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Replying to Difflugia in post #326]
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Replying to Difflugia in post #326]
Then let's address your "evidence of the resurrection." Remember, your evidence must somehow be strong enough to overcome the improbability of supernatural elements that in any other piece of literature would be considered positive proof of fiction.
This is another problem with your allegorical reasoning. It is predicated on a predetermined philosophical argument, not on historical evidence.
The normal way to assess differing historical hypotheses is by using the "inference to the best explanation" method. This method uses criteria like explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, degree of ad hoc-ness, and concordance with accepted beliefs.
Your allegorical hypothesis lacks explanatory power and explanatory scope. Your allegorical theory also has a large degree of ad hoc theories needed to make the allegory possible. Along with the inability to explain facts that nearly all scholars agree on. This final issue is a big deal any theory has to be able to account for the facts that most scholars agree on. Your allegorical hypothesis fails miserably at trying to explain the facts, so much so that you have not even attempted to make your theory match the facts. You simply say they are not true.
Plausibility would be a draw because in this case, it would simply be a statement of faith. You believe that the resurrection cannot happen because there is not God to perform the resurrection. I believe that the resurrection can happen because there is a God in heaven to perform the resurrection.
Based on the normal historical method the resurrection account makes much more sense than your allegorical account.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
1. Which I have said many times the resurrection has always been the central message of Christianity.
You've said lots of things many times. You've neither supported them nor explained how they help your arguments.
Yes and this is one of those facts that your theory cannot explain. Without denying other facts that most scholars agree on like how early the gospel message came into existence.
John Drane
"The Earliest evidence we have for the resurrection almost certainly goes back to the time immediately after the resurrection event is alleged to have taken place. This is the evidence contained in the early sermons in Acts of the Apostles... there can be no doubt that in the first few chapters of Acts its author has preserved material from very early sources." (Case for Christ )
A.N. Sherwin-White, the respected Greco-Roman classical historian from Oxford University, said it would have been without precedent anywhere in history for legend to have grown up that fast and significantly distorted the gospels". (Case for Christ pp. 220)
Your allegorical theory needs way to many ad hoc theories to account for the facts.
The earliest resurrection details that we have come from Mark's Gospel and Paul's epistles. Mark offers no information about a resurrection other than an empty-tomb story. Was that a resurrection in the same body? A resurrection into a spiritual form accessible only in visions? A translation into heaven? It doesn't say. Paul's is just as ambiguous. Paul didn't seem to know what kind of body Christ returned in and was snotty to those asking about it, claiming that it didn't matter (1 Cor. 15:35-40). That says to me that any traditions that reached Paul and the people he knew weren't specific about what form the resurrection took. I'd think that's something that Peter, John, and James could have cleared up for him if the Gospels are accurate about their relationships with Jesus. At least some of the Corinthians didn't think Jesus was resurrected (1 Cor. 15:12) and Galatians 3:1 makes it seem like some Christians weren't even preaching "Christ crucified." Why would any in the Church doubt that he was crucified or raised if the tradition was as strong and universal as you claim? We have nothing that predates Paul. The best you can say is that after Paul (A.D. 50?) a resurrection of some sort was the central message of some forms of Christianity, though perhaps not others, and that by the second century, that resurrection had come to be understood by at least some Christians as being a resurrection of the same body.
Again more ad hoc theories and outright denial of Jewish Tradition to try to explain established facts.
This is what being raised from the dead meant to a Jewish person in the 1st century.
37 Sometime later, I felt the Lord's power take control of me, and his Spirit carried me to a valley full of bones. 2 The Lord showed me all around, and everywhere I looked I saw bones that were dried out. 3 He said, “Ezekiel, son of man, can these bones come back to life?”
I replied, “Lord God, only you can answer that.”
4 He then told me to say: Dry bones, listen to what the Lord is saying to you, 5 “I, the Lord God, will put breath in you, and once again you will live. 6 I will wrap you with muscles and skin and breathe life into you. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”
7 I did what the Lord said, but before I finished speaking, I heard a rattling noise. The bones were coming together! 8 I saw muscles and skin cover the bones, but they had no life in them.
9 The Lord said: Ezekiel, now say to the wind,[a] “The Lord God commands you to blow from every direction and to breathe life into these dead bodies, so they can live again.”
10 As soon as I said this, the wind blew among the bodies, and they came back to life! They all stood up, and there were enough to make a large army.
So when Paul wrote, "that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" every Jewish person would know that Paul was saying that the bones muscle and skin all came back together and Jesus became alive again. This is where Ehrman is more than just a little disingenuous. He makes a big deal out of the fact that it takes years for a scholar to acquire all of the languages and knowledge of traditions but then he ignores both language evidence and traditions when they do not fit his theory.
Your reference to 1 Cor. 15 is actually another problem for your allegory theory because this is Paul doubling and tripling down on his resurrection account. In 1 Cor. Paul as addressing problems in the Corinthian church and one of the problems was the teaching that the dead would not be resurrected not that Jesus did not raise from the dead but that believers would also be raised from the dead because Jesus was raised from the dead. Paul's teaching here reiterates his belief in the resurrection and the resurrection of the dead.
This whole idea that the resurrection was not the central message of Christianity and that there was not very early evidence from the 30s is a dead argument unless you can explain not only the testimony in Scripture but also why most other scholars including critical scholars would believe the same thing.
C.H. Dodd from Cambridge University has carefully analyzed the appearances of Jesus and concluded that several of them are based on especially early material. Case for Christ pp 234.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022, 9:48 am
2. There were groups of people that say they saw the risen Jesus.
Maybe, but the only evidence of that is that Paul said that they did.
There is more than just this but Wolfhart Pannenberg perhaps the greatest living systematic theologian in the world, "has rocked the modern, skeptical German theology by building his entire theology precisely on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus as supplied in Paul's list of appearances. Case for Christ pg 233.
How can your allegorical theory explain this? A world-class scholar building his entire theology on the historical evidence for the resurrection that you say is vague.
Again, your allegorical theory does not have explanatory power and explanatory scope.
There are many accounts of people seeing Jesus alive. 3 in John 20, 2 in Matthew 28, 3 in Luke 24, John 21, Acts 1-5, 10, and 13. Some include creeds like 1 Cor. 15.
Why would scholars, men that have spent their lives studying the Bible, believe that there were early creeds and sightings of Jesus? Your hypothesis cannot explain this. Your theory does not have explanatory power and explanatory scope to explain why scholars would believe that one could glean historical evidence from scriptural accounts; therefore, your theory should be rejected.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
3. The moving of the day of worship to the first day of the week.
So?
Really is this another denial of Jewish tradition and in this case law?
4rd commandment; Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." The 4th commandment was huge to the Jews of the 1st century. It would be a very big deal for a Jew to change the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. Can your allegorical theory explain why Jewish Christians would change their day of worship from Saturday to Sunday?
This also dispels Erdman’s theory about artificially making Jesus the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to restore Israel to the glory it had before like under David and Solomon. The Jewish people were to rule the world and Judaism would be the supreme religion.
Now how would your allegorical theory explain this again?
Your theory does not have the power to explain why Christians would change Jewish traditions and the change of Jewish traditions that occurred because of the resurrection. Therefore again your allegorical theory must be rejected.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
4. In all 4 Gospels the Resurrection is central.
First, the four Gospels are the part that you're claiming aren't fiction, so that's a circular argument. Second, the four Gospels aren't independent. Martians are real in all ten Barsoom novels, too. Twelve, if you count the novellas.
What are you saying about Barsoom Novels since you are comparing them to the Bible? You must be saying that scholars studying Barsoom novels have found historical evidence in them. You must be saying that you are one of those that believe that there is intelligent life on Mars. You also must be saying, that John Carter was a real person if you are comparing these novels to the Bible. I mean people are welcome to believe what they want. I am sorry to have to break this to you but we have sent probes to Mars and John Carter was not there. Neither were any of the other characters from the Novels. Although there was something that looked like a face on Mars, but it ended up just being shadows. Sorry.
Concerning the Resurrection being the central message of Christianity, I am on the side of the majority you are on the side of a very small minority. This again shows your theory's lack of explanatory power and explanatory scope to explain the facts that most scholars agree to. You give no evidence on why you think the majority of scholars are wrong and your small minority is correct.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
5. Christianity Originating in the same City where Jesus died
Or the Jesus story was set in the same city where at least one form of Christianity originated. You might be putting the cart before the horse.
Can you please back up your claim with little things called facts? Without supporting FACTS this is nothing more than a belief statement of yours.
You might want to get on a horse and look for some facts to support your belief statement.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
6. The tomb was empty.
In the story that Mark wrote, yes.
It was also empty in Matthew, Luke, John, and Paul’s creed that he shared in 1 Corinthians 15. Again any time a Jew from the 1st century mentioned resurrection they would immediately relate that to Ezekiel 37.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
It was reported empty by women.
Not in Mark. Nobody reported the empty tomb in Mark. "How did Mark know about it, then?" That's a very interesting question, isn't it? Matthew and Luke changed the story so that they did report the tomb, but that hardly tells us what the original tradition was, does it?
That is not how historians look at narratives. A philosopher might look at these accounts and see inconsistencies and then apply the law of contradictions and say it is not true. But that is not how a historian looks at narrative accounts. A historian looks at these accounts and says, “I see some inconsistencies but I notice something about them: they are all in the secondary details.”
“The core of the story is the same: Joseph of Arimathea takes the body of Jesus, puts it in a tomb, the tomb is visited by a small group of women followers of Jesus early on Sunday morning following his crucifixion, and they find that the tomb is empty. They see a vision of angels saying that Jesus has risen.”
So we can have great confidence in the core that’s common to the narratives and that would be agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars today, even if there are some differences concerning the names of the women, the exact time of the morning, the number of angels and so forth. Those kinds of secondary discrepancies would not bother a historian. Case for Christ pg 215
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
The empty tomb account in the gospel of Mark is based upon a source that originated within seven years of the event it narrates.
Can you provide a link to that source and evidence for its dating?
If you ever read Mark’s gospel it is a series of short narrative accounts. Mark is more like a string of short stories than a smooth continuous narrative.
However, when you get to the last week of Jesus’s life then you do have a continuous narrative of events in sequence. Mark apparently took this passion story from an even earlier source and this source included the story of Jesus being buried in the tomb. Case for Christ pp 209
We can tell from the language, grammar, and style that Mark got his empty tomb story actually his whole passion narrative from an earlier source. In fact, there is evidence it was written before A.D. 37, which is much too early for legend to have seriously corrupted it.
“A.N. Sherwin-White, the respected Greco-Roman classical historian from Oxford University, said it would have been without precedent anywhere in history for legend to have grown up that fast and significantly distorted the gospels. Case for Christ 220
Mark is based upon a source that originated within seven years of the event it narrates. This places the evidence for the empty tomb too early to be legendary, and makes it much more likely that it is accurate. What is the evidence for this? I will list two pieces. A German commentator on Mark, Rudolf Pesch, points out that this pre-Markan source never mentions the high priest by name. "This implies that Caiaphas, who we know was high priest at that time, was still high priest when the story began circulating." For "if it had been written after Caiaphas' term of office, his name would have had to have been used to distinguish him from the next high priest. But since Caiaphas was high priest from A.D. 18 to 37, this story began circulating no later than A.D. 37, within the first seven years after the events," as Michael Horton has summarized it. Furthermore, Pesch argues "that since Paul's traditions concerning the Last Supper [written in 56] (1 Cor 11) presuppose the Markan account, that implies that the Markan source goes right back to the early years" of Christianity (Craig). So the early source Mark used puts the testimony of the empty tomb too early to be legendary.
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/hi ... surrection
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
the resurrection was preached in the same city where Jesus had been buried shortly before.
According to the story, anyway. Is there any independent corroboration of any of those details? We know from Paul that Peter, James, and John were in Jerusalem, but we don't know anything about what they preached or how it related to Jesus. It might even be inferred from Galatians that the "men from James" weren't preaching Christ crucified.
Drane explains it this way:
The Earliest evidence we have for the resurrection almost certainly goes back to the time immediately after the resurrection event is alleged to have taken place. This is the evidence contained in the early sermons in the Acts of the Apostles… But there can be no doubt that in the first few chapters of Acts its author has preserved material from very early sources.
Scholars have discovered that the language used in speaking about Jesus in these early speeches in Acts is quite different from that used at the time when the book was compiled in its final form. The Historical Jesus pp 149
Oscar Cullmann: “In the early church there were multiple creedal formulas which corresponded to various circumstances in the Christian faith. The most common of these confessions were purely Christological in nature. The two most common elements in these creeds concerned the death and resurrection of Jesus and his resulting deity. Historical Jesus pp 144[/quort]
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022, 9:48 am
7. Paul's Creed in 1 Corinthians 15 which I have already mentioned is dated by all scholars within 3 years of the Crucifixion of Jesus.
All scholars, huh? That's a bold statement. Do you have any support for that?
The strong majority of historians acknowledge that the creed dates back to AD 30-35.1 A very small minority go to AD 41.
The Oxford Companion to the Bible: “The earliest record of these appearances is to be found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, a tradition that Paul ‘received’ after his apostolic call, certainly not later than his visit to Jerusalem in 35 CE, when he saw Cephas (Peter) and James (Gal. 1:18-19), who, like him, were recipients of appearances.” [Eds. Metzer & Coogan (Oxford, 1993), 647.]
Gerd Lüdemann (Atheist NT professor at Göttingen): “…the elements in the tradition are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus…not later than three years… the formation of the appearance traditions mentioned in I Cor.15.3-8 falls into the time between 30 and 33 CE.” [The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. by Bowden (Fortress, 1994), 171-72.]
Robert Funk (Non-Christian scholar, founder of the Jesus Seminar): “…The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead had already taken root by the time Paul was converted about 33 C.E. On the assumption that Jesus died about 30 C.E., the time for development was thus two or three years at most.” [Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus, 466.]
James Dunn (Professor at Durham): “Despite uncertainties about the extent of tradition which Paul received (126), there is no reason to doubt that this information was communicated to Paul as part of his introductory catechesis (16.3) (127). He would have needed to be informed of precedents in order to make sense of what had happened to him. When he says, ‘I handed on (paredoka) to you as of first importance (en protois) what I also received (parelabon)’ (15.3), he assuredly does not imply that the tradition became important to him only at some subsequent date. More likely he indicates the importance of the tradition to himself from the start; that was why he made sure to pass it on to the Corinthians when they first believed (15.1-2) (128). This tradition, we can be entirely confident, was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus' death. [Jesus Remembered (Eerdmans, 2003) 854-55.]
Michael Goulder (Atheist NT professor at Birmingham): “[It] goes back at least to what Paul was taught when he was converted, a couple of years after the crucifixion. [“The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa, editor, Resurrection Reconsidered (Oneworld, 1996), 48.]
A. J. M. Wedderburn (Non-Christian NT professor at Munich): “One is right to speak of ‘earliest times’ here, … most probably in the first half of the 30s.” [Beyond Resurrection (Hendrickson, 1999), 113-114.]
N.T. Wright (NT scholar [Oxford, 5+ honorary Ph.ds]): “This is the kind of foundation-story with which a community is not at liberty to tamper. It was probably formulated within the first two or three years after Easter itself, since it was already in formulaic form when Paul ‘received’ it. (So Hays 1997, 255.)” [The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), 319.]
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
It has already been established that Luke never indicated that he was an allegory.
It's also been established that Luke never indicated that he was writing historiography. Your argument from silence cuts both ways.
Again, your view is the extreme minority view. Your allegorical theory is nothing more than a belief statement you are making with no evidence to support your belief. Your allegorical theory cannot explain any of the historical facts that virtually all scholars believe to be true.
Your theory is also based on the belief that Miracles are impossible. David Hume wrote an essay on Miracles which was rejected.
Miracle is an occurrence that is above nature and above man; not capable of being discerned by the senses, designed to authenticate the intervention of a power that is not limited by the laws either of matter or of mind. As an act which reveals God to humanity and depicts His intervention in human affairs, miracle has been a subject of philosophical debate. Some exponents of miracle opine that the biggest problem raised by miracles is the belief in God. They are of the view that if God exists, His morality is questionable while others maintain that God would not do miracles, to do so would be irrational and immoral. David Hume dismissed miracle as pious fiction and rationally unjustifiable to believe. The paper assesses the Achilles' heel of David Hume"s arguments against the possibility of miracle. It adopts a critical evaluation approach to critique Hume"s argument against miracle especially his argument from the laws of nature. The paper concludes that Hume"s arguments are unjustifiable to refute the possibility of miracle, being that miracle as a paranormal phenomenon could not be subjected to empirical investigation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... r=7b6ecff0
The objection to Hume’s argument which I develop in this article (culminating in section 3) strikes a decisive blow against Hume if we go with Fogelin’s reading of Hume. There I argue that Hume’s case against religious miracles is superfluous. It is superfluous because it is impossible to prove a religious miracle on epistemic evidence, alone. To show that no miracle can be established so as to be the foundation for a system of religion, it is not necessary to show that testimony in behalf of religious miracles is unreliable, for religious miracles have an ineliminable subjective component that makes them logically impossible to prove on epistemic grounds. Epistemic considerations can establish an event and its cause, but not how one ought to react toward either of these.
https://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2020/0 ... perfluous/
So your entire premise for your allegorical theory is a flawed argument. Combined with the fact that it has no explanatory power or scope means that your allegorical theory must be rejected.
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 9:48 am
It is easy to say something you don't like is fiction if you just ignore the facts.
It's also easy to claim that fiction is fact if you ignore the parts that are obviously fictional.
What parts are you referring to? The parts that you are classifying as miracles? According to the critiques above it is not possible for you to rule out miracles.
“The paper concludes that Hume"s arguments are unjustifiable to refute the possibility of a miracle, being that miracle as a paranormal phenomenon could not be subjected to empirical investigation.”
