bacht

I think there's a more basic problem. People are still afraid of their own death, so any group claiming to have the key to immortality (resurrection, reincarnation etc) will draw followers.

Most people are fuzzy thinkers anyway imo. They're either incapable of or uninterested in demanding logical/scientific arguments.

dog-on

As long as a seeming consensus exists to the effect that Jesus existed, such a consensus provides a comfortable base upon which a Christian can hang their faith.

If the consensus becomes that Jesus did not, in fact, ever exist, such faith hanging may get a bit more difficult.

Toto

The overly personal interchange between John Loftus and spin has been split off here.

Please keep this thread on the topic of the OP.

IamJoseph

<post removed as off topic>

KrisK10

I should also have mentioned that this book can be previewed and downloaded as an e-book at Mobipocket (and priced the same as Amazon priced the Kindle version) at: http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/...tr=komarnitsky

Steven Carr

And what did you think of my argument about whether or not the Christians in Corinth believed Jesus was dead?

KrisK10

Steven,

In answer to the one question and one argument you posed earlier:

1] No, I do not think Christians gathered in groups of 500+ in the first few years after Jesus’ crucifixion. In my opinion, the tradition in 1 Cor 15:6 is best explained as a tradition that began as a collective spiritual experience in the early Christian community that was then interpreted by some as an appearance and/or later grew into an appearance, with the number 500+ growing at the same time. The stubborn absence of this tradition from the rest of the Christian Origins literature also leaves open the possibility that Paul the persuader is the one who turned an early collective spiritual experience into an appearance when he wrote to his troublesome community in Corinth.


2] If I understand your second inquiry correctly, you think 1 Cor 15 is best understood to imply that some at Corinth doubted only the general resurrection, not Jesus’ resurrection. There are primarily two things which lead me to conclude differently. 1] Immersed in the Greco-Roman philosophies of raised souls, it seems nearly impossible to me that some of the Corinthians could doubt the bodily resurrection of the masses, with general questions like “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”, and not also doubt Jesus’ bodily resurrection. 2] If the Corinthians had no doubt in Jesus’ resurrection, then why does Paul add the comment about the appearance to the 500+, “most of whom are still alive though some have died”? The only way it seems to me to understand this little addition by Paul is that he wanted to bolster his proof that Jesus was raised by saying that there were witnesses the Corinthians could ask about Jesus’ resurrection (if they traveled over 1000 miles to Palestine!), which means that some in Corinth doubted Jesus' resurrection. There are a few other less significant things which I think also point to some in Corinth doubting Jesus’ resurrection. For example, Paul’s opening lines seem overly verbose and cautious to me for someone who is confident that all Corinthians believe firmly in Jesus’ resurrection: “Now I should remind you, brothers and sisters of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you – unless you have come to believe in vain” (15:1-2). Also, if the Corinthians firmly believed in Jesus’ resurrection, why does Paul feel the need to recite the core Christian creed which includes the assertion that Jesus was “raised” (15:3-4)? In another instance, Paul seems to be drawing on the influence of authority when he asks the Corinthians, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” (15:12). Why draw on the influence of authority unless some at Corinth were doubting Jesus’ resurrection? I do not think the Corinthian doubters Paul is addressing here thought Jesus was “dead as a doornail” (as you put it). Rather, perhaps they thought him raised in some way compatible with their Greek beliefs (raised soul) and they simply doubted Jesus’ bodily resurrection. As an aside, I have heard traditional Christians try to make the same argument you made in order to make sense of Paul’s silence on the discovered empty tomb in 1 Cor 15. The argument just doesn’t pan out for me, and it doesn’t either for those traditionalists that published the latest evangelical EBCOT (which I quote in the next page of my book but which is not available with the Look Inside feature at Amazon.com):

In one of the reports Paul received concerning what was going on in Corinth, he heard that some were claiming “that there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor 15:12)....Paul was so deeply concerned about this theological position that he gave an extended discourse in ch. 15 to prove the resurrection of Christ and to set a timetable for the final return of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead [emphasis added]. (The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 11 (ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Zondervan, 2008), 247.)

That's my take on it, and that's really it for me. All the best!

Kris

Steven Carr

Paul never attacks a belief in a raised soul. What he attacks is the belief that the general resurrection involves raising of corpses. He calls people who discussion the raising of corpses 'foolish'.

His point is to say that Christians will be raised in the same way that Jesus was, which was in a way that made him become 'a life-giving spirit', to quote Paul's words.

GakuseiDon

The resurrection of a recently dead body like Jesus' wasn't an issue. It was with bodies that had rotted away. This is the issue that Paul addresses in 1 Cor 15 when he was asked, "How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?" The question of a general bodily resurrection was disputed for the next few centuries as a philosophical issue.

The problem was this: Person A dies and his body falls into the sea. Fish eat the body. Person B eats the fish. When A and B are physically resurrected, who gets what part of Person A's body?

I address this in part in an article I wrote here.

The topic of contention wasn't whether resurrection was possible or not, but whether a body that had been dispersed could truly be physically resurrected. The pagans argued that it couldn't be restored in the same body, since that had already been destroyed. And if it was raised in another body, then it is a new person entirely, so the former one wasn't restored.

Tatian's reply to the problem is as follows: "Of fleshly matter, but being born, after a former state of nothingness, I have obtained through my birth a certainty of my existence; in the same way, having been born, and through death existing no longer, and seen no longer, I shall exist again, just as before I was not, but was afterwards born. Even though fire destroy all traces of my flesh, the world receives the vaporized matter; and though dispersed through rivers and seas, or torn in pieces by wild beasts, I am laid up in the storehouses of a wealthy Lord".

Justin Martyr responds similarly: "In the same way, then, you are now incredulous because you have never seen a dead man rise again. But as at first you would not have believed it possible that such persons could be produced from the small drop [of semen], and yet now you see them thus produced, so also judge ye that it is not impossible that the bodies of men, after they have been dissolved, and like seeds resolved into earth, should in God's appointed time rise again and put on incorruption".

Justin and Tatian both believed that God could restore even a vaporised body. Justin certainly believed in a physical resurrection. For Justin, just as one seed of sperm produces the full body, so God could do the same at the end of time from the "seeds resolved into the earth". Paul alludes to the same principle in 1 Cor 15 and gives the same response as Justin Martyr.

Steven Carr

Paul is pretty clear about this.

2 Corinthians 5
Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.



Paul hardly gives the same response as Justin Martyr, as he says nothing whatever about flesh and sinews and bone, the way that Justin did.

Paul says nothing about the bodies of men dissolving and rising again. Paul is careful to stress that there are two bodies (if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body)

Nor does Paul stress that God could reform bodies.

But it does confirm that ancient people thought seeds disappeared, and 'dissolved'.

Both Paul and Justin thought God could create anything, and Paul assumed the Corinthians accepted that God created life from dead matter.

But for Paul , the risen body was a new creation , and the earthly body had been destroyed.