Book Plunge: Can Christians Prove The Resurrection?

[37818]

How do you know that Paul "saw" Jesus in heaven? First of all, Paul never says he saw Jesus in the "third heaven", he only mentions hearing things that he could not repeat. Secondly, even Paul states that he was not sure if this experience was a literal bodily experience or only an experience in his mind (a vision or vivid dream).

How did Paul know that some of the five hundred were "asleep". Had he attended their funerals or was he simply repeating more second hand information? You have no proof that Paul knew any of the five hundred "witness" nor do you have any proof that Paul discussed the "appearances" of Jesus to the Eleven. For all we know, if Paul did discuss his appearance with the Eleven, they all agreed that all they had seen was a talking, bright light!!!

Isn't it possible that the Early Creed is historical, documenting "appearances" of Jesus (which occurred in vivid dreams and visions) to the persons listed, but the Resurrection stories in the Gospels, written decades later, were highly embellished additions to the original story.

You are confusing events. The "heavenly vision" you criticized supposing because the term "vision" was used was not real. As I point out the account in Acts, Saul had witnesses with him who experienced that event with Saul, not understanding what what Saul heard or seeing Jesus. Whom Saul saw from Heaven. Peter and Paul knew each other. Paul met and knew James (Act 21:18; Galatians 2:9).

". . . And there came thither [certain] Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and, having stoned Paul, drew [him] out of the city, supposing he had been dead. . . ." -- Acts 14:19. Paul had not died but was left for dead. This is where Paul had that vision of being caught up to the third heaven. It was what we call today a near death experience.

How did Paul know that most of the 500 were still alive? He reported that some were now dead.
Paul was making the claim to the Corinthian church that there were at his writing for them witnesses of Christ's resurrection yet alive. It was valuable to them to know.

[Gary]

You are confusing events. The "heavenly vision" you criticized supposing because the term "vision" was used was not real. As I point out the account in Acts, Saul had witnesses with him who experienced that event with Saul, not understanding what what Saul heard or seeing Jesus. Whom Saul saw from Heaven. Peter and Paul knew each other. Paul met and knew James (Act 21:18; Galatians 2:9).

". . . And there came thither [certain] Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and, having stoned Paul, drew [him] out of the city, supposing he had been dead. . . ." -- Acts 14:19. Paul had not died but was left for dead. This is where Paul had that vision of being caught up to the third heaven. It was what we call today a near death experience.

How did Paul know that most of the 500 were still alive? He reported that some were now dead.
Paul was making the claim to the Corinthian church that there were at his writing for them witnesses of Christ's resurrection yet alive. It was valuable to them to know.

You are assuming that because Paul sincerely BELIEVED that his experience on the Damascus Road was reality, that it was. How can you prove it? How can you prove that Paul was suddenly healed of blindness just because Annaias prayed over him? Who wrote the Book of Acts? Luke? Maybe. Maybe not. You are placing a lot of faith in a story told in an anonymous book and in the testimony of one man, Paul, who may have been very sincere in what he BELIEVED he saw and experienced, but we have zero proof that he literally did.

Most people would never believe this supernatural tale today, even if told by someone who otherwise has a sterling reputation, so why should we accept as "gospel" the word of one, vision-prone, first century man?

Bottomline: I believe that Paul most likely sincerely believed he had "seen" Jesus and had been commissioned by Jesus to be his missionary to the Gentiles. What I find strange is why Jesus, if he is God, would commission a "viper", a Pharisee, to be his primary messenger to the Gentiles, when he had just spent his entire earthly ministry training twelve men (eleven, minus Judas) to do the very same job!

"Go ye (the Eleven) into all the world and preach the Gospel..."

It's very odd. Possible, but very odd. My bet is that Paul wasn't dealing with a full deck, but, who knows.

[Gary]

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d...storical-paul/

It is interesting to note that Paul never details the events of his conversion in his epistles. Isn't it possible that "Luke's" story of Paul's conversion on the Damascus Road is nothing but a theological embellishment, similar to Matthew's guards???

[psstein]

I would largely agree with what Tabor is saying, but probably question #3. I think Acts has some genuine material about Paul not found in the Epistles. Whether or not the traditional authorship attribution is correct, there's definitely some source material from somebody who was a contemporary of Paul.

[Gary]

I would largely agree with what Tabor is saying, but probably question #3. I think Acts has some genuine material about Paul not found in the Epistles. Whether or not the traditional authorship attribution is correct, there's definitely some source material from somebody who was a contemporary of Paul.

Do you agree that the Damascus Road story, as told by the author of Acts, could be an a-historical, theological embellishment? All we know from Paul's epistles is that he claimed to have "seen" Jesus. He does not tell us where, how, or any circumstances related to the event.

Galatians 1



11 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters,[a] that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; 12 for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

13 You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. 14 I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. 15 But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son to me,[b]

[psstein]

It could be an embellishment, yes. It could also be an expansion of Paul's experience.

[Gary]

It could be an embellishment, yes. It could also be an expansion of Paul's experience.

True. So we don't know for sure what Paul saw, when he saw it, or if anyone else was with him when he saw whatever it was that he allegedly saw. Therefore, for all we know Paul saw Jesus in one of his many "revelations". Were these literal events of the body (specifically, the eyes) or were they experiences of the mind...even Paul says that he wasn't sure sometimes...

So what do we have as evidence for the alleged "appearances" of Jesus, in chronological order:

1. We have the Early Creed which claims that the dead but risen Jesus appeared, in some fashion, to all the major male figures of the early Christian Church.
2. We have Paul's statements in his epistles that he had "seen the Christ". He does not elaborate on this statement. Was this a real event or another "revelation" in a vision or vivid dream?
3. We first see detailed accounts of alleged appearances by the risen Jesus to the above men (curiously excluding James), to other men, and to women, showing up in written form, of which we still have copies today, in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew in the 70-80's AD and in the Gospel of John at the very end of the first century. The original Gospel of Mark, written in circa 65-75 AD contains no post-resurrection appearances.

What does this evidence suggest: A few vivid dreams and visions were eventually embellished to very colorful, detailed stories, with many additional eyewitnesses, and the details in these different versions of these stories which were finally written down contain some pretty significant differences (discrepancies??).

So the question is: Would first century Jews interpret their dreams as real events? Would a first century Jew dream of Jesus appearing to him, talking to him, interacting with him, and even engaging in physical contact, and believe it was a real event? Nick, Stein, and others say no. But I would like to point out that the Bible itself clearly indicates that Jews had a long history of taking dreams very seriously. I assert that Jews going back as far as Jacob would have vivid dreams and believe that God or his angel had truly spoken to him in the dream and that the angel or voice in the dream was just as real as if the person in question had been wide awake.

We see this for example in the two instances where Joseph, the husband of Mary, has two vivid dreams in which angels appear to him, once to tell him to marry a woman who is pregnant by someone other than himself, and on another occasion to warn Joseph of Herod's attempt on the life of the two year old Jesus and that Joseph should move the family to a foreign country...in the middle of the night! Mentally healthy people today do NOT take their dreams that seriously.

Therefore if the grieving disciples had vivid dreams of Jesus (which experts tell us occurs very frequently with the bereaved), they very well could have assumed that their dreams were just as real, and just as true, as the dreams of Joseph and other Jews before him who interpreted their dreams as real messages, delivered by real divine beings (angels), and not just as ordinary dreams.

Therefore, the evidence clearly points to vivid dreams as the most probable cause of the early Christian belief in the post-death appearances of Jesus.

[One Bad Pig]

I would largely agree with what Tabor is saying, but probably question #3. I think Acts has some genuine material about Paul not found in the Epistles. Whether or not the traditional authorship attribution is correct, there's definitely some source material from somebody who was a contemporary of Paul.

I would consider James Tabor to be on the fringe of scholarship; his work tends rather more to the sensationalist than the scholarly IMO.

[One Bad Pig]

We can resolve this disagreement with one simple question: Is it possible or is it impossible that someone, for some unknown reason, stole the body of Jesus from his grave, sometime during the time period between when his body was placed in the tomb and Sunday morning when the tomb was found empty?

This only resolves the disagreement if we assume, a priori, that anything at all, including flying pink unicorns, is more likely than the resurrection.

[One Bad Pig]

If we eliminate the presence of Roman guards at the tomb, as this detail is not historical according to the scholarly consensus, then what additional "available evidence" are you referring to? I am including all the Christian "evidence" in my grave robber scenario other than Matthew's invented guards. So this is what MAY have happened:

1. Joseph of Arimathea places Jesus' body in his tomb.
2. Sometime after Arimathea has left the Garden and before Sunday morning, grave robbers move back the stone, and for any number of reasons, take the body. (necromancy; thinking the body has some monetary value; Jews who don't want Jesus' grave to be a Christian shrine; Romans who don't want Jesus' grave to be a Jewish nationalist shrine; Christians who want to keep the movement alive; family members who want to secretly bury the body in a family plot; teenagers out for a night of pranks; the mentally ill acting in a state of psychosis, and on and on goes the list of possible reasons.)
3. Sunday morning mourners come to the grave and find it empty.
4. The empty tomb triggers the belief that Jesus had been resurrected, just as he had prophesied.
5. In the ensuing excitement (hysteria), everyone and his uncle starts having vivid dreams and visions in which Jesus "appears" to them.
6. Several years later, a Creed is written mentioning Jesus' "appearances" to all the prominent (male) leaders of the early Christian Church. It was not meant as an all inclusive list of persons who had "seen" the resurrected Jesus. An additional detail of an unnamed group of people "seeing" Jesus at the same time is included in the Creed. Since no details are given regarding this crowd other than that most of them are still alive, we can not be sure of the historicity of this claim. It might simply be legendary, including in the Creed for theological purposes, similar to Matthew's guards and his dead saints roaming the streets of a major city.

You haven't been paying attention *at all*, have you? This is just the same list of suppositions you've already repeated ad nausaeum in this thread, without any corrections from what anyone has said. You even forgot that conceded the presence of the grave clothes left behind in the tomb. I'm getting a little bored with responding to the same thing over and over and over again, so forgive me for declining this time around.

[Gary]

I would consider James Tabor to be on the fringe of scholarship; his work tends rather more to the sensationalist than the scholarly IMO.

Well, how about we all investigate the current consensus opinion of scholars on the historicity of the Damascus Road conversion of Paul Story as told in Acts. Here is an excerpt of one article discussing scholarly opinion and this issue:

To suspect or reject the historical basis of the story of Paul's conversion as we read it in Acts is certainly nothing new in the history of scholarship. Indeed, one might have thought the issue settled long ago, with a negative verdict, by Baur, Zeller, and Haenchen.2 The contradictions and implausibilities of the three linked episodes (Paul's persecution after Stephen's stoning; his vision of the Risen Jesus on the Damascus Road; and his catechism and baptism by Ananias) are well known. To review just a few of them, and thus to beat a dead horse, the Stephen martyrdom (as Hans-Joachim Schoeps,3 followed by Robert Eisenman,4 suggests) is a fictionalization of the story of the martyrdom of James the Just in similar circumstances (as one can still glimpse in Acts 7:52, "... the Just One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered."). Luke's reduction of the Jewish Sanhedrin to a howling lynch mob is not to be dignified with learned discussion. Worse yet, Saul has been appended to the narrative by means of a typical Lukan blunder. The Law mandated the casting aside of the clothes of the one executed, not those of his executioners, but Luke has Saul play coat-check for the mob. And then Saul does not so much spearhead as personify the persecution, which, as Haenchen notes,5 is primarily a piece of "darkness before the dawn" hagiography anticipating the impending conversion of the enemy of the faith. The whole church is supposedly dispersed, jailed, or tortured into blaspheming Jesus, but the Apostles and myriads of their followers remain unmolested all the way into chapter 21. Saul obtains a hunting license from the high priest to persecute Jewish Jesus-believers in Damascus, though in fact the jurisdiction of that worthy extended into Damascus no more than did that of Quirinius into Bethlehem.

That the Damascus Road Christophany is the creation of Luke is evident, first, from the fact that, for artistry's sake, he quite properly varied the details between his three accounts, even as he had with his two accounts of the Ascension, a full forty days apart. As James Barr said regarding the latter case, a writer who is so little concerned for consistency cannot very well have been striving for historical accuracy.6 Second, as Gerhard Lohfink notes, Luke's stories copy standard scriptural type-scenes (to borrow Robert Alter's phrase).7 The scenes "work" because they prompt the reader to recall the biblical prototypes. Since he offers them as transparent literary allusions, he simply cannot have expected his readers to take such scenes as historical reportage. And the Damascus Road episode certainly does embody such a type-scene, the kind Lohfink calls the "double vision." In such a sequence a heavenly visitant grants the protagonist a revelation, adding that at the very same moment he/she is appearing to someone elsewhere with instructions to meet/help the protagonist.8 A third reason, and the strongest of all, as we will see, is that, while Paul's epistles provide nary a historical peg from which to hang the Lukan tale, there are strikingly close literary prototypes on which Luke seems to have drawn.


Source: http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.c..._paul_conv.htm

[Gary]

Here is a statement by scholar Colby Townsend:

All in all, the book of Acts was written for a different purpose than what we areasking. It was not written to show literal, realized history in the sense that we think of today.Luke was writing apologetically in defense of his own tradition. With this realization we canmove forward and test the text verse by verse and compare it to other sources of the sameperiod. In many instances it can be shown that Luke took the story and smoothed it out tofulfill his apologetic needs of depicting a fully unified church which has been led by Godthrough divine inspiration.

Source: https://www.academia.edu/3305696/The...e_Book_of_Acts

[psstein]

I would consider James Tabor to be on the fringe of scholarship; his work tends rather more to the sensationalist than the scholarly IMO.

I absolutely agree.

Tabor is a qualified scholar whom unfortunately has become more of a crank as time has gone on.

[Gary]

This only resolves the disagreement if we assume, a priori, that anything at all, including flying pink unicorns, is more likely than the resurrection.

Let's limit the discussion to events known to abide by the natural laws of the universe and events that have regularly occurred in the natural world (eliminating theft by flying pink unicorns). And let's make it even simpler: Is it possible or is it impossible that a human grave robber stole the body of Jesus?

[psstein]

Gary, the people you're citing are hardly mainstream scholars... though I don't completely disagree with the point you're making about Acts.

Colby Townsend is an undergraduate. Robert M. Price is the only qualified mythicist scholar on the planet. James Barr was a phenomenal Hebrew Bible scholar, but not a NT scholar. Robert Eisenman is not a qualified NT scholar, and much of his work is fringe at best.