RUmike

To add to something pharoah wrote earlier, here is something that should shut any Christian up who makes claims like those in the OP:

Orthodox_Freethinker

It seems that what you are attempting to do is create a false dichotomy between Jesus' resurrection in the flesh and Jesus' resurrection as a spiritual being. The truth is that they are one in the same. The tomb of Christ was empty, He had risen. However, He was also able to walk through walls and therefore not bound by human limitations.
Paul was the Apostle to the Gentiles but he was also a Pharisaical Jew. To the Jews, there was no understanding of resurrection other than of the flesh.
The "spiritual body" that Paul speaks of is not one of non-flesh but one not tainted by human sin. It is not an entirely new body but the old body in a new quality of being. When Christ became incarnate, He freely choose to live in a human body with human limitations. Post-resurrection, Christ is still of flesh but is also a "life-giving spirit". Note that though Adam was a "living soul" that does not at all mean that he wasn't of the flesh also.
When Paul teaches that "flesh and blood shall not inherit the Kingdom of God", he means the sinfulness of our flesh and blood. Had he doubted the resurrection of the flesh, he would have used the phrase "flesh and bone".

For the same reason why anyone would doubt anything supernatural, anything that is beyond everyday experience. Almost every Christian will endure a period of doubt merely because of how otherwordly certain tenants may be.

Peace.

Orthodox_Freethinker

The Jews awaited a conquering military hero who would restore Israel as an earthly kingdom. However, Jesus came as a peace-maker who taught mercy and love. Isaiah 53, for example, does teach of the suffering servant who died for our iniquities but this was not interpreted to mean Christ until it was fulfilled by Christ. Had Jesus not risen from the dead, it is highly unlikely that anyone would have believed Him to be the Messiah.

The Gospels show that when Jesus predicted His own death and resurrection, His disciples did not entirely understand what He was speaking of. More likely than not, they also expected Jesus to be a conquering earthly hero. If they had expected the Messiah to die and rise from the dead, why did Peter attempt to save the life of Jesus by the sword? Though Christ was consistent in the purpose of His ministry, its meaning was not entirely clear to the disciples until fulfilled in His resurrection.

The assumption that the disciples had stolen the body of Christ was merely an excuse to not believe His resurrection. It would be entirely outlandish for the Apostles to give up their lives for what they knew to be a lie.

Anti-Missionary Jewish groups today still warn Jews to not believe that Jesus was the Messiah merely because He was not the conquering military leader who comes to restore Israel. Instead, Jesus forecasted doom to those who refused to repent and it came to pass in the fall of Jerusalem.

Peace.

Orthodox_Freethinker

Please allow me to stop you there. I would recommend that one study more of the Gospels before discussing their contents.

Luk 23:50 And, behold, [there was] a man named Joseph, a counsellor; [and he was] a good man, and a just:
Luk 23:51 (The same had not consented to the counsel and deed of them [he was] of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews: who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.

Mark
15:43 -
Joseph of Arimathea came, a prominent member of the Council, who himself was waiting for the kingdom of God; and he gathered up courage and went in before Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus.

Given that a member of the Sanhedrin was named, they would have contested the story if the tomb was not, in fact, empty.

John Dominic Crossan holds that the Gospels are not historically reliable. Even more, he contends that the resurrection of Christ was nothing more than the wish-fulfillment of the early church. The problem, of course, is that when given the opportunity to provide evidence for his claims, he fails miserably.

Peace.

Steven Carr

No, I simply quoted the Bible, which said that Jesus became a life-giving spirit.

I guess Paul's word is not good enough for you.

Steven Carr

You mean Jesus fulfilled so many Messianice prophecies and yet it was unlikely that anybody would have believed him to be the Messiah until he fulfilled a propechy which did not exist?

What Biblical passages did the Jews take as prophesying that the Messiah would be a conquering militiray hero?



Why did Jesus give Peter a sword?

How on earth could Jesus teach for 3 years with an authority that had not been seen before and fail to get across a message that a 19 year old can grasp easily, although from an entirely different culture and time period and who has never spoken to Jesus personally, and who has not been given the powers to work miracles that the disciples had been?

Let us look at what baffled people who had been given the secret of the Kingdom of God in Mark 4, and who were the closest disciples of Jesus the teacher.

Mark 9:9 'As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.'

What a stupid thing for Jesus to say! Didn't Jesus spot the look of bewilderment on the disciples faces when he said that?

Mark 8:31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

Gosh, that seems pretty clear to me. What on earth could the disciples have thought that he meant by 'he must be killed'?

It is utterly ludicrous that these disciples of Jesus were the biggest idiots who have ever walked the earth, and yet were hand-picked by the Creator of the Universe to spread his message of salvation.

I've never heard anything so damn stupid as Christianity. I really haven't.

Steven Carr

Ask Joseph Smith.

Diogenes the Cynic

This is not a fact, it's an assertion made by Mark. There is no independent corroboration for it and no mention of either Joseph of Arimathea or an empty tomb in any Christian literature before GMark.
Why would they? There is no evidence that anybody claimed a physical resurrection until the Gospel of Matthew, 50 years after the alleged event. The empty tomb was invented by mark. The location of Jesus burial...IF there was a Jesus at all...would have been completely unknown. When the story of the empty tomb was first contrived in GMark, the audience for the story was living outside Palestine and Jerusakem had been destroyed. There was no one around to contradict the story and no way to disprove it.
The Sanhedrin had been destroyed before the empty tomb story was ever told. There is also no evidence that they were hostile to Jesus. Since crucifixion victims were either left on the cross or buried in shallow, communal criminals' pits, there whereabouts of Jesus' body would have been unknown either to his followers or to any hypothical (and highly unlikely) counter witnesses a half century later.
There is no reliable testimony whatsoever that any person ever claimed to have seen a physically risen Jesus. The claims in the gospels were made by people who were not apostles or witnesses and who never met any apostles or eyewitnesses. Citing the Gospels to support your case is circular and assumes your own conclusion. Typical of a hack like Craig.

Also, there are no early Jewish allegations that apostles stole the body. That claim is flatly false. There are no Jewish writings which reference Jesus at all until centuries after the crucifixion.
Nope. Not a fact. Just a bumch of unsupprted aand mutually contradictory assertions made by non-witnesses decades after the facts. None of it is historically verifiable.
No, actually, they don't. Paul's claims are quite vague and the Gospels are not independent of each other.
What "researchers" would those be?
You'll have to enlighten me as to how either of these things prove anything about historical credibility.
There isn't a shred of evidence that any direct followers of Jesus believed any such thing. We do not have any writings from the apostles themselves, we just have claims made about the disciples made by people who never met them.
That's correct.
And there is no evdience that they DID believe he was the Messiah. Those claims were not made by the apostles but by others.
There isn't a shred of evidence that any apostle ever died for a belief in Jesus.

All of Craig's "facts" are, in fact, just bald, unsupported assertions. Sorry, but you're going to have to better than trotting out this kind of tiresome boilerplate apologia around here.

Orthodox_Freethinker

What I am saying is that if you read this in context, you'd understand that Saint Paul is not negating Christ's resurrection of the flesh but explaining how His flesh took on an entirely new quality. Did Adam not have a fleshly body because he was a "living soul"?

Peace.

Orthodox_Freethinker

...and Matthew, Luke and John; an assertion that if not true, the Sanhedrin would have contested.

This is false. The teachings of Paul, which date before the Gospels, stand or fall on the literal resurrection of Christ. What we know from Paul is that the tomb was empty and that witnesses attested to Christ's bodily resurrection, even a multitude of 500. Furthermore, if Mark is the earliest Gospel, it clearly implies a physical resurrection, even if you do not accept the final chapter which includes Christ's post-resurrection appearances. Throughout this Gospel, Christ predicts to His disciples that He will die and rise again. Christ dies. Then the tomb is empty. What shall we conclude?

Again, another falsehood. The Apostles openly testified to the emptiness of the tomb before the temple court.

The "hack" would be the one who makes a half-baked claim such as this.

Really? In the Gospels, what are the guards of Christ's tomb told by the Jewish leaders? Perhaps you should also check the Talmud.

Then I guess the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the Epistles of James and Peter and John just do not exist and never did.

Kind of like how there is no evidence that we landed on the moon?

In the debate, Crossan conceded that most New Testament scholars would accept these facts - Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and Son of God, that He was crucified, that His tomb was later found empty, and that His disciples believed that He had risen from the dead. Instead of providing a refutations to these facts, however, Crossan merely provided his own unsubstantiated assumptions. Ho hum.

Peace.