We already mentioned the Yohanan find. The current site of the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher indeed rests on a a site that Constantine’s mother claimed to have been revealed to her by visions. However, there is no actual evidence connectining the site to Jesus, and no evidence of any Christian veneration of a tomb in the 1st Century. 2nd century traditions are meaningless.
It’s my understanding that there are two “burial” places or Jesus (my memory is hazy regarding this though). Neither has a lot of credible evidence to support it. The suggestion is that they were created because Constantines mother (wife? I can’t remember, so take this with a grain of salt) was visiting the land. SHe also got the “nail” for the Spear of Destiny and some wood from the cross.
As to the bone box of the crucified person, that suggests that it’s possible that Jesus’ body could have been given for a proper burial - but I see no reason to think it was actually probable.
We do not know when the Gospels were written. A theory that seems plausible to me is that Luke and Acts were written by St. Luke, a physician, and a traveling companion to St. Paul, and that he used as source material Mark, and a more primitive gospel scholars call Q.
I have read the Bible from cover to cover in several English translations. Acts appears to have been written when St. Paul was still alive. He is experiencing a comfortable house arrest. The reader has been assured that he has not violated Jewish or Roman laws.
Writing three hundred years later Eusebius said that St. Paul was executed before the Jewish Uprising of 66 to 73 AD began. If Acts was written when St. Paul was still alive, it was written before 66 AD, Luke was written earlier, and Mark was written earlier still.
I differ from the scholarly consensus in giving an early date for Mark, Luke, and Acts. However, there is a consensus that St. Luke, who traveled with St. Paul, wrote Luke and Acts. He would not have had the incentive to wait for decades before writing those books.
It was very improbable, but I didn’t say it was impossible.
Even the assertion that Hadrian built the Temple of Venus on top of a site reputed to have been the tomb of Jesus is without real foundation. That was a claim made by Constantine’s court historian, Eusebius and lacks any actual corroboration contemporaneous with Hadrian.
It’s true that there are a couple of competing sites for the Holy Sepulcher site, mist notably the Garden Tomb.
The character of Luke the physician is 2nd century folklore without either internal or external corroboration. It’s true that the author used Mark and Q as sources, though.
No, Luke was written sometimes in the 90’s, long after Paul was dead. The fact that he uses Mark puts it around 80 (Mark has to be post 70), but Luke also shows knowledge of Josephus, which puts him much later. The most conservative dating for Luke-Acts is 80 CE, but they’re more like 90-100.
Writing three hundred years later Eusebius said that St. Pau
There is no consensus that the author of Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, and Mark’s post 70 dating is pretty much bulletproof. It sounds like you read a lot of apologist writing on this subject, but not much genuine scholarship.
I’ve been doing some reading and I ran across the following, I thought you might be interested:
True. I’ve found that ‘very improbable’ somehow translates to ‘probable’ to certain Christian apologetists.
I was listening to Craig’s debate with Luderman (his second) and it struck me as completely odd that Craig would expect the disbelievers of the first century christians to put a lot of effort in discrediting this small blooming faith.
It’s as though Craig expects the early disbelievers to be CSI agents who had an unwavering determination to stomp out any new faith.
Why assume that? It makes no sense. With what I’m learning there were multiple Jewish sects. Apparently there was one that worshipped Herod as a messiah (according to one thing I read - I haven’t verified it yet, so take with a grain of salt). Why focus on Christians?
Paul also seems increasingly bizarre to me if you assume he was talking about Jesus being resurrected physically. Then again, I am right in the middle of Carrier’s essay on a spiritual resurrection, so that is coloring my interpretations.
The “why didn’t the Romans (or Jews) show the body?” meme is a pretty common apologetic which rests on a multiplicity of unfounded assumptions. I don’t know why Craig bothers to try it in debates with real scholars.
I think it’s because his audience isn’t typically composed of scholars. I think that the average person would think ‘hey, that’s a good point, why didn’t they just trot out the body’?
Craig’s opponent would have to respond on multiple fronts, taking up A LOT of time.
The opponent would have to:
- Ask why anyone care to do this.
- Point out that there’s no reason to believe that the disciples ‘spread the faith’ instantly after Jesus’ death.
- That the gospels don’t necessarily correspond to history (this would be a lengthy endeavor).
- Question the assumptions:
A. That Jesus had a tomb
B. That the disciples knew where the tomb was
That’s just off the top of my head.
During the Ludeman debate, Ludeman said something to the effect of by the time they started preaching it (40 days after the event) the body would have been decomposed.
Craig responds that if there was a body (decomposed or not) in the tomb this would have been sufficient to dispell the resurrection claim.
This strikes me as misguided though:
- Why wouldn’t the Christians just deny that it was Jesus? After all, they had seen Jesus, obviously this decaying body in the tomb was a ‘plant’ by the very same Jews who crucified him to begin with. It’s not like we have any first century skeptic’s accounts on the event. At best I suppose you could appeal to Matthew, which was decades after the fact.
- Assumes the early Christians believed in a physical resurrection.
- Assumes that even if there was a body that it would have remained in the tomb. Wasn’t the tomb ‘on loan’, so-to-speak from Joe of A? I swear that I have it in my head that it was because they needed to get Jesus in the tomb before a specific time.
We actually have an example of something similar to this - Sabbatai Zevi:
Nothing dissuaded these people that Sabbatai was not the messiah. It’s not hard to envision the early Christians in a similar spot. A body is produced, it’s decaying - unrecognizable, it’s presence goes against their experiences (Jesus visions and the like), it couldn’t be their Jesus.
Another assumption is that anyone would have recorded such an event as an attempt to display a body even if it had happened. Why would anybody write that down, and then keep copying it for generation after generation?
I think the main premises that have to be supported, though, are that the disciples ever claimed a physical resurrection, and that there was ever a tomb. Neither of those claims are found in the earliest layers of Christian literature.
ETA of course, the presumption that anyone would have cared what the disciples were saying is also pretty tenuous. Most people even in Jerusalem would have had no idea who they were or who Jesus was, and cared even less.
That’s true.
I don’t think we have any writings from critics of Christianity for several hundred years, do we? I think we have a lot of Celsus work through a response to Celsus - we don’t actually have his work. That’s* after *Christianity was gaining ground (decades a century (?) after the fact).
I agree.
The Markian account, IMO, can’t be trusted. The other gospels are based on that and what does that say about them?
Dio, what do you think of the spiritual body hypothesis? I’m reading Carrier’s essay and I find it quite compelling.
Out of curiosity, why do you dismiss the Markian account, generally agreed to be the earliest? I mean up to 16:8, which includes the women finding the empty tomb. The post-resurrection appearances in Mark were added later of course.
I don’t think that Mark was written as history. I do think it was the earliest and I think the other Gospels depend on Mark (which is problematic). Mark doesn’t claim to be an eye witness.
I’m also starting to agree with the idea that the earliest Christianity was not what was preached in Mark.
The only reason to trust Mark seems to be because of it’s popularity - IMO. It seems a lot of gospels had their source in Mark.
I have heard theories that attempt to show Mark as derived of mythical elements - but all I’ll say is that I’m sympathetic to them, since I am not an expert in history, myth, and I have not done extensive reading on the matter.
BTW - If you accept that 16:8 is the end and you accept that Mark is writing history, how did the story of the empty tomb get out?
Firts I should say that I don’t think we can necessarily infer much about Paul’s personal beliefs from surrounding Jewish beliefs because Paul was idiosyncratic and iconoclastic in just about every way. He was obviously informed by very personal experiences, liberally interpreted scripture and was adamant that he was not taught his Gospel, but got it directly from Jesus.
Personally, I think that he believed the physical body was destroyed (“sowed in corruption”) and reborn as entirely new bodies. His language is rife with allusions to harvest rituals and terminology, and his metaphor for the bodies being “sown,” the decaying and becoming raised again as “firstfruits” are direct references to pagan agricultural metaphors.
Paul’s own reputed hometown of Tarsus had an annual ritual where it burned the local god (a local hybrid of Herakles, and the Cilician harvest god, Sanadan) on a giant pyre to symbolize the destruction of the vegetation by the sun, followed by a descension of Herakles into Hades, and a resurrection in the spring. There are inscriptions from ancient Tarsus calling Herakles a theos soteros - “savior god,” and this Tarsean ritual was similar to other sowing (“dying”) and resurrection metaphors found in other Pagan agricultural mythology (Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz - the latter two are closely related, and are also related to the Cilician Sandan - all are basically variations on the theme of vegetation being destroyed by scorching ANE summers and reborn in the spring).
Because of these allusions in Paul’s language, and because of his Tarsean/Cilician background (which I think gets overlooked and underrated in attempts to analyze Paul’s language and psychology, and that trying to simply him to “Jewish” is overlooking a huge part ofhis formative environment), shows that Paul believed in a pagan-style, total destruction of the physical body, and the creation of a whole new, purely spirtual body. He says explicitly that the physical, earthly body is destroyed (soma psuchikos/soma epigeion), and replaced with a body that he calls “heavenly” (epouranios) and “spiritual” (pneumatikos).
I think Paul believed in a spirtual resurrection, not a physical one, which is not to say that I think the crucifixion itself was not a physical event. I think the first experiences of a resurrected Jesus were visionary experiences later literalized as physical.
I think Wright’s equivocating about the physical body being wrapped in a spiritual body is ad hoc nonsense, by the way.
I think I would agree with you with regard to general Jewish belief. I do think that, if the spiritual body idea of Carrier is correct, then we can gleam some understanding out of other Jews at the time. For instance, Carrier quotes Philo as a Jew who had such an idea. I think I might have quoted a few instances in this thread.
I agree with the general thrust that you are getting at here though.
I think this is Carrier’s idea.
I think it actually accords rather nicely with Genesis, actually. Again, Carrier pointed out that God made our ‘corruptible’ bodies from dirt and ‘breathed’ into these bodies. Paul says at several points that flesh cannot get into heaven. He also makes allusions, as you say, towards new bodies.
Frankly speaking, I’m kind of digging on the idea, it sheds new light onto Christian belief and it’s actually appealing to me in a mystical type way.
I’m not quite up to speed on Pagan beliefs. I’m researching this, but it’s going slowly. On a board which shall not be named, I listed a website and asked about it’s authenticity. From what I can gather it’s fairly decent. It accords with what you’ve said here (from what I can tell).
I did want to pick your brain a bit though, speaking of a historical Paul (the reference to the home town), what’s your opinion of the radical belief (of Dr. Price) that he didn’t exist or was “Simon Magus” (sp?).
Yes, I would agree with this. I believe this is what Carrier’s essay supports. It seems very reasonable to me.
I pretty much agree here.
I think that 2,000 years of dogma is hard to resist… 
Since, in another post, my mistrust in the Gospels was brought up, I thought I’d share something. I’m pretty sure you are aware of this (or could correct me), but some of the other participants in this thread may not be and it may germinate some good discussion.
That said, I might be participating in a debate on another website about contradictions in the bible and the contradiction that I’m going to bring up is the contradiction between Luke and Matthew regarding the genealogies.
Generally I think that Matthew and Luke were written at different times for different audiences and I am not convinced that the authors were aware of each other. They both relied on Mark and felt compelled to include various details, including a link to the davidic ancestry line so as to match up with Jewish Messianic expectations. Since they weren’t aware of each other and they were essentially putting in names they thought should be there, their lists do not match.
Apologists generally say one of two things regarding this:
- The discrepancy is because Luke’s genealogy refers to Mary’s line. I think this is hogwash and is not supported by any evidence what-so-ever. There is no evidence (biblical or otherwise) that the Jews during the period practiced this or understood this. In fact, this site says:
What’s interesting to me is that no one gave a fig about Mary until the Gospel of James and then that was written to settle the question of why Mary was special.
According to my research the first time that this contradiction was noticed or addressed was by Africanus (whom Eusibues -sp?- quotes), which according to here:
I found a paper by scholars who did try to explain the discrepancy - their solution was that the author was writing at a different time, when Roman influence would have been felt. The Romans had the “adoption” requirements that would work in this situation. So the author simply assumed that the Jews during the time would have used Roman rules (which from a Jewish perspective would be absurd).
I find this an intriguing, yet utterly damning, idea.
- Apologists will appeal to Jewish adoption - which the paper I quoted makes quite clear is an utterly non-jewish idea.
I think that Paul can said to at least have been historically by tautologically defining him as the author of the authentic Pauline corpus if nothing else. I haven’t read Price’s Simon Magus theory, but I don’t see a prima facie reason to doubt the existence of Paul as essentially how he portrays himself in his letters.
I agree with all of this. The genealogies simply contradict eachj other, and there’s no way around it.
Obviously, they both have to be fictional anway, since there were no genealogies of any kind going back to David and Solomon, much less Adam.
And the Davidic bloodline can’t be passed on through adoption.
I had a long answer written and then I realized I had misinterpreted your question. You’re saying that if the women who were witnesses of the empty tomb went away scared and didn’t tell anyone (16:8), how did the story get out – right?
The fact that Mark tells the story of the empty tomb shows that it got out somehow, but he doesn’t explain how. Some have theorized that the original ending of the gospel has been lost - since it ends so abruptly and with no explanation as to how people found out about the empty tomb.
I don’t know if this is a fair characterization of Wright’s view, but I haven’t read his book on the resurrection yet. I think the summary of Paul’s understanding (the physical body is destroyed and replaced with a “spiritual” body) is accurate, but the question is what do we mean by a spiritual body? We tend to think of spiritual bodies as incorporeal or ghost-like, but there is no reason to believe that Paul thought of it this way.