Vorkosigan

You are not reading what I am writing. This creed (not taken from one of the Gospels!) goes back to the thirties.

There's no evidence of that.

Since we are speaking of E.P. Sanders and the evangelist's creating stuff up, I refer you to his repeated comments that Christian creativity was at a minimum in the gospels! If you read his work you would have known that.

What methodology does Sanders use to make that determination? Without a methodology, it is just his personal opinion.

In any case, literally hundreds of scholars have identified fictions in the gospels. These range from the water walk and the resurrection, to the birth narrative and Jesus confounding the elders in the temple at the tender age of 12. We could spend all day citing authority after authority. Without a methodology, neither you nor Sanders has a case.

In any case, Sanders does point out many cases in which the story is changed for dramatic effect. For example, he says it has been compressed. Further, he regards the gospel of Mark as "not...a first-hand diary of 'life with Jesus in Galilee', but an edited collection of individual events that may originally have had another context". In other words, he says, in a roundabout and indirect way, that Mark's account is invented and fictionalized. The underlying sources may not be (assuming Mark used them, which no one has proven). As Norman Perrin bluntly puts it, "The outline of the Gospel of Mark has no historical value."

Further, Sanders regards the accounts as theologically rather than historically constructed. "We do not move directly from his [Jesus'] life to the gospels. We move, rather, from his life to early Christian use of individual incidents as examples to score some point or other". Of course he also says "At a very early date Christians began improving on the gospels sparse accounts by making up stories". Hey, no kidding! Like all the gospels, which are made-up stories. This doesn't seem to me like "Christian creativity" is at a minimum -- does he offer some rational measure of "creativity?"

Couple this with the fact that Sanders never tells us what a sound historical method would be for extracting truth from the gospel fictions. Looks like Sanders is unwilling to say straight out that the accounts are unreliable and fictionalized, but nevertheless that is clearly the case from The Historical Figure of Jesus. He can pussyfoot around the truth all he wants -- he does have to sell books -- but the facts won't disappear no matter how he slants them.

Here's another thing to think about. Resurrection scenes were common in Hellinic novels of the Roman world, and very popular. F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Writing on the way we interpret the Gospels as history, "How far we do so," observes Kermode, "because of the saturation of our culture by the Gospels and traditional interpretations one need not try to say." See also , B.E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins (1967), or by B. P. Reardon, The Form of Greek Romance (1991). For possible Eastern antecedents, G. Anderson, The novel in the Graeco-Roman World. Resurrection accounts, open tombs and similar themes were a dime-a-dozen after the 40s, when the gospels were written. Both Celsus and Origen were aware of this.

I stole all this from http://www.christianism.com/ which has millions of interesting and useful articles and excerpts.

I never said the Rez stories were not puffed up. And I refer you to read Sander's chapter on miracles in light of this comment: "statement that "if the gospel writers were clearly making miraculous stuff up to make the story of Jesus more powerful"

Since they WERE making stuff up, from individual events and episodes to the entire framework of the story, and the canonical gospels all know each other more or less, well, the conclusion is obvious. How can you know any particular event is a historical fact? Much less be so sure that you base your personal beliefs on it.

Of course, it gets even weirder. If your mechanic told you that demons made your transmission fail, or if your doctor told you that monkey brains, rubbed in a slit in your head, would cure your migraines through sympathetic magic, you'd reject both out of hand. Far from being"bankrupt," methodological naturalism has made possible massive advances in human knowledge. Your position has neither philosophical nor historical methodological support. No historian of antiquity accepts any miracle of antiquity as a genuine violation of the laws of nature.

Let's go over your four points:

• 1) Belief in the Rez occured very early after the crucifixion of Jesus (anywhere from a few days to a few years) (on the basis of the ancien pre-Pauline formula.

There is no evidence that the formula cited is pre-Pauline -- it smacks of later interpolation (I assume we are talking about 1 Cor here). Price has identified several features of it that look like later legendary emendations. It does contain non-Pauline language, but that does not tell us much.

• 2) Deliberate fraud is not a worthwhile consideration for reasons delineated above.

Considering that deliberate fraud was the norm in antiquity, it is hard to believe that you can make a statement like this. As evidence of this, I offer everything from second-century complaints about fraud, to the existence of forged epistles of Paul, to the redactions in the gospels. Obviously fraud and Christianity go hand in hand.

• That Jesus' original followers had Rez experiences is a fact.

Incorrect. The fact is that others reported that they had claimed to have Resurrection experiences. No original follower of Jesus as left us any account of these experiences.

Further, people making up spiritual experiences is an event so laughably common, especially in self-serving legitimation contexts like that of nascent Christianity. It's common in cults -- see the Taiping generals, who claimed to get messages from Heaven when they intriguied against each other.

Furthermore, Paul's letters demonstrate that legitimacy in early Christianity was derived from the claim of having seen the Risen Christ, not from being appointed by Jesus. Paul nowhere says any of the pillars of the church were appointed by the original founder, whose purported life on earth he knows nothing about. So in fact, we have (1) many parallels for bogus claims of seeing the dead,especially in the context of power struggles within cults (2) testimony that in early Christianity legitimacy was conferred by resurrection appearances and (3) no account from any of Jesus original followers that would give us any idea of what they experienced.

I agree that some early Christians claimed to have seen the Resurrected Jesus, but which ones, and what they saw, will probably never be known.

4). No one was probably looking on a roman Cross for a Messiah. In fact, the Cross was an an impediment to early Christianity. The claim that this man who died on the cross was the expected Messiah who was bringing about the defnitive divine rule was probably seen by many as nonsense.

No doubt, but people make up such shit all the time. Saying that the idea is difficult to accept does not make it less fictional. The major ideas underlying Scientology are even dumber and less believable than the Resurrection (which at least has a popular and enduring mythic power), but it has adherents all over the world.

The Christians discovered their savior in the OT, and constructed him out of OT references. I found a reference to Henry Shires' ( Finding the Old Testament in the New, 1974) , who tracked down more than 1,600 references to the OT in the NT. Phrase by phrase, the NT is constructed out of the OT. What does that mean about Jesus?

Vorkosigan
Robert Ingersoll (1833 - 1899): "Religion is like a palm tree; it grows at the top. The dead leaves are all orthodox while the new ones are all heretics. "'

Family Man

Untrue. I've asked this question many times on this board and have never got a straight answer. Show me one miracle outside of the Christian tradition that historians generally accept as historical fact. There aren't any. Even an conservative as Raymond Brown says we can't take the resurrection as historical fact for that very reason.

I love it when Christians accuse the entire academic community of
bankruptcy. Is it the academics that are bankrupt, or is it the Christians that make such accusations?

That isn't my argument. My argument is that just because someone believes something crazy doesn't mean that it is true. That's a refutation of your fallacious argument. If reasonable evidence can be found for a crazy claim, then I'd be willing to believe that it is true. But I'm not willing to believe that something crazy is true just because it's crazy.

BTW: you don't seem to understand what I'm saying. Your four questions are worthless because they are arguments from incredulity In essence, your argument is: "It would be crazy for the early Christians to believe unless they had real resurrection experiences, so the resurrection must be true." This is parallel to "It would be crazy for the HG cult to kill themselves unless the comet was a real spaceship, so it must have been a real spaceship." Neither statement follows.

Yes, I have read what you said. You seem to be taking those pieces and issues at face value when there is no good reason to do so. That's the point I've been making here.

That's a huge if. I see major problems with those "data" that can't be easily dismissed. In fact, at worst, you'd have a rival theory, though in fact no one knows exactly what happened.

There are reasons why historians dismiss miracles as evidence -- they are by their nature unverifiable and they are universally promoted by those with an agenda. Your "four pieces of evidence" are highly dependent on such miraculous events, and thus, by all historical standards, must be dismissed leaving you with nothing to hang you hat on. So, yes, they are easily dismissed. You can believe if you want, but you can't say the resurrection occurred as a fact with any degree of confidence or intellectual integrity.

So? My argument has nothing to do with this.

Just because someone isn't very creative it doesn't follow that they aren't making stuff up. It simply means they weren't very good at it, which in the case of the gospel writers means they were getting most of it from the Old Testament, not that they weren't making stuff up. Yours is an incredibly poor reading of what Sanders meant.

And if you had read Sanders you would know he doesn't make the leap that you do -- a) that that means they didn't make things up at all and b) that the resurrection is a historical event.

?????

The bottom line is this: the resurrection stories depend on miraculous events of the type routinely and properly dismissed by historians, the logic and evidence of your argument is flawed, and the authors of the resurrections aren't reliable on this particular subject.

Family Man

As a sidenote, in the very same paragraph that Sanders talks about how the gospel writers were making stuff up and how their creativity was limited, he goes on to discuss his belief that they weren't lying in the traditional sense. Instead, they were deriving their beliefs from other sources -- dreams and visions was one thing he definitely cited -- and assuming that there visions were true.

Then, when he discusses the resurrection at the end of the book, he states that they had resurrection experiences but he was unwilling (unlike Vinnie) to say what those resurrection experiences were. While I can't say this with absolute certainty, I think it is a reasonable inference that Sanders thinks that these resurrection experiences were dreams and visions himself! It is a little ironic that not only do I get my counter-argument from the same author as Vinnie gets his, but from the very same paragraph! You'll excuse me, Vinnie, if I don't take your accusations that I didn't read Sanders closely enough very seriously when you don't even recognize the source of my counter-argument.

I don't have the book at home, but if I can find a copy of Sanders book in my local library I'll provide the appropriate quotes tomorrow.

Vorkosigan

You are not reading what I am writing. This creed (not taken from one of the Gospels!) goes back to the thirties.

In any case, the creed cannot go back to the 30s. There would have been no reason to develop a creed about an actual historical event to which living men and women were witness. Creeds occur much later, when things are in doubt, schism threatens, and Authority is required to keep the unruly in line. A creed is a sure sign of later creation and interpolation.

-DM-

The way that I see it, if "God" were truly perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, personal, and loving, he would have no use for a "Vinnie" or tens of thousands of apologists and evangelists (or would it be millions?) spending millions (or would it be billions?) of dollars and man-hours to try to convince us that the so-called Resurrection actually took place, muddying the waters in the process with their nonsensical arguments. For "God" to leave us with the can of worms that is "The Resurrection" would belie his alleged perfection and love for "His" creatures.

-Don-

Dargo

It is amusing that some Christians will waste their lives trying to prove the existance of a god who is too lazy or unable to spend ten minutes proving his existance to the world. With one appearance, god would provide infinitely more proof than all the apologists in Christian history combined. The arguements of nonbelievers would be totally silenced by such a revelation. Of course since god is nowhere to be found, we infidels florish.

leonarde

Posted by Dargo: Well, by some accounts He spent not 10 minutes but something like 33 years doing just that----not including any burning bush appearances or other OT claims.But any "apologist" worth his salt is referring back to events of that 33 year period. Think so? I doubt it. Plus he would have to keep reappearing every generation or
so since the younger people could claim it was all a mass hallucination of their elder

GreggLD1

First you have to show that the events of Jesus' life can be accepted as historical.

Then you have to show how these claims and miracles of Jesus are different from similar claims and miracles made by other reputedly historical individuals.

Finally, you have to explain why an omnipotent being would find it so much trouble to reappear every 20 years or so to convince the current generation of his existence. And before you say "but of course, a lot of people would just say it was a mass hallucination" or "the Devil would convince most people it was a mass hallucination" remember that "omnipotent" thing again. That means there's NOTHING God can't do. If he wants to convince people of his existence beyond ALL doubt, he can do it.

-DM-

If the [long-overdue] "Second-Coming" were to occur in the manner that the New Testament says that it will, the problem(s) that you mention would be precluded. Although some wil allegedly nevertheless stubbornly reject slavation, everyone will allegedly recognize that "God" exists.

-Don-

-DM-

"God": The One Supreme Being who, although omnipotent and omniscient, permits the vast majority of his creatures to worship false gods, thereby thwarting "His" own, most important purposes.

"God": the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and all-wise, infinite mind who, for strictly personal reasons, makes a point of seeming to be an impotent, know-nothing, nowhere, bumbling oaf.

- Rev. Donald Morgan, "nontheist theologian"