Just because people will put their life on the line because some guy said he’s got the straight word from God isn’t much in the way of proof I fear.
It was foolish for anyone to keep preaching Christian heresies during the Inquisition, but they did it and they burned at the stake for it.
Josephus doesn’t say why James was killed, nor does he say that James was killed willingly nor do we know what James believed to begin with.
This is not the pespective that historians take. They accept no such thing as being verified history. Most historians will tell you that the final dispositions of Peter and Paul are simply unknown.
And I’ll say again, we don’t know what Peter and James believed about Jesus. They left us no writings.
Would people be willing to castrate themselves and drink vodka laced with phenobarbitol to join Jesus on a spaceship behind a comet if it wasn’t true?
People die for nutty beliefs all the time. If pesecution is your barometer, there’s these people called Jews you might want to read up on.
The point is that the NT was likely not written by any of the original 12. Their passion would be for the beliefs they knew were true and crucial to save mankind. Those beliefs encompassed in the teachings of Christ did not have to include a physical resurrection.
So basically your argument is, “Because the Bible says so”
which is okay, but don’t present it as something else.
The point DtC is making is that there aren’t any eyewitness reports and the letters we know are from apostle Paul don’t mention a physical resurrection specifically. It’s possible that the what moved the apostles to preach was a spiritual resurrection and the physical resurrection was added later. Adding to the legend as it were.
It accords with what Paul says and he gives us the only testimony which comes from a person who is likely to have known any of the original followers of Jesus.
Yet Paul was a Jew who said that resurrections could not occur in physical bodies, but spiritual ones.
And as far as we know, the doctrine of a physical resurrection did not come from the first Jewish followers of Jesus but from converted gentiles later on.
(And the Jews had no expectation that the Messiah would die or be resurrected at all, of course)
Although I accepted the physical resurrection without question when I was a Christian, and even clung to the notion long afterwards, in this last decade as I studied other religions and the history of the Bible, I began to realize that I no longer had to cling to that belief of a literal physical resurrection in order to believe in and revere the message of JC.
For those who feel that belief in a physical resurrection is central it’s very hard to let go of. My beliefs have shifted in that the message of love, our relationship with God and each other and communion with God through the Holy Spirit are the main points of Jesus message. I don’t have to believe in the physical resurrection because it is no longer of primary importance in my beliefs about Jesus. I can accept that perhaps that belief as well as virgin birth and others were just part of man’s tendency to create legends around important figures. I don’t have to discard the belief completely either. It simply isn’t relevant in my worship or service. Physical resurrection or spiritual one, the message remains unchanged.
Excellent book. I don’t recall it dealing much with this question.
Ehrman doesn’t deal much (if at all) with the historicity of the resurrection in Misquoting Jesus but he has given his opinions elsewhere. He summarizes his opinion here at the end of a debate with William Lane Craig specifically about the historical evidence for the Resurection. I recommend reading the entire debate. Ehrman makes many of the same points I’ve made but is slightly more amenable to the possibility of a tomb.
I have heard from Christians how Craig destroys Ehrman in that debate. But reading it doesn’t even look like Craig is engaging in a debate. He does not address the points that Ehrman is making, but points he thought Ehrman would make.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective. To me it looks like Ehrman wiped the floor with Craig, and you’re right, Craig doesn’t so much address what Ehrman actually says, but what he thinks Ehrman will say.
The lack of Jewish & Roman records denying the martyrdoms. Various officials found the Jesus movement bothersome enough to persecute. We find no records from any of the persecuting powers negating the early Church’s claims that the apostles were martyred for maintaining their testimony that Jesus had risen as Lord. Following generations of Christians were upholding the apostles’ martyrdom as supports for the Rising of Jesus. If there were no such martyrdoms, the officials could easily easily undermine the movement. The existence & miracle-working reputation of JC is also upheld by this- that the enemies of his movement never denied his existence or his reputation as a miracle-worker.
I remember reading an article by a believer with many credentials supposedly refuting “Misquoting Jesus” It was the same thing. He kept referring to points that Ehrman never made. I was surprised because his credentials as a Biblical scholar seemed just as impressive as Ehrmans, yet his technique didn’t seem scholarly to me. His emotion in defending the faith obviously colored his response.
A series of points:
-
There is a minor but important caveat to be added to Diogenes’s comments on the timing, authorship, and lack of source material of the NewTestament books. Quite simply, what he (for simplicity’s sake, no doubt) asserts as factual statements here are scholarly conclusions from the style, contents, quotations in ECFs, etc. That is, they are in general the most reasonable conclusions to be reached by objective Biblical criticism regarding the questions they answer – but they are not “proven facts” in some abstract certitudinal sense, but rather the equivalents of sound scientific theory – the most accurate conclusions available with the data on hand, but subject to change with additional study or data. In particular I’d take issue with the assertion that the writers did not know any eyewitnesses – this may in fact be true in some cases, is nowhere explicitly contradicted, but is quite easily challenged by inferential arguments in a few cases.
-
It is important to note that “the dog did not bark in the night” – nowhere in the New Testament is there any description of Jesus’s Resurrection. What there is, in plenty and sometimes apparently mutually contradictory, is assertions that X. and Y. encountered the Risen Jesus on or after Easter Day, at least 40 hours after he was seen to die on the Cross. I consider that this is important – what they saw as vital to bear witness to was that “He was dead, but now He lives” – not that His deceased body was resuscitated and shambled from the grave. (I cannot resist the wry observation that those who are most insistent on a physical, bodily resurrection are also those who would have converts surrender their brains to Jesus! ;))
-
It’s also important to note that in the conceptual iconography of the First Century (shared by Jewish, Greek, and other Near East cultures), the issue of survival after death was not the key question. Just as today “everybody knows” that angels are moderately angrogynous winged young men wearing long white robes, while devils are red with horns and spade-tipped tails a la Underwood Ham, “everyone knew” in the First Century that you survived death, but as an impotent, gibbering shade barely capable of being perceived by mortals, while your capacities as a human were centered in your mortal body. This, not some abstruse distinction between “soul” and “spirit,” was key to Paul’s point in First Corinthians and the Creedal assertion of “the resurrection of the body” – when Jesus rose, He rose not as a revivified mortal as Jairus’s daughter, Lazarus, and various others had done, but in a glorified spiritual body that transcended the limitations of mortal man, and also those of the disembodied spirits that alone were what “naturally” survived death. What we typically bring to 1 Corinthians 15 is purely and simply seeing it as answers to the wrong questions.
-
Finally, the Resurrection was not considered a single anomalous miracle available to someone who was the Son of a Virgin, “God on His Father’s side,” etc. The First Century Christians believed in “the General Resurrection,” a point at which either all the faithful or all humanity would rise in new glorified bodies of the sort Jesus has already borne, the faithful to live in a thousand-year Kingdom and the others to pass to their eternal punishment. Jesus is, again to quote Scripture, “the firstfruits of those who sleep” – the single early exemplar of the fate of all, or at minimum all who follow Him. There are several eschatological passages that make clear that this was the general belief, including what Paul taught.
-
The other key point I’d make is that the creedal formula uses the present passive, not the perfective: The statement is not that “Christ has risen” but that “He is risen.” In other words, it is a present fact that the proper descriptor of the state He is in, today, is “risen.” This ties back to “the dog that didn’t bark” – it’s not that “some miracle happened before dawn on the first Easter that did something physiologically impossible to the dead body of Jesus,” but rather that, “Jesus, having once died on the Cross, is now alive.” The belief is in what His risen state means for us, not in how He got there.
So lack of evidence is now evidence. Nice.
Why would the Romans keep records of which obscure peasants from the provinces were NOT martyred. The Romans would have had no records or documents about the apostles at all, nor would they care about folklore relating to them 100 or more years after they supposedly lived.
TThe Romans did not persecute Christians for what they believed (they couldn’t have cared less) but because they wouldn’t worship (and give offerings) at state temples and because they were an unpopular group in Rome who made a convenient scapegoat for Nero after the fire. Miracle working heroes were a dime a dozen in the ancient world, why should the Romans take any particular interest in one more…especially a dead one? Why would they deny his existence? Why would they care? How would they even be able to determine it for themselves?
In addition, gods sired children with mortals all the time in Greek and Roman religion (today - mythology.) If the Jewish god were considered just one more god, the claim of divine birth would be no big deal - in fact the Jewish belief that God wouldn’t do that would be considered odd. Attacking much of Christian belief as irrational would as a side effect attack the official religion as irrational. I think Ted is also imputing Christian exclusivity to the Romans. IIRC, Egyptian religions were also quite popular at the time. Is there any record of Roman priests attacking the validity of religions besides Christianity? If not, why expect them to attack Christianity as a religion?
Diogenes (or anyone here, really), have you read The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty? I’m about halfway through it right now and it’s making a lot of sense.
But if you’re trying to make a historical case for eyewitnesses, wouldn’t the burden of proof be on you? To say, “You can’t prove they didn’t know eyewitnesses, therefore they did”, seems a rather unreliable way to look at it. In the absence of evidence that they knew any eyewitnesses, should we not assume then that they didn’t?
Here’s a question: If you concede that the accounts of a physical resurrection are perhaps more symbolic than literal, why then assume that the accounts of a resurrection are true at all? Couldn’t the entire concept be symbolic?
shrug Of course. Naturally I’d never have gone over the question in my own mind. I’m only 46, and I’ve gone all my life agreeing with everything my parents told me, and never questioning a thing.
Yes, I’ve read it. Doherty is also an occasional poster on a Biblical Criticism form that I moderate. He’s one of a handful of of individuals who have taken Jesus Mythicism from being utterly disregarded as claptrap and brought, if not to the mainstream, at least to the fringes of the mainstream, enough to cause the mainstream to at least acknowledge its existence instead of dismissing it outright.
Doherty makes a much better case than I ever would have thought possible before reading The Jesus Puzzle. I don’t think he proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but he covers his bases enough to keep it plausible. I do think he resorts to one or two ad hoc assertions of interpolation in Paul in cases where Paul appears to be speaking of Jesus in historical rather than celestial terms, but he does make things uncomfortable for historicists.
Still, the vast majority of historians and NT scholars still believe and teach as amtter of course that Jesus existed historically. Someone on my other forum posted a couple of months ago that he had emailed Bart Ehrman with some Jesus Myth questions and that Ehrman had emailed him back saying “there is no historical question that Jesus existed.” I don’t know if I agree that we can say that so categorically, but Ehrman’s response does represent the norm for now, so “Mythers” like Doherty, Price, Mack, Carrier and others still have a hill to climb, but they’re at least not just dismissed as absolute wackos anymore.
Except that, when you go that far back into history, absence of evidence for things is fairly normal, and shouldn’t be taken as proving anything one way or the other.
I don’t think anybody here is saying “You can’t prove they didn’t, therefore they did.” But neither should we say, “You can’t prove they did, therefore they didn’t.” Rather than “assuming then that they didn’t,” I’d rather not assume anything without a solid reason. There’s no harm in saying “We don’t know for sure one way or the other.”