dogsgod
Well-Known Member
But Paul called James the brother of the Lord, so that changes everything. Just ask a scholar.
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What Real Evidence Exists for The Resurrection?
- Thread starter godnotgod
- Start date
But Paul called James the brother of the Lord, so that changes everything. Just ask a scholar.
DallasApple
Depends Upon My Mood..
THE EVIDENCE is ONLY in the PEOPLE..
What do you want some sort of floating dead body???
I would LOVE to be able to have some DEAD (but alive) GHOST hovering in my face cheering me on..
Sorry..you dont get that.Its invisible and more like your whole body.
Love
Dallas
What do you want some sort of floating dead body???
I would LOVE to be able to have some DEAD (but alive) GHOST hovering in my face cheering me on..
Sorry..you dont get that.Its invisible and more like your whole body.
Love
Dallas
Smoke
Done here.
Paul concentrated on his mystical Christ, but it doesn't follow that he knew nothing of the historical Jesus. In fact, he mentions a few -- and just a few -- details about Jesus. To claim that Paul knew nothing of the historical Jesus and then discount what he says about the historical Jesus because you have already accepted your own specious claim, is blatantly dishonest.
Smoke
Done here.
Are you saying the resurrection is a spiritual event, and not a historic event?
Smoke
Done here.
I apologize for my baseless remark. I was thinking of logician; it's all coming back to me now.
DallasApple
Depends Upon My Mood..
Yes..of course..Could have been at the time some sort of "where is the body" event ...
I mean I have zero reason to believe Jesus didnt walk around here and get strung up because He had things to say that made some people mad and quite frankly afraid.
So I think Jesus walked and was quite a real man .And he was murdered.And His followers believed..that His way was a VERY and possibly the ONLY way to go.
And if you think about it He would be quite a nice way to go..as you walk along here ..He was quite the example.
Love
Dallas
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dogsgod
Well-Known Member
No problem, Smoke.I apologize for my baseless remark. I was thinking of logician; it's all coming back to me now.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Some pagan themes probably were, but in the case of conversion perse, I disagree, though I would not call the intent "cynical"...."calculating, perhaps, but not "cynical".
Consider the following statements:
"So the followers of Yeshua had to convince the followers of Mithras that they should abandon Mithras and follow Yeshua.
But Yeshua and Mithras had something important in common. Mithra's followers were promised immortality and he had been entombed and rose from the dead, proving that immortality was available to those who believed in him. The promise of immortality and his rising from the dead were also the central tenets of Yeshua's message as the early church promulgated it. Those weren't the central tenets of Yeshua's message as he gave it, but the early church was intent on converting people because they were certain Yeshua was going to return any minute to establish the Kingdom of God and as many people as possible needed to be converted to get them into the fold before the return. The promise to entice them to convert was eternal life in Yeshua's Kingdom of God.
But Mithras already promised eternal life in Mithras' Kingdom of God, so why should the Mithraites convert to following Yeshua? Paul and the other followers of Yeshua outside of the Jerusalem church took care of the problem. They just made some adjustments in the story of Yeshua's life so the pagan believers in Mithras would feel at home with the Jewish Messiah. In the earliest sources (Paul's letters, written around 50 CE to 65 CE, a very early gospel termed the Q source we know from sayings in Luke and Matthew that are not in Mark, written before 70 CE, and Mark, the earliest gospel, written just after 70 CE), there was no miraculous birth and only modest supernatural occurrences in Yeshua's life. By the time Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels (around 90 CE), the story was quite different; Yeshua had a host of supernatural events surrounding his birth and death. The question is, where did these events suddenly come from?
We find them in Mithras. The missionaries promoting Yeshua as the messiah for humankind simply wrote them into the narrations about Yeshua."
Paul and the Mystery Religions
Sounds like a plan, to me.
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Smoke
Done here.
It could have been a plan. I guess the reason I don't tend to think so is that my impression of Paul is one of a delusional, megalomaniacal religious enthusiast who really does believe he's God's own pre-eminent apostle. I don't think he thought much out very carefully, but threw together a theology on the fly to meet the perceived needs of the moment. Of course, that could easily include a certain amount of calculation.Sounds like a plan, to me.
godnotgod
Thou art That
My goodness! You determined the "calculating" characteristic just before I edited my post to suggest the same in place of your original one of his being "cynical".
I think the mind of a zealot in general is very calculating, and can be very inventive on the spur of the moment. You know, whatever it takes to serve one's ulterior motives.
"Manipulative" might also apply.
(the word "manipulative" always brings to mind the words on those turkey loaves describing the method of processing as "mechanically separated turkey"...yuk!
)
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godnotgod
Thou art That
godnotgod
Thou art That
Two monks came to a stream.
One was Hindu, the other Zen.
The Indian began to cross the stream
by walking on the surface of the water.
The Japanese became excited
and called to him to come back.
Whats the matter?, the Indian said.
The Zen monk said,
Thats not the way to cross the stream.
Follow me. He led him to a place
where the water was shallow
and they waded across.
John Cage
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy
One was Hindu, the other Zen.
The Indian began to cross the stream
by walking on the surface of the water.
The Japanese became excited
and called to him to come back.
Whats the matter?, the Indian said.
The Zen monk said,
Thats not the way to cross the stream.
Follow me. He led him to a place
where the water was shallow
and they waded across.
John Cage
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy
This response, the third post in the thread, give an honest answer. Jesus' life and death isn't really up for dispute, but the Resurrection as the poster says is purely a matter of faith. We can argue until the moon turns to cheese that particular testimonies are valid, but nobody accepts that written accounts of any age are a full and final proof for a dead body returning to life after three days with no apparent corruption of the flesh.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Then why do Christians go out of their way to demonstrate that there is "overwhelming evidence" that the Resurrection is a "historical fact"?
When confronted with the fact that there is no real first hand evidence to support such a claim, they then state that it is "purely a matter of faith".
Sorry, I don't buy it.
However, for the sake of discussion, let us leave alone the search for evidence, and focus on the Resurrection being purely a matter of faith. Firstly, if that is the case, then it is for Christians alone, who should not expect the rest to accept their dogma. But that is not the case, is it? Christianity claims also that it is the one true faith, that the Resurrection was a real event, and that faith that it occurred goes along with conversion. As St. Paul said, if you don't have the Resurrection, then Christianity fails. Christians must have faith in the Resurrection, and expect everyone else to do likewise.
Secondly, if it is purely a matter of faith, what is it a matter of faith FOR? What purpose does trusting that the Resurrection occurred serve for the Christian? We know that the Crucifixion definitely served to wash sin away, but the Resurrection?
Bear in mind that having faith that the Resurrection is a real event is an admission that it may also not be true, unless, of course, by "faith", the Christian is actually saying that it is a fact. In other words, the Christian is using faith and truth interchangeably. If the Christian means that he has reason to believe that the Resurrection is true, but is not certain, then the question becomes: why is it important that the Christian needs to maintain such a belief, knowing that it may not be true?
Careful how you answer this one, please.
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Smoke
Done here.
I can go along with that, sort of ...
roger_pearse
Member
Consider the following statements:
"So the followers of Yeshua had to convince the followers of Mithras that they should abandon Mithras and follow Yeshua.
But Yeshua and Mithras had something important in common. Mithra's followers were promised immortality and he had been entombed and rose from the dead, proving that immortality was available to those who believed in him. The promise of immortality and his rising from the dead were also the central tenets of Yeshua's message as the early church promulgated it. Those weren't the central tenets of Yeshua's message as he gave it, but the early church was intent on converting people because they were certain Yeshua was going to return any minute to establish the Kingdom of God and as many people as possible needed to be converted to get them into the fold before the return. The promise to entice them to convert was eternal life in Yeshua's Kingdom of God.
But Mithras already promised eternal life in Mithras' Kingdom of God, so why should the Mithraites convert to following Yeshua? Paul and the other followers of Yeshua outside of the Jerusalem church took care of the problem. They just made some adjustments in the story of Yeshua's life so the pagan believers in Mithras would feel at home with the Jewish Messiah. In the earliest sources (Paul's letters, written around 50 CE to 65 CE, a very early gospel termed the Q source we know from sayings in Luke and Matthew that are not in Mark, written before 70 CE, and Mark, the earliest gospel, written just after 70 CE), there was no miraculous birth and only modest supernatural occurrences in Yeshua's life. By the time Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels (around 90 CE), the story was quite different; Yeshua had a host of supernatural events surrounding his birth and death. The question is, where did these events suddenly come from?
We find them in Mithras. The missionaries promoting Yeshua as the messiah for humankind simply wrote them into the narrations about Yeshua."
Sounds like a plan, to me.
Interesting. You copied this off the web, of course, as you make clear. (The forum software forced me to snip the link)
But ... we all know that there is any amount of rubbish online, stuff that is biased, misrepresentative, or simply untrue. So ... what checks did you do, to make sure that this stuff was actually right? That it wasn't just a load of old rubbish, unreferenced hearsay and the like?
Or did you do, as so many do, and merely repeat something because it seemed convenient?
I can tell that, for your information, that you should consider every word of that page as factually wrong.
All the best,
Roger Pearse
Smoke
Done here.
I think claims of historical or scientific evidence are mostly a Protestant phenomenon, and more specifically, mostly an Evangelical phenomenon.
Protestants, and especially Protestant movements that arose after the first wave of classical Protestantism, like to believe that their religious beliefs are rational and that they have risen above the superstitions of Rome and the Christian East. Part of the Protestant strategy for breaking away from Christian tradition was claiming to base their religion on the Bible, which was pretty effective, but put them into an uncomfortable and novel position.
If your religion is based on the Bible, it suddenly matters very much whether the Bible is reliable, whether you have the most reliable text of the Bible, and whether your interpretation of the Bible can be rationally defended. These are issues the historic churches don't have to worry about. It doesn't matter if you have the very best, most "authentic" text, as long as you have the text that is received by the Church. You don't have to defend your interpretation of the Bible from scratch, on a rational basis; if your interpretation is in line with tradition, that's sufficient. It doesn't matter if the Bible is 100% reliable, because it's not the Bible you're relying on. I have, for instance, heard Orthodox Christians explain without the slightest qualm that certain parts of the New Testament have been superseded by the Holy Canons, and despite the undeniable fact that deaconesses are scriptural, the prevalent view among Orthodox bishops is that since the Holy Fathers have allowed the order of deaconesses to die out - the Orthodox are still living in their Patristic Age - it might be rash and inappropriate to revive it.
That's not to say you don't run across Catholic and Orthodox Creationists and similar apologists, but they're relatively rare. This kind of thing is mostly a Protestant phenomenon.
On the other hand, the traditional Christian insistence on the importance of faith has been retained by the Protestants, and with their unbearable burden of proof it's not surprising that they apply it to believing what they can't explain by reason. "Faith," says Archie Bunker, "is something you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe."
I'll grant you that thinking of faith simply as believing that for which you have no evidence is a rather debased view of faith, even from a Protestant point of view, and many Protestants are quick to point that out, but there's no denying that there's a strong element of it in Protestant religiosity. (It's also present to a lesser extent in the historic churches.)
Add to that the Evangelical obsession with "cults," and with "disproving" the claims of groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and you've made evidence even more important. Not that Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, especially the latter, don't find themselves in roughly the same position. Part of the genius of Mormonism, though, is freeing themselves from that burden to a great extent by having a living leadership that is believed to receive direct revelations, and by urging Mormons to look within themselves and see if they can't find Mormonism being confirmed by the Holy Spirit. That means that most of the apologetic and propaganda efforts of the Mormons are directed at outsiders, while Evangelicals have a constant need to direct these efforts toward their own faithful.
So, you start with a religion that carries with it an explicit burden of proof, or at least a burden of evidence, and must be defended no only in its own right, but also against the claims of others. You make your reasoned case as best you can, and to the extent your audience accepts your reason, so far, so good. Where reason and evidence fail, you resort to claiming the necessity of faith. It is, in the context of Protestantism, almost inevitable.
Of course polemics and apologetics occur among the historic churches, too, and especially within the Roman Catholic Church, which is in general more legalistic and makes a greater attempt to seem rational than the Eastern Churches. But these kinds of arguments don't carry the same sense of urgency, or strike at the heart of historic Christianity to the same extent, as they do for Protestants.
It's a curious thing about Christianity that belief is one of the very most important aspects of it. Other religions can be dogmatic, but none of them are dogmatic with same fervor as Christianity. All the historic churches recite creeds at their worship services; some Protestants claim to reject creeds but almost invariably invest their "statements of faith" with great importance. (And here again there's that blurring of faith and truth claims that you mention.)
Christianity, almost alone among the world religions, places greater emphasis on belief than on way of life. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus may have definite opinions about which beliefs are correct and which are incorrect, and may think it's a very important issue, but hardly any of them ever ascribe the same importance to belief as Christians.
In normative Christianity, God can and will forgive you of the most heinous sins, provided you repent. Mass murder is no real obstacle to salvation. But if you believe the wrong thing about the Trinity or the Virgin Birth, all is lost.
It's really an odd feature of Christianity, and I've heard and read a number of attempts to explain it. I've tried to explain it myself. But I can't say I've come across a really satisfactory explanation yet.
Smoke
Done here.
There is of course any amount of rubbish online, just as there is any amount of rubbish in print. The medium itself doesn't discredit or lend credence to anything, and trying to discredit something simply because it was found on the internet is both lazy and disingenuous.
And how do we know that this admonishment, found on the internet, is actually right? How do we know it isn't just a load of old rubbish, unreferenced hearsay and the like, biased, misrepresentative, or simply untrue?
Because it is an essential part of their belief system, but there is no 'overwhelming evidence'. Nobody in ordinary life accepts documentary evidence as proof of a supernatural event, therefore a dead body being restored to life after three days is an exception that amounts to no more than a special plea.
Faith is always the fall-back position. As with the PoE every possible theodical argument is employed, but when confronted with the truth that there is no logical necessity for evil, it then becomes purely a matter of faith that God is good.
It seems to me that the distinction between religious faith and truth are frequently blurred. I believe many theists constantly struggle with their faith, suspending their rational judgements in favour of what they want to believe. Christianity is a very confused system of belief, full of contradictions and absurdities.
godnotgod
Thou art That
The problem with your "supernatural event" is that it describes a resurrection of the physical body in a certain time and place. That makes the claim historical as well.
You cannot separate the "supernatural" (whatever THAT is) from the historical, as far as the Resurrection is concerned.
Your "special plea", unfortunately, is seen as factual evidence by major Christian apologists and scholars. They are busy little bees going out of their way to demonstrate that the Biblcial accounts are overwhelming proof. Here are a couple of quotes and references:
"When I was confronted with the overwhelming evidence for Christ's resurrection, I had to ask the logical question: "What difference does all this evidence make to me?"
Josh McDowell
Evidence for the Resurrection
*****
"The personal appearances of Christ following His resurrection are another overwhelming historical proof. The women and the disciples saw, heard, and even touched the Lord. In fact, 500 brethren saw him at one time."
(It is clear here that the author is using Biblical accounts as 'historical proof')
J. Hampton Keathley III, Th.M.
Evidences for the Resurrection | Bible.org; NET Bible, Bible Study
*****
"The evidence for Christs resurrection is overwhelming. The empty tomb stands as a monument to Christs victory over death, a monument that, though attacked throughout the ages, remains standing and unmoved."
(Again, the author uses a Biblical account as 'overwhelming evidence')
Gabe Ginorio, Institute of Biblical Defense
Resurrection | Institute of Biblical Defense
[FONT=Arial, Times, Roman] "Dr. Greenleaf, formerly the Royal Professor of Law at Harvard University, [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Times, Roman]was so convinced by the overwhelming evidence, he committed his life to Jesus Christ![/FONT]"
and....
[FONT=Arial, Times, Roman]"After investigating the evidence of the resurrection, Lord Darling, former Chief Justice of England, stated, ". . . there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true."
To deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ you have to close your eyes to the overwhelming facts of history."[/FONT]
(Here we have faith following the evidence!)
Dr. Terry Watkins, Th.D
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Fact or Fiction?
*****
There are tons more of examples. Many of the major apologists, such as William Lane Craig, regularly engage in public debates to defend the historicity of the Resurrection.