Did Jesus die and rise from the dead?

[Left Coast]

There is no self in that choice, it is motivated purly by a sensless love, it goes beyond material senses.

Rumi wrote;

"Love’s a stranger to earth and heaven too;
In him are lunacies seventy-and-two."

The issue may be that humainty has now seen to many acts of self based love in the form of terrorism.

Regards Tony

I think we may be conflating two issues: how we know what exists, and how we make decisions. I readily admit that people make decisions not based on their senses (i.e. irrational decisions) all the time. The question I was addressing is how we know what exists. I don't know how you do that without appealing to your senses. They are the only mechanism I know for discerning anything outside our own heads.

 

[Riders]

The term Christ means either Messiah or anointed one it could have been used by any messiah groups so could the term Christian.

 

[Left Coast]

Read the New Testament. It exists, it is evidence, so, prove it wrong. Of course, you cannot.

That is not the way burden of proof works. I can write down a bunch of claims in a book. The fact that I wrote them down isn't evidence that the claims I wrote down are actually true. Nor is it anyone's job to "prove wrong" my claims. It is my job to demonstrate my claims are true. Until such time as I demonstrate the truth of my claims, no one should feel obligated to believe them. Particularly when those claims involve completely implausible/impossible events.

 

[EtuMalku]

Read the New Testament. It exists, it is evidence, so, prove it wrong. Of course, you cannot.

You have opinions, which aren´t evidence, and you assume that since no one has been raised from the dead in a context you accept, it hasn´t happened.

Your assumption is wrong too.

The NT may be evidence (using circular logic) but it is by no means 'proof'.

 

[shmogie]

There's no significant evidence.

Besides dead people don't come back to life. Ever.

Actually there is evidence. So, people don´t come back to life, ever. That could be a false statement depending upon what you believe constitutes death.

A kid fell through the ice on a lake, drowned, and was dead when he was pulled out almost half an hour later, yet he was resuscitated and is alive today. Did he come back to life from the dead ?

Dead people, as far as you know, don´t come back to life. A much smaller circle than the one you were trying to paint.

 

[Riders]

Not when they're biased AGAINST something, just as Jesus and Christianity.

Tacitus only mentions a Christ Christ term means messiah,a Messiah who was crucified by Pontius Pilate and his group of Christians. the Christ term and Christian term could've been used for any of the group, but hey no ones saying Pontius Piltae did not exist, we know he existed and he crucified a bunch of the Messiahs from Messiah movements .

This is really all Tacitus words say that he crucified a Messiah Christ, Christ means messiah. Then he tortured his group of Christians the Messiahs group of followers, we already knew Pontius Pilate did this kind of stuff. he crucified lots of Messiahs.

 

[shmogie]

That is not the way burden of proof works. I can write down a bunch of claims in a book. The fact that I wrote them down isn't evidence that the claims I wrote down are actually true. Nor is it anyone's job to "prove wrong" my claims. It is my job to demonstrate my claims are true. Until such time as I demonstrate the truth of my claims, no one should feel obligated to believe them. Particularly when those claims involve completely implausible/impossible events.

You are from Ca., me too. My grandparents had a farm that would be in the LA city limits today. I went to school and college there spent my entire career there, and got out 23 years ago as it became a dump.

Witness statements, no matter how old, are evidence. At issue is the value of them. As a career 25 year law enforcement officer and criminal investigator, I have had significant experience in evaluating witness statements. There is much about the Gospels that compare favorably with truthful statements. I accept them as true.

Of course witness testimony gets rejected by juries, especially if they find the corroborative evidence as lacking, even though I believe the witnesses to be telling the truth.

You believe the events described are impossible. Based upon your personal experience and what you have been told they are, to you, and many millions.

Many, many millions, perhaps you too, believe that life began from a mixture of non living chemicals (abiogenesis), an impossible proposition that isn´t happening now and has never been observed. There were no witnesses to describe it.

No one should be obligated to accept anything they choose not to.

If they evaluate the evidence and it is lacking to them, so be it.

I find it much easier to accept that Christ arose from the grave, than to believe unknown chemicals in an unknown environment combined in an unknown way and bingo, a living organism popped into life, but thatś just me.

 

[shmogie]

The NT may be evidence (using circular logic) but it is by no means 'proof'.

correct, evidence isn´t proof. What circular logic are you using ?

 

[shmogie]

I think we may be conflating two issues: how we know what exists, and how we make decisions. I readily admit that people make decisions not based on their senses (i.e. irrational decisions) all the time. The question I was addressing is how we know what exists. I don't know how you do that without appealing to your senses. They are the only mechanism I know for discerning anything outside our own heads.

Hmmm, is consciousness based upon your senses ? Does consciousness exist ?

 

[shmogie]

Philo of Alexandria was a Greek who wrote Jewish story combined with Egyptian mythology its been proven to be wear Christianity starts at,

evidence, citations please

 

[Left Coast]

You are from Ca., me too. My grandparents had a farm that would be in the LA city limits today. I went to school and college there spent my entire career there, and got out 23 years ago as it became a dump.

Ah, I see. I'm up in Northern California. Less crowded than the LA scene.

Witness statements, no matter how old, are evidence. At issue is the value of them. As a career 25 year law enforcement officer and criminal investigator, I have had significant experience in evaluating witness statements. There is much about the Gospels that compare favorably with truthful statements. I accept them as true.

As someone with professional experience evaluating witness statements, I imagine you are familiar with how unreliable they can be. Witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in the scientific literature on the subject. Even when we are genuinely trying to remember a past event to the best of our ability, we invent details that never happened, we omit details that did happen, and we alter existing details.
I am reasonably confident that if you met a person in your professional capacity who told you they had come back to life after being dead for a day and a half, you would be highly skeptical and would demand more evidence than their say-so. Similarly if they claimed they had magically healed blindness with spit mud, or magically healed leprosy, or walked on water, or magically multiplied food to feed thousands of people, or had been conceived supernaturally without their mom having sex. I dare say if you met a person who claimed all those things about themselves, you would probably be quite worried about them and would not take their testimony very seriously. Yet Christians expect non-Christians to take seriously texts that claims all these things about Jesus. Texts that were written decades after the alleged events, don't concur on a myriad of details, and again, contain completely implausible things that we have no evidence have ever happened.

You believe the events described are impossible. Based upon your personal experience and what you have been told they are, to you, and many millions.

Not just based on my personal experience. Based on our empirical understanding of how the world works. Could that understanding be wrong? Of course. But the time to believe something is when sufficient evidence has been presented, not just on the chance that it might be true despite a lack of sufficient evidence.

Many, many millions, perhaps you too, believe that life began from a mixture of non living chemicals (abiogenesis), an impossible proposition that isn´t happening now and has never been observed. There were no witnesses to describe it.

How did you determine abiogenesis is impossible?

What I believe is that first of all, I exist. So I got here somehow. Thus far, every useful, demonstrable explanation for how stuff works in this world I live in has been through natural observation and explanation. Supernatural explanations have consistently failed to explain how the world works as we gain more and more information about it. Generally, supernatural explanations are posited as ways to fill the gaps in our lack of knowledge. Oh, we don't know how x could have happened? Must have been God. And so on.

Given all that, I am fairly confident that when we discover the exact mechanism through which life began on Earth, it will be through some sort of natural process, just like every other useful, demonstrable explanation we have ever discovered. God is simply not useful to explain it other than as a fill-in for our ignorance.

I find it much easier to accept that Christ arose from the grave, than to believe unknown chemicals in an unknown environment combined in an unknown way and bingo, a living organism popped into life, but thatś just me.

I appreciate your honesty. For me personally, I would rather admit that I don't know how something occurred than posit a God to fill in my ignorance that I don't have good reason to believe exists. Much less believe that a particular miracle by a particular God actually occurred.

 

[Left Coast]

Hmmm, is consciousness based upon your senses ? Does consciousness exist ?

The fact that we are conscious is certainly dependent on our physical senses, yes. I don't know what it would mean to be conscious without any physical sensations.

 

[Kilk1]

Wiki

Woah woah woah! As an editor of Wikipedia, I'm offended by calling it Wiki.

Wikipedia:Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"! - Wikipedia

isnt biased

But it is biased: Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source - Wikipedia.

(Okay, I'm just having fun here. )

 

[Trailblazer]

I bet it's written down somewhere.

So what? Anyone can write anything. That does not make it true.
Or perhaps that is not what you were implying....

 

[Kilk1]

WIkis source says Tacitus is reliable while others say its not. Here ar ethe words of Tacitus that Christians claim as proof. He is speaking of the punishment torture of Christians found by Pontius Piltae names Christ as the leader who was crucified .

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

There is a huge problem Im having with this. It does not prove Jesus was raised from the dead or even that his name was Jesus , it says Christ, Christ which is a name that could be used for any jewish Mesiah.

There is no doubt in my mind that there was a Messiah movement in Jesus times, and that Christians could have been a group started out of that, this writing could have just been about one of the Messiahs. Even if it pointed specifically to Jesus,and it does not say Jesus name it says Christ, as I said , but it does not prove that Jesus was raised from the dead.

I don't deny a guy named Jesus existed. There was a Messiah movement back then and I think Jesus could have been one of them or the whole group........but the Christians were one of the groups out of the Messiah movement.

The resurrection skeptic John Dominic Crossan certainly didn't think so. (It's also worth mentioning that you're just talking about one of the sources.) Are any other Messiah's actually called Christus (Christ), as in "Christus ... suffered ..."?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I think there's something to this. Notice Jesus has twelve disciples. In ancient Egyptian religion the sun god would go through the twelve hours of the night in the underworld and the twelve hours of the day in the sky. While the sun god was in the underworld he would go through a baptism, transfiguration, death, and resurrection.

Have you never considered that the division of the day into 24 hours (or a 7 day week) is an entirely human construct, and could easily have been decided otherwise. There would be nothing to prevent dividing the day into 20 hours, for example. (Probably the reason that 24 hours was chosen is that while 10 is divisible by 1, 2 or 5, 12 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4 or 6. That's actually quite useful.)

 

[nightshadetwine]

Have you never considered that the division of the day into 24 hours (or a 7 day week) is an entirely human construct, and could easily have been decided otherwise.

Yeah. Who else could have divided the day into 24 hours if not human beings? Animals?

 

[Trailblazer]

well if THAT Guy failed.....and He is dead
so are the rest of us and Man upon this planet is a complete mystery
without resolve
and without hope
extinction the only fate awaiting

Why do you believe that? Jesus is not dead, only His physical body is dead. His soul ascended to the spiritual world (heaven) and it took on a spiritual body comprised of spiritual elements that exist in that realm. The SAME exact thing will happen to all of us when our body dies. The physical body once dead, remains dead. It does not rise from the grave. It is this kind of superstitious belief that has discredited religion.

So what is the meaning of resurrection?

“According to the Bahá’í teaching the Resurrection has nothing to do with the gross physical body. That body, once dead, is done with. It becomes decomposed and its atoms will never be recomposed into the same body.

Resurrection is the birth of the individual to spiritual life, through the gift of the Holy Spirit bestowed through the Manifestation of God. The grave from which he arises is the grave of ignorance and negligence of God. The sleep from which he awakens is the dormant spiritual condition in which many await the dawn of the Day of God. This dawn illumines all who have lived on the face of the earth, whether they are in the body or out of the body, but those who are spiritually blind cannot perceive it. The Day of Resurrection is not a day of twenty-four hours, but an era which has now begun and will last as long as the present world cycle continues. It will continue when all traces of the present civilization will have been wiped off the surface of the globe.”
Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era, p. 222

The full explanation is on this link: The Great Resurrection

 

[Twilight Hue]

Actually there is evidence. So, people don´t come back to life, ever. That could be a false statement depending upon what you believe constitutes death.

A kid fell through the ice on a lake, drowned, and was dead when he was pulled out almost half an hour later, yet he was resuscitated and is alive today. Did he come back to life from the dead ?

Dead people, as far as you know, don´t come back to life. A much smaller circle than the one you were trying to paint.

Then the kid clearly wasn't completely dead.

 

[Trailblazer]

Jesus gave His life, Christ was raised to return again as promised.

True.... Jesus kept His promises...

John 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;

John 14:26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

John 15:26 But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:

John 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

John 16:12-14 I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.