Posted March 16, 2014
marianne
Carpe Diem
Registered: Mar 2012
From United States
toxicTom
Big Daddy
Registered: Feb 2009
From Germany
Posted March 16, 2014
I find it more like suffering a week of sleep deprivation and then watching The Ninth Gate. ;-)
jamotide
Jack Keane 2016!
Registered: Jul 2011
From Netherlands
Soyeong
Enter title here
Registered: Oct 2012
From United States
grimwerk
sleeper slice
Registered: Sep 2012
From United States
Posted March 16, 2014
Friendliest explanation I can find.
toxicTom
Big Daddy
Registered: Feb 2009
From Germany
marianne
Carpe Diem
Registered: Mar 2012
From United States
Posted March 17, 2014
Oh wow. I love The Ninth Gate. Wouldn't that make a great video game !!
Soyeong
Enter title here
Registered: Oct 2012
From United States
Posted March 17, 2014
Also: see eyewitness accounts and reliability.
Richard A. Burridge’s landmark work What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography has shifted the consensus of modern scholarship to consider the genre of the Gospels to be a variant of Greco-Roman biography. As I’ve noted previously, they also use many of the same literary devices. Even atheist scholars like Bart Ehrman are willing to grant that:
Many recent scholars have come to recognize that the New Testament Gospels are a kind of ancient biography. Most of the distinctive features of the Gospels relate directly to their Christian character. They are the only biographies written by Christians about the man they worship as the Son of God who died for the salvation of the world...It appears that ancient readers, whether they actually read the words off the page or heard someone else do so, would have recognized them as biographies of a religious leader. - Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, pp. 64-65
I may fairly claim to have entered on this investigation without prejudice in favour of the conclusion which I shall now seek to justify to the reader. On the contrary, I began with a mind unfavorable to it...but more recently I found myself brought into contact with the Book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth. In fact, beginning with a fixed idea that the work was essentially a second century composition, and never relying on its evidence as trustworthy for first century conditions, I gradually came to find it a useful ally in some obscure and difficult investigations [14]
Luke is a historian of first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy...this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians. [15] - Sir William Mitchell Ramsay
Also, what were Jesus' last words?
Luke: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
Mark: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
John: ""It is finished."
High quality eyewitness accounts? I would presume something as important as "last words" would be more coherent.
The reason given for them bringing their own spices was to anoint Jesus. In other words, they were going to the tomb because they wanted to mourn privately, not because they thought Nicodemus hadn’t brought enough spices.
Post edited March 17, 2014 by Soyeong
TrollumThinks
I got Wisdum
Registered: Jul 2011
From Australia
Posted March 19, 2014
Friendliest explanation I can find.
(my favourite quote from the article:
'option (c)' "it’s a correct calculation, but it answers the wrong question in some way we don’t understand."
- made me think of '42' LOL )
Quantum mechanics is interesting, it answers Q's but asks more (which is the fun part, I suppose)
toxicTom
Big Daddy
Registered: Feb 2009
From Germany
Posted March 19, 2014
Also, what were Jesus' last words?
Luke: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
Mark: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
John: ""It is finished."
High quality eyewitness accounts? I would presume something as important as "last words" would be more coherent.
Soyeong
Enter title here
Registered: Oct 2012
From United States
Posted March 25, 2014
Sorry again for the delay.
toxicTom: Let me quote Ze'ev Herzog from the Tel Aviv University:
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
You can also take a look at the statements of Professor Israel Finkelstein and Zahi Hawass. Minimalists have a history of claiming that certain cities, people, and groups mentioned in the Bible never existed only to be discredited by later discoveries, and some of Herzog’s statements in that quote are no exceptions. For instance, just last year the discovery of a palace was announced that dated to the time of David and very likely belonged to him. However, I do think he correct about the conquest not happening during the period he thinks it was supposed to have happened, with the problem being that you’re not going to find the right evidence if you look during the wrong time period.
The issue is that William F. Albright was a leading archeologist in the 1930’s who dated the Exodus to the 13th century BC. However, after he died, his theory fell out of favor because other minimalists and maximalists were finding significant problems with it. Minimalists concluded that meant the Exodus didn't happen, whereas other maximalists have argued that Albright got the date wrong and that the evidence much more strongly supports that it happened during the 15th century. Furthermore, discoveries such as the Ebla achieves, the Nuzi tablets, and Amarna letters have all served to confirm and clarify many of the customs in the Biblical record rather than contradict them.
toxicTom: So we have to agree to disagree, just like with the "dying-rising-god". For you the differences, well, make all the difference. For me the similarities are more striking.
But I challenge you to read at least some of the flood myths from around the world. You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
This list contains only a fraction of them. I have a lot of compilations of myths and fairytales from different cultures. Nearly all of them have contain some form of great flood, and it's almost always the same story basically. Insisting that those details are striking is in direct conflict with the fact that there are a multitude of flood stories in many different cultures that have the same basic details. By themselves, those details are not enough establish that any of the flood stories copied any of the other flood stories. Rather, the widespread accounts strongly suggest that they all share a common source.
“The common assumption that the Hebrew account is simply a purged and simplified version of the Babylonian legend (applied also to the Flood stories) is fallacious on methodological grounds. In the Ancient Near East, the rule is that simply accounts or traditions may give rise (by accretion and embellishment) to elaborate legends, but not vice versa. In the ancient Orient, legends were not simplified or turned into pseudo-history (historicized) as has been assumed for early Genesis.” - K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 1966, p. 89
toxicTom: Well. It's not that bad, really. And all of the noteworthy entries has extensive literature lists of "respected" scholars. I’ll take a look at seen what I find:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god
“The very existence of the category "dying-and-rising-god" was debated throughout the 20th century, most modern scholars questioning the soundness of the category.[2] [17] At the end of the 20th century the overall scholarly consensus had emerged against the soundness of the reasoning used to suggest the category.[2] Tryggve Mettinger (who supports the category) states that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate from a historical perspective.[18] Scholars such as Kurt Rudolph have stated the reasoning used for the construction of the category has been defective.[2]
The overall scholarly consensus is that while the examples provided often involve death of the deity, they do not generally involve resurrection of the same deity.[2] Eddy and Boyd state that upon careful analysis, it turns out that there is often either no death, no resurrection or no god in the examples used to construct each of the examples in the category.[17] Jonathan Z. Smith, a scholar of comparative religions, writes the category is "largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts."[1][37] The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion states that Smith is correct in pointing out many discontinuities within the category, and although some scholars support the category, it is generally seen as involving excessive generalization.[1] Gerald O'Collins states that surface-level application of analogous symbolism is a case of parallelomania which exaggerate the importance of trifling resemblances, long abandoned by mainstream scholars.[38]
Frazier's analysis of cases such as Adonis has generally been viewed as highly speculative, casting doubt on the validity of the entire category of dying-and-rising gods.[1][39] Beginning with an overview of the Athenian ritual of growing and withering herb gardens at the Adonis festival, in his book The Gardens of Adonis Marcel Detienne suggests that rather than being a stand-in for crops in general (and therefore the cycle of death and rebirth), these herbs (and Adonis) were part of a complex of associations in the Greek mind that centered on spices.[40] These associations included seduction, trickery, gourmandizing, and the anxieties of childbirth.[41] From his point of view, Adonis's death is only one datum among the many that must be used to analyze the festival, the myth, and the god.[39][41]
A main criticism charges the group of analogies with reductionism, insofar as it subsumes a range of disparate myths under a single category and ignores important distinctions. Marcel Detienne argues that it risks making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than many other faiths.[42] Dag Øistein Endsjø, a scholar of religion, points out how a number of those often defined as dying-and-rising-deities, like Jesus and a number of figures in ancient Greek religion, actually died as ordinary mortals, only to become gods of various stature after they were resurrected from the dead. Not dying as gods, they thus defy the definition of “dying-and-rising-gods”.[43]”
You made the claim, so you need to back it up. You brought up Adonis and I asked you a number of questions about parallel themes, but you again neglected to respond.
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
You can also take a look at the statements of Professor Israel Finkelstein and Zahi Hawass.
The issue is that William F. Albright was a leading archeologist in the 1930’s who dated the Exodus to the 13th century BC. However, after he died, his theory fell out of favor because other minimalists and maximalists were finding significant problems with it. Minimalists concluded that meant the Exodus didn't happen, whereas other maximalists have argued that Albright got the date wrong and that the evidence much more strongly supports that it happened during the 15th century. Furthermore, discoveries such as the Ebla achieves, the Nuzi tablets, and Amarna letters have all served to confirm and clarify many of the customs in the Biblical record rather than contradict them.
But I challenge you to read at least some of the flood myths from around the world. You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
This list contains only a fraction of them. I have a lot of compilations of myths and fairytales from different cultures. Nearly all of them have contain some form of great flood, and it's almost always the same story basically.
“The common assumption that the Hebrew account is simply a purged and simplified version of the Babylonian legend (applied also to the Flood stories) is fallacious on methodological grounds. In the Ancient Near East, the rule is that simply accounts or traditions may give rise (by accretion and embellishment) to elaborate legends, but not vice versa. In the ancient Orient, legends were not simplified or turned into pseudo-history (historicized) as has been assumed for early Genesis.” - K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 1966, p. 89
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god
“The very existence of the category "dying-and-rising-god" was debated throughout the 20th century, most modern scholars questioning the soundness of the category.[2] [17] At the end of the 20th century the overall scholarly consensus had emerged against the soundness of the reasoning used to suggest the category.[2] Tryggve Mettinger (who supports the category) states that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate from a historical perspective.[18] Scholars such as Kurt Rudolph have stated the reasoning used for the construction of the category has been defective.[2]
The overall scholarly consensus is that while the examples provided often involve death of the deity, they do not generally involve resurrection of the same deity.[2] Eddy and Boyd state that upon careful analysis, it turns out that there is often either no death, no resurrection or no god in the examples used to construct each of the examples in the category.[17] Jonathan Z. Smith, a scholar of comparative religions, writes the category is "largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts."[1][37] The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion states that Smith is correct in pointing out many discontinuities within the category, and although some scholars support the category, it is generally seen as involving excessive generalization.[1] Gerald O'Collins states that surface-level application of analogous symbolism is a case of parallelomania which exaggerate the importance of trifling resemblances, long abandoned by mainstream scholars.[38]
Frazier's analysis of cases such as Adonis has generally been viewed as highly speculative, casting doubt on the validity of the entire category of dying-and-rising gods.[1][39] Beginning with an overview of the Athenian ritual of growing and withering herb gardens at the Adonis festival, in his book The Gardens of Adonis Marcel Detienne suggests that rather than being a stand-in for crops in general (and therefore the cycle of death and rebirth), these herbs (and Adonis) were part of a complex of associations in the Greek mind that centered on spices.[40] These associations included seduction, trickery, gourmandizing, and the anxieties of childbirth.[41] From his point of view, Adonis's death is only one datum among the many that must be used to analyze the festival, the myth, and the god.[39][41]
A main criticism charges the group of analogies with reductionism, insofar as it subsumes a range of disparate myths under a single category and ignores important distinctions. Marcel Detienne argues that it risks making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than many other faiths.[42] Dag Øistein Endsjø, a scholar of religion, points out how a number of those often defined as dying-and-rising-deities, like Jesus and a number of figures in ancient Greek religion, actually died as ordinary mortals, only to become gods of various stature after they were resurrected from the dead. Not dying as gods, they thus defy the definition of “dying-and-rising-gods”.[43]”
You made the claim, so you need to back it up. You brought up Adonis and I asked you a number of questions about parallel themes, but you again neglected to respond.
Post edited March 26, 2014 by Soyeong
Soyeong
Enter title here
Registered: Oct 2012
From United States
Posted March 25, 2014
This is simply more BS. There are a perhaps handful of gods who have died in some form and raised in some form, but they are widely divergent in theme and origin, so you have neglected to established that there is even a type that they belong to, let alone that Jesus belongs to this type. You have neglected to establish the purpose of Adonis’ death or what advantageous that gave him over gods that didn’t die. You have confused how people understand stories about gods with how cults react to the execution of their leader. Cults almost always died out along with the execution of their leader, so there was very little advantage to killing them. Ancients also associated how someone died with their moral character, so there was even less advantage in having them executed by means of most humiliating status degradation ritual possible.
There were many Messianic cults during that time period and the Jewish revolutionaries all expected their Messiah to triumph over their enemies and then reign over them. If he got executed instead, then they either went home or found another Messiah, and there is evidence for disappointed followers doing both of those things. There are no other instances where they claimed their hero had risen from the dead and was still the Messiah after all even though they failed to conquer and reign. That was completely foreign to Jewish thought at the time.
“Christians who wanted to proclaim Jesus as messiah would not have invented the notion that he was crucified because his crucifixion created such a scandal. Indeed, the apostle Paul calls it the chief "stumbling block" for Jews (1 Cor. 1:23). Where did the tradition come from? It must have actually happened.” - Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Third Edition. pages 221-222
As Martin Hengel has amply shown us in his monograph, Crucifixion, the shame of the cross was the result of a fundamental norm of the Greco-Roman Empire. Hengel observes that "crucifixion was an utterly offensive affair, 'obscene' in the original sense of the word." (22) As Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [263-4], crucifixion was a "status degradation ritual" designed to humiliate in every way, including the symbolic pinioning of hands and legs signifying a loss of power, and loss of ability to control the body in various ways, including befouling one's self with excrement.
The process was so offensive that the Gospels turn out to be our most detailed description of a crucifixion from ancient times - the pagan authors were too revolted by the subject to give equally comprehensive descriptions - in spite of the fact that thousands of crucifixions were done at a time on some occasions. "(T)he cultured literary world wanted to have nothing to do with [crucifixion], and as a rule kept silent about it." (38)
It was recognized as early as Paul (1 Cor. 1:18; see also Heb. 12:2) that preaching a savior who underwent this disgraceful treatment was folly. This was so for Jews (Gal. 3;13; cf. Deut. 21:23) as well as Gentiles. Justin Martyr later writes in his first Apology 13:4 -- They say that our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God...
Celsus describes Jesus as one who was "bound in the most ignominious fashion" and "executed in a shameful way." Josephus describes crucifixion as "the most wretched of deaths." An oracle of Apollo preserved by Augustine described Jesus as "a god who died in delusions...executed in the prime of life by the worst of deaths, a death bound with iron." (4)
And so the opinions go: Seneca, Lucian, Pseudo-Manetho, Plautus. Even the lower classes joined the charade, as demonstrated by a bit of graffiti depicting a man supplicating before a crucified figure with an asses' head - sub-titled, "Alexamenos worships god." (The asses' head being a recognition of Christianity's Jewish roots: A convention of anti-Jewish polemic was that the Jews worshipped an ass in their temple. - 19)
Though in error in other matters, Walter Bauer rightly said (ibid.): The enemies of Christianity always referred to the disgracefulness of the death of Jesus with great emphasis and malicious pleasure. A god or son of god dying on a cross! That was enough to put paid to the new religion.
And DeSilva adds [51]: No member of the Jewish community or the Greco-Roman society would have come to faith or joined the Christian movement without first accepting that God's perspective on what kind of behavior merits honor differs exceedingly from the perspective of human beings, since the message about Jesus is that both the Jewish and Gentile leaders of Jerusalem evaluated Jesus, his convictions and his deeds as meriting a shameful death, but God overturned their evaluation of Jesus by raising him from the dead and seating him at God's own right hand as Lord.
N. T. Wright makes these points in Resurrection of the Son of God [543, 559, 563]: The argument at this point proceeds in three stages. (i) Early Christianity was thoroughly messianic, shaping itself around the belief that Jesus was God's Messiah, Israel's Messiah. (ii) But Messiahship in Judaism, such as it was, never envisaged someone doing the sort of things Jesus had done, let alone suffering the fate he suffered. (iii) The historian must therefore ask why the early Christians made this claim about Jesus, and why they reordered their lives accordingly.
Jewish beliefs about a coming Messiah, and about the deeds such a figure would be expected to accomplish, came in various shapes and sizes, but they did not include a shameful death which left the Roman empire celebrating its usual victory.
Something has happened to belief in a coming Messiah...It has neither been abandoned or simply reaffirmed wholesale. It has been redefined around Jesus. Why? To this question, of course, the early Christians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah because he was raised bodily from the dead. Nothing else will do.
The message of the cross was an abhorrence, a vulgarity in its social context. Discussing crucifixion was the worst sort of social faux pas; it was akin, in only the thinnest sense, to discussing sewage reclamation techniques over a fine meal - but even worse when associated with an alleged god come to earth. Hengel adds: "A crucified messiah...must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone, Jew, Greek, Roman or barbarian, asked to believe such a claim, and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish."
That a god would descend to the realm of matter and suffer in this ignominious fashion "ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people." (10, 4) Announcing a crucified god would be akin to the Southern Baptist Convention announcing that they endorsed pedophilia. If Jesus had truly been a god, then by Roman thinking, the Crucifixion should never have happened. Celsus, an ancient pagan critic of Christianity, writes:
But if (Jesus) was really so great, he ought, in order to display his divinity, to have disappeared suddenly from the cross.
This comment represents not just some skeptical challenge, but is a reflection of an ingrained socio-theological consciousness. The Romans could not envision a god dying like Jesus - period. Just as well to argue that the sky is green, or that pigs fly, only those arguments, at least, would not offend sensibilities to the maximum. We need to emphasize this (for the first but not the last time) from a social perspective because our own society is not as attuned as ancient society to the process of honor.
We found it strange to watch Shogun and conceive of men committing suicide for the sake of honor. The Jews, Greeks and Romans would not have found this strange at all. As David DeSilva shows in Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity, that which was honorable was, to the ancients, of primary importance. Honor was placed above one's personal safety and was the key element in deciding courses of action. Isocrates gives behavioral advice based not on what was "right or wrong", but on what was "noble or disgraceful". "The promise of honor and threat of disgrace [were] prominent goads to pursue a certain kind of life and to avoid many alternatives." [24]
Christianity, of course, argued in reply that Jesus' death was an honorable act of sacrifice for the good of others -- but that sort of logic only works if you are already convinced by other means.
This being the case, we may fairly ask, for the first time in this essay, why Christianity succeeded at all. The ignominy of a crucified savior was as much a deterrent to Christian belief as it is today - indeed, it was far, far more so! Why, then, were there any Christians at all? At best this should have been a movement that had only a few strange followers, then died out within decades as a footnote, if it was mentioned at all.
The historical reality of the crucifixion could not of course be denied. To survive Christianity should have either turned Gnostic (as indeed happened in some offshoots), or else not bothered with Jesus at all, and merely made him into the movement's first martyr for a higher moral ideal within Judaism. It would have been absurd to suggest, to either Jew or Gentile, that a crucified being was worthy of worship or died for our sins.
There can be only one good explanation: Christianity succeeded because from the cross came victory, and after death came resurrection. The shame of the cross turns out to be one of Christianity's most incontrovertible proofs!
Source
There were many Messianic cults during that time period and the Jewish revolutionaries all expected their Messiah to triumph over their enemies and then reign over them. If he got executed instead, then they either went home or found another Messiah, and there is evidence for disappointed followers doing both of those things. There are no other instances where they claimed their hero had risen from the dead and was still the Messiah after all even though they failed to conquer and reign. That was completely foreign to Jewish thought at the time.
“Christians who wanted to proclaim Jesus as messiah would not have invented the notion that he was crucified because his crucifixion created such a scandal. Indeed, the apostle Paul calls it the chief "stumbling block" for Jews (1 Cor. 1:23). Where did the tradition come from? It must have actually happened.” - Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Third Edition. pages 221-222
As Martin Hengel has amply shown us in his monograph, Crucifixion, the shame of the cross was the result of a fundamental norm of the Greco-Roman Empire. Hengel observes that "crucifixion was an utterly offensive affair, 'obscene' in the original sense of the word." (22) As Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [263-4], crucifixion was a "status degradation ritual" designed to humiliate in every way, including the symbolic pinioning of hands and legs signifying a loss of power, and loss of ability to control the body in various ways, including befouling one's self with excrement.
The process was so offensive that the Gospels turn out to be our most detailed description of a crucifixion from ancient times - the pagan authors were too revolted by the subject to give equally comprehensive descriptions - in spite of the fact that thousands of crucifixions were done at a time on some occasions. "(T)he cultured literary world wanted to have nothing to do with [crucifixion], and as a rule kept silent about it." (38)
It was recognized as early as Paul (1 Cor. 1:18; see also Heb. 12:2) that preaching a savior who underwent this disgraceful treatment was folly. This was so for Jews (Gal. 3;13; cf. Deut. 21:23) as well as Gentiles. Justin Martyr later writes in his first Apology 13:4 -- They say that our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God...
Celsus describes Jesus as one who was "bound in the most ignominious fashion" and "executed in a shameful way." Josephus describes crucifixion as "the most wretched of deaths." An oracle of Apollo preserved by Augustine described Jesus as "a god who died in delusions...executed in the prime of life by the worst of deaths, a death bound with iron." (4)
And so the opinions go: Seneca, Lucian, Pseudo-Manetho, Plautus. Even the lower classes joined the charade, as demonstrated by a bit of graffiti depicting a man supplicating before a crucified figure with an asses' head - sub-titled, "Alexamenos worships god." (The asses' head being a recognition of Christianity's Jewish roots: A convention of anti-Jewish polemic was that the Jews worshipped an ass in their temple. - 19)
Though in error in other matters, Walter Bauer rightly said (ibid.): The enemies of Christianity always referred to the disgracefulness of the death of Jesus with great emphasis and malicious pleasure. A god or son of god dying on a cross! That was enough to put paid to the new religion.
And DeSilva adds [51]: No member of the Jewish community or the Greco-Roman society would have come to faith or joined the Christian movement without first accepting that God's perspective on what kind of behavior merits honor differs exceedingly from the perspective of human beings, since the message about Jesus is that both the Jewish and Gentile leaders of Jerusalem evaluated Jesus, his convictions and his deeds as meriting a shameful death, but God overturned their evaluation of Jesus by raising him from the dead and seating him at God's own right hand as Lord.
N. T. Wright makes these points in Resurrection of the Son of God [543, 559, 563]: The argument at this point proceeds in three stages. (i) Early Christianity was thoroughly messianic, shaping itself around the belief that Jesus was God's Messiah, Israel's Messiah. (ii) But Messiahship in Judaism, such as it was, never envisaged someone doing the sort of things Jesus had done, let alone suffering the fate he suffered. (iii) The historian must therefore ask why the early Christians made this claim about Jesus, and why they reordered their lives accordingly.
Jewish beliefs about a coming Messiah, and about the deeds such a figure would be expected to accomplish, came in various shapes and sizes, but they did not include a shameful death which left the Roman empire celebrating its usual victory.
Something has happened to belief in a coming Messiah...It has neither been abandoned or simply reaffirmed wholesale. It has been redefined around Jesus. Why? To this question, of course, the early Christians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah because he was raised bodily from the dead. Nothing else will do.
The message of the cross was an abhorrence, a vulgarity in its social context. Discussing crucifixion was the worst sort of social faux pas; it was akin, in only the thinnest sense, to discussing sewage reclamation techniques over a fine meal - but even worse when associated with an alleged god come to earth. Hengel adds: "A crucified messiah...must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone, Jew, Greek, Roman or barbarian, asked to believe such a claim, and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish."
That a god would descend to the realm of matter and suffer in this ignominious fashion "ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people." (10, 4) Announcing a crucified god would be akin to the Southern Baptist Convention announcing that they endorsed pedophilia. If Jesus had truly been a god, then by Roman thinking, the Crucifixion should never have happened. Celsus, an ancient pagan critic of Christianity, writes:
But if (Jesus) was really so great, he ought, in order to display his divinity, to have disappeared suddenly from the cross.
This comment represents not just some skeptical challenge, but is a reflection of an ingrained socio-theological consciousness. The Romans could not envision a god dying like Jesus - period. Just as well to argue that the sky is green, or that pigs fly, only those arguments, at least, would not offend sensibilities to the maximum. We need to emphasize this (for the first but not the last time) from a social perspective because our own society is not as attuned as ancient society to the process of honor.
We found it strange to watch Shogun and conceive of men committing suicide for the sake of honor. The Jews, Greeks and Romans would not have found this strange at all. As David DeSilva shows in Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity, that which was honorable was, to the ancients, of primary importance. Honor was placed above one's personal safety and was the key element in deciding courses of action. Isocrates gives behavioral advice based not on what was "right or wrong", but on what was "noble or disgraceful". "The promise of honor and threat of disgrace [were] prominent goads to pursue a certain kind of life and to avoid many alternatives." [24]
Christianity, of course, argued in reply that Jesus' death was an honorable act of sacrifice for the good of others -- but that sort of logic only works if you are already convinced by other means.
This being the case, we may fairly ask, for the first time in this essay, why Christianity succeeded at all. The ignominy of a crucified savior was as much a deterrent to Christian belief as it is today - indeed, it was far, far more so! Why, then, were there any Christians at all? At best this should have been a movement that had only a few strange followers, then died out within decades as a footnote, if it was mentioned at all.
The historical reality of the crucifixion could not of course be denied. To survive Christianity should have either turned Gnostic (as indeed happened in some offshoots), or else not bothered with Jesus at all, and merely made him into the movement's first martyr for a higher moral ideal within Judaism. It would have been absurd to suggest, to either Jew or Gentile, that a crucified being was worthy of worship or died for our sins.
There can be only one good explanation: Christianity succeeded because from the cross came victory, and after death came resurrection. The shame of the cross turns out to be one of Christianity's most incontrovertible proofs!
Source
Post edited March 26, 2014 by Soyeong
Soyeong
Enter title here
Registered: Oct 2012
From United States
Posted March 26, 2014
The statement “from nothing, nothing comes” is one of the most certain principles of metaphysics and as far as I can tell, philosophers have universally held it since its conception irrespective of their religious background. I’d love to be wrong because I want to read a philosopher who disagrees with it, but I haven’t been able to find any. If it is denied, then it becomes inexplicable why anything and everything doesn’t pop into existence uncaused, so it is much more reasonable that its alternative.
The Big Bang tells us that the universe had a beginning, which is also very confidentially held by many scientists irrespective of their religious background. It is reasonable for anyone to hold both beliefs and use them as premises to form the conclusion that the universe necessarily has a cause, so I don’t think it can be chalked up to confirmation bias. However, it is actually within reason to deny the universe had a beginning, so I prefer Aquinas’ arguments because they don’t depend on that premise.
Or think of Stephen Hawkings, who just believed in himself.
FYI:
I haven't received the testimony that you were working on earlier.
Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; And see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh ... And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught. Judges 21:20-23
Their actions were according to what they thought was right in their own eyes and were not according to what God had commanded.
Much like the Crusades, if you don’t understand the context and only focus on the very worst things that happened as representative of the whole, then you’re going to have a very warped understanding of history.
Post edited March 26, 2014 by Soyeong
jamotide
Jack Keane 2016!
Registered: Jul 2011
From Netherlands
Posted March 27, 2014
Oh boy, I see nothing we have discussed here for all these pages has resonated in any way.
Soyeong: The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus convinced me first, so Kalam and Aquinas confirmed my belief, but there are many people who have been converted by them. One does not need to be a theist in order to recognize an argument with true premises, a valid form, and a conclusion that logically necessarily follows. Ressurrections are impossible, if someone gets ressurected, they weren't really dead in the first place. We don't know that the premises are true, therefor your logical conclusions are irrelevant.
Soyeong: The statement “from nothing, nothing comes” is one of the most certain principles of metaphysics and as far as I can tell, philosophers have universally held it since its conception irrespective of their religious background. I’d love to be wrong because I want to read a philosopher who disagrees with it, but I haven’t been able to find any. If it is denied, then it becomes inexplicable why anything and everything doesn’t pop into existence uncaused, so it is much more reasonable that its alternative. Quantum mechanics. Your philosophers did not know about those. That''s why Hawking said Philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
Soyeong: The Big Bang tells us that the universe had a beginning, which is also very confidentially held by many scientists irrespective of their religious background. It is reasonable for anyone to hold both beliefs and use them as premises to form the conclusion that the universe necessarily has a cause, so I don’t think it can be chalked up to confirmation bias. However, it is actually within reason to deny the universe had a beginning, so I prefer Aquinas’ arguments because they don’t depend on that premise. It doesn't actually, we don't know what happened during the first few moments. Furthermore we don't know that the universe we can see and that was maybe caused by this bang is everything there is.
And even if you were 100% right about all this cosmo-argument stuff, there is absolutely no argument to go from that to your specific creation myth.
And even if you were 100% right about all this cosmo-argument stuff, there is absolutely no argument to go from that to your specific creation myth.
Starmaker
go Clarice!
Registered: Sep 2010
From Russian Federation
Posted March 27, 2014
For instance, the word "supernatural" describes things that are not found in nature by any reputable sources and appear to be entirely imaginary. If, for example, ESP is ever confirmed to be real, is would stop being "supernatural" and become natural; and it wouldn't even be extrasensory - it would be yet another sense to add to the 20+ we already know we possess. But it might keep its legacy name anyway, like it does in roleplaying games.
Similarly, the word "death" commonly describes a specific event where a biological organism appears to go from "this mode" to "that mode". It exists because people noticed biological organisms tend to have some similarities in functioning and invented a word for a specific apparent mode transition. As humanity's understanding of the world improves, people might suggest refining the definition, setting specific criteria for particular classes and instances of things actually found in the world for when this type of event is considered to have occurred.
Now, I think arguing with people who believe in magic is pointless as it is, but if you do anyway, it would do well to remember you shouldn't appeal to definitions, because the definitions for things that don't exist aren't yet implemented.
So "resurrections don't exist by definition" isn't really a rebuttal of Soyeong's belief in events featuring magical space zombies. His factual belief is as follows: "2000 years ago, there was a Middle Eastern dude who was subjected to torture, after which he ceased moving and talking and his body looked similar to those of other humans when they permanently cease moving and talking to later decompose. Three days later, the dude started moving and talking again, and later still, rose into the air and flew away. He still lives and has magical abilities." Soyeong chooses to call the described events "death" and "resurrection" to highlight how unusual the events are. Making him implement the definition so that said dude ends up "mistaken for dead" doesn't actually challenge the substance of his claim.