Just to be clear, I’m claiming ambiguity: I’m saying that it’s substantially plausible that Paul believed in a physical resurrection of Jesus. To make that case you have to go beyond the text though – but surely it’s reasonable to pull in other evidence of the oral traditions of the day. (Reasonable, but Dio can easily argue not definitive. But again I’m saying that thin evidence is necessarily consistent with a range of defensible interpretations. Which is not to say that other aspects of Paul’s theology can’t be gleaned).
Occam’s Razor may favor the purely spiritual resurrection story. But Occam is not decisive here, or so I argue.
Under the physical resurrection premise, Jesus’ physical resurrection is analogous to and a promise for the spiritual one that believers will enjoy. As for 1 Cor 15:12 - 19, Paul isn’t writing a treatise or a legal document: he’s trying the cheer up a congregation. Paul is hardly going to say: “Jesus rose from the dead, but it doesn’t affect any of us. Pretty cool though, huh?” No, he says, “We live! God rose Jesus (as we believe regarding the miracle) and he can do something analogous for us too!”
Gnostics: that’s compelling evidence in my view: that moves the needle towards spiritual resurrection. So we have 2 conflicting oral traditions to weigh. I don’t get your next point though: I assume that widely disbursed small congregations would believe a variety of things. Whether due to temperament or a longer vision, Paul struggles to keep the troops in line, with rather mixed success. While his listeners tolerated him, many of them were apparently dubious of his argumentation.
3a. A for the Q in the OP: Faith. And tradition. And divine guidance of the church. And because we said so. But that point has been made: this is a matter of doctrine.
3b. I’ll say though that the question is a little odd. If a transcript was unearthed entitled Peter the Apostle: the Pauline Interviews and it claimed a physical resurrection, it would be an exciting find but I would hardly consider it ironclad evidence of the supernatural. See 3a.
While this could be evidence, of a sort, I suppose, I think it’s obvious that it’s a forgery. For one thing, the image is not distorted as it should be.
That’s a fair position and I can understand the reasonability of the physical resurrection. In my opinion I think Carrier makes an extremely good case in the Empty Tomb. That said, I’m not sure that I could make such a compelling case.
To make my position more explicit, I find the spiritual Christ compelling - but I don’t think that those who do not hold it are irrational.
I think the analogy is substantially weaked if you put that as Paul’s message. If our resurrection is different than Jesus’, then why should the congregation believe that they will be raised?
The idea of a physical resurrection seems to harken back to Lazarus - if Jesus’s resurrection was physical, then how was it different than Lazarus? Also, what of Paul’s insistence that flesh cannot enter Heaven?
I suppose my point is that it seems a lot easier for me to see the two versions of Christianity (I’m generalizing, I know there were more than two) if the core concept of Christianity was difficult to understand - i.e, a spiritual resurrection.
After the collapse of the temple and the groups were scattered, the knowledge not quite lost, but not easy to get to, I can see a group forming which thought that Jesus had physically resurrected. I could see that group writing out the gospels to try to make it more explicit.
It’s harder for me to see the reverse, that Jesus was physically resurrected and then a spiritual view came into being far later (100 years or whatever).
It’s not impossible, but it seems harder for me to believe.
The shroud is an enigma. It does represent a man that was crucified. The image contains no known material or substance that was applied to the linen. It still baffles many scientists. I can’t connect all the dots, but as for physical evidence, this is as close as it gets. And carbon 14 dating is still in debate to due the damage of the shroud from fire and other contaminants throughout the centuries.
[QUOTE=Megas P.]
Meatros and Diogenes, as we are discussing whether Christ and not any hypothetical person resurrected or not I think you will both agree that magic and giant ice ants from Pluto come as a second to God as far as how Christ was resurrected.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
Right, envisioning that our universe was created in a closet and not some fully formed reality makes just as much sense, and wasn’t intended to misrepresent or belittle(?)..
…It is not just as likely that some being stuck in a closet decides to create a universe as to say that being exists in his own fully formed reality…
[/QUOTE]
It is not just as likely that Jesus was resurrected by ice ants as by the God he is quoted as preaching about. And quoted by people who had a heck of a lot more reason to know than you do.
The actual analogy would be, you saying you saw your grandmother raped by a chair, and me, not believing you, (and I wouldn’t,) saying “these things can’t happen… and I can prove it, because these things can’t happen. Whenever you think it might have, go back to that statement, and that proves that these things can’t happen.” That won’t convince you if you saw it because the reason I gave is circular and not worth a damn. But, secondly, I wouldn’t have initiated a conversation at all.
That is what Dio is doing, and you obviously can’t recognise a circular argument, either.
His premise: these things can’t happen.
Our rejoinder: If we find Paul reliable, (along with Mark and Luke,) we’re forced to conclude Jesus was resurrected. (not concerned here with physical or spiritual.)
His rebuttal: Paul wasn’t reliable. Paul was “obviously” hallucinating.
Our Question: Why wasn’t he reliable? Why was he “obviously” hallucinating?
His “argument”: the proof is overwhelming… wait for it… because these things can’t happen.
His premise is only supported by his “argument.” And they are the same statement. Circular; therefore, there is no argument. The burden of proof has shifted because of his repeated statements that these things can’t happen backed up by his belief that these things can’t happen. He can’t support it, so his claims have no weight, and he has to support the statement before he can use it against us.
#132
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
See, no one would expect that, especially at the time. It’s only in hind-sight, after coming to see Jesus as the risen Messiah that you can say, “oh, he kept those because it’s the symbol of his greatest triumph. Not his greatest defeat. He came specifically to be humble unto death, and He accomplished that. And by that he redeemed the world.”
[/QUOTE]
#136
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
There is no evidence that anyone claimed to have seen Jesus with holes in his hands. We have no idea what, if anything, people may have actually hallucinated. If you want to assert that holes in the hand is not something anyone would have hallucinated, that’s fine (specious but fine), since it hasn’t been shown that anyone claimed to have seen such a thing in the first place. No explanation is required.
[/QUOTE]
(emphasis mine.)
What? If no one claimed it, why did you bother to ask the question?
#173
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
“Resurrection body?” So now you do think he came back in a spiritual body rather than a physical body? Why did he still have holes in his hands?
[/QUOTE]
And then ask it again? Seems a little insane to ask a question, and when you get a response, to claim no one claimed it… (If no one else had, there was no reason for your initial question. And if no one else had, you **just did **in your initial question…) And then to ask it again. Seriously?
How do I explain a text that was lost to history, and had no impact on the partriachial societies around it? I don’t really have to explain that.
Even the Catholic church, which worships Jesus’ mother, Mary, was historically extremely patriarchial and misogynistic, and treated women, at best, as second class citizens.
The Gospel of Mary itself has Peter and Andrew questioning her reliability. (“Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us?”) And appears to be trying to convince us.
You don’t make a doctrine more trustworthy by saying it came from “unreliable” witnesses. However, you can make someone seem more trustworthy by showing they explained what you already believed.
There are two basic reasons to report from “unreliable” witnesses. To make the witness more reliable, or as a simple statement of what you think happened.
The Gospel of Mary strikes me as doing the former, and Mark appears to be doing the latter.
My point was simply that the ‘testimony of the women’ is not actually ‘testimony’ and was not looked at it that way back then. Modern apologists attempt to foist it as evidence, when it is not.
IIRC this was a later development. This came after the Gospel of Mary, for example.
So should we trust women or not? It seems that even according to Christian tradition, women are dubious. If that’s the case, then why do you put any weight on their claims?
Further, the much more likely explanation is that Mark was trying to make an excuse as to why people hadn’t heard of the resurrection before - it is because the women didn’t tell anyone.
In any event, the Gospels do not present the women as giving testimony, so the entire point is moot.
As to your two basic reasons - I’ve presented an alternative to your false dilemma. You are presupposing the Gospels as accurate, which is why you are coming away with two options. The truth is there are many.
I’m not sure how the Gospel of Mark is supposed to be trying to make the resurrection more reliable by introducing the women. Again, they are not introduced as giving testimony, they are not introduced to strengthen the story, despite what apologists would have Christians believed.
In fact, they supposedly told no one - which goes directly against this idea and undercuts the Gospels themselves.
So if it did have a 1900 year tradition you’d believe it?
So how about the beliefs of the ancient egyptians, you have three soul-type things and their pharaohs are kings. You get weighed against Ma’at after you die. That tradition is longer than 1900 years, does that give it any more credibility?
How about astrology, which is about as old as human history - does the length of time people have believed it have any impact on whether or not it’s true?
It’s hard to see how. Please explain.
There were people in south america who lived during the same time - that doesn’t mean that they would be good witnesses.
Also, I have the opportunity to meet Kim Jung Il in the since that I live during the same age and I could theoretically have transportation to reach him - that doesn’t mean it’s likely I would. Further, my meeting him would do nothing to support his claims of controlling the weather.
This ‘evidence’ you mention is grasping. You wouldn’t accept it for claims of Muhammad or Joseph Smith.
Again, what does the amount of time something has been believed have anything to do with whether the thing is true or not?
Why?
Your example in that thread made no sense - begbert2 seemed to be arguing that your naming of the reality was suspect. I can’t really comment much about this since I haven’t read the thread or have only read your snippit.
The question remains, what makes it more likely that Jesus was resurrected by God as opposed to aliens? We can throw the ice ants out, if you wish.
I think you completely misunderstood me. I give them no credence at all. My point was that being educated, or knowing good and well about the lack of evidence, doesn’t necessarily stop people from being believers.
While there is an element of justice in what you say, I think that the “rejection of the impossible” is something we all do, pretty much every day. We do not accept highly implausible claims.
When a little child says, “I saw an elephant,” we think, at first, okay, maybe the circus is in town. We say “Where?” “On the roof.” And, poof, just like that, we stop bothering to give the statement any further credibility.
I recently read Plutarch. Basically, it seems to be a sound history, or series of biographies. But Plutarch keeps telling stories about miraculous auguries. The night before a big battle, the figure of Dionysus was torn out of the tapestry of the gods in the temple in Athens. That sort of thing. Over and over. A cow gives birth to a lamb. A statue spoke aloud.
I reject these statements. I’ll accept that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and had a battle with Pompey. I will not accept that the entrails of a tern had writing on them indicating a defeat in battle.
A local Indian restaurant has a photograph of a Yogi holding up a 70-ton steel beam. It’s a photograph!
And I reject it. I do not believe that this scrawny little guy in a loincloth is actually holding a 70 ton weight in the air. I don’t care that there is photographic evidence. I think it’s faked.
I agree that Diogenes the Cynic would be committing a lazy argument if it consisted of nothing other than “it’s impossible because it’s impossible.” But we know too much about human physiology to accept a human body dying, then coming back to life. God would have to do immense, detailed repair to denatured proteins, coagulated blood, etc. It just requires too many concessions to reality as we know it. The elephant on the roof is vastly easier to believe!
The key to all of this is evidence. Show me the elephant on the roof. Let me examine the 70-ton weight that the Yogi is holding. Give me a reason to accept that Jesus rose from the dead…or that the statue wept or that the cow gave birth to a lamb. Show me the evidence.
Tradition is not evidence. And the testimony of the gospels is very, very weak. The fact that there are many spurious gospels which even Christians reject is, to me, a tremendous undermining of the “canonical” ones. Apparently, every Tom, Dick, and Jeremiah was writing gospels in that era. Why accept some and not others?
As asked above, why accept the tradition of the resurrection of Jesus, but not the tradition of the resurrection of Osiris? Why is one story “just a myth” and the other a revelation of the creator of the cosmos? I see 'em both as about equal in terms of evidence.
There is no way a person with sincere intellectual curiosity has spent time and effort to educate themselves and be aware of the world around them, and still be honestly supporting any religious argument.
Religious beliefs are ego-centric psychological drives of self-gratification, and whoever knows even a bit about reality, is aware of it already.
Exactly. Compared to the anonymous Christian gospels, the Book of Mormon is much better attested. In its preface is the sworn statement of several eyewitnesses that they have seen and hefted the gold plates, filled with heiroglyphics and given by an angel to Joseph Smith, which he then translated into English. The statement concludes,
“And we give our names unto the world, to witness unto the world that which we have seen. And we lie not, God bearing witness of it.
Christian Whitmer
Jacob Whitmer
Peter Whitmer, Jun.
John Whitmer
Hiram Page
Joseph Smith, Sen.
Hyrum Smith
Samuel H. Smith”
As Mark Twain remarked, “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.”
Every argument I’ve ever heard for the validity of the Gospels applies to the Book of Mormon. For example.
“Believers were persecuted and killed, so why would they die for a false doctrine?”
“The religion grew rapidly from a handful of poor followers into one of the richest and fastest growing religions in history. How could that happen if God wasn’t working in it?”
“There were people around who could have checked, so why didn’t they debunk it?”
On that last one, before anyone responds that as a matter of fact, the vast majority of people where Mormonism was founded did not believe it, remember that the same was true of Christianity. Palestine remained firmly Jewish, and Christianity was more successful in places like Greece, Rome, and Asia Minor, where the people knew next to nothing about Jewish prophecy, and had no way to check the claims of the Gospels.
These points you bring up are interesting - some people did try to debunk Mormonism while it was founding. I would say this is no different than Christianity - since even Christian apologists try to argue that the Gospels contain evidence of enemy attestation (the Jews claimed the Christians stole the body!).
Also, it’s interesting that the Jews who were trying to debunk Christianity were not doing it as modern skeptics would do. Instead they argued from scripture that Christianity was invalid. The dialogue with Typhro (sp?) shows this. His complaints were the Christians were mistranslating scripture (virgin birth) and mixing Hellenistic ideas with Judaism (he brings up Hercules, Perseus, and some others).
During the ancient times miracles were commonly accepted. Superstitious belief ran rampant. I believe one of the historians even commented on his annoyance of the common folk running around during an eclipse banging pots and pans to get the Sun back (a superstitious belief).
This is taking the word of a human who was possibly having a hallucination,doesn’t mean it happened, just as there are people today who claim they see Jesus. There are also people who claim to see the Mother of Jesus, they all describe a different looking woman. The belief is only in their mind, not a fact as they cannot prove it happened. Self hypnosis is also a possibility.
It doesn’t make sense to me that God, Jesus, or any spirt being, would just pick a person out and not make themselves appear to all people. Nor do i belive a loving God would have some of his children kill others.
One cannot say with certainity that an angel dictated a whole book to Muhammed and there is just as much reason for some to believe that, as the NT or the OT.
The length of time itself has no bearing on whether something is true. I explained it in the previous post. You quote it in your next question, which is basically the same as this one, so I’ll answer them both in a moment.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
Paul, Mark and Luke lived at the same time and in the same part of the world as people who saw the actual events. They had every opportunity to meet people taught by Jesus or the disciples, or to speak to the disciples themselves. They have a possibility of being connected to the event. Their word has more weight than you do, making a claim 1900 years after the fact with no connection to the event. If you want to make the claims equal, you’ll have to show us how your claim dates back and connects to the event. Even if you don’t believe them, their claims can not be disconnected from the events. Where your claim can’t in any way be connected to the event. There is no way in which these have the same evidentiary value. You don’t understand evidence at all.
[/QUOTE]
not length of time, connection to the event. My point can be stated as it already was…
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
Their word has more weight than you do, making a claim 1900 years **after the fact **with no connection to the event. If you want to make the claims equal, you’ll have to show us how your claim dates back and connects to the event. Even if you don’t believe them, their claims can not be disconnected from the events. Where your claim can’t in any way be connected to the event. There is no way in which these have the same evidentiary value. You don’t understand evidence at all.
[/QUOTE]
If you said you had personally seen Kim Jung Il control the weather, I would discount the claim immediately if you were shown to have never been within 1000 km, (or 1900 years,) of the man.
I would consider it closer if you could be shown to have met him, or at least been in the same city at the same time. The two situations do not have the same evidentiary value. Even if I don’t believe Kim Jung Il can control weather, I now have to consider if you might make it up, or probably saw something, but mistook the event, or if you got it right. I don’t have to consider any of that if you have no connection to him at all.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
It is not just as likely that Jesus was resurrected by ice ants as by the God he is quoted as preaching about. And quoted by people who had a heck of a lot more reason to know than you do.
[/QUOTE]
Umm, they had a heck of a lot more reason to know than you or Dio do…
I was saying, if there is a being that could create this entire universe, he probably lives in his own fully formed reality. Begbert2 said more than once, that it was just as likely he existed in a closet attached to this universe. Just like in this debate with you and Dio, I was showing that the two situations don’t have the same value as evidence as you all claim, (resurrection of Christ in one case, the reality God would live in in the other case.)
You can’t see a difference in the one case, I’m not surprised you can’t see it in the other either, since it’s the same difference.
Already answered, but once more. If Dio had had a history showing that the ice ant theory could date back to the event. Was believed at the time by people who had a good chance to meet Jesus or the disciples, or those people directly taught by them, and quoted Jesus and the disciples as having said ice ants did it, Then, I would have to lend them relatively the same credibility. Since he can’t, I don’t. His, and your, claim to being of the same value shows you don’t understand evidence.
You don’t have even this much for NT claims about Jesus.
They had less, actually. They were in no position to know anything at all. We at least have the benefit of critical scholarship and historical perspective. The authors of the Gospels had no connection to the events they wrote about (and sometimes demonstrably fabricated) historically, geographically lingusitically or culturally. The Gospels were written by Gentiles outside of Palestine to a Gentile audience in a Gentile language 40-70 years after the alleged events without any access to witnesses. In point of fact, the supernatural claims in the Gospels cannot be shown to have existed as having been made by Jesus cultists before the Gospels themselves. What makes the claims made by the NT Evangelists any more credible than the claims made by Joseph Smith or Lafayette Hubbard?
Meaningless tautology. If magic can happen then magic can happen. Fine. Now show that magic can happen.
You don’t have this for the Jesus claims either. They can’t be traced back to Jesus or the disciples.
