Doug Shaver

I'm not saying they would. My disagreement with the orthodox interpretation of the gospels is about what the writers intended to convinced their readers of. I don't believe they were trying to convince anybody that a real man really came back to life after being executed.

Doug Shaver

I'll stipulate that for the time being.

There is zero evidence for that. It is blatant special pleading.

Jane H

Thank you for your thoughts.

This is a somewhat unique interpretation, and I really don’t know if I’ve understood you correctly. I can’t see how they could be read in any other way, whether you believe them or not. What do you think Paul, Matthew, Luke and John, very independent writers, were trying to do?

Jane H

I’m not sure of your use of ‘stipulate’ here- maybe a trans-Atlantic difference. Could you rephrase?

I’m not quite sure what you think the position of women was in the ancient world. To quote from the Richard Carrier article linked to above:

“In other words, it was unseemly for a woman to leave the home and appear in court--but it was still legal.”

“More recent scholarship has established that although Athenian society considered it unseemly for a woman to appear in court, women could and often did testify through a male proxy, and such testimony was taken under oath outside of court and considered as valid as any man's.”

”…this reflects the same sentiment found even in the more liberal Hellenistic and Roman periods: there was no widespread distrust of women, merely a chauvinistic expectation that proper women do not appear in public, least of all in a distinctly male domain.”

“When Josephus summarizes the law of testimony, he says two or more witnesses were always required to establish a fact at trial, and then says ‘there shall be no testimony of women, because of the levity and boldness of their gender.’ …Josephus is saying that women should not appear in court simply because it was unseemly--essentially saying that women were liable to giggle or scold or otherwise violate the proper demeanour of the court.”

Women in this country didn’t get the vote until 1918, and the law allowing rape within marriage was only completely removed in 1991. The position of women in the first century was rather worse.

spamandham

The only Biblical authors who claim to have seen the risen Christ are Paul, and the writer of Revelation. Both of these admit they were visions.

These are combined with 2nd hand claims of unknown witnesses, written as much as 100 years after the purported facts. This is obviously legend to anyone who isn't indoctrinated into a religious cult that promotes it.

Doug Shaver

It is unusual, not unique. I am not alone in this.

That is probably because, for practically all of the past two millennia, virtually nobody, regardless of their beliefs about Jesus, has thought they could be read any other way. Essentially every scholar, regardless of his or her intellectual background, has assumed that the gospel writers were describing events that they believed, rightly or wrongly, had actually occurred, and virtually nobody has thought it worthwhile to question that assumption.

I don't think they were at all independent. That is not to deny that they had their disagreements, but they expressed their disagreements by reworking what was essentially the same story.

I believe they were writing a fictional account of a fictional itinerant miracle-working preacher named Jesus, and what they were trying to do was promulgate the teachings that their stories attributed to Jesus.

Doug Shaver

It means that for the sake of this discussion, I'll act as if I agree with it, because it has no bearing on the point I'm making.

I think their status was subordinate to that of men. I'm not questioning that at all. What I'm questioning is the assumption that Paul or someone before him revised certain stories about Jesus' post-resurrection appearances because of male chauvinism. That is not to suggest that it could not have happened. It is only to note that there no evidence whatsoever that it did happen.

Paul, writing sometime probably during the 40s CE, mentions no women to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection. The gospel authors, writing several decades later, mention some women. The most parsimonious explanation is that as the stories circulated within the Christian community, the women were added to them during those decades. The suggestion that they were deleted from Paul's account is without justification except only on a presupposition that Paul had to be familiar with the same stories that the gospel authors were familiar with.

stuart shepherd

The Gospel writer, Matthew, believed that illness was caused by Devils.
He believed that Jesus healed illness by casting out Devils.
Now in the 21st Century, we know that illness is not caused by Devils.
Now Jesus, if he is God as some believe, would have certainly known that illness is not caused by Devils.
So if Matthew is reporting the word of God, as many believe, then either Jesus is a fraud, or Matthew is a fraud.
In any case, how can we believe that Jesus rose from the dead, as reported by Matthew, if the Gospel of Matthew contains untrue information?
Can we believe the report that Jesus rose from the dead, if Matthew contains blatantly untrue statements that illness is caused by Devils and illness can be healed by casting out Devils?

--- Stuart Shepherd

Jane H

Thank you for your responses, Doug.

Again, we come back to the question of why Paul doesn’t mention the women, and the gospels do. The only explanations offered have been:

1) A desire to make the gospel more appealing to women (Carrier), which I’ve already discussed.

2) A randomly made up story, which wasn’t strong when 1 Corinthians was written (50-60AD, rather than the 40AD you quote- but I wish you were right!), which managed to gain enough credibility to appear in all four gospels (Mark‘s by 65-80); this must be questioned very strongly. The fact it appears in four different traditions in four different forms (suggesting independent sources), serves no obvious useful purpose with no motivation for invention, and would have certainly been written with men starring rather than women had it been invented; all this counts against an invention.

3) As we’ve agreed, it was an androcentric world. The women’s appearance was known, but quietly dropped in Paul’s evangelistic accounts because it didn’t help matters to have women see the appearances first. We view all this with twenty-first century eyes, and don’t understand the problem. Try to put yourself mentally with this taking place in a society where women are systematically suppressed (there are some around today). It becomes very easy to see why it didn’t do apologetically to have women get the resurrection discovery first.

Jane H

Spamandham-

Interesting thoughts, and this is where I was coming in earlier on in this thread. It is not so much the forensics of the accounts that I’m looking at here, but the question of the effect that the resurrection events had.

Resurrection on C1 Judaism was viewed within a spectrum of beliefs. It was at the fringes of the religious system, with little clarity as to its nature. Within early Christianity, a very different mutation of this belief occurred, which was both radical and was viewed very consistently by the early church and within the NT.

When we ask the early Christians themselves where this mutation comes from, the answer revolves around the empty tomb and subsequent appearances, appearances of a character different to other categories known to the ancient world. (An obstacle to alternatives such as recovery, ghosts, hallucinations...)

The meaning of resurrection within second-temple Judaism makes it impossible to conceive of this reshaped belief emerging without it being known that the tomb was empty and the person discovered thoroughly alive. Furthermore, the notion of resurrection became redefined uniformly within Christianity around a physical process involving the re-emergence after death of a new form of physical body.

This requires historical explanation. We are still waiting for a generally acceptable alternative to the orthodox Christian explanation.