LilytheTheologian wrote:
Even in the 4th and 5th centuries, the word of women was not acceptable, not only in a court of law, but in general. Women were not as respected as you seem to believe in the early Church. Of course, even today, women are barred in the Roman Catholic Church from the priesthood and from the diaconate. In the early Church, they were also barred from being lectors, taking care of the money, etc. All of the important tasks were reserved for the men.
On the contrary, we have very good reasons for thinking that women played important leadership roles such as ministering as deacons and leading services in their homes. Paul also remarks that Junia is "foremost among the apostles" (Rom 16). So again, within the context that these narratives were forming, changing, and being preserved, woman played a significant role, so the idea that their testimony would carry no weight isn't very credible.
Using your train of thought, you wouldn't mind having the surviving Boston Marathon bomber testify for you, if something extremely important to you is at stake, over a person of stellar reputation, who was known to be always truthful and honest.
Obviously not a good analogy. I also note that you didn't respond to the other lines of reasoning I mentioned.
This “myth� view is the widest held view of skeptics today, yet it is the weakest by far.
Only in the minds of devout and literalist Christians. That the stories of miracles and the like in the NT are embellished/mythologized versions of whatever historical kernal of truth these documents were based on appears to be the predominant view among credible Biblical scholars, many or most of which are themselves Christian.
It is biblical scholar and theologian, NT Wright who debunks the “myth theology.� The ancient Jews, Wright said, knew as well as we know today that people who are dead and buried don’t come back to life. The Jews then and the Jews now, do believe in the resurrection of the body, but not until the end of human history. They certainly didn’t expect Jesus to return to life and were dumbfounded when he did. It’s no wonder some, like Thomas, were unwilling to believe it at first. And, as Wright says, it is one thing to make up a story and quite another to endure persecution for it. Although we do not know how all of the disciples died, James and Stephen were stoned to death, and Peter and Paul were likely crucified in Rome. John was even thrown into a vat of boiling oil, though it seems not to have harmed him. Would the disciples, who seemed to be men of intelligence and mental health be willing to die for something they had made up if denouncing it would have saved their lives? And what would be the point of making it up anyway? It didn’t buy them a wealthy life of luxury and relaxation. It brought them trouble and persecution, instead.
As if we don't have plenty of examples of people for dying for something they know is false, because they believe it contributes to the greater good in some way. But I don't really believe that early Christians did not believe the Christ narratives- every indication is that they did believe it. That is not, however, any guarantee of its truth, particularly in light of the compelling counter-evidence.
For centuries, the Jews tried to say that Christ’s body was stolen. This, too, is a hypothesis filled with errors. The entrance to the tomb was barred by a stone and guarded by Roman soldiers. How could anyone have gotten in, much less gotten in and left with the body? Moreover, if the disciples stole the body, they knew Christ wasn’t resurrected, and we return to the dilemma of why they would die for a lie, and something that made no sense to lie about in the first place. What is really required with this hypothesis is not how Christ’s body could be stolen, but why the apostles would do it. If the tomb was empty and the disciples really did see Christ, then that explains it. However, if they stole the body, the Romans would have known where it was hidden, and they would have produced it.
Others contend that Christ didn’t really die but was merely in a swoon or trance. He revived in the tomb, made his “getaway� (past the Roman guards), and “appeared,� glorified, no less, in front of his disciples. This theory is fraught with problems. To begin, one has to assume that the Romans didn’t know how to crucify people and didn’t know how to tell a dead man from one who was still alive. Death from crucifixion was usually accomplished by asphyxiation, and when the Roman’s weren’t sure if a victim was dead, they broke his legs. The Romans were SO convinced that Christ was dead, that they did not break his legs, fulfilling prophecy (how any man could “engineer� to fulfill that prophecy is beyond me).
And note that, as far as probability goes, any one of these explanations is, strictly speaking, more probable than a resurrection. But there may be no need for any explanation of the empty tomb,
since its improbable that Christ was buried in a tomb (known or otherwise) in the first place, as already covered here.
The problem with this “theory� is that hallucinations are almost always private. Except in VERY RARE cases, two people do not have the same hallucination. Even ten eyewitnesses to a robbery will give ten varying stories even down to the color of clothes the suspects wore. Eyewitness testimony is often the weakest of all. I don’t doubt that people have seen UFOs. I’ve seen one myself, however, I don’t believe it was filled with people from another planet. I do believe the US military has things they wisely do not tell the public about. In fact, one of my friends has a husband who is very highly placed in the US Air Force. While he could not tell us just what the US is doing, he did confirm that they are doing things of which the public has no awareness.
I also don’t doubt that some people “saw� Elvis. There are a great many Elvis impersonators around, mostly in the Las Vegas area, though I saw several in Branson, Missouri and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Some men have become very adept at dressing and singing like Elvis. I would be very surprised if NO Elvis sightings had taken place.
Historian Gary Habermas uses the analogy of a shipwreck to illustrate the unlikelihood of two people having the same hallucination. If one man, treading water, points to the horizon and says, “A ship!� others will certainly look, but if the first man is hallucinating, then the others are not likely to see the ship. If they do, there probably really is a ship out there, and everyone better start yelling. People see Elvis, but it’s almost surely an impersonator. People see UFOs, and that is exactly what they see, an object they cannot, themselves, identify. They aren’t hallucinating or lying; they just can’t identify with certainty what they saw.
Christ, however, appeared MANY times to his disciples. They touched him. (How many people who “saw� Elvis actually touched him and interacted with him? I’ve heard of none.) As to Paul reporting that Christ appeared alive before more than 500 persons, many of those persons were no doubt still alive when Paul reported the incident. Yet no one disputed it. Not one. James, a relative of Christ’s, who is referred to as his “brother,� was very skeptical of Christ’s ministry…until he, too, had contact with the risen Christ. After that, James became the head of the Church in Jerusalem and was eventually put to death for his beliefs. You know Thomas doubted until he touched Christ’s wounds, and that Paul persecuted Christians until he encountered Christ on the Damascus road.
Well but as you noted, while mass hallucination is rare it is not entirely unprecedented, and all we have is a tradition claiming many people saw Christ. We have no independent corroboration of that. Ultimately, we have a few sources that claim that Christ appeared to many more.
Never in history have so many diverse individuals, from different backgrounds and on different occasions, reported seeing the exact same thing. And a hallucination cannot account for the empty tomb of why the Jews or the Romans did not produce Christ’s body. The Resurrection hypothesis, on close inspection, turns out to be the most likely in fulfilling the historical data. No matter how sophisticated the “vision� theorists try to be, that veneer of sophistication falls away on close inspection.
I do not know how the Resurrection actually occurred, nor do I know why God chose to effect it in the tomb except that the tomb was the most likely place. However, the Resurrection cannot be cavalierly dismissed as “myth,� “a stolen body,� a “swoon,� or a “vision.� The more one looks at the alternatives, the more one has to accept the Resurrection as a historical reality or come away with quite a lot of egg on his or her face.
As we've seen, your estimation of the textual and historical evidence against the resurrection doesn't appear entirely realistic, and as noted above, any of the naturalistic alternatives are more probable, both intrinsically (a miracle defies all probability
by definition), and especially in light of the evidence, than taking the Gospels at face value.
PS: Almost EVERY post to me is uncivil because of my belief in Christ, which I don't mind, but more compelling conversation would included a rational refutation of what I write rather than attacks on my faith, which gain the attacker nothing.
I haven't been anything but perfectly civil with you, nor have I concerned myself with anything other than what you state in your posts. If others are not being civil, I recommend either/both reporting the offending posts to moderation and refraining from engaging those posters in the future.
