I know the traditional Christian answer is that Jesus actually did rise from the dead, and actually is the Son of God. But what are some more skeptical explanations for the events afterwards? It seems pretty clear to me that the early Christians sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and the early Romans weren’t too fond of Christianity. Why didn’t the Romans just parade Jesus’ corpse through the streets of Jerusalem to stop their beliefs from spreading?
Didn’t the concept of Jesus rising from the grave come about some hundreds of years after his time, or am I confusing this with another story?
Speaking with my skeptics hat on (in my free time I’m an observant Christian)
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The resurrection never happened at all, his followers just made it up or justified it based on “visions” of the savior that they had after the crucifixion. Maybe some of them even robbed his grave and disposed of his body so that no definitive proof could ever be found.
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The resurrection wasn’t part of the original story at all, and was cooked up a few generations later.
That’s really the only logical explanations.
It probably wasn’t important enough to them. Suppose right now there was some little cult somewhere in the US that talked about how its dead founder has resurrected himself; would the government care enough to bother to demonstrate otherwise? Just because Christians think of Jesus and Christianity as being of world shaking importance now doesn’t mean that the Romans of the time regarded it as anything other than one more minor cult.
The first Roman official persecution of Christians did not begin until 64 A.D., under Nero. I doubt anyone could have found Jesus’ corpse by then, or, if so, proved it were his (no living disciple would’ve recognized Jesus’ skull as Jesus’, after all), and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – Nero had a problem with this cult because by then it had spread to Rome. In Judea, the Romans would have had very different concerns – the Jewish Revolt would break out in two years.
It’s not like Christianity was spreading like wildfire during the first few years after Jesus’ death. By the time it was a big enough deal to need to be squashed, a generation or more later, it was too late to parade anyone’s bones through the streets.
At the time it would have mattered, it wasn’t important enough for the Romans to bother discouraging another mystery cult out in the boondocks.
They were a fiction of whoever wrote those parts of the new testament.
There’s a book called, IIRC The Passover Plot, which has a somewhat plausible suggestion. The “vinegar-soaked sponge” was a drug that simulated death. The plan was to take Jesus off the cross alive but appearing to be dead, hide him away and then stage a “resurrection.”
A more plausible explanation for the vinegar-soaked sponge was that the Roman soldiers offered Jesus that to drink because it was what they had. Wine would get you drunk and water usually couldn’t be trusted, so Roman legionaries drank wine vinegar on the march.
You’re certainly confusing it with something. The letters of Paul, written over a period commencing about twenty years after the death of Jesus, are emphatic about the reality of the resurrection, and its central significance. The Gospels, which are later than Paul but independent of him, also assert the resurrection; the earliest of them was written maybe forty years after the death of Jesus, though some scholars suggest an earlier date. According to the Acts of the Apostles the Christian community was proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus pretty much from the outset; although Acts was written a generation or more after the establishment of the Christian community, there is no particular reason to doubt this claim.
You can argue with some force that the resurrection story is fundamentally implausible. But you are on weaker grounds if you argue that it was a late addition to the corpus of Christian belief; all the evidence points to it being a very ancient belief indeed.
The same explanation for the events after the death of Elvis. Or aliens. Or Incubi. Fairies. Ghosts. Anything Muhammad did.
First of all, you’re assuming that Jesus existed and was crucified at all, which is not necessarily a given, but assuming at least that much is accurate:
We have no primary testimony that anyone ever claimed to have seen Jesus physically resurrected from the dead (for that matter, we have no first had testimony from any of the disciples or anyone who ever knew Jesus).
The first claim that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead does not come until the Gospel of Matthew, which was written at least 50 years after the alleged crucifixion and written by an author who did not know Jesus or anyone else who knew Jesus.
Mark is the first to tell of an empty tomb, but does not have any appearance narratives and does not explicitly claim that Jesus was physically resurrected.
No Christian literature prior to or contemporaneous with Mark (the Pauline corpus, Q, Gospel of Thomas) make any mention of an empty tomb. Only Paul even mentions a crucifixion, and while he does speak of Jesus rising from the dead, he does not mention an empty tomb or characterize it as a physical resurrection (indeed, he says that physical resurrections are impossible), but only says that Jesus “appeared” to the apostles after his death. He does not describe the nature of these “appearances,” and does not distinguish between Jesus’ appearances to “the twelve” or to himself, which strongly suggests Paul was not aware of any claim or tradition of Jesus physically walking out of a tomb.
The empty tomb story is historically implausible for other reasons too - namely because the Romans did not give crucifixion victims over for burial. They were either left on the cross to rot, or buried commonly in lime pits or shallow graves. Denying a proper burial was part of the punishment, and giving a body back was tanatmount to an admission of innocence (something Pilate could not have done given the nature of Jesus’ conviction for sedition and challenging the sovereignty of Caesar himself). It virtually never happened. The whole point was to leave them on the cross as examples. Proper burial was so rare, that of the hundreds of thousands of people crucified by the Romans, the remains of only one victim have ever been found.
So basically, it needs to be provenm that anyone ever claimed to have seen Jesus rise physically from the dead. Asking skeptics to explain why people woul make that claim is putting the cart before the horse. We have no reason to believe they ever made that claim at all.
From a critical, historical perspective, we just don’t have the data to reconstruct Christian origins exactly or really know how it started, but it is possible to come up with reasonable hypotheses which are more plausible than magic.
For instance (and this is what I think is likely), It is possible Jesus’ disciples scattered and fled back to Galilee when he was arrested. The final disposition of his remains was unknown to anyone who cared. Some time later (not necessarily after 3 days, it could have been months or years), one or more of the disciples had some visionary experiences of Jesus. They saw him “appear” and talk to them. This is not an unusual phenomenon for people grieving a loss. The meme that Jesus was “still alive” or “risen” and would imminently return began to make the rounds and foster a new Messianic cult. Paul had his own visionary experiences, along with his own particular interpretations and understandings of “Christ,” and began to spread his own teachings to the gentiles.
A couple of generations later followers wanted to historicize this “resurrection” event and make it more literal. Mark writes the empty tomb story, Matthew and Luke add to the story and it becomes well enough established in tradition that John incorporates it too.
So, to summarize, I would say that the physical resurrection was invented a half century (or more) after the crucifixion by non witnesses, but it may well have started with visionary experiences by people who did.
I think perhaps you mistakenly believe that because Christianity is huge now that it must have been huge when Christ died. It wasn’t, at the time Christianity was nothing but a very small cult.
Let me put it this way, did the US parade David Koresh’s body through the street? If surviving Branch Davidians claim Koresh was resurrected, would you even know they claimed it, much less expect some authority figure to go about disproving it? Now consider, Christ couldn’t find more than 12 guys to follow him around. David Koresh had ten times as many followers during the siege.
To quote Matthew 28: “While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.”
Skip the part about the bribe and you’ve got an interesting story. Include the part about the bribe and note that – as per the New Testament – the soldiers in question are perfectly willing to lie upon getting bribed.
The Romans had no awareness of Christianity until decades after the crucifixion, when the recovery of any body was impossible. The whereabouts of any remians would have been unknown, and even if they’d found a skeleton and displayed it, so what? It’s a skeleton. How would they prove it was Jesus?
The Christians didn’t care about the resurrection claims anyway. Their problems with Christians were not theological. The Romans were actually very accepting on that score and didn’t give a shit what you worshipped as long as you paid tribute to the state Temples. The Roman citzenry didn’t like Christians because they wouldn’t pay tribute to the state temples (this wasn’t a religious issue, but a patriotic one. It was the equivalent of refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance or refusing to stand for the national Anthem as a ball game) and becuase they refused to serve in the military. There were also a number of rumors anmd slanders about their religious practices (like that they practiced cannibalism), but their belief in the resurrection of Jesus was not something either the Roman citizenry or the Emperors gave a rat’s ass about or felt any need to disprove.
None of the canonical Christian accounts of the resurrection have ever claimed that anyone saw Jesus rise physically from the dead. Even Matthew, who asserts that the tomb was guarded at the time, presents the guards as noticing nothing until an angel arrives to roll back the stone sealing the tomb, revealing it to be already empty. A somewhat fanciful story, but it shows I think that Matthew was working with the confines of a tradition which already insisted upon an unwitnessed resurrection. If he were free to invent an eye-witness, he would have done so.
Thus claims for a physical resurrection rest not on any alleged eye-witness to the event itself, but on the empty tomb plus the emphatically asserted reality of the Christophanies. And both the tradition of empty tomb (first mentioned in Mark) and the reality of the Christophanies (first mentioned in Paul) are earlier than Matthew, though Matthew is the first writer to mention both in the same text.
As you say, Mark doesn’t explicitly claim that Jesus was physically resurrected. But the whole significance of the empty tomb, it seems to me, it to point to the bodily resurrection; it emphasises that experiences of/encounters with the risen Christ are not merely evidence of an afterlife, or signs of divine endorsement of the mission, teachings and sacrifice of Christ, or manifestations comparable to the manifestations of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration (which of course Mark also describes).
We can’t read too much into Paul’s failure to mention the empty tomb. He tells us practically nothing about the events of the life and ministry of Christ. This could be because he knows next to nothing about them, or simply because they are not the subject he wants to write about.
If “not merely” all that, then what?
Then bodily resurrection.
Bear in mind that the idea of the resurrection of the dead was already current in first-century Judaism (though controversial, of course). I think anybody reading Mark could have been expected to make the link between the empty tomb and the implied bodily resurrection of Christ.
But, you already covered “an afterlife.”
Yes, but “afterlife” and “bodily resurrection” are not at all the same thing.