Family Man

Unfortunately, although the Sanders book was supposed to be on the shelf at the local library, it wasn't. I will be at another library on Wednesday and I'll look up then -- if only to have it the next time someone tries to misinterpret Sander's "they weren't very creative" comment.

However, Meier's book The Marginal Jew was so I thought I skim through it to see what I could glean about his attitude towards the evidence. While I'm not going to claim to grasp all of Meier's arguments, once again, I can see how careless reading leads to claims that we can glean more information about miracles than historians would normally admit. In fact, on the question of whether ancient miracle could have occurred or whether we can say they did occur, Meier was quite specific:

In my view, these wide-ranging questions are legitimate in the areas of philosophy or theology. But they are illegitimate or at least unanswerable in a historical investigation that stubbornly restricts itself to empirical evidence and rational deductions or inferences from such evidence.

Despite the claims that Vinnie makes about how historians should consider miraculous claims (and a myriad of other theists on this board), even a conservative NT scholar as Meier rejects that notion. In fact, in Meier's analysis of the miracles claimed for Jesus, all he is trying to do is to determine whether the belief preceded Jesus's death, not whether the miracles actually happened. That distinction never seems to appear in the apologistic comments that appear on this board (which appear to rely on Meier). From Meier's conclusions, if accurate, it would seem to be that Jesus was little more than a glorified faith healer, since he concludes that Jesus's more interesting miracles (such as walking on water) were later inventions of the church. However, whether Meier was successful I'm not in a position to say -- though I've seen his criterion challenged by other scholars. I know that Vork heavily contests many of the things that Meier says.

leonarde

Partial post by GreggLD1:And if "God" appeared tomorrow how could a theist 2000 years
later "show" that it was an historical event? To a dedicated non-theist, I submit, that is not possible.
Hmm. You just made my
point: you essentially said that even if Jesus existed more or less as portrayed in the NT and that was proved to your satisfaction, even then you would demand some "deconstruction"
of other religions. Fairly unrealistic. Confirms my conviction that you aren't open to even considering Xtian claims as you already have a "fall back" position staked out.

Cheers!

Clutch

Ah, I love it when Christians trot out my very own contribution to the Big List of Theist Arguments.

Vorkosigan

Actually, not really. Mostly his criteria, which are utter failures in the NT context.

Vorkosigan

malookiemaloo

malookiemaloo

Im fully accept that there are diffulties of interpretation and (in the case of the post resurrection events) problems re harmonising events. I wonder if the difficulties are more imaginery than real and with a bit of objective study, they could be harmonised after all. There are many so-called contradictions in the Bible that disappear with a little knowledge-and lateral thinking at times. The lenght of King Pekah's reign being a case in point. (20 years in the Bible but actually eight.)

If we regard the gospel writers as historians we make a grave error. The writers had little regard for history, particularly when proclaiming the resurrection. After all, if you were the first person to witness the resurrection you would be beside yourself to get that point across (even 30 years later when you write it down) that details could be a blur. I am NOT saying that the gospels writers made mistakes just that all else pales into insignificance when proclaiming something like the resurrection.

The bottom line is this. On a Friday evening a tomb had a body in it. By the Sunday it was gone. Sceptics, to me, have never explained this.

Family Man

No, the bottom line is that we don't know if the empty tomb is a legitimate story. Given your admission that the gospel writers weren't writing history, we can't assume the empty tomb story is a legitimate one. Since much of what the gospel writers wrote were fabrications designed to bolster their arguments, how do we know this one isn't either?

Family Man

Which is what I meant.

Benjamin Franklin

You are assuming that the empty tomb is historical in the first place. There are two esssays in the secular web library that deals with the historicity of the empty tomb

One is by Jeffrey Jay Lowder

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...der/empty.html

And the other is by Peter Kirby

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...mb/index.shtml

And furthermore the resurrection stories appear together with the empty tomb story, which means their evidence is exactly the same. Therefore if you consider the empty tomb to be historical based on the available evidence, then it automatically follows the resurrection is historical. There is no need to argue for the resurrection based on the empty tomb. Which is why Archbishop Carnley pointed out that it is entirely possible that the empty tomb is an legend which arose from the belief in the resurrection story. I enclose a quote from him from Peter's essay



"[124] Carnley, ibid., pp. 60-61: "For, try as we may, and with all the positive good will in the world, we simply do not have sufficient evidence to say for certain whether the tomb is a very primitive story whose kernel is factual, or whether in fact it is a later development, the product of faith, given a particular set of theoretical presuppositions about what might necessarily be involved in resurrection belief. Given the meagreness of the evidence it is difficult to see that the logical shortfall can be overcome by purely rational argument, using only the critical techniques of scientific historiography."

malookiemaloo

I've read Jeffrey Jay Lowders work on the resurrection. I thought it was quite outstanding.

I don't think the empty tomb proves anything. (Although how it became empty has not been explained, apart from the resurrection, other than to say 'I don't believe that anyone could rise from the dead.')

The empty tomb is simply a rather obvious consequence of the resurrection.