Christians- How do you know Jesus and the Bible are true?

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Why say "borrowing from a non eye witness" if the eyewitness in Mark's case is Peter?

Peter isn’t reliable in both canon and noncanon stories.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Someone then comes to confirm that she is now dead, but Jesus (as Elisha) doesn’t fret, and he goes into his house, works his miraculous magic, and raises her from the dead.

My one issue with this is that Jesus insists she is asleep. He doesn’t back down on that, unlike when he clarified that Lazarus was dead. To me, he woke her from a coma. It’s not like people are checking pulses here.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

According to the scriptures and Roman practice, there was a large heavy stone blocking the tomb with Roman soldiers guarding it. The disciples had all run and hid after the death of Jesus. Not too plausible they confronted the guards, moved the stone, or stole the body.

I don’t care if there’s a stone. Clearly if someone put it there they can take it away.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

There may be legitimate reasons they didn’t immediately recognize Him. Nevertheless, they all did shortly come to know it was Jesus.

Most versions have Jesus being turned into hamburger meat after hours of torture, yet they meet some guy that they don’t know who only has a few wounds. Doesn’t that seem odd?

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

So you go with the scholars who say the supernatural is not true and bring that into their work.

You have great faith. Go tell a mountain to move. I’ll wait.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Faith is a subjective thing, but imo the Gita has no evidence for the reality of any stories in it and cannot even be located in history and the Chronicles of Narnia are fictional, like the Lord of the Rings.

Dwarka existed. The ruins were found. Bishma died during a certain astronomical event and the event happened. The Gita tells people that they made their bed and now they have to lie in it, while the NT is primarily instruction on how to throw Jesus under the bus so that you don’t get consequences for your actions. The Gita is better.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

There is no evidence that the Apostles died for the belief that Jesus was resurrected.

Indeed. And when Jesus complained that prophets are killed, he was likely referring to a story invented around his time, because hardly any prophets were killed by the people in the Bible.

 

[InChrist]

Most versions have Jesus being turned into hamburger meat after hours of torture, yet they meet some guy that they don’t know who only has a few wounds. Doesn’t that seem odd?

No, not if Jesus is God with the power to conquer death and resurrect in an incorruptible body. It’s not surprising the disciples didn’t recognize Him at first, since they had seen Him die, run and hidden in fear, in shock, and were not expecting to see Him.

 

[Brian2]

Religious beliefs are kind of provable. A charismatic preacher can be very convincing. But some of those charismatic preachers have turned out to cult leaders. All religions have their charismatic leaders, and some charismatic leaders create new religions.

The Baha'i Faith is one of those. They make it easy to accept a watered-down, less extreme, and less dependent on believing things literally version of Christianity and all the other major religions of the world. If a person wants to believe in their version of God and that he sent the Baha'i prophet, the teachings of the Baha'i Faith can be quite convincing. And that becomes the proof. And it is verified by how, in pretty much every religion, that if you do the stuff that you are told to in that religion... it will work.

Christians feel saved, feel like Jesus and the Holy Spirit are guiding them. Some, I'm sure have been healed or experienced little miracles in their lives. And the support of their fellow believers helps give them assurance that what they believe is true.

But believers in any religion feel similar things. And just like some Catholics have visions of Mary, some Baha'i have visions of Abdul Baha'. And both Christians and Baha'is can look at things happening in the world and see things that proves to them that what they believe is true.

So, sure your religion works and seems true, but so does theirs. And, to me, what's the common denominator? Believing it is true. And what's an Atheists or a skeptic to do but say, "But it's all based on things that the religious person assumes are true. And, in each religion, those things are that are assumed to be true, are different. They are only real in the mind and heart of the believer. Which to the believer makes them seem real, but to the skeptic makes it look like the religious person is just believing in made-up fantasies.

Maybe, but again, just between what Born-Again Christians believe and what Baha'is believe, we have two very different beliefs that contradict each other. And again, what is it that they have in common? They get people to follow the rules and laws and moral codes of the religion in order to get a reward later in some after-life. Does that reward even have to be real? No, but if the people in the religion believe it, they will make an attempt at obeying the laws of their religion. So, to the skeptic, what is the truth? I agree with them, best stay with only the things we can verify with objective evidence. So, maybe God is real. Maybe your religion is true. But... maybe not.

This quote from Peter is about the transfiguration (called by Peter "the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ".
2Peter 1:16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son,9 with whom I am well pleased,” 18 we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

Matthew 16:28 Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Matt 17:1 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2 And he was itransfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for lElijah.” 5 He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son,1 with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

To a skeptic, why should they believe that the record in the NT is from witnesses? Other skeptics have thrown doubt on that by saying that the supernatural is not real and so the gospels were written after 70AD by people who did not know Jesus. The gospels must be lies, shown to be that by scholars, and who would doubt scholars.
The scholars who believe are biased in what they say.

Then add to this the religions like Baha'i which say that the Bible does not even mean what it says and it is enough to turn someone into a skeptic.
I guess it's easier for believers who already believe in an evil deceiver called Satan.

 

[Brian2]

When did John witness the “beginning “ again?

???

 

[Brian2]

Peter isn’t reliable in both canon and noncanon stories.

Which non canon stories are you referring to.

 

[Brian2]

Dwarka existed. The ruins were found. Bishma died during a certain astronomical event and the event happened. The Gita tells people that they made their bed and now they have to lie in it, while the NT is primarily instruction on how to throw Jesus under the bus so that you don’t get consequences for your actions. The Gita is better.

Dwarka exists. Bishma died during the winter solstice, and winter solstices do happen.
The Gospel tells people to repent and trust in the Lord Jesus.

 

[joelr]

Testimonies probably run into the tens of thousands, those that have experienced the living God and Holy Spirit.

Yes and testimonies run into the tens of thousands that experienced Allah speaking through emotions telling them Islam is the only truth.
I personally knew one.
I also knew a Hindu who said the same about a personal relationship with Lord Krishna and knew many others who had the same experience.
Everything I have heard about personal Jesus stories are mirrored in Krishna stories.
What does this show?
When a person believes a deity is real and personal they cause feelings of communication and attribute all sorts of experiences to the deity.
Religious experiences, emotional, blissful experiences, "miracles", it's all psychology and not evidence for anything outside of a human mind.

Two Unexplainable experiences!!​

Submitted by vaishnava14 on Sat, 2011-06-18 22:20
Hare Krishna everyone,
Experience #1
Eight months ago I went to visit my mother in another city, and she told me about this 'Spiritual Temple' called Krsna consciousness. Obviously, I had hardly any interest in spirituality really, but I had SOME motivation for going to the temple when suddenly IT happened.
As we were entering the temple I could hear the sound of kirtan playing and as I entered the temple room and found a comfortable place in the back of the crowd, I listened and began studying what was going on - many men dressed in skirts, and women in robes were surrounding what looked like some statues on an alter, and there were plaques with some foreign language that read: "hare krishna, hare krishna, krishna krishna, hare hare, hare rama, hare rama, rama rama, hare hare" by the sides, then I spotted what looked like an old man sitting on a large chair, It was Srila-Prabhupada's statue! By now I was freaked out a little, when suddenly there occured a small rip in the crowd, like having a cloudy sky split in two..
Time slowed down as I saw this statues deity face smiling and holding a flute near his mouth, for one second I became confused and then - for 3 seconds, THATS RIGHT 3 SECONDS: I felt Bliss, Serenity, Love, Joy - and a thought occured in my mind: "I've finally found home!"
In the Skanda Purana there is the following description of the result of seeing arati (worship) of the Deity: 'If someone sees the face of the Lord while arati is going on, he can be relieved of all sinful reactions coming from many, many thousands and millions of years past. He is even excused from the killing of a brahmana or similiar prohibited activities.' (The Nectar of Devotion, Ch. 9)
Then I became bewildered; and I also suddenly realized that one of the temple Brahmin priests was staring at me oddly, and then I REALLY freaked out.
As kirtan finished and we sat down to talk the priest was handed the microphone and pointed at me and said "You see that there boy - his soul was very happy!" I immediantly became emberrased and as well with still being disorientated after what had just happened to me.
Experience #2
2 months later - I was chanting my 18 rounds in the temple and circling the deity darshana - all alone. Every time I came around the back and passed the Pujari room, I had the feeling some 'Ghost' was following behind me and disappeared either every time I looked back or came around to the front of the alter. Finally I decided to stand in the hall behind the alter and wait. Suddenly, there was a peaceful - magnetic sensation to my Third Eye coming from the back wall of the alter, I moved closer and it felt really good; I embraced it, and it gradually faded into my Third Eye. I never realized that people touch they're heads to the back wall until a week later I saw people pressing they're heads in obesiances against the back wall.
Conclusion#
So now, ever since then these experiences have given me constant faith in Krishna, as I cannot explain them and the fact my heart started feeling emotions again, I've grown so detatched from computer games, non-devotee friends, modern-music, improved intuition, love of god, attatchment to chanting, etc. And the feeling that Krishna is often with me, showing me the way. I'm terribly attatched to him and can't imagine my life now without him, I almost LUST for him at times and then feel helpless because I can't reach him.
God bless you all, I swear that everyone will have intimate experiences like these in Krsna Consciousness, don't think you'll only have one, a couple, or a few, or even JUST several, he will reveal himself to all who have confidence in him! He is the light of lights!
With love, Haribollll!


Not evidence of Gods, evidence of psychology.

 

[joelr]

My one issue with this is that Jesus insists she is asleep. He doesn’t back down on that, unlike when he clarified that Lazarus was dead. To me, he woke her from a coma. It’s not like people are checking pulses here.

Right that is true. But its' also just a re-write of an OT Elisha story. Elisha raised several people in the OT, it's well established that Mark was using a OT/Kings narrative to construct a Jesus story.



"As for some other notable coincidences, we see Mark reversing a few details in his version of the story. Instead of a woman begging for her son, it is a man begging for his daughter. While in 2 Kings, an unnamed woman comes from a named town (Shunem) which means “rest”, in Mark we have a named man coming from an unnamed town, and the man’s name (Jairus) means “awaken”. In Mark’s conclusion to this story (5.42), he mentions that “immediately they were amazed with great amazement”, and he appears to have borrowed this line from 2 Kings as well (4.13 as found in the Greek Septuagint version of 2 Kings), which says “You have been amazed by all this amazement for us”. It’s important to note that this verse from 2 Kings (as found in the Greek Septuagint), refers to an earlier encounter between the unnamed woman and Elisha where he was previously a guest in her home and this verse was what the woman had said to Elisha on that occasion. Then Elisha blesses her with a miraculous conception (as she was said to be a barren woman in 2 Kings). In fact, this miraculous conception was of the very son that Elisha would later resurrect from the dead. So to add to this use of 2 Kings we also have another reversal from Mark, reversing the placement of this reaction (double amazement) from the child’s miraculous conception (in 2 Kings) to the child’s miraculous resurrection (in Mark 5.42)."

The Gospels as Allegorical Myth, Part I of 4: Mark

Previously, I’ve written about the historicity of Jesus, and mentioned how the most recent analysis, in Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus (the first comprehensive, academica…

lagevondissen.wordpress.com

 

[joelr]

This quote from Peter is about the transfiguration (called by Peter "the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ".
2Peter 1:16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of

Here Peter is responding to something. People were accusing Jesus to be a myth and this is a response to that.

his majesty. 17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son,9 with whom I am well pleased,” 18 we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

Matthew 16:28 Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Matt 17:1 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2 And he was itransfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for lElijah.” 5 He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son,1 with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

To a skeptic, why should they believe that the record in the NT is from witnesses? Other skeptics have thrown doubt on that by saying that the supernatural is not real and so the gospels were written after 70AD by people who did not know Jesus. The gospels must be lies, shown to be that by scholars, and who would doubt scholars.
The scholars who believe are biased in what they say.

Then add to this the religions like Baha'i which say that the Bible does not even mean what it says and it is enough to turn someone into a skeptic.
I guess it's easier for believers who already believe in an evil deceiver called Satan.

ALso the theology is Greek and already happened several times.
The stories in Mark are re-writes of several older sources, OT, Epistles, Greek poetry.
Mark uses a fictive style of literature, never used in historical writing.

But besides all that your argument is the same special pleading that you have been using all along. The skeptical writers are "biased".
Uh, no, there isn't any reason to not find this to be mythology. But the real question is if this is using Greek and Persian theology (it is), Justin Martyr admitted this to be the case, and it does seem to re-write several older stories why would you expect this to get a pass?
And why would ALL supernatural stories also not get a pass? So you have to assume the Quran is true. Bahai as well. He said straight out he is a messenger of God. So did Muhammad. So you get to have a supernatural bias with everything else except the stories you already believe?

Mormonism, got messages. Jehovas Witness, new messages. Why would you have a supernatural bias and not believe these stories but believe the one story that looks the most to be a myth?

 

[Apostle John]

Yes and testimonies run into the tens of thousands that experienced Allah speaking through emotions telling them Islam is the only truth.
I personally knew one.

And there is the stupidity (in the operative sense of the word) of following a false religion. Muslims are clearly misled having been told in their texts they cannot hear God or have personal instruction from Him and have no experience of the Triune God at all. It will be the same for all other false religions.

 

[joelr]

That idea is a result of your disinterested scholars.
That idea also means saying that Church history on the authors of the gospels is wrong, lying.
The presumption of no supernatural and so authorship after 70AD is more important than Church history and the internal evidence of the gospels.

There is no evidence of supernatural. You seem to think scholars should turn a blind eye to the massive evidence staring them in the face, just because you want this story to be true.
Mark is massively mythic. Everything in it is written as fiction. You seem to think a prophecy should be taken as evidence while pages and pages of purposeful mythwriting should be ignored? And you blame scholars for that? As if they SHOULD be that blind? If they took that approach with the Quran and announced the Quran has been proven to be true and Islam is definitely real you would probably be beside yourself. Yet you want the same with Mark?

Everything in Mark is fiction. The Barabbas story is an obvious literary device. First no Roman magistrate, especially the ruthless Pilate, would let a murder rebel go free. No such Roman ceremony has ever been attested to have existed, nor is it plausible. The ceremony clearly emulates the Jewish ritual at Yom Kippur of the scapegoat and atonement (in a story about atonement), it's status as an allegorical myth is clear. Mark has merged the sacrifices of Passover and Yom Kippur by having Jesus be a Yom Kippur sacrifice performed during passover.

Barabbas means "Son of the Father", which was also Jesus. So we have two sons of the father, one released into the wild mob containing th esins of Israel, murder and rebellion, the other is sacrificed so his blood may atone for the sins of Israel. The one who is released bears the sins literally, the other figuratively. This is the Yom Kippur ceremony of Leviticus - 2 identical goats were chosen, one released into the wild containing the sins of Israel, the others blood was shed to atone for the sins.
Hebrews already said Jesus' death was the ultimate Yom Kippur atonement sacrifice. Mark is telling us with a parable to reject the sins of the Jews and embrace eternal salvation of atonement in Christ.
As history this is incredibly implausible. As a myth it makes perfect sense.
There is clear evidence Mark was using the Greek version of the OT.
The sea narrative has so much complicated ring structure with cycles, phases, done similar to the Greek literature he is borrowing that it's definitely made up. Every unit of each narrative has the same literary purpose, a message about faith and the gospels. This and much more is evidence that it is a literary creation, which you would have scholars ignore??

"When you look at what Mark has to do to force the narrative to fit this elegant structure so perfectly, and the central role of unbelievable events or behaviors in nearly every one of his scenes, it is no longer possible to believe Mark is recording memory or even re-crafting historical lore. He is inventing all of this, each scene his own parable, usually with Jesus cast as the central character, illustrating symbolically something the reader needs to understand about the gospel. This is an artful literary creation, start to finish.

Dr Carrier

But you know the gospels are not written in the first person and that this proves nothing.



So again you suggest that interested reports are lies and you are presuming that any reports from non believers would not be interested and would not be lies.
Luke was a gentile who said He investigated the whole thing from those why had been witnesses and there from the beginning. But Luke ended up believing and so must be lying.

Luke is not a historian. HE tries to present as a historian but is terrible at it. He presents details that Paul or no other gospel writers knew so he was definitely making things up. But as a historian he is awful compared to actual historians of the time. Luke is redacting Mark and Matthew.
Again, the Synoptic Problem is not disputed.

The Synoptic Problem | Bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as...

bible.org

Reasonable people also believe those claims. Reasonable people remain skeptical or wait for more evidence also as you say.

Unreasonable people want to allow a supernatural claim to be true when no evidence supports it.

Some reasonable people want to show that all those things are false. Some reasonable people don't care much either way.
I think there is probably something there to provoke the reports. It does not bother me much and I don't really want to show that the reports are wrong.
I see the Bible as believable and I'm reasonable imo.

You might be reasonable but a belief in the Bible as true is not reasonable. You are not "waiting for further evidence", you have decided you want it to be true and have closed your mind off. You use one re-cycled argument which holds no weight and you ignore a massive amount of scholarship giving some nonsense reason and don't even listen to what they are saying to actually find out if it makes sense.

This is typical of fundamentalists, they don't even study biblical scholarship. When you have read experts in the field and can present a reasonable reason why Lataster is wrong about the Greek origins of Christs divinity, Ehrman, Carrier, whomever. You are not actually trying to get new information. At least be honest?

Some people are open to belief in the supernatural and others just deny it until proven.



Your beliefs are called facts by you.



Faith is a subjective thing, but imo the Gita has no evidence for the reality of any stories in it and cannot even be located in history and the Chronicles of Narnia are fictional, like the Lord of the Rings.

There are many books in Hinduism. The kings mentioned in scripture are well documented. Mormonism is extremely abundant in evidence of historical places and people. So is Islam?

OK so faith for you is only in things that can be shown to be true by observation and testing. That is how science is determined and why people believe what it says (up to a point).
Historical faith and religious faith are believed without observation and testing,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, but a faith can be tested to see if it is true, and people do that all the time, but subjectively.
It does not matter to you I suppose if someone gives a testimony of what Jesus did for them in their life.

If you think that anecdotal argument is valid what about the testimony of Krishna?


"Krishna wants us to think of him more as a companion than as God. He loves it when his devotees treat him as a child, and they the parent, or as a close friend, or as a beloved. In whatever way we love Krishna, Krishna responds in kind. Gita 4.11:....

I saw my Lord Krishna. Krishna was here, Krishna was there; everywhere I was seeing Lord Krishna! Before that, I was not thinking of Krishna at all; I was meditating on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But when I saw Lord Krishna everywhere, I was so thrilled. My dearest boyhood friend was right beside me. I was telling him, “Look, look, look at what I am seeing!” He had such love for me that he did not think of challenging me or saying that it was a mental hallucination. But he himself did not see anything. This experience I will never forget. 1....


He guides me, through feelings and emotion, he loves me, ............"

That is not a problem for me, that is about you.



So that is why you have no faith,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, you are closed to the possibility from the start.



I believed before I knew why I should believe. I have since seen plenty of evidence for me and no reason, from the disinterested scholars, to deny my faith. It can come close at times but there are always answers that I am willing to believe but a skeptic would not be willing to believe, especially a skeptic who only believes the empirical, the falsifiable.

Because you haven't even read 1 book by a scholar. You see no reason because you don't even look? Why this game?

 

[joelr]

So you go with the scholars who say the supernatural is not true and bring that into their work.



That idea is a result of your disinterested scholars.
That idea also means saying that Church history on the authors of the gospels is wrong, lying.
The presumption of no supernatural and so authorship after 70AD is more important than Church history and the internal evidence of the gospels.

You are arguing against an idea of a fictional scholarship that exists in your mind.

There are many reasons why dating is what it is. But precognition as a factor is still considered on some level.


"

The Dating Game VI: Was Mark written after 70?​

In the previous post in this series, we concluded by looking briefly at James Crossley’s commendable effort to rethink the dating of Mark. If that attempt is unsuccessful, it is nevertheless worth asking how secure the standard scholarly dating is. One of the values of challenges to the consensus is that they can send us scurrying back to the texts to think again about the issues and to reexamine our reasons for coming to particular views. My own thinking on the subject has been strongly influenced by three recent studies which successfully reinforce the grounds for locating Mark in the aftermath of 70, Brian Incigneri’s The Gospel to the Romans, H. M. Roskam’s The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context and John Kloppenborg’s article “Evocatio Deorum and the Date of Mark”. Although these three disagree with one another on the details (e.g. the precise referent of Mark 13.14), all agree on the significance of the key text:

Mark 13.1-2, Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down.

For many, so blatant a prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem settles the question of Mark’s date – it is written in full knowledge of the disastrous events of 70. For Kloppenborg,

“The fact that this seems to correspond so precisely to what occurred invites the conclusion that it was formulated (or reformulated) ex eventu” (431).

For Roskam,

“The evangelist could not have presented the prediction of the destruction of the temple as an utterance of Jesus with such firmness unless he was very certain about its fulfilment” (86).

Objections to this view are ably discussed by Incigneri (Chapter 3, "No stone Upon another"), who stresses Mark’s “over-arching concentration on the Temple” (154), the destruction of which is so important in his narrative that it is implausible that it was still standing when Mark wrote.

One of the standard arguments against the idea that Mark shows knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem is the reassertion of the text’s own character here as prediction. To take one example among many, David A. DeSilva, in his Introduction to the New Testament, suggests that

The primary reason many scholars tend to date Mark’s Gospel after 70 CE is the presupposition that Jesus could not foresee the destruction of Jerusalem – an ideological conviction clearly not shared by all (196).

But this kind of appeal, while popular, tends not to take seriously the literary function of predictions in narrative texts like Mark. Successful predictions play a major role in the narrative, reinforcing the authority of the one making the prediction and confirming the accuracy of the text’s theological view. It is like reading Jeremiah. It works because the reader knows that the prophecies of doom turned out to be correct. It is about “when prophecy succeeds”.

The text makes sense as Mark’s attempt to signal, in a post-70 context, that the event familiar to his readers was anticipated by Jesus, in word (13.2, 13.14) and deed (11.12-21) and in the symbolism of his death, when the veil of the temple was torn in two (15.38). The framing of the narrative requires knowledge of the destruction of the temple for its literary impact to be felt. Ken Olson has alerted me (especially in a paper read at the BNTC three years ago) to the importance of Mark 15.29-30 in this context. It is the first of the taunts levelled when Jesus is crucifie:

So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!

For the irony to work, the reader has to understand that the Temple has been destroyed; the mockers look foolish from the privileged perspective of the post-70 reader, who now sees that Jesus’ death is the moment when the temple was proleptically destroyed, the deity departing as the curtain is torn, the event of destruction interpreted through Gospel narrative and prophecy.

The point that is generally missed in the literature, especially that which comes from a fairly conservative perspective, relates to the attempt to understand the literary function of the predictions of destruction in Mark's narrative. John Kloppenborg is one of the few scholars who sees the importance of the literary function of the predictions, noting the role played by the literary motif of "evocation deorum" echoed here in Mark, e.g.

This raises a crucial distinction between omens and rituals that (allegedly) occurred before the events, and their literary and historiographic use in narrative (446).

Discussions about whether the historical Jesus was or was not prescient may be interesting, but in this context they miss the point. The theme of the destruction of the temple is repeated and pervasive in Mark's narrative, and it becomes steadily more intense as the narrative unfolds. Jesus' prophecies in Mark attain their potency because "the reader understands" their reference.





"Moreover, where there are clear signs of Marcan redaction, they point away from Crossley’s thesis (for early Mark dating). In the key passage about hand-washing in Mark 7, the narrator’s framing of the material explains that hand-washing before eating food is something practised by “the Pharisees and all the Jews” (καὶ πάντες οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι). This does not set up the debate as an intra-Jewish one of the kind that Crossley’s thesis requires. The practice of hand-washing is established as something that all Jews do, and which Jesus’ disciples do not do (7.2, 5), setting up a contrast that Jesus’ words then speak into, a contrast that makes good sense on classic form-critical grounds. For Crossley, the reference here to “all the Jews” is a Marcan exaggeration, but this concedes the ground about the accuracy and precision of Mark’s knowledge of Judaism that is a major and necessary element in his case."



more parts at

NT Blog

Mark Goodacre's academic blog. Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University, in the Religious Studies Department. Visit my <a href="http://markgoodacre.org">homepage</a>, follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/goodacre">twitter</a>, or contact me by <a...

ntweblog.blogspot.com

 

[syo]

Christians today have never met Jesus physically yet believe in Him. Why?

If you say you believe in Christ because of the Bible then how do you know the Bible is true?

How do you know Christ and the Bible are true?

What makes you so sure?

They don't know. They are sheep following trends.

 

[Brian2]

Right that is true. But its' also just a re-write of an OT Elisha story. Elisha raised several people in the OT, it's well established that Mark was using a OT/Kings narrative to construct a Jesus story.

When you say it's well established, what you are really saying is that skeptic and atheist scholars assume that the stories in the gospels are not true and inspired by earlier stories.