graymouser

It occurs to me that there is an overriding central difficulty in accepting any account of a historical Jesus - above and beyond the lack of attestation. This is quite simple, actually:

The tomb.

Not an empty tomb; a tomb with bones in it too. The tomb element in the story demonstrates the complete fictitiousness of the entire crucifixion account - for the plain and simple reason that crucified criminals were not buried. They were left exposed to die horribly (and very slowly; Jesus dying in a few hours is most questionable) and be picked to pieces by scavenger birds.

The Gospels make another absurd suggestion - specifically, that Pilate let Joseph of Arimathea have Jesus taken down to the tomb on Friday afternoon because the Sabbath was coming. Pontius Pilate's chief hobby as ruler was Jew-baiting; while I think the concept of the man who established worship of Zeus in the Temple having crucified would-be messiahs quite reasonable, his supposed concessions to custom are downright laughable. (Indeed, the whole character of Pilate in the Gospels is almost definitely not written by a Jew who lived through Pilate's reign, a convert to Christianity or no.)

The whole tomb business is something that, to a contemporary reader, would seem ridiculous if they were given it as a transcription of historical events, regardless of whether they think it was empty on Sunday or not. As history, they'd be able to tell immediately that it got the details wrong - but as a myth, it would be almost immediately acceptable. The mythic god-man expires (in the powerful symbolic position with his arms outstretched) the same day and is buried, to rise again three days later; this is an established pattern.

The Gospel writers, having some intelligence, and the audience, being aware of events, should not be held so gullible as to accept such accounts as fact - indeed, I'd say that the jarring nature of the crucifixion account makes much more sense if the Gospels were intended to establish Jesus as a myth and not as a flesh and blood crucified criminal.

The very idea that the Gospel crucifixion accounts have any bearing on history is extremely weak when you consider the supposed burial; historians can see it now and audiences could when they were first written. Accepting them as having had anything to do with history, therefore, is hardly a sound proposition at all.

-Wayne

Johann_Kaspar

Not only this. All the gospels are showing writing and re-writing of the same story (and not hi-story). It means that the different and successive writers were making up pieces of literature when they felt completely free to modify, to add or to delete anything they like or dislike to fit any other scripture or interpretation of that former scripture. Now the gospels meaning is completely upside-down.

Vinnie

IIRC, Raymond Brown spends several hundred pages on the tomb material in the Gospels in Death of the Messiah. I reject it but the tomb story is not as easy to dismiss as you make it out to be.

Vinnie

Llyricist

This is pretty hilarious coming from someone that dismisses Doherty's similarly verbouse arguments with even less reason to do so.

graymouser

So, care to give any explication behind your position at all? I think the problem of the tomb - the very thought that a crucified political criminal in the Roman Empire would be buried (when the exposure of the body was a large part of the punishment's intention), and by Pilate in accordance with the Sabbath laws is laughable then as now. Can you demonstrate otherwise at all?

-Wayne

MortalWombat

I don't think the lack of a burial is a problem for HJ of itself, because one can make the argument that the HJ behind all of the myths was crucified and left to rot, but later legends had him buried in a tomb. Not that I subscribe to a HJ (I'm agnostic with MJ leanings), but I'd just thought I'd play devil's advocate for a minute.