Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Giuseppe wrote:

Perhaps the enemies found the bodies of Gaius or Tholomeus and then somehow this was missed or confused in accounts, which were written at a later time. Or perhaps they actually secretly escaped the battle? Perhaps someone will think that these are reasonable possibilities, even if not likely.

Or maybe their bodies were found, but were later adorned by the tropos in question (saying they were disappeared contra factum), only in order to honour them.

Maybe you can find empty tomb stories in paganism. But they are more obvious in Judaism with its body resurrection belief.

If what you want is to apply on Jesus a hellenistic tropos, you have only to istantiate it accordingly in a Jewish matrix. I don't see Judaism and Paganism as so black and white.

Judaism emphasizes bodily resurrection out of a grave, associating this with the Messianic and apocalyptic future.
Greek thought frequently imagined a separation of the body from the soul as ideal, didn't it?
So I don't see how the resurrection, leaving an empty grave, is therefore a sign of paganism in particular.

Paul and Peter looked at that verse and announced in Acts that Jesus fulfilled this verse from Judaism. That Jewish prophecy is the obvious motive for this belief even if it is a myth.

Marcion would not agree. Especially if your argument is based on Acts.

Sure, but Marcion's crazy belief was that somehow the NT Testament was absolutely divorced from the NT, such that they were not even the same Gods. This is not sensible because of the plethora of OT citations. Every chapter of the NT could have a dozen or more crossreferences to something in the OT.

It's foundational to Christianity and Jesus as the concept of "the Messiah" that Christianity (Christ=Anointed=Messiah) is from the Old Testament. For example, as Judaism's King David says in Psalm 16: my flesh rejoices, because you won't abandon the holy one to the grave. As Peter explains in Acts, the resurrection of the body of the Son of David was seen by the Christians as fulfilled in this verse. As Peter said: We have David's grave with us, and David was buried. But this Jewish verse must be about the Messiah who was not left in the grave.

But obviously, the rabbis and Marcion would not want to see those links.

The irony here is that I can even concede you free the assumption of a tomb for Jesus. His record at all in the original belief, if indeed found (and I doubt about it), is more easily explained as the banal corollary of the our innocent tropos and not as evidence of a real empty tomb. But this obviously for my naturalistic assumptions.

OK, I understand that you are saying that you have a naturalistic assumption that Jesus stayed dead, so you are concluding (1) that must have meant his body stayed in whatever grave he was in, and (2) since you disagree with Christianity, you assume that since it's wrong, it couldn't even be based on what it says it is - Judaism. So you say the empty tomb must be in paganism, not Judaism.

As I explained many times before, neither conclusion is correct, even if Jesus did stay dead and Christianity is made up.

It's amusing to me how i am simultaneously arguing with someone with the opposite viewpoint from you on another thread:

Jesus' appearances to James
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2015&start=60

John2 is proposing that Christianity in the 1st century based around James, Jerusalem's bishop, was all about keeping the Torah. He supports the medieval Judaizing Shem Tov Matthew version as if it were the original gospel.