Paul Baxter

Toto,

I'm looking back over that section of the book. I think I misspoke a bit about dating. Some portion of the early Christian writings can (apparently) be dated fairly well, but the Nag Hammadi stuff cannot be dated as easily.

But here is a bit of his concluding section on Nag Hammadi:

. . .we note a complete absence, throughout the Nag Hammadi and related texts, of three themes which dominate the presentation of the resurrection, both of Jesus and of believers, in the line that stretches from Paul to Tertullian and even to Origin.

1. There is no emphasis at all on the Jewish and early Christian doctrine of creation, on the goodness of the present created order and on the one true god as having made it and as intending to remake it . . .

2 There is no emphasis on future judgment, a judgment which requires a resurrection if it is to be truly just . . .

3. There is little or no sense that resurrection goes with a stance against the ruling authorities . . .

[any spelling errors are mine] end quote

As far as the assumption of a god in the argument, I'm not quite sure what to say. Wright does, as an anglican bishop, believe in one true God. He argues on the basis that ancient people were theists. But he does not argue that people thought that resurrection was the sort of thing which was bound to happen sooner or later (with the exception of pharisaic Judaism).

Again, to circle back, my feeling was that this would be the sort of book an atheist might find interesting to wrestle with, but, not being an atheist, I wouldn't really know.

Paul Baxter

DP,

so let me get this straight (and not laugh). THIS is what you find more probable:

quote
According to this theory, the idea of an historical progenitor was not original to the faith even in Paul's day, but evolved over the course of the later 1st century. As Doherty argues, "Jesus Christ" (which means "The Anointed Savior") was originally a heavenly being, whose atoning death took place at the hands of demonic beings in a supernatural realm halfway between heaven and earth, a sublunar sphere where he assumed a fleshly, quasi-human form.
end quote

While I suppose one could present an argumen for anything at all, this doesn't sound anything like anything I've read in any New Testament book. So, emphatically YES, I find the NT accounts much more plausible. At least they are about people.

Let me say that better. The actual documents of the New Testament claim that there was a person named Jesus who did various things and said things within a fairly definable period of time (events somewhere around 30 AD). It seems just prima facie more probable that they wrote about an existing person than that they made one up just as a tool to argue about religious supremacy amongst themselves (as some would have it). But much smarter folks than I have made the case a little better.

Dominus Paradoxum

I know it sounds crazy. But you should go to Doherty's site and read for yourself. Occasionaly he begs the question, but overall he makes a very good case.

Layman

Care to be specific for a change? Afterall, Paul believed in a physical resurrection. That's about as nongnostic as it gets.

CX

Preaching to the choir good sir. I thought your "are you kidding" rhetorical query was directed at the question of if we had seen Wright's work in these parts. You get no argument from me regarding the historical probability of the resurrection. I'm almost tempted to pick up Wright's book just to see what this historical evidence is. I think I'm reasonably familiar with the current state of the evidence for Xianity and consider it inadequate to even determine that the Jesus of the NT was an actual historical person much less any claims made about him.

Dominus Paradoxum

Regarding this:

If Doherty's reading is correct, then none of the new testament epistles (which are the earliest Christian writings) make any reference to a historical human figure as a founder of the movement. If you read the whole article (and I'm sorry to say I suspect you didn't), you would have seen that Paul's use of kata sakra (according to the flesh) is actually more consistent with Doherty's interpretation than the standard historcist one. Doherty does have explanations for the seeming references to a historical Jesus. You probably won't believe them. All I ask is that you go to Doherty's site, and read his introduction and his main articles before reaching any conclusions.

Steven Carr

According to the New Testament, many people thought resurrection from the dead was possible.

Herod was supposed to have thought Jesus was John the baptist raised from the dead.

Let me see - just before Jesus's death there was a popular preacher, unjustly killed, is thought to have been raised from the dead, and Wright considers it totally unprecedented that a popular preacher , unjustly killed could have been believed to have been raised from the dead.

Ted Hoffman

Incorrect. Only the Gospels do. Matthew and Luke copied from Mark. The Gospels were written many years after Jesus supposedly "lived" and no authentic non-christian document talks of a historical Jesus. The earliest references to a historical Jesus are the fabricated Ignatian epistles and Mark which was written by someone who never met Jesus, and someone who was not conversant with Jewish law or even Galilean landscape.

I suggest you consider the implications of the above and put some effort into finding out the truth or falsity of my statements.

It is claimed that Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians :
Ponder upon this, dear friend.

Steven Carr

It is interesting to see Wright whitewash away all the bits in
Paul which say that the final judgement will happen soon...

He is simply a wordsmith, who plays with words until they do what he wants them to.

As he does with 'resurrection', adding layers of meaning in the word, until it becomes true that no other people believed that a resurrection, as defined by Wright, was possible.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/communicate/arc...od/page1.shtml
is a transcript of a chat with Wright.

Wright 'The Gospels that we have in the New Testament stand up remarkably well to historical scrutiny, despite a great deal of skeptical treatment over the last hundred years. The way you approach a question like this is not to ask sentence-by-sentence whether this or that is believable but to lay out the full historical picture as best you can within the parameters set by the history of the time, and make as good sense as you can of the central figure who is portrayed. As I have tried to show in my scholarly work, we can do this fairly thoroughly, and the Gospels come out of it pretty well - certainly as well as the major historians in the Roman and Jewish world, such as Tacitus and Josephus.'

Toto

<groan> That means that Benny Hinn really does heal people?

And of course the only evidence of those "large crowds" that were not large enough to be recorded in any secular history books is - the gospels!