That’s a pretty compelling guess. What exegesis do you base it on?
Cradle Catholic here, Catholic school through 12th grade, still go to mass.
Never once did any of my teachers (mostly nuns) tell us to take the Bible literally. We were told that the Bible stories illustrate the “truth” of God’s love for us and not the actual facts. Heck, even if you just look at Genesis there are two conflicting creation stories.
My kids go to public school but attend religious education classes at our church – I sat in on a class once and the catechist taught that the Bible was written by men thousands of years ago in an attempt to interpret and illustrate God’s love for us and role in our lives.
Plus the Gospels were all written years after the events, so it makes sense that some of the details would be wrong.
And what did Catholic school teach you specifically about the Book of Matthew and the rising of the dead at the death of Jesus?
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I believe that the Gospels are generally historically reliable documents, so I’d take them literally unless I have a strong reason not to. (For example, I certainly believe in what you apparently call the ‘zombie invasion’.) I don’t think that rules out occasional historical errors of fact or chronology in a generally reliable text).
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I think the chronology in the Gospels generally makes sense, and I’d allow that any details which don’t fit may just be errors on the part of Luke, Matthew or both. Here’s what I think happened.
A) Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem, while Mary is pregnant. (Luke attributes this to the census, which is one of the Gospel episodes I do find a bit dubious; I’m less certain that it happened than most of the other events in the Gospels).
B) Jesus is born in Bethlehem. Shepherds, angels, etc…
C) Eight days later they present him at the temple. Simeon and Anna prophecy, etc…
D) They return to Bethlehem, and shortly afterward are visited by the Magi.
E) The Magi deliver their warning, and Mary & Joseph leave for Egypt.
F) Some time later they return from Egypt, but hearing about Archelaus, they go up north to Galilee rather than Judea.
That’s the chronology I would synthesize from Matthew and Luke.
I’m not really sure why this episode gives some people pause. If Jesus could raise Lazarus, the daughter of Jairus, etc., then surely He could raise a bunch of dead saints.
The people on this Roman Catholic message board from the website www.catholic.com seem to take Matthew 27: 52-53 as gospel(sorry).
On one level, I’m absolutely fascinated by how much time and energy some atheists spend in finding “contradictions” in the Bible. If they would spend even one-tenth the time and energy in reading the text with an open mind, they would find a lot of their questions resolved.
I am also utterly perplexed by the phenomenon of (perhaps deliberate?) lack of understanding and reading comprehension, shown so clearly by the first part of the OP, and by other people. Why in the world some people insist on taking two parts of the SAME STORY, and claiming that they are two separate, mutually contradictory stories, is beyond me.
The Magi obviously arrived on the scene some time after the birth of Jesus. The wording of Herod’s killing order makes that perfectly clear.
Now as for the actual question posed by the OP: there could be, and quite possibly were, several different reasons why the disciples never tried to resurrect Jesus. My first thought would be “lack of faith.” Sure–IF you have faith, you can do just about anything. But when it comes to extreme things like raising the dead, that’s a stupendously big if. And we know from the Gospels that the disciples sometimes had trouble believing what Jesus told them.
I have no doubt that there are many Christians who take it all literally. I have no idea how the rectify things other than slam them together and say that’s good enough. Though I tend to feel that people see Evangelicals or Baptists, separately, as a stand in for all Christianity. I would be shocked if my mainline Protestant church (Lutheran) had even 10% of folks who took the Biblical narrative literally. I think that we probably have more folks who think Jesus was just a rabbi with really good God-consciousness (as opposed to being the divine God the Son) than those who think the Bible is literally factually true.
That’s to say that I think there are lot more people than you’d think who would look at Matthew as UDS put it and say it is prone to “dramatic flourishes”.
Yes, because if we don’t agree with you that it’s all consistent and wonderful, then we’re close-minded. We can’t possibly have read the same text and simply come to a different conclusion than you unless we’re horribly biased.
Right, that’s pretty much the default position. The thing is, the “strong reasons not to” keep growing, and what’s literal keeps eroding. I get all kinds of crap from educated Christians about taking things like the 6-day creation literally, when it’s “obviously” a metaphor. But that became obvious only after science proved the age of the earth. Up to the 19th century or so, it was unusual for a typical Christian to have the modern view of many Biblical “metaphors,” and not too long before that, it could cost you your life if your heresies fell on the wrong ears.
I’m aware that there were theologians, notably Augustine, who counseled against being too literal, but that is typically blown way out of proportion. His writings make clear that he took a great deal more of the Bible literally than the people who cite him today. And in any case, the vast, vast majority of illiterate Christians through the ages took everything literally. Even in this age of science and the internet, there are US colleges and universities, including those who supplied many of the experts used by the Bush administration to administer the occupation of Iraq, that require their professors to sign a statement of faith, which includes the assertion that the Bible is literally true in every detail, regardless of what those egghead scientists or historians think they know.
So now, more liberal Christians are reduced to your position, where you back off when science makes you look silly to persist in a literal view, and simply ignore obvious errors when even that isn’t enough. You’re welcome to that position, but IMO if a book can’t even get mundane details of history and chronology right, it is ridiculous to believe it when it talks about things that are completely untestable.
Matthew says they lived in a house in Bethlehem, and gives no indication that they ever lived anywhere else before Jesus was born. They clearly intended to return there after Herod died, but were warned away by God, and only then did they settle in Nazareth, apparently for the first time.
Correct. And the Magi. Kind of puzzling how all these strangers (let alone angels) came from miles around to worship an infant who hadn’t done anything but poop in his diapers, and yet 12 years later, his parents don’t understand why he does unusual things, and 30 years later, the people of Nazareth, and even his own family, worry about his sanity.
No, you have made the same mistake the great Biblical scholar Bill O’Reilly made in his book, Killing Jesus. Jesus was circumcised after 8 days, but it was another 33 days before Mary’s purification ended (women are so fucking dirty) and they could visit the Temple. See Lev 12:4. So Jesus was at least six weeks old when he was presented in the Temple.
The holy Temple denizens Simeon and Anna did indeed proclaim Jesus to be the Messiah, and Luke 2:38 says that Anna, at least, told everyone looking for the Messiah about Jesus. And yet, the same King Herod, who Matthew says was paranoid enough to kill an entire village’s infants on the basis of a horoscope, did nothing in Luke when the Messiah was publicly proclaimed half a mile from his palace. It is inconceivable that the Temple priests, let alone his own spies, would not have heard and reported this to Herod.
No. Luke 2:39 clearly says that after all the doings at the Temple, they returned to Nazareth.
Correct, according to Matthew. But you left out that God tells the Magi not to go back to Herod, to save themselves. So why couldn’t he have told them not to see Herod in the first place, to save all the innocent babies that were killed? And why did the Star have to stop and ask directions anyway, when it knew which house the baby Jesus was in? Was Jesus out of range before they got to Jerusalem?
Correct, according to Matthew. But why did they have to be diverted to Nazareth by a warning from God, if that’s where they lived? Why wouldn’t they just go straight home to Nazareth? Unless, as I said above, they had always lived in Bethlehem, which is why Matthew didn’t have to resort to Luke’s stupid census to get them there.
And it’s a historical fact that Archelaus ruled Judea from 4BC to 6AD, so that was ten years they had to stay out of Judea. But Luke says they came to Jerusalem (in Judea, and where Archelaus ruled) every year for Passover. That is a flat contradiction.
It’s perfectly obvious that at least one of these stories was fabricated, to explain how Jesus could be the Messiah, and yet be from Nazareth, rather than Bethlehem. Matthew says his parents lived in Bethlehem all along, but were forced to move to Nazareth for fear of Herod and Archelaus. Luke says his parents lived in Nazareth all along, but were forced to journey to Bethlehem for the worldwide census that required everyone to pay his taxes in the town his ancestors lived in a thousand years earlier. Since no historian, secular or otherwise, heard of the Slaughter but Matthew, and no historian, secular or otherwise, heard of that census but Luke, it’s almost 100% certain that both tales were fabricated.
Well, that’s more or less how it works in Dungeons and Dragons…
Well, they’re written by two separate people, and the details don’t sync. It may be the same overall set of events, but the two (four!) stories are clearly separate.
This doesn’t matter to anyone with an ounce of ordinary common sense. Eyewitness accounts often contain contradictions; how much worse, then, for stories written decades after the event.
It only matters to absolute literalists; they’re the ones whom we are rebutting by observing internal inconsistencies. If you’re not an absolute literalist, don’t worry about it. You aren’t the target of this kind of thread.
Thank you for calling me bereft of common sense.
It wouldn’t matter to anyone with an ounce of common sense if it was in Aesop’s Fables, but when I am told that I will burn in hell forever if I don’t believe other parts of the book, which have not a shred of evidence other than the credibility of the authors, then I’d say it should matter whether or not the parts of the book we can test turn out to be absurd.
And when several members of Congress take it literally enough to make it the basis of their policies on climate and health and foreign aid to Israel etc. etc., then I’d say anyone with an ounce of common sense should think it matters a lot whether our national policies are based on the maunderings of first-century mystics.
Ohhhh! I get it now!
You’re witnessing!
Right forum for it. Have fun!
No, I came here for an argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
The you want room 12A, right down the corridor.
Am I the only one who keeps reading the title as asking about Chris Matthews?
Are you an absolute biblical literalist? Those were the ones I was suggesting lacked sufficient common sense to engage in comprehensive literary analysis of the Gospels.
Shrug. That’s a fine opinion, but only an opinion. Religious faith is highly “opinion-like,” in that it is not susceptible to objective analysis. If Reverend Joe believes the Bible is literally true in every single word, but Father Roland believes that certain of the stories are parables (such as the Book of Job) and need not be taken literally – what process can you suggest by which we can learn which of the two viewpoints is correct?
The pointing out of internal contradictions between the Gospel stories weighs somewhat against Reverend Joe’s viewpoint. At very least, it offers him a challenge.
Shrug again. We have members of Congress engaging in all sorts of wrong-doing. Some take money for votes. Some lie under oath about sexual peccadillos. And some betray the First Amendment by making religion into official policy.
Whether or not Mark contradicts Matthew is pretty low on the list of ways we should scold these scofflaws.
I think you probably are, but now I’m imagining Tweety interviewing Jesus and not actually letting Jesus say anything.
CRUCIFIXION! Romans are for it, Jews are against it. How will this affect Hilary’s chances in 2016? Howard Fineman, what’s your take?
No, no, no. Biblical literalism is a modern phenomenon. It requires a modern mindset to assume that the truth, validity, significance, etc of a text depends on it’s fidility to the genre of journalism-of-record. When this text was composed, and for well over a millenium afterwards, the genre of journalism had not been invented. It defies common sense to suggest not only that it has always been read as journalism, but that it’s validity and significance has always been seen as dependent on its journalistic accuracy.
They may not be. But twentieth-century young adult Americans are not normative for Christianity. They are a product of their time, their modern culture and (I do not mean this pejoratively) their immaturity.
And - don’t take this the wrong way - the fact that biblical literalism is a modern phenomenen has just slid right out of your consciousness. The bible has texts which can be read as suggesting that the world is flat (and, indeed, square). The ancients knew that the world was round. Christianity was completely unbothered by this; we have no records of people being persecuted for teaching the roundness of the world, or denounced as heretics, and conversely we have no records of opponents of Christianity using these facts to question the validity of scripture, or the rationality of Christians in regarding it as inspired. It’s only in the modern era that we have things like the Galileo shitstorm. But that has just slid right out of your consciousness. You know all these facts, but you have never connected them up in a way that causes you to question your assumption that biblical literalism has historically been normative for Christianity.