A better question would be, why would Jesus rise from the dead, even assuming he really was the Messiah? Christian doctrine holds Jesus was (1) the foretold Messiah; (2) the Son of God; (3) a redemptive sacrifice for the sins of humanity; (4) giver of life everlasting. The crucifixion-and-resurrection story fits in with all that. But, based on such OT prophecies as are clearly messianic, the latter three are not things the Messiah was supposed to be or to do, as Zev Steinhardt will doubtless tell you.
Because the gospels, to be effective religious propaganda, needed a better ending than Jesus dying an ignoble death on the cross and just staying dead? (Who would worship that guy?)
The gospels are nothing without the resurrection coda.
The Attempts of William Lane Craig to Exhume Jesus
This is a detailed discussion of Craig, too much to convey in a few selected quotes but reading it makes me think he is not a serious scholar, just another axe-grinding apologist. Well, okay, just one quote.
Yes. Craig tries to argue that Paul met Peter and James, therefore he must have gotten his appearance formula from them (not in the text). Craig then tries to import the “empty tomb” from the gospels into this purely inferred conversation between Paul and Peter/James. The problem, of course, is that if the empty tomb started with Mark, then Peter and James could not have told Paul about it.
Craig is presuming his own conclusion. He’s presuming the historicity of the gospels in order to prove the historicity of the gospels. It’s circular and it’s bad scholarship.
My (atheist) view is the same as Polycarp’s: that something must have happened, dream, vision, or what have you, to convince Jesus’s followers that he had risen from the dead.
My question is this: if you are going to accept these dreams/visions as proving that Jesus actually did rise from the dead, why not also accept that the much better attested dreams/visions of Asclepius prove his existence and healing power? There are dozens of inscriptions on his temple, thanking him for having come to someone in a dream and healed them. These are first-person accounts, unlike the Gospels. If you’re looking for historical “proof” of religious belief, Asclepius has it all over Jesus.
Why must there have been?
As the Jesus story is prefigured in great detail in previous mythological godmen lives we can just as reasonably argue that Christianity first developed as another Mystery Cult in the same tradition, as Speke does. One that may or may not have taken one of the many messiahs and holy men of the early AD’s (who may have been called by the common enough name of Joshua/Jesus0 and attributed the same mythology and wise-sayings tradition to him as part of the Outer Mysteries of the cult.
Given the similarities between the life of Jesus and many other God-men and the similarities of their message then Occams Razor and the rest of your excellent points suggests to me that is the simplest answer. It’s funny how the Razor gets thrown away for Christianity.
The only unique thing about Christianity seems to be the insistence on a living, historical godman for which there is no real evidence and the fact one brand won the Roman State Religion lottery and so had the muscle to kill off any external competition and any competing christian traditions.
Can you give us a feeling for the texture of these encounters? Does he speak in English? Does he have a physical appearance?
We’ve discussed the question of “historical Jesus” enough before (you can find earlier threads using the search function), so I’ll just say that I think he actually existed because of Occam’s Razor. To me, it’s much more likely that a person named Jesus actually existed than that someone cobbled together a bunch of random myths and got a whole lot folks to fall for it.
And Paul’s letters are certainly “real evidence”: he knew Jesus’s brother, James, for instance.
No, that’s hearsay at best. And, Paul could have lied about knowing Jesus’ brother. I agree with you that the more likely scenario is that some guy named Jesus was preaching for a while in ancient Israel. And at least a small group of people found his message appealing. However, for marketing reasons they just made up the stuff about the miracles and resurrection.
Can you give me the chapter and verse cite for Paul and James so I can see if it’s from the authentic pauline letters or the forgeries?
Thanks.
My best guess is this was invented to better sell Christianity in the Roman Empire. They wanted to shift blame for the death Jesus from Pilate to “those Jews”. They weren’t trying to convert Jews. (Likely for the obvious reason that Jesus just didn’t fit the Jewish expectation of what the Messiah would be.) Admittedly that Pilate would act so strangely based on what his wife told him about a dream (Matthew 27:19) seems like an implausible tale. However, they had to invent some story.
Also, Pilate according to the Bible reportedly admitted Jesus was innocent before Pilate ordered him crucified. At the point Pilate is said to have publicly washed his hands symbolically indicating he considered Jesus innocent.
The thing is, for Pilate to admit Jesus was innocent either before or after the crucifixion (and any delivery of the body for burial would have been an admission of innocence). would have been not only a completely uncharacteristic and implausible statement that he (Pilate) was wrong about something, it would have also amounted to a tacit subversion not only of his own authority but of Tiberius Caesar, the Emperor.
Remember the ostensible reason that Jesus was crucified by Pilate? Remember what the titulus said? To say that Jesus was innocent was to say that the inscription on the titulus was true.
The way I have described it before, and perhaps the only way I know how, is by using the term “conviction”. One moment, I have one outlook on life, on an issue, on a question, or what have you, and the next, I have another. Accompanying this new understanding is a peace, an assurance that the understanding is solid. New interpretations replace old, and nothing of the old remains except memory. (And sometimes not even that — I really can’t remember how I actually felt about some things when I was an atheist.)
Almost always, I immediately begin to attempt to verbalize these phenomena in order to analyze them intellectually. Often, it is metaphor, and sometimes the surprises are breathtaking, at least for me, as when I learned from Him that a theist has no salvational advantage over an atheist, and that He has no concern about belief or rejection on an intellectual level.
That particular insight came one day a couple years back when I took a break from posting, after a rather depressing (at the time) round with Gaudere. She kept assuring me of her happiness, which contradicted my assumption that an atheist could not be truly happy. But even as I typed I felt a sort of spiritual nausea about our discussion. I knew there was nothing evil about her, and I didn’t feel right pigeon-holing her as separate from God. I walked outside with my conflicting thoughts and emotions, and prayed, “Lord, how can Gaudere possibly be happy? She doesn’t even believe you exist!”
Instantly, I was given the understanding, and when I returned to the keyboard, I typed out this: “I am the Love Everlasting. Whatever men say about me with their minds is vapor. I cannot be known by the mind, but only by the heart. Stop dividing the world between atheists and theist, and start dividing it rightly, as I do. There are those who love, and those who don’t. Those who love, they are my disciples.”
I understood then that there is a division between man the animal (brain) and man the spirit (heart). I understood that a man may proclaim God with his mouth, having an intellectual belief in His existence, but be far from God, while another man, who professes that God does not exist, might be a very Godly man indeed. Gaudere, with her beautiful spirit, is more Godly than I.
Would you agree that calling the source of these convictions “God” is itself a metaphor?
In a Nietzschean sense, I suppose all language is metaphor. It seems to me that, based on the conviction that I shared with you, it really doesn’t matter what you call It.
Liberal, we are left with nothing to debate. A temporary state of affairs, I hope; (though I can’t quite bring myself to pray).
Yep. And while at least theoretically I can imagine Pilate would have secretly arranged for the body of Jesus to be handed over for burial, there’s that matter of the hand washing incident. Scripture says that Pilate ordered Jesus crucified, while publicly washing his hands symbolically in front of a crowd indicating he considered Jesus innocent. The Romans did believe in the concept of rule of law. For Pilate to have done that would have been him saying he was a murderer. For Pilate this would have been a Bad Thing.
Thanks to everyone. I really appreciate it.
Polycarp, I always greatly respect what you have to say. However, you place a lot of weight on the “change in the apostles.” However, we have no reliable biographies of them.
For example, people say that Peter would not have died for something he knew to be a lie. Yet, we have no written accounts of his death (where and when he died, and why). We only have the (possibly legendary) oral tradition of the early church. It seems funny to use the boldness, courage, and martyrdom of the apostles as evidence when we have no real record of their boldness, courage, and martyrdom. Proving the resurrection from the apostles’ behavior is proving something uncertain from something even more uncertain.
As for your personal experience, that is extremely subjective evidence. Mormons, for example, tend to have personal experiences by which they become absolutely certain of something that is obviously false.
Your case stands or falls on the reliability of the NT. Unless you believe it to be inerrant, you will notice many inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and historical errors in the NT. The most reasonable conclusion is that the resurrection is one of these places where the NT is wrong.
Poly, how would you respond to Diogenes and many others who can easily claim that there is insufficient historical evidence for the resurrection. It seems that if God wanted us to believe that he raised Jesus, he could have arranged the trail of historical evidence differently: He could have preserved the evidence in such a way that a fair-minded, honest investigator would have no trouble accepting the resurrection.
Diogenes, your view makes the most sense. In terms of the evidence, the claims of the NT seem no better off than any other false religious claims of the time. I see no good reason to believe in the resurrection.
However, I think the “empty tomb belief” is implicit in Paul. Paul, as a Pharisee, already believed in the literal, physical, bodily resurrection at the end of time. In this context, “raising from the dead” already had a standardized meaning—a meaning inconsistent with a full tomb. Now, Paul claims that Jesus’ resurrection is the first installment (1 Cor 15:23) of the eschatological resurrection. How could Paul have claimed that God “raised” Jesus from the dead if Paul knew that his body was rotting in the grave?
Paul treats the resurrection as something extraordinary and unbelievable. It seems impossible that Paul could have meant something symbolic or spiritualized, like “Jesus was raised into the meaning of God” or “Jesus lives on in our liturgy.”
It seems clear that Paul’s statements require that he believed in and proclaimed an empty tomb.
Also, how do you explain the origin of Christian belief? Did it start as a fraud or hoax? I think that is unlikely. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that such outrageous claims could have arisen by accident.
Lib, I also respect what you have to say, even when I can’t understand it.
When you say that the living Jesus speaks to you, what does that mean? To many people it would appear that you are bluffing when you speak of your personal experiences. How do you know that you are not the victim of a very powerful and attractive (but false) meme?
Do you believe in a literal, bodily resurrection? Why? When you were an atheist, what did you think of those who believed in the resurrection?
I wish I had greater expository skills.
I’m not entirely sure. I don’t see apparitions, or anything like that. It’s just an understanding that arises without the aid of my volition. By the time it reaches the brain, it is already finished. I suppose it is something akin to being in a dark room, and knowing someone is there. I think that the mechanics of communication with God is, for me at least, a sort of spiritual empathy. I quiet my mind, and listen for His voice.
Yes, and that’s all right. I can’t expect someone else even to comprehend an experience that is nothing like anything they’ve ever known, much less to trust a stranger that says it has happened. It’s too much for me to demand of a man, that he synthesize that which he himself has not experienced.
Well, I don’t. But then, knowledge isn’t really relevant. God really isn’t about knowledge, but morality — that is, the facilitation of goodness.
I do now, yes. And I do just so it isn’t anything I need to fret about. It just really doesn’t matter. By the same token, it doesn’t matter to me whether God created the universe: it serves His purpose all the same.
That they were pathetic idiots. I was a very hard atheist.
The proper prototype of the crucifixion and resurrection in the Old Testament is not the Day of Atonement, but Passover – just as Passover was a crossing for the Israelites from slavery to freedom, so is the crucifixion and resurrection a crossing over for us from bondage to death to spiritual freedom. Christ is the Messiah, not in the Jewish religion’s mistaken notion of gathering in the exiled Jewish people and establishing an earthly kingdom, but of gathering in and liberating all of humanity, and establishing an eternal and heavenly kingdom. The Church is Israel, which carries the promises made by God and to which the nations have been grafted on as branches to a tree, and the Kingdom has been established – we are just waiting for the time of this earthly existence to be fulfilled and all of the exiles (i.e. humanity) to finish being gathered.