Doug Shaver

I have, in my lifetime, read at least six different accounts of Isaac Newton's life. I don't recall noticing any contradictions.
I am not specifically defending the assertion that they are contradictory. I am defending the assertion that nobody has ever met Barker's challenge to produce a coherent narrative that assigns a time and place to every incident.

Doug Shaver

I have posted the core of Barker's challenge. If you still to have to ask whether the Crosswalk site meets it, then you're being deliberately obtuse.

dr lazer blast

Care to explain to me how its obvious?



I told you like 3 pages back that it is a combination of unbelief and misunderstanding.


Incorrect, my narrative states the joy preceeded the method. Please stay within the rules thanks.


this is you doing a combination of breaking the rules and ignoring my other posts explaining this.


there you go again breaking the rules.

AHAHHAHAHA not only is this a baseless assertion it is also you breaking the rules, I explained in earlier posts what happened and you just ignore it.


Please stop making arguments from silence thanks.

Breaking the rules.

ok so you have replaced your fallacious logic (not totally) with just breaking the rules. Please stay within the contraints of logic and the rules thanks, once again you have found yourself back at square 1.

Amaleq13

If you need me to explain to you why it is obvious that Mary would responding with joy to an angelic message that Jesus was alive, you are hopeless. :banghead:

What I said then continues to hold true. There is nothing in the text to support attributing either to Mary. The doubt and stupidity of the disciples cannot be transferred onto Mary from anything in the texts.

Then your narrative contradicts Matthew and fails the challenge.

Pointing out details you failed to include is not an example of me breaking the rules.

Identifying your "explanations" as implausible is not the same as ignoring them.

You have asserted that the chronology of John 20 to which I refer is the product of my personal interpretation but you are apparently unable to provide an alternative to support that claim.

This leaves us with the apparent chronology I described.

This is a detail of John's Gospel you must include according to the challenge.

Your narrative continues to contradict that detail.

Your narrative continues to fail the challenge.

QED :wave:

Stephen T-B

Time for a summary?
Here are the issues I’ve got.

The Christian message hangs on the Resurrection more, perhaps, than any other event in life of Christ, including the miraculous virgin birth and subsequent miracles.
It does seem extraordinary, therefore, that such very different versions of it should have been included in the NT. I’ve suggested that perhaps those versions had acquired their own followers, and rather than antagonise even more of the early Christians than was already being done by the exclusion of competing texts, the hierarchy made a compromise.
It would have simplified matters if the accounts in the four gospels could have been rolled into a single, coherent narrative, but the differences are so great, such a task was impossible.

Here I shall rehearse those differences once again.

Matthew says the tomb was sealed with a great stone, and a guard was set by the Jewish authorities so that the disciples shouldn’t be able to steal the body and claim Jesus had risen from the dead.
No other account mentions this.
Matthew says that May Magdelene and “the other” Mary visited the tomb.
No mention of Salome (Mark) or Joanna “ and other women” (Luke) .
These discrepancies are extraordinary considering the pivotal importance of this moment in the resurrection story.
So who was at the tomb?

Matthew alone refers to a great earthquake.
A great earthquake, mind. Not some minor little tremor which might have gone unnoticed. No one in the vicinity of a great earthquake can fail to notice such a thing, yet Mark, Luke and John omit any reference to it. That doesn’t even begin to make sense.

Matthew says the earthquake was caused by an angel of the Lord which rolled back the great stone, and sat on it, his countenance “as lightning and his raiment as snow” while the guards were so shocked they “became as dead men.”
These aren’t minor details which might easily be overlooked, or forgotten. So how come neither Mark, Luke nor John include them?

Matthew has this angel addressing the two Marys from the stone; he “answers” them, implying they’ve asked for an explanation, or look as though they want one.
There is now a similarity with Mark’s account. In Mark, the Marys plus Salome enter the tomb and there sitting inside it on the right hand side is a young man clothed in white. Matthew and Mark agree that his message is pretty much the same: Jesus, who they seek, is risen, and they can see where he was laid.
Mark’s angel instructs them to tell the disciples, and “Peter” by name, that Jesus has preceded them to Galilee where they will see him. Matthew’s angel doesn’t mention Peter specifically.
As they run off, with “fear and great joy” (fear of what? Well, they’ve just seen a figure which in both accounts, frightened them so one might reasonably assume that they are still very agitated), Matthew says they (the two Marys), are met by Jesus - they take hold of his feet and adore him. And he repeats his message about Galilee. (According to John, when Jesus is first seen he says "don't touch me because I haven't yet ascended to my Father).
Then Matthew has a detail about the guards (who’d been knocked out?) and the “Ancients” giving a “great sum of money” to the soldiers to spread the story that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body, “and this word was spread abroad among the Jews even unto this day.”
Matthew has the eleven going to Galilee, meeting Jesus “And seeing him they adored: but some doubted.”
Then he gives them their mission.

Mark has Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdelene. This is unequivocal. “…he appeared first to Mary Magdalene“
She then finds the disciples, who are mourning and weeping, and she says she has been with Jesus., but they don‘t believe her.
Mark then says Jesus appeared “in another form” to two of the disciples” and the others didn’t believe them any more than they’d believed Mary Magdelene.
(This doesn’t even begin to chime in with Matthew).
Finally Jesus appears to them all, upbraids them for their disbelief, then gives them their mission..

So now to Luke.
Here we have “women” - Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them” going to the sepulchre, going in, not finding the dead body of Jesus and “ behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:”
So not one, really spectacular angel sitting on the stone, nor one angel sitting on the right hand side in the tomb, but two angels.
Their message, however, is pretty much the same as the angels’ in Matthew and Mark: Jesus is risen (plus some reminders about his own prophecy concerning his resurrection which we don’t get in the other two gospels). Then we read: “And they remembered his words.”
Nothing said about Galilee, or Peter; just that they “returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.” Then we get confirmation as to who it was who brought this message: “It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.”
In accordance with the other versions, the 11 don’t believe them, but Peter “ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.”
According to Matthew and Mark, Peter ought to have gone to Galilee, the angels in their versions having said that that was where Jesus would meet the disciples.
Luke, clearly, hasn’t heard that version; not only does he fail to mention the angels‘ instruction, but he has Peter violating it.
Luke has a long and detailed account of Jesus meeting “two of them” on their way to the village of Emmaus (first mention of such a place) and names one of them as Cleopas. Luke says he shared their evening meal with them, “ And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.”
So now they return to Jerusalem, “and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them.”
Jerusalem, note. Not Galilee where Matthew and Mark have Jesus meeting them all. And it’s at this meeting in Jerusalem, according to Luke, that Jesus reveals himself to them and “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”
He even ate some broiled fish and some honeycomb. So that earlier “vanishing out of their sight” had been a neat trick - unless of course he’d just dodged behind a tree… And his sudden appearance is a bit mysterious too.
Anyway, he leads them to Bethany, gives them their mission, and “was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.”

By now I am thoroughly confused - but there’s John’s version yet to come, adding new layers of incoherence.
He gives some hitherto unmentioned details about the tomb never having been used before, but goes along with Mark, saying it’s Mary Magdelene who goes to the tomb. No one else mentioned. The stone has been rolled away, sure enough, but there are no knocked-out guards, no stunning angel sitting on the stone, no angel on the right-hand side in the tomb, no two angels in the tomb either. Obviously no messages about Jesus having risen and meeting the disciples in Galilee.
All she sees is the empty tomb: “Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.”

Makes perfect sense: she’s gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body - finds the stone has been rolled away (not, as far as she knows, by an angel or angels), and the tomb is empty. Her conclusion: someone’s been there and stolen the body.
Peter and “that other disciple“ (remember - according to Mark, it was Peter on his own...) therefore go to the sepulchre to check her story - and yes, the body’s gone - but the linen cloth and “napkin that was about his head “ (thus, incidentally, ruling out the image which appears on the “shroud of Turin” as being anything but a fake) are still there.
But ignorant of the scripture, “that he must rise again from the dead“ they went away again unto their own home.”
Now John brings Mary back into the tale - she’s “without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,” and this time she sees two angels, “in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.”
Does she know they’re angels? John doesn’t say, but when they ask why she’s weeping she give a matter-of-fact answer (no mention of her trembling with fear): “they” have taken the body and she doesn’t know where “they” have put it.
Then she turns and sees Jesus, (this is consistent with Mark, who has Jesus revealing himself to Mary before anyone else) but John’s story has details (she doesn’t recognise him and thinks he’s the gardener) which appear nowhere else.
And we have Jesus telling her not to touch him because he has not yet ascended to his Father, but to tell the disciples and “say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”
Nothing about Galilee.
Nothing about Jesus meeting two of his followers on the road to Emmaus.
He instead appears through locked doors where the disciples are “assembled for fear of the Jews” (an odd expression, considering they’re all Jews too - is this a later attempt to distinguish “Jews” from “Christians” and make the Jews look bad?) and gives them their mission.
Is the "Jesus", at this stage, a physical being which can be touched, and therefore consistent with the Jesus in Matthew and Mark? I don't think so.
But he gets to be real because then comes the Doubting Thomas story, and one about meeting the disciples at the sea on Tiberius, giving them advice about catching fish and sharing the catch and having a meal on the shore and a whole lot of stuff not mentioned anywhere else. And apparently there was a lot more, besides: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

The Acts is very much more circumspect but does refer to Jesus “being seen of them forty days“ He finally meets them in Jerusalem, gives them their mission and they witness the Ascension: “he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.
And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel;
Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.“
Yet more angels! And not mentioned in any of the other stories.
No mention, by the way, of Bethany where Luke says he was “carried up.”

If these four “gospel writers” were giving evidence in court, they’d be torn to shreds.

andrewcriddle

One should note that this is based on Mark 16:9-20 which is probably not part of the original text of Mark.

Andrew Criddle

Keith&Co.

Well, that would be a solution to the riddle...the details are the work of men, not God.
You could apply that to any niggling little problems and cut out disharmony with a scalpel.
Of course, then you're just begging a critic to assert that all the details ,even the harmonized ones, are the work of men, not gods. Which would require the B'leever to show his proof that the REAL story is god-breathed, and how he tells the difference.

James Brown

I feel sorry for John's angels.

Apparently, Michael, or whomever is responsible for handing out Earth assignments to the heavenly host, calls *two* angels front and center for their mission:

"Descend to Earth and ask that woman why she's crying. Of course, we already know why she's crying, so make it sound like you're being rhetorical. Don't tell her anything--don't make any proclamations, don't wave your sword around or blast your trumpet or anything else angelic. No, just ask her, 'Why are you crying?' She'll answer you, but don't reply or try to comfort her, because at that point Jesus will step in and take over. Then you're to return for debriefing, and don't dally. If she leaves and returns with someone else to verify her story, they can't see you or the jig is up. Oh, and one more thing . . . I'm sending both of you, but only *one* of you needs to ask her why she's crying. The other of you can just stand there and radiate or something, I don't care."

Talk about your underwhelming assignments.

dr lazer blast

ok so you made a basless assertion that you cannot back up. Another fallacy keep going your rackin em up.



another argument from silence and a strawman. I never said the doubt of the discipels is transfered to mary so thats 2 fallacies.



another baseless assertion you're full of them.


The alternative to the chronology of jhon was the narrative which I said in an earlier post. Once again the only thing you can do is either break the rules or use logical fallacies which leaves you once again at square 1.

Im sure there are other people wililng to bring valid criticims to the narrative using logic and staying within the rules.

aChristian

I will try it one more time. I would like a simple yes or no please.
Is it possible that Mary's emotions changed at all from the time the women went to the tomb until John 20:2?