liamconnor wrote:
This OP has a slightly different bent than my previous (historical evidence); but in truth, what follows was what I always intended for the other. I am guilty of falsely advertising that thread by the title. You will see the title of this thread is posed as a question, and the term "Resurrection" does not occur.
My proposal is that, applying basic historical methodology (which is a fancy term for common sense) to the relevant texts (canonical and non) we can gleam quite a bit about Jesus and the movement which followed his death.
NOte that I am not interested at all in defending the resurrection here; but I do think we need to be responsible in assessing the data. Even if you think ANY explanation is better than a MIRACULOUS one, still, surely you think some natural explanations are better than others, and that some are just plain silly?! It is my hope that the majority of members here have the intellectual honesty (and curiosity!) to weed out the more ridiculous ones.
(I should add, I have met only one member on this forum who proves the exception. He said, quite explicitly, that he did not care whether the explanation was good or bad, so long as there was even one; that was some time ago. If you fall into this class, then we are immediately at an impasse).
I quote, as a guiding principle for history, E.P. Sanders (an agnostic, and one of my favorite, if not my favorite, historians of the period) "One should begin with what is relatively secure and work out to more uncertain points."
I give what amounts to a consensus among scholars by quoting the eminent skeptic Bart Ehrman; I can give other names upon request. I then provide what theories these positions exclude.
One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate.
This means that, according to Ehrman and others, arguments against the historicity of Jesus are off the table.
I dont doubt at all that some disciples claimed (to have seen the risen Jesus). We dont have any of their written testimony, but Paul, writing about 25 years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I dont think he is making it up. And he knew at least a couple of them, whom he met just three years after the event (i.e. the crucifixion)
So then, according to Ehrman, Paul is 1) a historical person, 2) is not fabricating the entire list in 1 Cor. 15; perhaps he was tricked by some, but he was honest.
You see that Ehrman grants that Paul had visited the Jerusalem church, and met with at least Peter. I think we can infer with a very high degree of probability that something like that list in 1 Cor. 15 therefore goes back to 36 AD. It is highly doubtful that when Paul visited Peter, the two played craps. The term Paul uses in Galatians 1:18 ("Then, three years later I went up to Jerusalem to
become acquainted with Cephas, and stayed with him fifteen days" NAS) is
pronounced historeo, from which is derived our term "History". It has the connotation of "inquire, investigate, search".
There is no doubt that Paul believed that he saw Jesus real but glorified body raised from the dead.
This means that Paul was not a fraud. Delusional, perhaps, but not a liar. It should also be noticed that Paul believed he saw Jesus' "glorified" body. Some on this forum talk of the resurrection as if it were mere revivification. This is not true. What the disciples preached was that what all Jews (well, the majority) believed their god would do at the end of times, he did for Jesus in the middle. The Jewish resurrection was into a new mode of bodily life.
I give a list of historians who concede an empty tomb, but do not believe in the resurrection: Dale Allison, Bostock, Carnely, Ehrman, Fisher Grant and Vermes. I am familiar with Vermes, Ehrman and Allison. The three others I have not read, but have found them cited in scholarly works.
So then, two questions:
Which of these conclusions do you agree/disagree with and why?
What else do you think we can infer from the data (and please back it up)?
Thanks once again for not listing your source for your quotes.
It's probably a good move on your part not to chit chat about the resurrection again, because in the words of your boy Bart Erdman in chapter 5 of
Jesus, Interrupted: "Many Christians don't want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection." Seems the consensus is that there was no resurrection. Or, as Erdman put it in
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee:"the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened."
So I'm glad to hear we can ignore that nonsense given the scholarly consensus about it.
Moving on, the claim that there was a human being named Jesus is entirely plausible, and personally I don't see a reason to discount it. How accurate is the Biblical portrayal of Jesus? That is another matter entirely. As has been noted at this website many times, the Bible is written by mostly persons unknown after the supposed events transpired. As Erhman noted in
How Jesus Became God: "The very first surviving account of Jesuss life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. Thats obviously a lot of time." Jesus' transformation into a created persona is well noted, as Ehrman writes in
Jesus, Interrupted: "Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable." He also wrote in the same book: "The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical"other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous"written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on".
As for Paul, it is not difficult to concede that he was a real person either. In fact Paul is one of the few people in the Bible that scholars are actually pretty sure did exist. But I don't think Ehrman is validating Paul's claims nearly as much as you think he is. He notes in your quote that 25 years passed between the events and when Paul wrote it down. Ehrman is very aware of the dangers of time as it relates to human memory. In a blog titled
Ehrmans Statement: The New Testament Gospels Are Historically Unreliable Accounts of Jesus he writes: "Since the 1920s cultural anthropologists have studied oral cultures extensively, in a wide range of contexts (from Yugoslavia to Ghana to Rwanda to many other places). What this scholarship has consistently shown is that our unreflective assumptions about oral cultures are simply not right. When people pass along traditions in such cultures, they think the stories are supposed to change, depending on the context, the audience, the point that the story-teller wants to make, and so on. In those cultures, there is no sense at all that stories should be repeated the same, verbatim. They change all the time, each and every time, always in little ways and quite often in massive ways." He also notes in J
esus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior :"A classic study, which set the stage for much research to come, was done nine years after Brown and Kuliks initial publication. It was undertaken by psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, who were perceptive enough to realize that a personal and national disaster could be important for realizing how memory works.12 The day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, they gave 106 students in a psychology class at Emory University a questionnaire asking about their personal circumstances when they heard the news. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1988, they tracked down forty-four of these students and gave them the same questionnaire. A half year later, in spring 1989, they interviewed forty of these forty-four about the event. The findings were startling but very telling. To begin with, 75 percent of those who took the second questionnaire were certain they had never taken the first one. That was obviously wrong. In terms of what was being asked, there were questions about where they were when they heard the news, what time of day it was, what they were doing at the time, whom they learned it from, and so on"seven questions altogether. Twenty-five percent of the participants got every single answer wrong on the second questionnaire, even though their memories were vivid and they were highly confident in their answers. Another 50 percent got only two of the seven questions correct. Only three of the forty-four got all the answers right the second time, and even in those cases there were mistakes in some of the details. When the participants confidence in their answers was ranked in relation to their accuracy there was no relation between confidence and accuracy at all in forty-two of the forty-four instances."
So while Paul may have been a real person, there simply is no reason to assume he is accurate. He may have believed what he wrote down was true, but the length of time involved makes his accuracy almost certainly erroneous. And the elephant in the room is still there - Paul could have made it all up too. Erhman may think he didn't, but no one knows for sure.
And let's not forget that we don't even know what Paul ACTUALLY wrote for that matter. What we read today is not the original Paul. Ehrman has many quotes in several books about the constant editing and changing of the books of the Bible, including the exclusion of texts because they were from different sects of the early church. I provide one of these many statements here, taken from
Misquoting Jesus : "It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals"so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later"much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places."
To sum up, the only things we can really accept as plausible are that Paul and Jesus were real human beings. Everything else is unreliable given the frailties of human memory and the constant changing of what now constitutes the modern Bible (and this has been continuously pointed out by many for months now).
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." -- Albert Einstein -- Written in 1954 to Jewish philosopher Erik Gutkind.
