner conviction. Thus I would have to believe that these deeds had creative personalities behind them, and so I would call them Tell, Siegfried, Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, Romulus and Sargon, just as I call Shakespeare the author of the unmistakably distinctive literary marvels, pointing to a single originator, that go under his name, in spite of the fact that we have as little certain knowledge of the life of the man Shakespeare as of the life of the man Christ—nay, we have less.