The Historicity of "Post Resurrection" Jesus

[John T]

@Diogenes the Cynic,

Please clarify by citing sources for your following statements because I don't want to remain ignorant about the truth of your claims.

Thanks in advance.

1. Even Bart Ehrman has now changed his mind and says he does not believe there was an empty tomb…Diogenes the Cynic

Response: What do you mean by now? Ehrman has not been a Christian for many, many years, so of course he wouldn’t believe in the empty tomb. Or instead were you implying; Ehrman now claims the first Christians didn’t believe in the empty tomb either, that the empty tomb was a made-up story added decades later? If so, please cite your source.

2. Carrier does not think aliens resurrected Jesus. He doesn't think Jesus existed at all. I believe (IIRC) that he was only pointing out that aliens are not as improbable as magic…Diogenes the Cynic

Response: I didn’t say he did. He said that Quantum Teleportation and Neural Engineering by space aliens is entirely possible. That the Heaven’s Gate Cult really made sense, in that there really could have been a flying saucer flying by and those aliens could have scanned a brain and reproduce it into a new body. See the 29:30 mark of his lecture.
http://youtu.be/79UAYyMYk7I

3. We don't know what they [the predominate view of first Christians] believed because we don't have any writings from them. The closest we have is Paul who said that physical resurrections were impossible, never mentions a tomb and says that Jesus was turned into a spirit… Diogenes the Cynic

Response: Although several examples to the contrary have been provided by me and others you still insist Paul disavowed the notion of a physical resurrection. Please cite your source.

4. He [Paul] was a narcissistic liar for sure. He may or may not have also been psychotic… Diogenes the Cynic

Response: No doubt Paul was envious of the authority of James the Just and had contradictory beliefs, i.e. circumcision but that does not make Paul a liar. Please cite your source that proves Paul was a narcissistic liar.

Again,
Thanks in advance for your help in removing my ignorance.

John T

[outhouse]

I seem to recall that Crossan's case for the bodies always being left for the birds and dogs was not anywhere near as firmly established as he implied.





DCH

Agreed.

But it still is highly plausible by all that is known.


Crossan says many good things and fits as close as he can to anthropology, yet then turns around and perverts it, by giving way to much credibility to specific verses that fit his personal agenda.

[DCHindley]

Besides, what about Josephus in War, book 4, section 317?

These were actions done in defiance of Roman law during a revolt.

Really? Where does it say that the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Ananus et al ever executed anyone in the period of the revolt? Even if they had, say as part of normal operations of an "independent" government, Josephus still makes it seem like the removal of bodies for burial was the norm at all times, even including Roman dominated times, and that the Idumeans had shockingly violated this practice.

You'll have to find a passage where it says people were executed and their bodies left to rot. Even Antigonus II, who revolted against the Romans with the help of their arch foes the Parthians, and was beheaded/crucified by the Romans "which had never before been done," was apparently buried as recent archaeological finds, discussed here endlessly, suggest.

DCH

PS: If Pete or someone wants to make a case for Josephus being fiction written in much later times and based on scripture or whatever, see

(RSV Jer 7:31-33) 31 And they have built the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.
32 Therefore, behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when it will no more be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of Slaughter: for they will bury in Topheth, because there is no room elsewhere.
33 And the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth; and none will frighten them away.

(LXE Jer 7:31-33) 31 And they have built the altar of Tapheth, which is in the valley of the son of Ennom, to burn their sons and their daughters with fire; which I did not command them to do, neither did I design it in my heart.
32 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when they shall no more say, The altar of Tapheth, and the valley of the son of Ennom, but, The valley of the slain; and they shall bury in Tapheth, for want of room.
33 And the dead bodies of this people shall be for food to the birds of the sky, and to the wild beasts of the earth; and there shall be none to drive them away.

Oh damn, there's that Gehenna thing again!

DCH

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Can you sum up his argument in the pay-wall part of the post, without violating any agreements?

Hopefully I won't get in trouble for this. I'd paraphrase these points, but they're kind of already paraphrased. It would be hard to condense this anymore than it already is without losing substance.

I won't make a habit of this. This is Ehrman:

1. Josephus is clearly saying what he does about the piety of the Jews, who bury “even crucified victims,” in order to provide an contrast them with the despised Idumeans, who not only slaughter at will but refuse to bury their victims. But if he says that Jews buried “even crucified victims” in order to show their (his) moral superiority to the hated Idumaeans – has he exaggerated a bit to make the point? There is no way to know.

2. Josephus does not say who crucified these Jews who were given decent burials. The normal assumption is that he means that these people were crucified by the Romans rather than by the Jews. That may be the correct reading, although he is contrasting how the Idumeans treated people they killed with how Jews acted — so is it not in reference to people that Jews executed? It’s worth remembering that, at earlier periods (e.g., under Alexander Jannaeus in the Maccabean period) we do know that Jewish leaders crucified Jews. Is that what Josephus is referring to? I’m not sure what to think about this.

3. For the sake of the argument let’s just say that he is indeed saying that Jews typically buried victims crucified by Romans. Even if so, another bit of doubt is cast on his claim by the fact that two of his goals in writing are:

a. To celebrate the great piety of the Jews. Remember how Josephus does this elsewhere, in ways that simply cannot be believed: he actually claims that Jews executed their children when they planned to do something unjust to their parents!

b. To exonerate the Romans, in part by saying that the war was not their fault. Here the implication would be that the Romans were highly merciful, even allowing decent burials contrary to their own customs. Again, contrast those hated Idumeans.

These two objectives are never far below the surface in Josephus’s works – and they dictate what he has to say, so that he often stretches the truth in order to make his point. Is that the case here?

4. It is important to note that in this short statement, Josephus does not say that burial of crucified victims had been the Jewish custom from time immemorial. He is writing about events that transpired 35-40 years after the days of Jesus, in a very different circumstance. It’s not immediately obvious that he can be taken to mean this always, or typically, happened – only that it was, in his claim, something that took place in his day.

general practice. During the Jewish War, about which Josephus is writing, there were massive crucifixions. At one point, the Roman general Titus was capturing and crucifying 500 Jews a day – a day! – in front of the walls of Jerusalem, while those inside looked on. There is no one on the planet (now or in antiquity) who honestly thinks that Jews inside Jerusalem regularly left the relative safely of the walls to ask the Roman commanders for permission to take down the bodies because they didn’t want their laws to be broken. Why not? Because it was a time of war.

6. In other words, if Josephus’s statement *was* true – even if this was a Jewish practice – it was not true all the time, but only in some circumstances, when the conditions allowed. For most of the crucifixions of the first century, conditions did not allow.

7. Did conditions allow in the case of Jesus? At this time, around 30 CE, the Romans were not laying siege to Jerusalem and there was not a war going on. But it’s important to look closely at what Josephus actually says. When he says that “even malefactors” who were crucified were given decent burials, for the term “malefactor” he uses a generic term (καταδικη). He uses the term or its derivatives 17 times in his surviving writings, always to refer generally to someone who is condemned to something (e.g., slavery, dishonor, or crucifixion). In none of the 17 times that he uses it does he use it to refer to someone who was condemned to crucifixion as an “enemy of the state” or an “insurrectionist.” Jesus in the New Testament is never referred to with this term (translated here as “malefactor”). When he is crucified, he is not simply “condemned.” He is charged with calling himself the King of the Jews – i.e., it is a charge of political insurgency. He was an enemy of the Romans.

8. Most people who were crucified throughout the Roman empire in times of relative peace, in Judea or elsewhere, were simply “malefactors” – e.g., murderers, robbers, run-away-slaves. If Josephus is right in the claim that I’ve quoted – i.e., if he is not exaggerating the piety of the Jews in order to have a nice contrast with the Idumeans and to emphasize the benevolence of the Romans – and if it is the case, as it *has* to be, that he does not and cannot mean that Jews *always* buried crucified victims (since they didn’t for many thousands), then it may be plausible (though I’m not convinced it’s true) that in times of peace, Jews were sometimes given the right to bury some crucified victims when they were guilty of lesser crimes, when they were simply “malefactors,” as opposed to being “enemies of the state.”

9. The reasons Jesus would not have been one of these for whom burial would be allowed are the ones that I have given extensively over the course of the past three weeks. To sum it up, not only during war but also in times of (relative) peace the Romans publicly humiliated and tortured to death enemies of state precisely in order to keep the peace. Jesus was condemned not for blasphemy, not for cleansing the temple, not for irritating the Sadducees, not for bad-mouthing the Pharisees, not for … well, not for anything but one thing. He was crucified for calling himself the King of the Jews. Only Romans could appoint the King. If Jesus thought he himself was going to be the King, for the Romans this would have been a declaration of war (since he would have to usurp their power and authority to have himself installed as king) (I’m talking about how Romans would have interpreted Jesus’ claim to be king, not what he himself may have meant by it). They may have found it astounding, if not pathetic, that this unknown peasant from the rural hinterlands would be imagining that he could overthrow Roman rule in Judea. But Romans didn’t much care if someone was a megalomaniac, a feasible charismatic preacher, or a bona-fide soldier in arms. If the person declared “war” on Rome – which a claim to being the King amounted to – the Romans knew how to deal with him. He would be publicly tortured and humiliated, left to rot on a cross so everyone could see what happens to someone who thinks he can cross the power of Rome. There was no mercy and no reprieve. And there was no decent burial, precisely because there was no mercy or reprieve in cases such as this. After the point was made – after time, the elements, and the scavengers had done their work – the body could be dumped into some kind of pit or common grave. But not until the humiliation and the punishment were complete. Yes, it’s true that in Jesus’ day, the country was not in armed rebellion against Rome. There was a general peace. But this is the very reason *why* there was peace. Would-be offenders – insurrectionists, political enemies, guerilla warriors, rival kings, enemies of the state – were brought face to face with the power of Rome in a very gruesome way, and most people, who for as a rule preferred very much not to be food for the birds and dogs, stayed in line as a result.

10. In sum, even if Josephus is stating a general practice among Jews (I’m not sure we can trust that he is. But even if he is), it is not a practice that applied to times of war or threats of war. As we have seen repeatedly in the past three weeks, it did not apply to enemies of the state. Jesus was an enemy of the state, crucified for calling himself King of the Jews.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

@Diogenes the Cynic,

Please clarify by citing sources for your following statements because I don't want to remain ignorant about the truth of your claims.

Thanks in advance.

1. Even Bart Ehrman has now changed his mind and says he does not believe there was an empty tomb…Diogenes the Cynic

Response: What do you mean by now? Ehrman has not been a Christian for many, many years, so of course he wouldn’t believe in the empty tomb. Or instead were you implying; Ehrman now claims the first Christians didn’t believe in the empty tomb either, that the empty tomb was a made-up story added decades later? If so, please cite your source.

Being an atheist does not necessitate a belief that there was no empty tomb, Ehrman still assumebed the historicity of the tomb for years after he lost his faith and it has only been recently - specifically in his latest book, How Jesus became God - that he said he has changed his mind on that.

Response: I didn’t say he did. He said that Quantum Teleportation and Neural Engineering by space aliens is entirely possible.

They are. What do you think makes them impossible?

That the Heaven’s Gate Cult really made sense, in that there really could have been a flying saucer flying by and those aliens could have scanned a brain and reproduce it into a new body. See the 29:30 mark of his lecture.

Nothing about the belief was categorically or physically impossible. Nothing about it was supernatural. He wasn't saying that they had any likelihood of being true, though. Not categorically impossible does not mean likely to be true.

Response: Although several examples to the contrary have been provided by me and others you still insist Paul disavowed the notion of a physical resurrection. Please cite your source.

You have provided no examples of any writings from witnesses and my own source is Paul. Specifically in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff, where Paul says physical resurrections are impossible.

Response: No doubt Paul was envious of the authority of James the Just and had contradictory beliefs, i.e. circumcision but that does not make Paul a liar. Please cite your source that proves Paul was a narcissistic liar.

He frequently mischaracterized or misquoted scripture to serve his agenda, especially as it pertained to the law. Probably the worst example is his twisting of the meaning of the veil of Moses in 2 Corinthians 3:13.

[ficino]

Can you sum up his argument in the pay-wall part of the post, without violating any agreements?

Hopefully I won't get in trouble for this. I'd paraphrase these points, but they're kind of already paraphrased. It would be hard to condense this anymore than it already is without losing substance.

I won't make a habit of this. This is Ehrman:

Many thanks for this summary, Diogenes.

I can't really quibble with Ehrman's case here, and I don't particularly want to. I appreciate the thought he's put into it and his attempts to distinguish malefactors from true seditionists against Rome (or those who were considered so).

I note that even here, though, we again fall onto the merry-go-round of deciding which pieces from the gospels to treat as historical and which ones to treat as embellishments. Ehrman relies on the information that Jesus was condemned for claiming to be King of the Jews. Some scholars think that charge, and Pilate's titulus, are invented. Ehrman seems to rely on those items to argue that another item, the Empty Tomb, is invented.

Sigh.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

I think he still accepts John and the Synoptics as being independent sources for the Passion. I don't (at least, I don't think we can count on it) but he does.

[ericbwonder]

I believe there's something to be said for the hypothesis that Mark's empty tomb story is a resurrection version of a translation story. The following articles are worth a read:

Hamilton, Niell Q. 1965. 'Resurrection Tradition and the Composition of Mark', JBL 84, 415-21.

*Miller, Richard C. 2010. 'Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity', JBL 129/4, 759-776.

*Smith, Daniel A. 2003. 'Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Post-Mortem Vindication of Jesus in Mark and Q', Novum Testamentum 45/2, 123-137.

*I have not read Smith's fuller book-length work, and this idea has its criticisms (e.g., Peter Bolt 1996. 'Mark 16:1-8: The Empty Tomb of a Hero?', Tyndale Bulletin 47/1, 27-37 [online free pdf]).

But it makes sense, particularly given Mark's ending, which indicates the story is fictional, as I pointed out earlier.

The other gospels rescripted the story to follow up with tales of appearances. The direction of dependence seems obvious. I cannot imagine Mark altering a traditional story (represented by the other gospels) in the semi-negative direction in which he takes it, and it is right at that point where Matthew, Luke and John veer off in wildly contradictory directions about the next sequence of events.

I can grant that Joseph of Arimathea may have existed, and may have buried Jesus, but I don't think anyone knew where. He was presumably long dead when the gospels were written. Mark invented a story where Jesus's place of burial by Joseph in a rock-cut tomb was stumbled upon ('discovered') by women performing customary rites (see e.g., Angela Standhartinger 2010. '"What Women Were Accustomed to Do for the Dead Beloved by Them" ("Gospel of Peter"12.50): Traces of Laments and Mourning Rituals in Early Easter, Passion, and Lord's Supper Traditions', JBL 129/3, 559-74.), but no one knew about this because, as Mark states, the darn women didn't tell anyone.

Or perhaps it's the case that Joseph's tomb was known, and since he was also known as a sympathizer with Jesus's following, Mark wrote that it was Joseph who buried Jesus in his tomb, and the story of the discovery was Mark's 'etiology' for why Jesus's body was not found there (no gospel, other than Luke's by implication, says it was actually empty), although this would suggest that by Mark's time there was tradition of a tomb associated with the burial of Jesus, although it wouldn't reflect historical reality (again, given Mark's ending).

Just some ideas I'm playing with at the moment.

In any case, I'm not convinced by the view that Paul believed in a resurrection where the resurrected body wasn't identical to the corpse, even if transformed. So while his reference to Jesus being buried and then resurrected would entail a gravesite where his body was absent, that need not correspond to any known or 'discovered' tomb.

[outhouse]

I can grant that Joseph of Arimathea may have existed, and may have buried Jesus, but I don't think anyone knew where

I view it as rhetorical prose in fiction, to create to build a character important enough to be buried where most peasant were thrown in a pit.

We se many rhetorical parallels to the Emperor and his divinity, speaking to large crowds, Augustus star at his birth, and a fancy birth myth.

They factually built divinity by means of rhetorical prose, despite any possible historical core.

[cienfuegos]

Response: I didn’t say he did. He said that Quantum Teleportation and Neural Engineering by space aliens is entirely possible. That the Heaven’s Gate Cult really made sense, in that there really could have been a flying saucer flying by and those aliens could have scanned a brain and reproduce it into a new body. See the 29:30 mark of his lecture.
http://youtu.be/79UAYyMYk7I

John T, You keep tripping over yourself in your vendetta against Carrier. Carrier compares what he clearly considers 2 ridiculous claims. He only says that the Heaven's Gate resurrection belief makes more sense than Christianity, not that it "really made sense."

He says "If the Heaven's Gate Cult is absurd, Christianity is absurd."

You have a problem with taking everything Carrier says absolutely literally ignoring context and nuance (much like your claim that Carrier promised to destroy Christianity). You are a constant source of misinformation related to Carrier.