Featured Resurrection of Christ - What's the evidence for and against a literal resurrection

Busy today, so I will only reply to this part now.

I fail to see any allegory in Matthew. If you see such allegories, please identify and explain them. Matthew very plainly intends to be understood literally to counteract the obvious (and possibly real) skeptical conclusion about Mark - stolen body, shill says Jesus rose from the dead. Or what do you think Matthew's detailed story about the guards is an allegory of? What deeper meaning does it have? For that matter what is the deeper meaning of any of the elements of Matthew's resurrection story? Matthew's resurrection account is fiction written to be understood as real in order to reassure the faithful that Jesus really rose from the dead. Allegory is probably beyond his skill set.

The signs of Matthew clumsily going overboard are here, such as having the angel tell the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee (as per Mark) and then moments later have Jesus appear to tell the women the same thing! If Jesus is right there in Jerusalem, why do they have to go to Galilee to see him? Matthew stuck this in to have witnesses to the risen Jesus, which Mark does not.

Concerning clumsily going overboard, other examples are the already mentioned saints coming out of their graves and the two animal entry into Jerusalem.

 

Maybe it was beyond the spiritual capacity of the audience, thus more descripitve spiritual comparisons were required.

I could say I am sad, but may wish to tell you how sad and thus start to use more materially descriptive words.

I could say my heart has been torn in two, all the while knowing it is a feelng of heart I am trying to impart to the listner.

The listner now gets a vision of the sadness.

After a while, the spiritual intent gets combined with the material explanation, as history has shown does happen, this is why Christ comes again and makes all things new.

Faiths also have seasons and winter clouds the Spiritual.

Regards Tony

 

It also allows us to consider what the new Temple will be.

Regards Tony

 

"Evolution" of the story? As in that it grew into something bigger and different than before? How about the whole story of Jesus? How many gospels have the virgin birth story? Are they consistent? Beyond that, the things told in the gospels about the things Jesus said and did... are they consistent?

I see variations in all the gospels... Even in the details about the crucifixion. Now we get into the resurrection. Do all the gospels say the same things happened? No, they all have variations. So you say Matthew made up a "complex" allegorical story. If so then Luke and John copied Matthew? If so, why do they have variations from what he said? Or, did they all get their information from the oral traditions passed on by those that supposedly knew Jesus?

So you have a problem with the resurrection and the first nine chapters of Genesis... and no where else? So did Elijah fly off in a fiery chariot? Did the walls of Jericho fall down? Did the sea part for the Hebrews? Did Daniel's friend survive unhurt from being thrown into a furnace? Or is the whole Bible filled with unlikely things being presented as literal, historical events?

You say it is "pure" religious mythology... making it sound as if it "actually" happened? But it didn't. Then that's fictional. If we know it is myth, we take it as such. But, if it's passed on as the "inerrant" Word of God, then that makes those that say such a thing as liars and deceivers. Is that what Christians are? The Bible says something that doesn't line up with scientific thinking, and we are to be smart enough to start looking at it as a metaphor. Why? To me the most logical way to look at it is that if it isn't true, if it really didn't happen, then the writers made it up. Why would all the gospel writers come up with the same allegorical resurrection story? It makes much more sense, if it didn't really happen, that the resurrection myth was past on down and when it got written down, each writer embellished the story.

But I know you can't have that. Baha'is need the "truth" of the allegorical, symbolic resurrection. But really Matthew thinking up all those symbolic meanings weaving them into the resurrection story? I don't think so.

 

"There is no books we remove or change because it doesn't fit our theology. The Baha'is and Christians do have important theological differences though, including the resurrection of Christ." That's a pretty substantial change.

I've asked this so many times... so the gospel writers tell of the events of the life of Jesus up to the crucifixion and then suddenly, all of them, break into symbolism and allegory? Whether or not it is true, I still think they intended it to be believed as true, and therefore, they, themselves, believed it to be true.

 

I am also sure we have answered many times, also with many quotes, that there are many Spiritual mysteries behind all the stories.

Regards Tony

 

adrenaline would be the medical evidence...

 

As I see it, Matthew was trying to make up for what he perceived as deficits in Mark’s account. As I said before, Mark wrote it that way because either that is the tradition he was given or because the idea of the resurrection of Jesus was already so entrenched that he did not need to ‘prove’ it. After all, his main program was emphasizing the importance of keeping the faith despite the passage of time with Jesus still a non-show.

To Matthew, Mark’s account – empty tomb, somebody says Jesus rose from the dead and went to Galilee – would sound a lot like grave robbery and a cover story. Matthew even mentions that such a story was being told. Mark’s young man, a possible shill, becomes a dramatic angel in Matthew. No lack of authority. Guards assigned to prevent the body from being stolen see the angel roll back the stone. No chance of a shill or of grave robbery either. The stories being told about that arose, Matthew tells us, from the cover story invented to cover up the truth. Matthew also has witnesses to the risen Jesus, both near the tomb and in Galilee. No doubt about a resurrection. I have already pointed out some of the issues I have with Matthew’s account but will not repeat them.

The label ‘preterist’ carries rather more baggage than I care to carry around. I would not go so far as to say that Jesus got it wrong. I am not certain that a real historical Jesus was thinking in apocalyptic terms. He may have thought of himself as a new prophet, urging a return to the spirit of the Law as did prophets of yore. Those prophets often looked forward to a messianic age but did not think it would happen soon. Some of the prophets, Malachi especially, saw a return to the spirit of the Law instead of slavish attention to ritual as a way of making Israel worthy of a Messiah and the messianic age and so speeding his arrival. On the theory that the more Jewish portrayals of Jesus in the Gospels (in much copied Mark anyway) are more likely to be authentic traditions, Jesus himself could easily fit this pattern.

See:
APOCALYPSE - JewishEncyclopedia.com APOCALYPSE - JewishEncyclopedia.com

The introduction of a near future apocalyptic end of days seems to be Paul’s doing. It may be that Paul read Daniel. Consider the following:

The reference to clouds might be from Daniel 7:13-14, or it may not. Paul does not use the phrase Son of Man, but this may be because of his desire to not confuse things by having both ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man’ in his writings.

What does seem very likely is that Paul was influenced by the other Jewish Apocalyptic literature available at that time. The dramatic end of days idea in which the world is changed with the coming of the Messiah is one common element in these works. The resurrection of the dead is another. If Jesus was the Messiah as Paul says (and apparently was not his invention) and he rose from the dead (again a pre-existing notion), the apocalyptic concepts could be adapted very easily to make a really compelling story. Having Jesus the Son of God (a messianic title) become the pre-existing quasi-divine Jesus the Son of God (as conceived by Philo of Alexandria) would impart enormous power to the story.

See: https://www.iep.utm.edu/philo/

Mark is paraphrasing Isaiah 13:10 and Isaiah 34:4 and Daniel 7:13-14. The last the source of the phrase ‘Son of Man’. They are part of existing prophecy about the end of days and were apparently meant literally by the original writers, if perhaps expressed as hyperbole.

In his Olivet Discourse (Mark 13), in order to revive faith in a speedy return of Jesus, Mark has Jesus say that the destruction of the Temple will be the first sign that the end of days are beginning. Mark apparently wrote not too long after the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD. Too long after and it would not be a credible claim. That Mark intended to say that the end would follow not too long after the Temple was destroyed is clear from Mark 8:38 – Mark 9:1, which says that some of those hearing Jesus speak will still be alive when the Son of Man returns. Mark repeats that thought in Mark 13:30. Nonetheless Mark cannot have all this happen immediately after the Temple business, otherwise it would be happening already. So he adds The passage about not knowing when the owner of the house will return (Mark 13:32-37).

Matthew wrote five or ten years after Mark. He repeats pretty much everything Mark says but adds even more disclaimers about the time frame (e.g., Matthew 24:36-50) including changing the owner of the home coming back unexpectedly into the image of a thief in the night. (v 43).

 

When asked how to obtain eternal life, Jesus replied with the commandments that are associated with action, omitting the religious ones and the ‘covet’ ones. ”You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.” (Mark 10:19) These are quotes directly from the Torah, and fit well with the Jesus we see in Mark 7:1-8 who has no patience for ‘man made rules’ that are about ritual and not what the Torah is really about.

I do not see the connection between the many witnesses and the ‘saints’ who arose from the grave. If Paul was aware of anyone else being resurrected, he would certainly have used that is his argument that resurrection was possible. (You already know my opinion of what Matthew said about this. No need to repeat it.)

Paul says that he got ‘his gospel’, which differed from that being offered by the Jerusalem church In very important ways, directly from Jesus in visions. Acts tells a different story. I see Luke writing Acts as a way to clean up all the problems and discrepancies of the earlier scriptures. Having Paul be in possession of information that Jesus did not give to the Apostles was a problem. So Luke has the ‘vision’ be simply Jesus telling Saul/Paul to stop persecuting the church and blinding him to drive the point home. In Acts Paul never gets any ‘private gospel’. He simply learns about and converts to an already established Christianity. In his usual masterful way, Luke wipes away Paul’s problematic claim via a dramatic imagination catching story, which he repeats two more time to make sure the reader does not forget.

Mark plainly did use traditions independent of Paul. But he also used Paul in very significant ways. Mark took the bread and wine ritual that Paul said was given to him and merged it with Paul’s depiction of Jesus as the Paschal Lamb. Result: Mark has the Last Supper be a Passover Seder. Unfortunately this lead to such improbabilities as the Sanhedrin meeting at night and on Passover when work of this sort would have been out of the question.

Here are the places in the several Gospels where Jesus explicitly says that he will be killed but will rise again in three days.

Mark 8:31-33
Mark 9:30-32
Mark 10:33-34
Matthew 17:22-23
Matthew 20:17-19
Luke 9:21
Luke 18:31-33

John does not have explicit predictions of this type. He often refers to Jesus being ‘glorified’ in contexts that suggest death and resurrection. But the closest John comes to being explicit about the matter is this.

Sounds like the metaphor Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15 about death and resurrection.

You can allegorize all you want. But the plain sense of all the Gospel resurrection passages is that they are intended to be taken literally, that Jesus literally bodily rose from the dead. As Paul says:

The belief was clearly that of literal resurrection of the dead. The accounts in the Gospels very clearly embody this same belief about a literal resurrection from the dead. As Paul says, if this is not the case, the whole thing falls apart. This is why Matthew had to come up with his elaborate cover story for Mark.

 

He is actually correct because the gospels start with the Greek phrase for "as told to me by" instead of the usual way to say "I am the author".

Tò katà Matthaīon euangélion; -The Gospel According to Matthew
So the gospel authors are not the same as the title.

 

I took the time to read through this and I believe Bart Ehrman has made many false claims.
His case was pretty well debunked as well.
Ehrman on Historicity Recap - Richard Carrier


Ehrmans book on Jesus is so misleading that in some way it lends credibility to the mythicist theory:

"...filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and badly worded arguments. Moreover, it completely fails at its one explicit task: to effectively critique the arguments for Jesus being a mythical person.

Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic - Richard Carrier



But regarding the resurrection, further down in the above article Carrier touches on the fact that there were many demigod resurrections before Jesus and they also included personal salvation through baptism, struggles with Satan, 12 disciples and so on:

"I shouldn’t have to adduce passages such as, from Plutarch, “[about] Dionysus, Zagreus, Nyctelius, and Isodaetes, they narrate deaths and vanishings, followed by returns to life and resurrections” (Plutarch, On the E at Delphi 9.388f-389a). That looks pretty cut and dried to me. But it’s worse than that. Because for Romulus and Zalmoxis we undeniably have pre-Christian evidence that they actually die (on earth) and are actually raised from the dead (on earth) and physically visit their disciples (on earth). And likewise for Inanna, a clear-cut death-and-resurrection tale exists on clay tablets a thousand years before Christianity (she dies and rises in hell, but departs from and returns to the world above all the same)."


Later on some mistakes Ehrman made on denying baptism in Pagan cults:

We also know that something like baptism into eternal life was a feature of the cult of Bacchus-Dionysus, and we know this not only because Plato mentions it (Plato, Republic 364e-365a, where we’re told of Orphic libations “for the remission of sins” that secure one a better place in the afterlife), but also from actual pre-Christian inscriptions (that’s right, words actually carved in stone). See examples in Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (Fortress 1975), pp. 275-76, n. 116. Both sources (Plato and inscriptions) also confirm the Bacchic belief that one could be baptized on behalf of someone who had already died and thus gain them a better position in the afterlife. It cannot be a coincidence that exactly the same thing, baptism for the dead, is attested as a Christian rite in Paul (1 Corinthians 15:29). We have hints of baptismal rituals in other cults (Tertullian, for example, in On Baptism 5, describes numerous pagan rituals of baptism for the remission of sins, clearly understanding it to be a common practice everywhere known). Sure, in many of these cases the baptism was part of a larger ritual (perhaps involving prayer or incense), but Christian baptisms were not free of their own ritual accoutrements, so those hardly matter to the point.

This also undermines Ehrman’s claim that there is no evidence that the death of Osiris (or any other god) “brought atonement for sin” (p. 26). We know Egyptian afterlife belief made the physical weight of sin a factor in deciding one’s placement in the afterlife, and that (as just shown above) baptism into the death and resurrection of Osiris washes away those sins and thus lightens the soul to obtain the best place in heaven. It is hard to imagine how this does not entail that the death and resurrection of Osiris somehow procured salvation through remission of sins (and clearly a similar belief had developed in Bacchic and other cults). One could perhaps get nitpicky as to what might be the exact theology of the process, but whatever the differences, the similarity remains: the death and resurrection of Osiris was clearly believed to make it possible for those ritually sharing in that death and resurrection through baptism to have their sins remitted. That belief predates Christianity. Ehrman is simply wrong to say otherwise. And the evidence for this is clear, indisputable, and mainstream. Which means his book is useless if you want to know the facts of this matter. Or any matter, apparently."
Giving the mythicist theory a strong probability of being true.


So Ehrmans position that Christianity wasn't a copy of the mystery cults because baptism, resurrection and sin-forgiving (among many other similarities) wasn't known until Christian scripture is completely false. Did he make it up to sell books to Christians or is he trying to convince himself that that mythology is true? I don't know?

 

Those are titles applied later to already existing anonymous works. None of the Gospel texts proper contain such a phrase.