Yes, all the time. Those who are only “mostly dead”. And in fact back then, it was not rare for a person thought dead not to be.
But honestly the Resurrection has to be taken on Faith.
John was still alive.
Which Gospel did Paul write?
Well Josephus mentioned Jesus, at least and so did Tacitus.
John is a eyewitness.
It’s one of those things I’ve read, and you can find discussing of the idea in numerous websites, but all the ones on the first page are either apologetics or skeptic sites. So, I’m linking to one of the latter that has citations referring to statements from academics at universities. Here you go. Mark mentions swine being run into the Sea of Galilee in Gerasa, but Gerasa is 30 miles away. Jesus path is also iffy/illogical, he just took very wide side trips on the way from one place to another and trotted back and forth (or that, of course, motivation was more theological in asserting his path). But in Matthew/Luke the language is changed, and the path more logical, indicating that authors had knowledge of the area.
[url;=Mark - Paul J. Achtemeier - Google Books]Here is a Google books result that you can see says that Luke and Matthew avoid asserting the same path, as it’s illogical. BTW, author was a professor at a seminary.
I’m sorry, I should have said contemporary Roman records do not mention Jesus at all. Those references are later than Paul’s.
Josephus’ mentions were written 30 years after Paul’s (and 60 years after Jesus died) and one reference is believed interpolated, so we don’t know how much of it is accurate.
Tacitus writing (Annals) was also later than Paul’s. Not written until around 116, 70ish years after Jesus’ death.
Of course as I mentioned, historical-critical scholars mostly dispute this and so I expect many of the readers here to dispute it too, so this claim will need some defence. I believe that the historico-critical consensus is wrong and I take a dim view of many of the methods they use in general, but it’s fair to say this is a matter where you and I are going to disagree with most of the readers here, so neither of us can rely on “John was an eyewitness” or “John was not an eyewitness” to convince the other side.
To sum up really quickly the things that convince me that John is eyewitness testimony are:
- two separate and distinct early traditions that the book was written by John, one of which dates back very early to Papias,
- internal clues (based around the fact that the Apostle John is barely mentioned by name) suggesting that he was the beloved disciple
- lack of any counter-tradition, either orthodox or heretical, regarding the authorship of the book
- careful attention to historical, geographical, numerical, etc. details, including a couple geographical details of the city that were lost after the city was destroyed and only rediscovered by modern archeology (e.g. the Pool of Bethesda)
To be fair to the other side, the primarily historical-critical arguments against John’s authorship are:
- John mentions the expulsion of Christians from synagogues and this didn’t happen till 90 AD,
- John explicitly believed Jesus was divine (more explicitly than the Synoptics), and the belief that Jesus was divine could only have developed over time,
- Early Church tradition holds the book was written in the 90s AD and John probably wouldn’t have lived that long
- The theology is too ‘high’ and the vocabulary too good for a Galilean fisherman to have written the book
I think the four arguments against Johannine authorship are all really weak, but I have to run right now so I can explain why I think they’re weak later. However if any of the skeptics here want to add additional reasons why they doubt eyewitness authorship I can address those as well.
For what it’s worth some conservative scholars think the Fourth Gospel was written by an eyewitness but not by the Apostle John (Richard Bauckham thinks it was written by a different eyewitness named John, and Ben Witherington believes it was written by Lazarus).
John certainly claims to be an eyewitness account (it’s the only Gospel that does, though some of the apocryphal gospels do as well). You can certainly dispute that claim and many people do, though I think it’s credible, but it’s not correct that none of them claims eyewitness authorship.
This is a common claim, but I think it’s misguided.
Consider the hypothesis that a guy called Steve lived in Wolverhampton in the 1930s. He liked drinking beer, he played for the pub football team, he performed seventeen specific miracles and he was resurrected from the dead. If we can find no evidence for any of the miracles, and no evidence for the resurrection, is the question of the historicity of “Steve” still a meaningful question? Does it really mean anything that there was almost certainly someone, probably numerous people, called Steve who lived in Wolverhampton at the time, who possessed the other unremarkable characteristics?
There were undoubtedly cult leaders in that era who did some unmiraculous things that loosely correspond to some events attributed to the mythical Jesus. And people were certainly crucified. But if there is no evidence for any of the specific and remarkable things that the mythical Jesus supposedly did, what are the criteria for claiming that any of the people who did exist were the mythical Jesus? It seems to me to be an idea that is not even wrong.
Cool; thanks! I’ll pursue the links and read more!
Yes, I think so to. Sure, did John personally set pen to parchment? Doubtful. (Few did in those days, Cesar was considered kinda weird for doing so.) But he lived to a ripe old age and had his own disciples in Ephesus.
- John was alive in AD 90.
- Yes, it did, after 60 or so years.
- Oddly most sources say he did.
- Well, you can get a lot of education and polish in 60 years and of course he had help.
Most modern scholars think that John was dictated by that disciple (at least to some degree) but possibly edited by his followers. Again, have a secretary or scribe was very common.
The miracles were minor. John only claims seven miracles. Curing the sick? Any half decent tent preacher does so today every week. The power of suggestion is very strong, medicine then wasnt a science, and of course illnesses could be psychosomatic.
Raising the dead? Was the daughter of Jairus even really dead? Medicine being what is was, people were even buried who werent dead.
Even if you accept that John was one of Jesus’ disciples and that he personally dictated the Gospel that bears his name, we still have the issue of whether he was an eyewitness to the events he described.
Here’s an example; the account of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. The account records the dialogue that they exchanged. But here’s the thing: the account also explicitly says that the disciples were not present during the conversation. None of them heard the dialogue. At best, they were given an account of what was said after the conversation was over by somebody who had been present. Who was that person? Jesus? The Samaritan woman? Some other person who was present but whose presence was not noted in the account? We don’t know.
But the point is that the Gospel of John doesn’t say “I went into town with the other disciples while Jesus stayed behind. When we came back we saw him talking to a Samaritan woman. We asked Jesus what they had talked about and this is what he told us.”
Or maybe this: “I went into town with the other disciples while Jesus stayed behind. When we came back we saw him talking to a Samaritan woman. The other disciples began asking Jesus questions about what he had told the women and she walked away. I followed her and asked her what Jesus had said to her and this is what she told me.”
In other words, we don’t know if the account of the conversation came from Jesus himself or from the Samaritan woman. And that’s a significant issue.
What?
OK I’d totally disagree with this and I’d also you’re not exactly providing a robust defence of John’s Gospel here. If he was mistaken about the, well, miraculous nature of all the miracles, then exactly what is the point of his gospel, and why should we bother reading it?
I think the miracles recounted in John’s Gospel are just what they claim to be, miracles, that happened. (I don’t automatically rule out that some of the miracles in the hadith traditions, or Jewish tradition, or for that matter the miracles recounted in various pagan or apocryphal Christian texts, might have happened as well). That’s because I don’t believe in metaphysical naturalism and don’t set the priors for miracles as near-zero. But I don’t see the point of arguing “John is an accurate eyewitness, except he was wrong about all the miracles”. People back then did have some ability to identify death, and I’m sure they also understood the power of suggestion.
Oh, fair enough. Sure, in this sense John is not an eyewitness to many or most of the events he records: I’d assume he got the information from the Samaritan woman, since church tradition says that she became a significant figure in the church, and since Jesus wasn’t around for very long. Who really knows, though.
He does claim to be an eyewitness to some events, and most explicitly the crucifixion.
I would actually disagree with your argument here. For different reasons both traditional and historico-critical scholars tend to date John in the 90s AD. (Traditionalists because that’s when Irenaeus seems to date it). I take the minority position of Carsten Theide, Robinson, Daniel Wallace and a few others that it was written sometime in the 60s AD (after the death of Peter and before the fall of Jerusalem). Regarding the expulsion of Christians from synagogues I’d just say that a quick look at history shows us that religious bodies issue repeated anathemas against the same things all the time, that the anathema banning Christians from synagogues might have been a local rather than universal one, and that there’s no reason to think the anathema described in John is the same one as the anathema issued at Jamnia.
The reasons why I think it was dated early are because 1) it fails to mention the fall of Jerusalem as an example of fulfilled prophecy, even though John loves to point out other examples of fulfilled prophecy (including the death of Peter, betrayal of Judas, etc.), 2) it talks about the city in the present tense, and 3) goes to some length to point out that John the Baptist wasn’t the messiah, which seems to argue for an mid- rather than late-first century date. As for the high Christology in John this is only really a problem if you beg the question and assume that Jesus was a purely human figure who later became divinized (which is something that not just orthodox Christians but also neo-gnostics and mythicists, for different reasons, would all dispute).
Let’s take the census of Quirinius first. There are several problems that skeptics raise with the census.
- It’s implausible that a census would have required everyone to go to the home of their ancestral clan.
- There was no Roman census within the possible time frame.
- The Roman Emperor wouldn’t have ordered a census, since Judaea was ruled by a client kingdom who had the power to tax.
- Herod died in 4 BC, and the governorship of Quirinius wasn’t till 6 BC.
I actually agree with the first part, but Luke doesn’t explicitly say that everyone was required to go to their ancestral home, it says that everyone was required to go to ‘their own town’, and tht Joseph’s ancestry was from Bethlehem. It’s plausible that Joseph needed to go to Bethlehem for other reasons- maybe he was born there or owned property there- and that it was by coincidence (or supernatural foresight) that it so happened that was also the city of David. As for the second part, there are records of a Roman census around 8 BC, and there’s also references in Josephus to Herod falling out of favour with the emperor at the time and being temporarily demoted from ‘rex socius’ to ‘rex amicus’, although he was later restored to favour. It’s not implausible that Rome would have initiated a census around or shortly after 8 BC, and that the matter would have been tabled when Herod was restored to favour, only to be picked up again in 6 AD under Quirinius. This is more or less the explanation provided by Ebrard, Darrell Bock, and some others.
Other alternative explanations are that “this was the first census under Quirinius” is better translated as “this was before the census under Quirinius”, which is the explanation favoured by Witherington. There are also those who believe Quirinius had some previous role in Syria during the first century BCE (I think there are references to him being elsewhere in the Near East e.g. Armenia around the time, although nothing explicitly placing him in Syria).
As for the death of Judas, the standard reconciliations of Acts and Matthew are that Judas hanged himself and after he was dead his body fell from a height and burst apart (plausible if he had been dead for some time and the body had disintegrated), or else that he hanged himself, was cut down and survived, and later died from bursting open. Papias recounts yet another tradition involving him bursting open which is slightly different than the one in Acts, but still not totally contradictory if you assume he was cut down and survived.
Ahh, Dopers Dopers… If you’re so right, then why haven’t these arguments dissuaded Christians for millenia? Oh yeah, that’s right, you’re smarter than we (and they) are. If your counterarguments are so strong, they should have been bullet-proof and Christianity would have died long ago. Right?
Let’s approach this from a different angle. Why has Christianity stayed so strong all of these years? What is the reason(s) for that?