TNorthover

I'll go with the others saying oral tradition isn't that reliable. Look at Homer.

Godless Dave

I do, but it's well known that oral traditions change details as stories are passed on.

FatherMithras

As the High Father of the Reformed Church of Mithraism, I have to make a few slight corrections. If you really read the Mithras story, it bears significant, but not as significant as you claim, similiarites to Christianity. If you take several, separate branches of it from over the world at the time, you can make an almost identical story it's true(, and I have little doubt that Mithraism to some extent influenced the church) but as a whole it's significantly off.

To the OP:

The fact is, there were no witnesses and it defies all known scientific fact. Not to mention there's no supporting evidence of anything like that ever occuring in history. Do you believe all the mystics in India, or that David Blaine or Chris Angel are gods or magic? They have more evidence for it than Jesus.

Alethias

It seems to me that the subject matter of the historicity of the resurrection of the central figure of the christian myth would fit better in the Biblical Criticism & History Forum, so I'm moving this thread from GRD to that forum.

Alethias,
GRD Moderator

MortalWombat

If you do not believe that the spirit of Augustus Caesar rose to heaven from his funeral pyre as reported by the Roman historian Suetonius, would you please indicate your rationale for rejecting it?

If you do not believe that the angel Moroni descended from heaven and presented Joseph Smith with golden plates (as testified by 11 witnesses) used to translate into the Book of Mormon, would you please indicate your rationale for rejecting it?

If you do not believe that Charles Manson levitated a bus over a creek where there was no bridge as his followers claim, would you please indicate your rationale for rejecting it?

If you do not believe that the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was God, as proven by witnesses who saw the marks of crucifixion on his hand during his trip to Jamaica in 1966, would you please indicate your rationale for rejecting it?

I think you get my drift.

Godless Dave

Excellent examples, MortalWombat.

Draconis

I did once propose to a baptist pastor that we conduct the following experiment:

Summon Jesus (by whatever means available) then get someone to shoot him, and perhaps a doctor might pronounce him dead. Then wait for the 2nd resurrection.

Oddly, he complained that it might be possible to fake such a resurrection!

Steven Carr

And what do you make of the fact that many of the people who converted to Christianity at the time (perhaps all?) still scoffed at the idea that God would choose to raise a corpse from the dead?

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, calls the Corinthians idiots for denying the resurrection because they were baffled as to why God would choose to raise a corpse, and tells them that they too will become life-giving spirits, just like the second Adam (who was Jesus, of course)

He tells them they are presently like the first Adam, made from the dust of the earth, and will be like the second Adam , made from heaven.

No wonder he regarded them as idiots for confusing the concepts 'resurrection' and 'a corpse being reformed from dust'.

They were like people denying that you can fly to Europe from the US, because there is no way to put wings on cars.

That is just dumb. You don't put wings on cars. You fly in a different machine altogether.

Paul tells the Corinthians that they were just as dumb as that.

wordy

and that could be the real story behind Jesus. Jesus as the concept of a spiritual Christ that incarnate in a historical person named Jesus. The myth is constructed as if the historical person has existed. It is made up that way.

It could have been an add on unto Paul's mission. He himself not so much into the historical Jesus, Paul more about the spiritual Christ available now to those who had faith in that possibility. what became lasting tradition after Paul's dead was the version that survived the redactional editing of the books. I find it very likely they tried to make it watertight but as many has pointed out they didn't succeed, there are too many details showing how they failed.

Isn't one very obvious the story about the fig tree that is without fruit? In one version it is a real event and in another a metaphorical story to learn from. Fish and bread story seems to come in two versions too.

Maybe they was careless or in tight time scedule. They killed each other over the interpretations didn't they? Gnostic versions was condemned. So political power struggle seems to be one big motivation. Paul also talk a lot about competing missiories claiming to be the one's to listen to.

So that tells me that Jesus never existed, the myth could be based on several revolutionary persons though.

From our time. Castaneda wrote about encounter with a Don Juan? an alleged real shaman. but it is more likely that all is fiction based on three different shamans he read about in a library and he made it all up based on these texts he read. Paul and the others who started Christianity seems to have used same technique. Midrash reading of old testament and extarpolating into future what those texts could be interpreted to mean. But presenting it as if real in history. Christ incarnating in a historical person. But it is all a midrash.

Doug Shaver

No, I don't actually, but it would make no difference if I did. I don't consider oral tradition infallible, and before I'll believe that a dead man came back to life, I need to hear it from an infallible source.