So say you. But then, your whole case requires you to take this extreme position in order to try and argue that belief is evidence.
At this point, you’re being slippery, because you are simply repeating a contention I have already responded to. There is no reason to think that they would have to deliberately lie. They just believed, and no doubt rumor and myth spun out very fast, and they were very inclined to believe. Which is the case for all sorts of things that Christians must believe are false. And we don’t really know what they believed or asserted. We only know the game much farther down the game of Chinese telephone.
It certainly seems like it was far from a universal concern and dogma until later on.
Well, she made a number of predictions she said came from the Virgin Mary that turned out to be false. I see no reason to believe the Virgin Mary was really talking to her: there are many reasons to think that she was a possibly mentally ill young girl who in those more primitive times was treated as a phrophet (it happens). The alleged miracle, in fact, is a perfect example of how sincere belief can come to believe that grand and amazing miracles are at work out of nearly nothing at all.
Just what I said. But it is extremely poor evidence. First, the writer of Matthew could not have had first hand experience with the events, and almost certainly could not have talked to Mary. Second, miracle birth stories were very common - Matthew making up the story is certainly a plausible explanation. Third, as I said, one of the pieces of evidence supported a prophecy that did not exist. That you haven’t explained. A true prophecy, that the Messiah will be born in the home of David, did not come true and got explained away by the suspicious hit the road for the census bit. Given the lack of confirming evidence for the events in Matthew, isn’t the most plausible explanation he made them up?
Right. So you really think there is a possibility that Eusebius would say that the resurrection did not happen? He’d be a crispy critter in no time. Scholars are very suspicious of evidence without independent support, especially if the writer had ulterior motives - in Eusebius’ case, staying alive. I’m not saying that he found evidence against the resurrection, just that his conclusion was foreordained.
First, it is odd indeed to depend on a so-called historical event for which there is little or no evidence against an event (the flight from Mecca and the subsequent victory) for which there is. Second, of course the resurrection was important. The Messianic prophecy as understood did not include the Messiah getting arrested and executed. Those who believed in Jesus had to come up with an explanation. Is your quote from Paul from the part he is understood to have written, or the part he almost certainly did not write?
Oddly enough, this growth happened in the population who would not have had direct knowledge of the resurrection. Those who would have been aware of it, had it happened, showed a remarkable lack of interest. It is very interesting that the further away you got from the event the more believable it became. I’m sure the lack of knowledge of what the Messianic prophecies actually said helped too. The Son of God bit is very Greek/Roman also. Their gods had children all the time. The Jewish god was way beyond that. I speculate that Jesus got promoted to godhood to compete against the divine emperor.
You really think Christian scholars, many of them, don’t have the conclusion first? Some like Spong don’t buy it - you see how popular they are.
The closest thing you’ve presented as evidence is a Christian scholar working from documents now lost which supposedly were eyewittness accounts, in an environment where checking evidence they way we do today had not been invented. Fairly feeble evidence, if you ask me.
The text of Simon Greenleaf’s treatise (it’s not a book) is available here.
This first thing you may notice is that it dates from the 19th Century. The next thing you will notice is that it’s a frankly devotional piece which stipulates from the outset that…
The argument is pretty much over right there. Greenleaf begins his case by asserting that there can be no argument as to the authenticity of the Gospel traditions. It goes downhill from there. Greenleaf proceeds unhampered by any knowledge of modern scholarship or higher criticism. He demands that the Gospels be taken as eyewitness accounts, that the “witnesses” must be presumed to be telling the truth, etc. The whole piece is a masterpiece of question-begging and circular logic.
Note to JThunder: it is not true that Eusebius is regarded as a reliable historian. It’s quite the opposite actually. Eusebius is important because he is the only source for some quotations and other traditions of early Christianity but he was also biased and credulous, prone to report fantastic claims of miracles (in at least one case, even claiming to have witnessed one) spurious legends (He quotes a bogus correspondence between Jesus and the King of Edessa) and he even claimed in Ecclesiastical History (12:31) that “…it will be necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a remedy for the benefit of those who require such a mode of treatment.”
Historians use him as a starting point because they have little else, but he is regarded as wildly unreliable and it’s absolutely not true that they accept martyrship traditions for the apostles based on his say-so.
Nonsense. You have presented no credible evidence that the people you mention knew “Jesus” or witnessed anything that might be considered reliable evidence. Your completely unjustified implication here is that people would not martyr themselves for something that wasn’t true or was at least believed based on strong evidence, whereas the truth is that many millions of people have willingly martyred themselves for what they – quite mistakenly – only imagined was true based on no sound evidence whatsoever. In short, martyrdom is not only not “proof”, it is not even “evidence” that the beliefs they held had any foundation at all.
As for this Greenleaf guy, please provide official citations from professional legal (and non-religious) sites affirming that he is “one of the greatest legal authorities of all time”. I am quite skeptical, especially considering that the amazingly dumb web site to which you linked started right off committing the primitive logical fallacy known as a “False Dichotomy”. No legal mind would ever make such a stupid mistake, let alone a “great” one. But even in the unlikely case that he is a great legal mind, he (at least according to the web site you linked) is obviously a particularly dull-witted and credulous person when it comes to religion and logic.
Have you ever actually read that site? This Greanleaf fellow’s arguments boil down to this and nothing else: he believed the Bible because he chose to believe it. His ostensible “arguments” are based 100% on his belief that the Bible (at least the New Testament) is a reliable work of history. He argues that the alleged “Apostles” would not have “martyred” themselves if they did not “know” that “Jesus” was resurrected; that they would not die for a “lie”. Can you really not see the extreme naivete of that claim? That he is simply relying on what the New Testament says merely because it says so in the New Testament? That there is NO genuinely reliable evidence to suggest that “Jesus” or any “Apostles” even existed in the first place? That there is NO genuinely reliable evidence to suggest that any “Apostles” martyred themselves even if they did exist? He is simply accepting the Bible at face value!
And please don’t give us any of those tired, old, bogus or utterly misrepresented claims about Josephus or Pliny or Tacitus or Eusebius or other figures who are falsely claimed to have provided independent evidence of “Jesus”. The infamous Josephus entry was at least largely fabricated, and even if it wasn’t a total forgery (which I doubt), Josephus speaks of (IIRC) some 20-odd Jesuses and there’s absolutely no way to know if the one that might be associated with the blatant forgery wasn’t some other “Jesus”. Pliny simply wrote a tiny bit about Christians based on what he learned from the Christians themselves, and thus his writings can in no way be considered independent evidence of anything about any alleged historical “Jesus” or “Apostles”. And Tacitus again is merely repeating – at best – what he seems to have also heard from a Christian, and he doesn’t even get that right, since he calls the ostensible messiah “Christus” (with no mention of a “Jesus”) and in the very same sentence grossly misreported the identity of Pilate. This proves he was not referencing any historical record, as Christian apologists like to claim, else he would have gotten his information correct.
As for Eusebius, there is fairly strong reason to believe that – far from being an accurate or reliable source (your claim above is little but Christian apologetics) – he actually forged the ostensible Josephus passage himself! Eusebius is the very FIRST writer to have written about the extremely suspect passage in The Antiquities, even though if it was original to Josephus it would have been present for hundreds of years! Why didn’t Justin mention it? Why didn’t Irenaeus mention it? Why didn’t Tertullian mention it? Why didn’t Origen mention it? Why didn’t Cyprian mention it?
This not only effectively discredits the alleged “reliability” of Eusebius, it is strong evidence that Josephus never wrote anything about anyone similar to the New Testament “Jesus”.
To summarize, there is absolutely zero reliable, credible evidence that “Jesus” or the “Apostles” ever existed, let alone was resurrected.
There you go again with your false dichotomies. There are other alternatives, by far the most likely explanation (grossly simplified) is that the Apostles and Jesus never historically existed and that the Gospels were written by people who wished to create a faith-inducing narrative that combined in a chronological and easy-to-understand manner the many divergent stories they had heard (and believed, though unjustifiably) about what they didn’t realize was actually a mythological (in its sociological sense) figure created by their forbears and neighbors. This mythological figure was a composite of the stories and words of various itinerant teachers (the area was full to overflowing with them) such as the Stoics combined with a huge number of elements borrowed almost directly from Jewish Scripture.
This alternative explanation is not only growing in general acceptance among some of the finest religious scholars in the world (with, of course, various diagreements in the details), but it is also – unlike the view you propose – eminently rational, thoroughly consistent with modern science, philosophy and understanding of cultures and mythology, and is vastly more likely since it doesn’t require any violations of natural law or indeed anything outside the realm of the natural world.
The utterly insuperable problem, of course, Tom, is that in this case we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the people in question actually said and did what the New Testament claims they did, or even that they actually existed. All we have is a highly dubious faith-selling text with absolutely no reliable external evidence.
I’ll certainly grant you that testimony at a actual, historical trial is legitimate evidence. But if all you provide me as “evidence” for this trial is a dubious, 2000 year old text with no reliable provenance and no independent evidence of the trial’s actual existence and historical accuracy, then I contend you have provided me with no legitimate evidence whatsoever for the alleged testimony.
Ambushed, I think JThunder is falling short of establishing his point, but you are falling off the cart on the other side.
It did not take very much of a web search to discover that Greenleaf was a very much respected author on the rules of evidence. Using the silly site in which his remarks are linked only demonstrates that some Christian apologists are credulous, not that Greenleaf had poor skills. Given that Greenleaf wrote prior to the discoveries of Tischendorf and some of the other events that accelerated the the re-evaluation of the gospels as history, Greenleaf’s analysis suffers from accepting too casually the veracity of the gospels, but given that (fatal) flaw, his analysis is not characterized by shoddy logic–that tends to be the province of the people who quote him.
Your claims against Eusebius may or may not have some basis in fact. However, your claims would have been stronger had you shown that Tertullian, Cyprian, and Irenaeus actually knew the Josephus text. What have they quoted from Josephus outside the tampered verses? If Eusebius is the first to quote the tampered verses, I suppose that it is possible that he inserted them, but it is also possible that he was the first to encounter a modified manuscript. Eusebius lived over 100 years later than Irenaeus and Tertullian, 150 years later than Justin, plenty of time for a spurious insertion by another hand. Cyprian is not believed to have known Greek, so his ability to have read or commented upon a changed copy (in Greek) is greatly diminished.
This is not to say that Eusebius could not have added the passage on Jesus, or at least modified it with the references to his goodness or being the annointed, but you would need to produce a bit more evidence than a failure of earlier authors to comment on the passage (which is generally acknowledged to be a Christian interpolation) to conclude that Eusebius authored it. Eusebius is criticized for his credulous acceptance of earlier writings, but I am unanware of any other passage in an earlier work that is attributed to him.
So what? I have not put forth that the gospels are accurate of anything. I was addressing whether a statement may be considered evidence.
I have never read the entirety of the Histories of Eusebius, so I am not familiar with the claims that Eusebius was quoting statements from the apostles (or from witnesses who knew the apostles at the times of their purported martyrdom). Those were the citations on which the claims of “evidence” were initially made, if I recall, not the claims of the Gospels.
I would also agree that even an accurate reproduction of earlier testimony by Eusebius fails to prove anything other than there were texts containing various stories. That, again, is not a position I hold. I was merely pointing out that such testimony is legitimately considered evidence. It may be weak evidence if the author is lying or deluded. However, someone who is analyzing an entire situation is not relieved of the responsibility of considering it as evidence–if only to identify problems with the narrative and set it aside.
It is my understanding that there are martyrdom traditions for many of them, but no actual records of trials (and thus no records of whatever testimony they may have offered to that effect).
How do you know that some of them didn’t? (The earliest significant non-Christian report on the matter, Pliny the Younger’s report to Trajan, says that quite a few of those accused of being Christians promptly fell all over themselves to curse Christ, make offerings to the emperor and the established gods, and otherwise decline the glory of a martyr’s crown.)
I’m surprised there has been little reading of Eusebius here. I’ve read his History of the Church – it was published (probably still is) by Penguin, and is a pretty good read.
I agree that Eusebius is not entirely trustworthy as a writer/historian, and that his chief virtue is as one of the earliest and most complete writers on the early history of the Church we have. He certainly quoted from earlier manuscripts, and frequwently acknowledges the same. Unfortunately, I don’t recall exactly what he said about the martyrdoms.
However, Eusebius wrote with a bias as a committed and convinced Christian, and not as a skeptical historian. That’s pwerfectly understandable, and I’m not faulting him for it. But it means that it invariably colors everything he says, and means that you have to take that into account when you use him as evidence. One example stands out in my mind. Eusebius is quoting another text, and talks about an “Angel” coming down. A footnote in the Penguin edition notes that we have another copy of this account (apparently quoting an earlier source that both it and Eusebius used), in which it talks about not an angel, but an owl coming down, and that ity was seen to be a messenger from God (“Messemger” = “angelos” in Greek, the source of our word “angel”). It seems probable that Eusebius has either scanned and misread the passage to talk about an angel (I’ve seen this sort of thing in citing sources in histories), or else quoted an intermediate source which was so mistaken. In either case, the quote about an "angel fit in perfexctly with Eusebius’ vision of the world, and he probed no further. A modern historian would certainly have looked further and probed into this. I can’t accept Eusebius’ quote about angels as conclusive proof of the existencve of angels, not when I know the other text exists. I’m similarly wary of accepting his word on matters of the resurrection of Christ.
By the way, you could apply many of the same arguments to the life and resurrection of Apollonius of Tyana. I don’t find the evidence for his resurrection particularly convincing.
However, the sole evidence for that is the New Testament. So presenting evidence of the apostles being martyred (outside the New Testament), implying that makes the resurrection more likely (because of what’s in the New Testament), doesn’t count as extra-biblical evidence for the resurrection.
Moreover, and it’s perhaps a nitpick, the earliest surviving gospel did not claim any apostles were eyewitnesses. Only that women that knew Jesus went to the tomb and it was empty.
Oh, does anyone know if “N.T. Wright” is a “stage name,” if you will? I mean, I see the guy’s site and all, but “N.T. Wright” just seems too much a play on words to be real.
“Greenleaf was a very much respected author on the rules of evidence.”
LEGAL evidence, yes. But he wasn’t a historian used to dealing with historical evidence of the ancient world. He’s part of a long tradition of trying to trade showboating legal analysis for historical scholarship of which Phillip Johnson and his “Darwin on Trial” is a more recent example. But, put simply, the standards of evidence for courts are simply not the same as science or history, and expertise in law is still false authority in the realm of historical scholarship.
Josephus in the Ante-Nicene Fathers: all the citations.
Josephus was known and cited by Irenaeus, Origen, Clement and Tertullian, among others, but the Testimonium Flavianum is not quoted until Eusebius. Origen cited Josephus’ Antiquities to prove the existence of John the Baptist and he also cites the James passage but then says that Josephus “did not accept Jesus as Christ.” I’ll quote it here:
Since the TF does ostensibly have Josephus claiming that “He was the Christ,” this would seem to indicate that Origen was unaware of it, even though he shows a great deal of familiarity with Antiquities. It’s true that he could have been familiar with an untampered version of the TF (even those who accept partial authenticity are virtually unanimous in the opinion that “He was the Christ” is an interpolation), but if he knew the passage at all, it’s odd that he didn’t use it to support the historical existence of Jesus, especially since he used Josephus to support the historicity of John the Baptist.
It would seem to be a safe assumption that the passage either did not exist in any manuscripts known to Origen or (some hypothesize) that the untampered passage was somewhat less than flattering, even insulting. Josephus did not like false Messiahs (did not even like to use the word Messiah) and it’s theoretically possible that his original description of Jesus wrote him off as a fraud or a heretic…perhaps something similar in tone to Tacitus’ sneering characterization of Christianity as a “disease.”
It’s actually helpful to the case for a historical Jesus that Origen does seem to validate the James passage (even quoting the “called Christ” part) and indeed it’s the James passage, not the TF, that historians regard as one of the strongest bits of historical corroboration for HJ. It might be worth mentioning that in Greek, the pharsing of “Jesus, called Christ” can also denote a level of sarcasm. Some argue that it might be better translated as “Jesus, the so-called ‘Christ,’” which would be more in keeping with Josephus’ usual tone and attitude, but even then, it would still indicate that Josephus (a native Galilean) thought Jesus was a real person.
Having said all that, I’m not persuaded by any arguments that Eusebius forged the passage himself. I think it far more likely that he used an already interpolated manuscript. I’ve also seen theories that Eusebius was the author of Luke-Acts and have been even less persuaded by that.
I agree with all of this. I don’t disgaree I even finished your thought for you in red
If you insist that any release of the body was as tacit admission of “innocence”, and I am not saying it is ignorant or illogical position, just huh I see where you could infer that but I am not sure that is right, then there is little anyone can say.
But what I can offer is an alternative. A paraphrase from Tabor – who certainly is as an impressive an authority as anyone can name save Erhman himself, and what he says isn’t that Pilate carried about the religious contamination – but that Pilate cared about keeping order and looking competent. To Tabor, Jesus proclaiming himself King and Messiah and screwing around in the Temple as Passover approached had already sparked disorder. Passover was always a dangerous time for the Romans and why Pilate had to personally come to Jerusalem in the first place – to look over what he saw as a bunch of fanatics at anytime likely to riot and carry on. There were more religiously fired up Jews in Jerusalem (literally 100 of thousands and perhaps “millions”) than Pilate had troops to deal with (As his successors definitively found out ~30 years later) and he needed the Temple establishment to help keep order. They were, in effect an arm of Rome – even though the Passion Narrative would play it the other way – and if the Sanhedrin said: bodies hung on a tree were to be buried the same day, if they said having these men certainly at an entrance to Jerusalem (and Tabor posits ‘possibly’) within sight of the Temple compound was a contaminate on the High Holy Day and Passover – if they said these bodies at this place and time were more likely to offend and whip up pious Jews than worry them, if they said that Jesus was popular and this would only anger the Jews more, if any or any combo of these things were said by the Sanhedrin then Pilate would have pulled the bodies down – provided they were sure they were dead - and quite possibly would have let the Sanhedrin do it themselves (If decades later tradition recalled these men as followers of Jesus – and be clear the gospel calls them “secret followers” of JC - well it didn’t necessarily need to be so).
So, OK Jimmmy – OK maybe this and possibly that – a hypothetical scenario. But is there any extrabiblical evidence anywhere, anywhere at all mind you, in the relatively small amount of documents from 1st Century Judea that Crucified bodies were a particular concern of the Jews and would have been needed to be dealt with in some manner – even if it was a middle finger – by Pilate? Why yes Rhetorical friend, I am glad you asked that! In the Jewish War 4: Chapter 5 Josephus tells us that during the First Jewish Revolt the Idumeans cast out corpses without burial. Noting his horror and disapproval Josephus states, “The Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even those who are crucified because they were found guilty are taken down and buried before the sun goes down.” Who knows with Josephus right? He was after all an apologist for his people and wanted them to look good – got anything else? Well there is the Temple Scroll (IIQTemple) which records a command to bury the body of one who has been crucified on the same day, and applies it to both dead and live crucifixions. Now you will say that the Jesus Seminar (people who know) and specifically John Crossan considers this law idealized (and thus, not really followed), but Tabor – who is certainly their superior on this single issue - doesn’t say it is.
I will “thesis up” again : I state that there is non-Christian, non-apologetic, secular, semi-hard evidence that Jesus being allowed to be removed from the cross is not the jaw-dropping/eyes agog/chest clutching, extraordinary claim that some state that it is.
Thanks for the assist, Jimmmy, and thanks for wading through my abortion of bad coding.
Again. I don’t think it’s implausible that Jesus would have been taken down from the cross. I would actually lean more towards the lime pit scenario myself. I just think that turning over the body for a proper, religious internment would be the least likely scenario. Getting the bodies into a communal grave would serve Pilate in preventing a religious outcry or protest at Passover but would also not allow any inference of innocence or leniency.