Loomis

Nope again. The zombies in Hosea 6:1-2 came back to life to “live in his presence” - presumably forever.

bacht

Well it depends on which version of resurrection you want to look at. The gospel writers definitely go for the revivification of a "real" human body. But the epistles leave room to consider a "spiritual" or "heavenly" resurrection, with the old carnal body transformed or abandoned (as per Paul). The first scenario is a physical miracle, the second assumes the existence of spirits and immortal human souls, which is a more common belief (eg reincarnation)

According to the NT the first "witnesses" of Christ's resurrection were Peter, John, James and the disciples, with Paul a little later. It's possible that there were people (gnostics?) who believed they had seen an apparition, and later proto-Catholics either didn't understand or couldn't accept this without historicizing Jesus.

bacht

There's no logical reason to accept the reality of miracles and supernaturalism. People believe in these things for emotional reasons, not rational ones. Science has demonstrated again and again that previously confusing phenomena have empirical explanations.

The resurrection of Jesus is central to the teachings of the church, which include the promise of eternal life. No-one wants to die, and the idea that there's a way to avoid death is powerful. That doesn't make it true. The notion that God is waiting in the wings to lift us from the grave is an infantile fantasy imo. Regression to an emotional child and expecting our "parent" to save us is not a defensible position for sane adults.

Larkin31

Because he seemed to answer your question precisely about attestation and evidence.

Too speculative? He spends most of his time reducing the life of Jesus and cutting out the more "speculative" aspects. IMO. Are you calling it "speculative" to de-speculate?

Do you accept he Gospel claims re Jesus as, well, "gospel"?

aa5874

"Dead men cannot rise" is deduced through empiricism. There is no need to check every single recorded death ever in the world. Once a body is certified to be dead it will not resurrect based on the destruction of the body and most critically the brain cells. Once blood supply is cut from the brain, the body will lose its ability to function and recover to a normal state.

The resurrection of Jesus is complete fiction once he was really dead and was really human. But the NT, the source which claimed he resurrected also claimed he was the offspring of the Holy Ghost, the same source which claimed he walked on water, and transfigured.

How do you kill a Holy Ghost of God? With fiction.

aa5874

What is the name of a gnostic that possibly saw an apparition of Jesus in a resurrected state and how would he/she positively identify the apparition as a true replica of Jesus?

And on what date was the apparition seen or how old was the apparition? Where did the apparition actually live and was his mother really Mary?

An apparition is a useless piece of information when dealing with the investigation of a supposed historical figure.

bacht

I agree, I have no interest in ghost/spirits/apparitions etc, but it would seem that Christianity could have started this way: "finding" Christ in the scriptures and then "seeing" him in the spirit, God's confirmation of the end of the age

aa5874

But when will all this "could haves" end if no-one is prepared to back up their "could haves" with historical sources.

A man found guilty "could have" been innocent but it is a useless and baseless claim if no-one is prepared to provide the evidence to show he "could have" been or is innocent

The NT and Church writings clearly show the start of Jesus that he started as the offspring of the Holy Ghost. The Church writers "could have" started Jesus as only man but they decided not to since he 'could not have" resurrected in such a human state.

Jesus "could have" been anything except that we HAVE a MYTH in the NT.

His origin has been recorded in his history book, the NT.

This is what we HAVE, not could have.

Mt 1:18 -

Zenaphobe

Not sure if it makes much difference to your point, but according to Matthew 28:8 it was Mary and Mary that saw Jesus first.

it appears Luke has a different slant, the women just get a message from two angels,

John says,

If you accept the addition to Mark as legit, it says

How do historians treat conflicting accounts in ancient documents? I can't imagine them ascribing historicity to records that deviate in as many details as the gospels do.

Doug Shaver

The more I studied those posts, the more uncertain I became that I had correctly understood you. Then I reviewed the entire thread. That made nothing clearer. So, I'm going to take it from the top, responding anew to your OP but incorporating subsequent commentary as it seems relevant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ercatli 1. I suggest you approach it from the perspective of summarising to me, a follower of Jesus, why I should change my beliefs. Don't try to persuade me

On the face of it, you contradict yourself here. As these words are ordinarily used by English-speakers, if Smith tells Jones why Jones should change his beliefs, then Smith by definition is trying to persuade Jones to change his beliefs. That is what it means to persuade someone --to give them a reason to change some belief.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ercatli (which will tend to create heat rather than light)

Whether any attempt at persuasion is more incendiary or more enlightening depends entirely on how it is done, not on whether it is done.

If I don't believe what you believe, then you may reasonably infer that I think you are mistaken to believe it. So, if I tell you why I don't believe it, you may construe that as my telling you why, in my opinion, you should not believe it, either.

One reason the discussion here has been so muddled is that, regarding just about any nontrivial aspect of Christianity's origins, there is not even a consensus about whether a consensus exists.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ercatli I rely on experts. I don't care so much whether an expert agrees with my viewpoint or not, but whether he/she has persuaded his/her peers of the validity of their arguments.

If you cannot, or would just rather not, do your own research on this subject, then you are certainly entitled to just go along with whichever group of scholars makes the most sense to you, using whatever criteria suit you for judging how much sense anybody makes. That's about the way I did it for most of my life, until I got my first Internet connection several years ago. That was when I began to discover how chaotic the state of most New Testament scholarship is. What follows is a little bit of what I have learned.

If you don't want to be persuaded to change your beliefs, then fine. Go find some experts who will assure you that you don't need to change them. There are plenty of those experts out there. It doesn't matter what it is that you happen to already believe. You can find some experts who will tell you that the consensus of scholarship is on your side.

But if you want to know the truth about Christianity's origins without presupposing that you already know how it got started, then your are on your own, and you are going to be very busy for a very long time. It would be prudent to initially assume that you should trust nobody. You will come in due course to trust a few people, but you need to make them earn your trust.

Learn to distinguish between facts and inferences from facts. And remember that an inference does not become a fact just because it's hard to find anyone who questions it.

Learn how secular historians do history by reading what secular historians themselves have to say about how they do their work. Never trust any non-historian who says, "These are the criteria that historians use when evaluating documentary evidence."

A question that peps up constantly in this area is "How do we know?" That is a philosophical question. If you want an answer, you will have to learn some philosophy.

I do not know how many thousands of religions currently exist or how many thousands more have existed in times past. There are some people who think all religions are true. I find that notion absurd. There are some people who think all religions are false with one exception. I find no reason to make any exception.

Partly for that reason, I was drawn to philosophical naturalism quite early in my life, when it became obvious that most of the best arguments for God's existence were in effect just arguments from ignorance. Belief in God, for most people, seems to be nothing more than a way to avoid having to say "I don't know" in answer to certain questions for which we desperately wish we had some answers that we could be very sure were the right answers.

That, to me, looks like reason enough to doubt God's existence. All the other arguments against theism, although compelling enough in their own right, are redundant in my judgment. I didn't become an atheist on account of any of proof of God's nonexistence. I became an atheist simply because theism, so far as I could tell, was without any rational foundation.

Having made this personal evaluation, I do not infer that all theists are being irrational. I have a worldview and God doesn't fit anywhere in it. Others have different worldviews, and in many of them, God fits well. So be it. I don't accept those worldviews, but they don't lose their rational validity just on that account.

A worldview is more or less rational according to whether it is more or less coherent. But none of us is perfectly rational, and even it we were, no one has anywhere near enough time to check his entire noetic structure for consistency. All we can do, if we care to do anything at all in this regard, is to select some portion of it for closer scrutiny.

As a naturalist, I of course did not accept the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact. I could, however, and for a time I did, accept it as a metaphorical reality. I thought, in those days of my youth, that the gospels and Acts were a heavily embellished and legendized account of Christianity's origins. The disciples apparently came to believe, some time after Jesus' execution, that he had come back to life. Whatever made than believe such a thing, I had no clear idea, but it was entirely consistent with much that I thought I knew of human nature. I knew from personal observation that ordinary people of ordinary intelligence could come to believe all manner of falsehoods, and rather easily, if they just very much wished those things to be true. Hardly anything more was required -- certainly no conspiracies, or high-pressure con jobs, or mass hallucinations.

According to numerous sources that seemed authoritative to me, the gospels and Acts were written in reliance on oral traditions passed along for many years within Christian communities. That to me was sufficient to justify a general skepticism about whether any particular part of the story was factual. Only the broadest possible outline, it seemed, could be accepted with much confidence. And in all my reading, it appeared that there was hardly anything that nearly all scholars agreed on except that broad outline: There was an itinerant Galilean preacher called Jesus; he attracted a band of disciples; he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, perhaps at the instigation of Jewish religious leaders; and sometime after his execution, certain of his followers founded a new religion based on their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead and that he was the incarnation of God, maker of heaven and earth.

A standard apologetic line is that the disciples could never have come to believe in any of those things unless the resurrection had really happened more or less as the gospel authors say it happened. I have to admit that I don't have a killer argument against that. I know only what I have seen of what people are capable of believing. Nothing in my experience tells me there is anything prima facie improbable about the disciples believing in a resurrection even if a resurrection never really happened.

Such was my thinking for most of my adult life. I did not regard the New Testament writings as historically reliable, mainly because I had to no reason to think them reliable. Again, I regarded arguments against their reliability as redundant. The simple fact that the authors were unknown, and that the sources (if any) that they relied on were also unknown, was reason enough for skepticism.

(In this context, all I mean by skepticism is maintaining an attitude of "show me the evidence," and in this context, "people sincerely believe it" is not evidence.)

I didn't care much about specific details of what, beyond the broad outline, could have been true, because my intellectual interests didn't go there in those days. Did a rich man named Joseph really have Jesus' body put into a tomb that he owned? Probably not, but maybe so. It didn't matter. If he did, then did some women find the tomb empty a few days later? Probably not, but maybe so. It didn't matter. Did some of the disciples experience vividly realistic conversations or other physical encounters with Jesus? Probably not, but maybe so. It didn't matter.

Obviously, or so I thought, something about Jesus' teaching or his personality made a tremendous impression on a certain group of his followers. What that could have been, there was no way to know, because none of the people who knew him had contributed anything to the surviving historical record. Such details didn't matter to me. Christianity was just one among the thousands of religions that people have invented throughout history. That it happened to be the dominant religion of the culture that I happened to have been born into was no reason to think there was anything special about it.

That is why I don't believe what you believe about Jesus, and why I think you should not believe it, either.

This thread has also touched on the subject of whether Jesus even existed. I have become persuaded that he probably did not, but that has nothing to do with what anyone who thinks he did exist ought to believe about him. For very many years, I had no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person, and I have no general problem with people who still don't doubt it. I think that belief in a historical Jesus is still a reasonable belief for most people. But it does not follow, from the assumption that he did exist, that the gospels are historically reliable to the extent that if they affirm his resurrection, then the resurrection must have really happened.