Steven Carr

http://home.hiwaay.net/~kbush/Wright_Mat28

is an excerpt from this book


'In particular, the movement in Western culture known as the
Enlightenment, which swept through philosophy and politics
in the eighteenth century, producing the French Revolution,
the American Constitution, and many other phenomena, always
tried to make out that it had done away with previous super-
stitions and was replacing them with rational, 'enlightened',
views. These, it claimed, would free people from intellectual
and political tyranny. In fact, the opposite is the case. Granted,
the movement brought great blessings, such as modern
medicine and communications. It also brought great curses -
not only the French Revolution itself, which killed thousands
of its own people in the name of liberty and equality for all,
but also the terrifying totalitarianisms of the twentieth century.

So Stalin was a child of the Enlightenment, as was Mao.


Wright continues
'No wonder, then, such a world-view wants to resist the news
of Jesus' resurrection every bit as much as the chief priests did.
No wonder it bribes people in all kinds of subtle ways to tell
stories in which Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. No
wonder it tries to make out that Christianity is just the inven-
tion of a few cunning individuals trying to feather their own
nests. (This always was an absurd charge, of course; it was
three centuries before anyone gained anything except insults,
danger, torture and death by believing in the resurrection.)'

Wright concedes that believing in the resurrection did not bring eternal life. Nobody gained anything, he says.

Wright says :-

'In this passage Matthew returns to the
chess-game once more, to ward off more thoroughly a move
that was regularly made in his day to enable people to avoid
coming to terms with the resurrection as an actual event. He
knows the line of attack that is regularly employed among the
non-Christian Jews of his day: the disciples, they say, came at
night and stole his body. Ah, says Matthew, that's what the
chief priests paid the guards to say. You're simply repeating a
frantic and unlikely tale that people told when they'd been
well bribed to do so.'

How any idiot thinks soldiers can be bribed to say that they fell asleep on duty is beyind imagining.

Wright , however, makes a savage attack on the Bible.

'Everybody in the ancient world, just like everybody in
the modern world, knew perfectly well that dead people don't
get resurrected.'

Gosh, the disciples had personally been given powers to raise the dead. Lazarus was still walking around. Moses and Elijah had been seen by the disciples.

Wright says 'The Christian belief is not that some people
sometimes get raised from the dead, and Jesus happens to be
one of them. '

This is exactly the Christian belief , surely?

Postcard73

I think this thread would fit better in GRD...

Scott (Postcard73)
BC&H Moderator

UV2003

I thought Matthew's belief was that MANY dead people got raised from the dead, then Jesus himself did a little while later after the many, according to Matthew 27:52.

....
Wright says 'The Christian belief is not that some people
sometimes get raised from the dead, and Jesus happens to be
one of them. '

This is exactly the Christian belief , surely?
...

Brother Daniel

Short answer: You're right.

Longer answer: Wright is playing games here.

He is implicitly referring to the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. He is trying to counter the modern idea that the belief in the resurrection represents a primitive worldview. Everyone knew all along (says Wright) that people don't naturally get raised from the dead. But science is the study of the non-miraculous (goes the argument), and as such cannot falsify a miracle.

There are several problems with this line of argument.

First, the line between the natural and the supernatural is arbitrary: Whatever happens, happens. The very attempt to draw the line is a product of the cognitive dissonance that arises from hanging onto ancient beliefs in the modern world. Thus Wright's argument depends, ironically, on his (partial) buying into the very enlightenment worldview that he attacks.

Second, when skeptics present alternative explanations for the existence of stories of the resurrection, and Christians try to paint these alternative explanations as strained (i.e., unlikely), the Christians have to appeal to nature in the process of doing so. This stands in direct contradiction to their willingness to push natural law aside in order to assert the existence of a miracle.

Third (closely related to the second objection): In general, when trying to decide which of competing explanations for a set of data is the more likely, the most rational procedure considers (a) how well the explanations match the data, and (b) the prior probabilities (i.e., in the absence of the data in question) of the competing explanations. (See Bayes' Theorem.) Supernatural explanations are apparently not subject to assessments of prior probabilities - we wouldn't want to imagine that we can understand the mind of God, would we? - and thus they are simply a way of putting people off balance in their assessment of posterior probabilities.

To put it in terms of two popular fictional detectives, Wright is trying to refute Sherlock Holmes ("when the impossible is removed, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth") with Dirk Gently ("the impossible has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks"). But that "certain integrity" is highly subjective, to say the least.

Nom

Well, according to another piece linked on Kevin Bush's N.T. Wright page (a fan page for a bishop? Oooooookay....<insert cuckoo clock sxf here>) here:

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m...le.jhtml?term=

Wright says he's a "big-picture person" not a "detail person." Maybe he just missed a few details...?

Steven Carr

I forgot about all those raisings from the dead.