Honestly? No. I believe the Bible. I don’t neccessarily need to verify every single incident outside the Word of God. You make a good point though. It would be interesting to see if there are any other historical documents that detail the apostles after Jesus. However…let’s be real for a moment regarding Jesus’s tomb. IF the Romans or the Sanhedrin had produced the body of Christ…we wouldn’t be talking about this “resurrection” business would we? The Bible would be invalid and the world would have been EAGER to quash this “messiah” nonsense.
Jesus was either a who he said he was or he was a hoax. It’s a simple choice. What are you going to do with that?
I can agree with this. I also believe the Bible and don’t feel that I need to verify everything it says from an outside source. I consider it reliable and God’s word. If you think Jesus didn’t rise from the dead bodily, then produce His body with absolute proof that it’s His. Cholo is right, you either believe Him or you don’t believe Him…simple choice. Everyone makes their own.
[short hijack] His4ever, earlier this month I asked you why you posted on this board, and I liked your response. I should have thanked you for your answer at the time. But better late than never, so thankyou.
[/short hijack]
Cholo- But if you simply believe in the Bible, and that’s that, then why present all these arguments for it? And why do you expect me to believe that the Romans producing the body would have stopped the talk of the Resurrection?
Who’s arguing?I simply addressed the post regarding the resurrection and why it rings true to me. I stated that the Apostles are recorded in the Bible of turning into true believers that Jesus was indeed the Son of God AFTER the resurrection. Bear in mind they became cowards once Jesus the man was arrested. Jesus’s favorite, Peter, denied he even knew Jesus at three separate times in a matter of hours after Jesus was arrested and he was the same guy who stated he would lay down his life for Jesus that same night. They ALL fled in fear…so the real question is…what turned them into zealots after Jesus died? What made them go into other countries and spread the gospel (which of course means “the good news” as in “he has risen”) for decades until their deaths without fear about the consequences? Why would they devote their lives to someone who was a liar? That’s exactly what he would have been had he stayed dead wouldn’t he?
Regarding my comment about the Romans. Think about it. There would have simply been no reason for anyone to buy off on Jesus as the Son of God had he not resurrected. The Sanhedrin and the Romans did not want this Jesus nonsense to go any further than it did. His following was growing and threatening the power and authority of the Sanhedrin and they pleaded/manipulated with Pontius Pilate to officially have him executed. The Sanhedrin also wanted to be sure that the Apostles did not steal his body from the tomb to give any credence to Jesus’s earlier message about rising from the dead in 3 days. That’s why they stationed guards outside the tomb. Once the resurrection occured the Sanhedrin and the Romans were stunned. Rumors abounded that Jesus arose. (Bear in mind, Jesus was seen by others than just the 11 Apostles at this time) I’m sure by then, the Sandhedrin and the Romans would have LOVED nothing but to quash these “rumors” and the simplest way to do so would have been to parade his body. Had they been able to produce his body, the resurrection of Jesus would have been proven false and the ministry of Jesus would have therefore been invalid. Therefore he would have been PROVEN to have been a liar and a lunatic like all the other so called “Messiahs” who came calling to Jerusalem at this time in history. But they couldn’t produce his body. The tomb was empty. This “Messiah” was entirely something else.
Ryan, I answered your question. How about answering mine this time? I’ll ask it again.
Jesus was either who he said he is or he was a hoax.
What do you say?
Cholo, there’s one small problem with your last comment. What the Church has created as a theology of the nature of Jesus Christ (“Christology”) is not necessarily who and what Jesus was. I happen to believe it’s a good approximation of the truth using Aristotelian/Athanasian logical categories – but I can respect someone who says that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah that the Jews expected – a man – but in a role of “victory in defeat” rather than “Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes” (which is Judas Maccabaeus, not Christ, anyway).
AFAIK, any person who ascribes any degree of approach to accuracy to Matthew, Luke, or John, or to either of the two endings of Mark, will have to admit that something happened that changed the lives of Jesus’s followers from rather doltish and fairly cowardly individuals into people standing against torture and death for a truth in which they believed. The various theories to explain away the post-Easter stories suffer from the fact that, on the presumption that the Gospels are reporting something anywhere near the truth, almost immediately people began acting quite different than they had. Something convinced them.
I think a lot of skeptics have a big problem with the idea of the resuscitation of Jesus’s physical body – it sounds like a particularly cheesy “B” horror movie – “Night of the Undead Messiah.” (And in the back of my mind I can see Jesus chuckling at that idea and doing three or four stiff-legged arms-extended Boris Karloff-style zombie steps, grinning all the while.)
The fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians gives Paul’s reasoned explanation of what it was that happened, and why, and I think it’s among his finest pieces of writing. It’s quite long to quote here unless someone feels it essential, though.
Christian, no. Follower of Jesus Christ’s desire that we all love each other and act accordingly, yes.
All religions involve a single common thread, faith. In order to believe in a theology, it is necessary to compartmentalize rational thought and accept that which you cannot prove.
The “resurection” is only one of many tenets/concepts that are beyond our ability to verify. It requires an act of faith, not reason.
Cholo: explaining why a particular set of claims leads to another set being true seems like an argument to me. Not “argument” in the sense of “quarrel”, but “a course of reasoning”.
Your argument, or explanation, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t make sense to me. You believe the Bible because the stuff in the Bible makes it seem like the stuff in the Bible is true?
As for the “where’s the body?” question, I could talk for days of assertions that been shown to be definitely, absolutely, without a doubt false, and yet people still continue to believe them. In my experience, in every society there is a large population of highly gullible people, even in one such as ours where people have unprecedented access to information. I see absolutely no reason to suppose that Roman Judea, with even less public access to information, was an exception to this rule.
Also, you seem to be still expecting me to take for granted that Christianity was this huge concern that you claim it was. I just don’t see any reason to suppose that the Romans really cared.
There’s another major problem with your position. You say that the body disappeared despite being securely guarded, and say that because of this the disciples believed in Jesus. But this works the other way, too. The vast majority (as in probably 99.99%) of the people of Judea didn’t believe in Jesus. Now, it’s a basic principle of logic that if A implies B, then it follows that not B implies not A. So if Jesus’ body disappearing implies that people would believe in Jesus, then people not believing in Jesus would imply that Jesus’ body did not disappear. Seems to me we’re faced with two possibilities. One is that Jesus predicted that he would rise from the dead, and did so, and we have to explain how an entire country, when confronted with incredibly convincing evidence, managed to continue to not believe in Jesus. The other is that Jesus did not rise from the dead, and we have to explain why people believed in him anyway. Faced with having to either dismiss a small group of people who quite possibly were the ancient version of today’s cultists, or dismiss an entire population, I’ll go for the former.
As for whether Jesus was a liar:
Seems to me that if you believe that what the Bible says Jesus said, he said, then he clearly was wrong. Liar? Maybe not. But he was definitely wrong.
The more recent scholars Bonhoeffer and Bultman wrote some thigns that imply they though Christians needs to live regardless of God; that is, they needed to live as if there were no God, while following the precepts they bvelieved in. Mysticism was just too tired out to them. However, it also should be noted that they lived through the dark days of Nazism, and they tended to believe that the world had gone to hell completely.
I don’t mean to be argumentative, and I am not educated enough to know the answer. But your argument that Jesus was definitely wrong hinges on the word ‘generation’, yes? I wonder what the actual concept would be in the original tongue? A bible here at work offers an alternate translation of ‘generation’ as ‘race’ . In that context Jesus was neither a liar or wrong.
Just a thought. In the end it all comes down to faith. What is interesting is what some people put their faith in.
Perhaps when Jesus was saying “this generation shall not pass away, etc” he was speaking of the generation that saw the things he was talking about begin to come to pass. Just a thought. I don’t believe Jesus was a liar. We sometimes misinterpret what He says.
But remember that I said “Seems to me that if you believe that what the Bible says Jesus said, he said, then he clearly was wrong.” Could it be that what the Bible says Jesus said is wrong? Yes. But We’re operating under the premise that the Bible is correct.
His4Ever
If you’re going to allow that sort of nitpick, then I say the Bible never claims that Jesus rose from the dead. Just try to prove me wrong.
exactly.
The generation that saw the sign (the 1967 war in Israel IMHO) was the “last” generation.
IIRC, a generation, in the Bible, is 40 years.
So…times running out!
When I was growing up, the “sign” was believed to be the formation of Israel in 1948. Since 1988 has come and gone with no raptures, tribulations, or second comings, I guess the date has to be moved forward? I wonder what will the sign be once 2007 comes and goes too?
