Gary & Rhinestone's Thread on Burial and Resurrection of Christ

[One Bad Pig]

Keep laughing.

Yes, the highly respected archeologist is commenting on the historical accuracy of Mel Gibson's "Passion" but she also states the current position of scholarship regarding the historicity of the Gospels:

Not
reliable!

That laughing you hear is secular scholarship snickering at your first century superstitions.

As usual, you see what you want to see. As an archaeologist, she is mostly opining outside of her own field here. Inside her field, she relies on Silberman to assert that the James Ossuary is a fake (which is not borne out by the archaeological consensus), and brings up the "Jesus boat" (which no one actually thinks is tied to Jesus - it's just from his time) as an example of tourism trumping fact. And she should know better than to pretend that there is no archaeological evidence for the location of Jesus' tomb. Bias her bias is obvious.

[Raphael]

... she relies on Silberman to assert that the James Ossuary is a fake (which is not borne out by the archaeological consensus) ...

To be fair, the final testing that proved that the James Ossuary was not a forgery was in 2012 and her letter was written in 2004.

[One Bad Pig]

To be fair, the final testing that proved that the James Ossuary was not a forgery was in 2012 and her letter was written in 2004.

Quite true. But her pronouncement is rather confident for something which was not nearly settled - and relying on Silberman (of "The Bible Unearthed" infamy) is not a sign of high scholarship either.

[Juice]

What, from Paul, prevents me from concluding that he was asserting all the appearances were the same?

Gee I dunno. How about for a start the fact that Paul never asserts all the appearances were the same? But you are free to conclude whatever you want.

And how can you conclude "raised from the dead" means a physical bodily resurrection without reading the later appearance reports into it?

You're assuming a priori it means physical resurrection but what other contemporary source uses the phrase "raised from the dead" the same way as Paul uses it for Jesus?

Are we strictly sticking to just Paul or not? Please, for the love of all that is holy, make up your mind about this.

Most apologists assert that Jesus' resurrection was a unique event unlike any other! I'm surprised you would assume being "raised from the dead" like Jesus had other analogous precedents in the ancient world!

That's why I attempted to show from Jewish sources that predate Paul, being "aroused from the sleep of death" or "recalling the dead to life" need not necessarily imply a physical embodied existence that involved the resuscitation of the earthly corpse. Instead, there are plenty of sources that emphasize the continued existence of souls as opposed to the resurrection of the physical body. Therefore, merely being "raised" is a non-sequitur considering the wide range of views regarding afterlife and resurrection.

[Gary]

As usual, you see what you want to see. As an archaeologist, she is mostly opining outside of her own field here. Inside her field, she relies on Silberman to assert that the James Ossuary is a fake (which is not borne out by the archaeological consensus), and brings up the "Jesus boat" (which no one actually thinks is tied to Jesus - it's just from his time) as an example of tourism trumping fact. And she should know better than to pretend that there is no archaeological evidence for the location of Jesus' tomb. Bias her bias is obvious.

She is a professor at a Roman Catholic university.

[Gary]

Dear Christians,

Sometimes events in the ancient past had significant, lasting effects on the entire world and sometimes the event was insignificant in the long term view of humankind.

The topic of this long thread is not something insignificant in human history. We aren't discussing whether or not Pliny the Elder died from smoke inhalation. We are discussing, if conservative/traditional/orthodox Christianity is correct, the fundamental truth of the universe: that a first century man named Jesus of Nazareth is the Creator of and Almighty Ruler of the Universe, and, that you had darn well better believe in him and submit to him as your Lord and Savior (master) before you die or you will suffer eternal consequences!

But upon what evidence is the human race asked to believe this incredible claim?

---the veracity a compilation of 66 middle-eastern holy books written in the ancient past over a period of many hundreds of years which contain numerous errors in geology, astronomy, and history.
---Alleged eyewitness testimony written in four anonymously authored books written decades after the alleged events in question.
---Supernatural claims that even the majority of modern followers of this ancient religion would not believe if the same claims were made today, such as walking on water, talking animals, and raising the dead.
---the claim of the absolute historicity of the greatest event to have allegedly ever occurred on planet earth, but no mention of a known location and/or veneration of the location of this event (an empty tomb) prior to the FOURTH century!

And we are asked (threatened, actually) to believe this ancient tale or suffer terrible consequences.

Come on, folks, if this God of theirs really loved us as much as they claim he does, he would have sent us a much stronger, much clearer message. Now of course they will claim that their God is not obliged to behave as we think he should, but I disagree. The evidence present in the universe suggests that if there is a Creator God, he (she, they, or it) prefers order and values reason. I don't think that the true Creator would do such a sloppy, half-___ job of communicating with us.

Accept the evidence: Yahweh doesn't exist, and the man Jesus has been dead for two thousand years. It is time to put this ancient superstition in the same category in the bookstore and library as Zeus and the gods of Mt. Olympus: in the fiction section.

[Adrift]

Dear Gary,

Jesus Christ, the son of God, has risen. The historical evidence overwhelmingly supports it, and the Holy Spirit confirms it.

Your attempts to undermine the widely received work of reputable New Testament historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists with soundbites from moon hoax/lizard people websites, movie reviews, and selective Google keyword quote-mining is, frankly, pathetic and laughable.

You're terrible at this.

Slam the pulpit till your hands bleed, you will not win any converts.

Signed,

The Christians.

[Gary]

Dear Gary,

Jesus Christ, the son of God, has risen. The historical evidence overwhelmingly supports it, and the Holy Spirit confirms it.

Your attempts to undermine the widely received work of reputable New Testament historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists with soundbites from moon hoax/lizard people websites, movie reviews, and selective Google keyword quote-mining is, frankly, pathetic and laughable.

You're terrible at this.

Slam the pulpit till your hands bleed, you will not win any converts.

Signed,

The Christians.

Stop threatening the rest of us (and innocent children) with your ancient ghost stories; stop imposing your superstitions into secular laws---and the rest of us will care less which ancient superstitions you choose to believe.

[Adrift]

Stop threatening the rest of us (and innocent children) with your ancient ghost stories; stop imposing your superstitions into secular laws---and the rest of us will care less which ancient superstitions you choose to believe.

Stop conning poor trusting individuals of their hard earned cash with quack pseudo-medicine. Stop recommending unproven Eastern folk medicine and alternative therapies based on the work of 19th century spiritualists on those who desperately seek your help as a healer.

[Gary]

Stop conning poor trusting individuals of their hard earned cash with quack pseudo-medicine. Stop recommending unproven Eastern folk medicine and alternative therapies based on the work of 19th century spiritualists on those who desperately seek your help as a healer.

Nice deflection.

--no eyewitness testimony
--no evidence of an early empty tomb tradition
--no evidence that the visions of a recently departed first century loved one were any different than the tens of thousands of visions of other grieving loved ones and friends of recently deceased persons over the millennia.

It isn't true, folks. It is an ancient legend.

Let it go.

Embrace reason, science, and secular humanism. The world will be better for us all when supernaturalism is relegated to the bin of discarded ancient belief systems.

My stay here on TW has served its purpose.

Goodbye,

Gary

(If I ever come back to TW to comment, remind me I left...and to stay away. My wife will be eternally grateful.)

:)

[Adrift]

Says the guy who ignores NT scholarship and compares their work to the study of leprechauns and fairies. Who routinely declares that he accepts the majority view of experts in their qualified fields, except when it refutes whatever goofball agenda he's pushing. Who, as a Christian, presumably, wrongly, and psychotically turned a blind eye towards a God that he sincerely believed murdered innocent women and children. Who adopts the arguments of conspiracy nuts who believe in astrology, parapsychology, and David Icke in lieu of reputable academics. Who hypocritically condemns the belief of theists as fraud while fraudulently huckstering the sick with practices that have been proven by his peers to be, at the very least placebos, at the very worst, expensive and harmful procedures. Who promises time and again that he'll stop posting, to the consternation of his poor wife who has to put up with his absolute nonsense, but who lacks any sense of self control, and will predictably post on this forum again, because he is the very poster child of



You are a crazy mess Gary. You wasted a year of your life arguing against a worldview that was limited to your own naive fundamentalist upbringing. Maybe some day you'll eat that humble pie and realize you were in the wrong, but I won't count on it.

[RhinestoneCowboy]

Gee I dunno. How about for a start the fact that Paul never asserts all the appearances were the same? But you are free to conclude whatever you want.

No, I need a reason to rule out that Paul WAS NOT equating the appearances. Since Paul makes no distinction, that still remains a valid conclusion. He puts his own vision in parallel with the other appearances. The only reason you think they're different is because the gospel accounts say so. This becomes evident when I ask you for a reason and you go "b-b-but Paul says Jesus was raised from the dead! See!"

What? That has nothing to do with Paul making a distinction between the appearances! That's a red herring.

Check out the Jewish sources I've been posting! Being "raised from the dead" is a non-sequitur due to the many different ways this could be understood by a 1st century Hellenistic-Jewish audience and more importantly, Paul distinguishes the "spiritual body" that's raised from the natural/earthly body. This means all bets are off when it comes to the resuscitation of the physical corpse. You seem to still be interpreting "raised from the dead" solely on the basis of its use in the gospels.

"Paul never explicitly says that "bodies" will be raised. When he qualifies the noun "resurrection," it is once with the phrase "from [i.e., out from among the dead" (ek nekron, Phil 3:11) and several times with the phrase "of the dead" (ton nekron; e.g., 1 Cor 15:42). In both of these usages, the expression "the dead" refers not to impersonal corpses but to dead persons. So when Paul speaks of the "resurrection of the dead," he is not envisaging the mere revitalization of corpses. Rather, he has in mind the emergence of deceased persons from the realm of the dead in a transformed bodily state." - Murray J. Harris, Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Av...page&q&f=false

Are we strictly sticking to just Paul or not? Please, for the love of all that is holy, make up your mind about this.

Sure.

1. Paul makes no distinction between the appearances. He does not claim to have seen anything different than what the apostles saw. Therefore, a reasonable interpretation is that they all saw the same thing or something similar.

2. He equates the appearances with the same aorist passive verb which we know was used overwhelmingly for supernatural/spiritual visions of things instead of actual "physical" sightings.
https://books.google.com/books?id=r1...page&q&f=false

3. Paul makes no distinction between resurrection and exaltation. They both happened simultaneously. This makes sense if Paul was equating the appearances as visions from heaven but not so much if he knew about the Risen Jesus being touched on earth before ascending to heaven.

4. Paul connects his resurrection theology to Sheol - Romans 10:6-7, Eph. 4:8-10 - cf. Psalm 68:18, 1 Cor 15:55 - cf. Hosea 13:14. Sheol was the underworld where spirits dwelled. The idea is that spirits would be "raised" or brought up out of Sheol and given new spiritual bodies to inhabit in heaven.

5. Overall, Paul's resurrection terminology is too ambiguous and obscure to conclude he was speaking about the resurrection of the physical body and it can actually be interpreted that he was arguing the exact opposite. He seems disinterested in the earthly Jesus or what happened to physical corpses.

6. Paul mentions no empty tomb or even any of the details surrounding the story - no women, angel, Joseph of Arimathea, discarded grave cloths, nothing. These elements are conspicuous in their absence since they would have greatly helped out Paul's argument in response to "With what type of body will they come?"

Are you suggesting we read Paul as if he wrote his letters in a vacuum? Or is it more reasonable to assume he was influenced by the Hellenistic-Jewish culture that surrounded him? You missed the point of those verses, which was to show it's the righteous souls that will be vindicated, "raised" out of Sheol, or "brought back to life" in a sense. The wicked souls will not be "raised" but will either be punished or stay in Sheol in an indeterminate shadowy state. Paul seems to have some of the same ideas as found in Enoch and Daniel so it's probably safe to say he was influenced by the works. However, those works don't necessarily speak of physical corpse revival as I've clearly shown.

[RhinestoneCowboy]

Jews venerated tombs in honor of the dead patriarch or prophet inside the tomb. (see Robert Gundry's commentary on Mark pg. 1002, citing J. Jeremias, Heiligengraber, and The Cult of the Saints by Peter Brown, pg. 3).

Right, but Jesus wasn't just a dead patriarch or prophet. According to Christians he was the Son of God or God manifested in the flesh! Does it therefore make sense to let the site of his burial just fall into obscurity for 300 years? No of course not! The site would have had significance to the earliest Christians because it's the only place on earth where a resurrection by God happened!

I'm not sure what you're taking issue with at this point, that the tomb of Jesus was venerated, or that it wasn't? That knowledge of the site of the tomb was passed down as living memory (per Dale Alison Jr.) does not imply that it was necessarily venerated from the start.

You just said that Jesus' body was gone and that's why it wasn't venerated. The fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre came to be venerated without Jesus' body in it undermines your claim because it shows that Jesus' body was obviously not required for veneration. The earliest Christians would have had even more reason to venerate the tomb because they actually knew Jesus before his crucifixion.

Not exactly sure what your point is in citing the rest of the paragraph. To be sure, Kloner does believe that the Holy Selpuchre is the location of Jesus' tomb (see his article "Reconstruction of the Tomb in the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre According to Archaeological finds and Jewish Burial Customs of the First Century CE", or minute 29:41 of this video). He's only remarking that the tomb was added onto in later times. Since you seem to have access to BAR magazine articles, check out Dan Bahat's "Does the Holy Sepulchre Church Mark the Burial of Jesus?" Where he addresses the archaeological work being done to the Holy Sepulchre, and where he summarizes, "We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus' burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site."

Jesus was most likely buried in a trench or pit. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is just a deceptive sham.

[DesertBerean]

Right, but Jesus wasn't just a dead patriarch or prophet. According to Christians he was the Son of God or God manifested in the flesh! Does it therefore make sense to let the site of his burial just fall into obscurity for 300 years? No of course not! The site would have had significance to the earliest Christians because it's the only place on earth where a resurrection by God happened!

You just said that Jesus' body was gone and that's why it wasn't venerated. The fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre came to be venerated without Jesus' body in it undermines your claim because it shows that Jesus' body was obviously not required for veneration. The earliest Christians would have had even more reason to venerate the tomb because they actually knew Jesus before his crucifixion.

Jesus was most likely buried in a trench or pit. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is just a deceptive sham.

Ugh. Again with the sham accusations.

There are *plenty* of reasons why veneration of Jesus's tomb might not have followed the same manner as the others

1. He's alive, and the tomb served only as proof that he was not there because he had risen.

2. The religious environment in Jerusalem did not always favor the believers. How easy was it for them to gather at the tomb's location without being harrassed? Doesn't the Mosaic law limit how much contact one could have with the dead?

3. And as I mentioned before, persecution worsened and the believers were scattered and, after the Romans were done with Jerusalem, access to the tomb was lost, and eventually because of the changes to the city, not everyone was sure where it was located in the beginning.

There - I supplied what I believe are perfectly good reasons why the location of the tomb was not consistently preserved. Obviously I believe in the existence of the tomb as passionately as you disbelieve in it. I don't KNOW anymore than anyone else if the Holy-Sepulchre is the right one, but I truly believe they don't see it as a sham.

[Adrift]

Right, but Jesus wasn't just a dead patriarch or prophet. According to Christians he was the Son of God or God manifested in the flesh! Does it therefore make sense to let the site of his burial just fall into obscurity for 300 years? No of course not! The site would have had significance to the earliest Christians because it's the only place on earth where a resurrection by God happened!

You just said that Jesus' body was gone and that's why it wasn't venerated. The fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre came to be venerated without Jesus' body in it undermines your claim because it shows that Jesus' body was obviously not required for veneration. The earliest Christians would have had even more reason to venerate the tomb because they actually knew Jesus before his crucifixion.

Nah, it doesn't undermine the claim. You may be able think through this if you give it a bit of effort. Here, let me help. If the early followers of Christ believed that they were indwelled with the very Holy Spirit himself, it's counterintuitive, and, as mentioned, not particularly in keeping with Jewish practice, to venerate an empty tomb. The tomb, the cross Jesus hung on, the nails he was crucified with, the shroud he was buried with, the crown of thorns he wore, his seamless garment, the sponge he drank from, the lance he was pierced by, I don't believe any of these held any particularly mystical or supernatural meaning to the very earliest Christians. When the living son of God stands before you, you're not going to care so much about the plate he's eating off of, or the silverware he's using, you're going to care about the man himself. As Christianity became more and more Gentile, as the event faded further and further into the past, Christians desired some way to connect with that past, with Jesus and his earliest disciples. And eventually there arose the idea that these items and places could diffuse some sort of holy blessing or protection. They read the stories of the woman healed by touching the hem of Jesus' garment, or the handkerchiefs touch by Paul, and put more emphasis on the item than the faithfulness that actually imparted the healing. Relic and place veneration didn't happen overnight. It grew in popularity over time.

Jesus was most likely buried in a trench or pit. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a farce.

Nope. Jesus was likely buried in a tomb prepared by a member of the Sanhedrin, and the Holy Selpulchre marks that spot.