Hypatia wrote:

If women ended up in a key role in this particular story, it's probably because they put themselves there.

Hypatia, can you unpack the work being done by "probably" in yours above?

Thanks, F
 

ficino wrote:

If we go back to Paul, we don't find anything about an empty tomb in his epistles. All we get is ἐτάφη, "he was buried/put in a grave." Paul says the risen Jesus ὤφθη, "appeared to/was seen by" various individuals and then ὤφθη "also to me." Since Paul saw a vision according to Acts, I think I Cor 15:5-8 is consistent with the hypothesis that the others mentioned by him saw a vision. I.e. that the first church spoke of a spiritual resurrection, although these verses are also consistent with the traditional thesis that they believed in a physical resurrection.

The Greek grammar of 1 Corinthians 15 demonstrates that the physical body that died was the same body that was raised, and therefore it must have been physical.  Anastasis refers to someone physically coming back to life.  This fits with people during Paul's time generally thinking of resurrection as a bodily phenomenon

ficino wrote:

You might think, though, that if Paul knew a story about the empty tomb and the women on Easter morning, he might have referred to it, though of course he might have done in speech or writing that we don't have, and he need not have referred to it at all. Still, it seems to me it's an argument from silence of some hard-to-specify degree of weight.

Paul doesn’t mention Jesus' mother Mary by name, does that mean he didn’t know it?  Anyways, Paul is using a creed.  There’s no need to reference every single detail, especially since it would be common knowledge to most Christians.  It has to be short, simple and easily transmittable.  It's perfectly natural to leave things out.

ficino wrote:

The argument that women witnesses are authenticated by the criterion of embarrassment is poor, since Mark's whole "the last first and the first last" theme also accounts for that detail: to whom else would the Jesus of gMark appear BUT to those not at the top of the hierarchy? And the male disciples are constantly depicted as absurdly uncomprehending in Mark.

Even if you can appeal to Mark’s theology as a reason for including women witnesses, this would still leave the fact that outsiders to Christianity (Jewish and Gentile) would have seen the idea of women witnesses as ridiculous.  If you were making stuff up or stretching the facts, you wouldn’t include this sort of detail.

ficino wrote:

About the CoE in general and about the Criteria of Authenticity, there is a growing movement among biblical scholars I have read to admit their circularity.

More scholars than before are contesting the critieria of authenticity, but the new strategy they seem to be using is trying to look at Gospels as coherent presentations of Jesus.  You'll have to show why this excludes the empty tomb under this aproach.

ficino wrote:

So given the above, what about the empty tomb story? My view so far is that we don't know it is factual. There is no reference to Arimathea as a place except in the gospels. As a designation of Joseph it is fishy (a riff on "best disciple"?). We don't have evidence to make it plausible that a Roman governor would release the body of a crucified seditionist to friends or relatives. The one poorly authenticated case known to me almost proves the rule, since it is of the last Hasmonean claimant to the throne, Antigonus II Mattathias, and his death in 37 BCE was not under the Roman system of govt that obtained in c. 30 CE; he was handed over to the Romans by Herod.

Ehmran is not a good source for this sort of stuff.  The fact of the matter is that Jesus' burial fits quite well with what we know of the time period.  Roman law did allow the release of the bodies to friends or relatives. See Digesta book 48.  In the case of Jews it fell to the Jewish Council to oversee the burials.  Romans were more likely to grant a burial request to Jews during peacetime and near Jerusalem.  Philo, Josephus both attest to these practices.  We have archeological evidence for crucified bodies being buried.  And Jews took burial rites very seriously.  They wouldn’t tolerate bodies being regularly left on crosses outside Jerusalem.  Since the Jewish Council initiated Jesus’ execution they would have to make sure these burial rites were followed.  It makes sense for Jospeh of Arimethea to ask for the body of Jesus.

ficino wrote:

There are a lot of fishy things about gMark, and Luke/Acts are likely to be second century, since Josephus' Antiquities seems to be used but misinterpreted.

Only a very small minority of scholars think that Luke/Acts is second century.  This sort of hypothesis requires you to believe that Luke read Josephus, ignored a ton of stuff from Josephus that he could have put into Acts, and then completely misremembered or misused the three things from Josephus that supposedly prove that he read him.  It also doesn’t track with how he closely he stuck to other sources that we know about like Mark.

ficino wrote:

The section of I Cor 15 in which we get a list of witness to whom Jesus "appeared" is written with a cadence that makes it sound un-Pauline, and possibly, some sort of credal fragment or the like. But whether Paul inserted it or whether it was inserted by someone else later is not known.

Most scholars don’t think this is an interpolation.  The only real backing this has is from mythicsts

 

Last edited by Freakazoid (8/05/2018 10:06 pm)

Freakazoid wrote:

And Jews took burial rites very seriously.  They wouldn’t tolerate bodies being regularly left on crosses outside Jerusalem.  Since the Jewish Council initiated Jesus’ execution they would have to make sure these burial rites were followed.  It makes sense for Jospeh of Arimethea to ask for the body of Jesus.

Hello Freakazoid, adding: the above is the kind of point that I had in mind when I first replied to Roman Joe, that the more I thought about the passion narratives, the less well they fit together. The gospels present the chief priests and scribes and elders as making a push to have Pilate order Jesus executed. It is obvious that he will be crucified. In John, they themselves actually call for Jesus to be crucified and not Barrabas; in the synoptics, the priests et al stimulate the crowd to demand Barrabas' release from execution as an insurrectionist (i.e. it would be crucifixion), and the crowd yell, crucify him.

But if the priests are worried that bodies might be still on the cross/crosses by nightfall, why are they pushing so hard for Jesus to be crucified then and there? Surely they'd know that it would be rare for someone to die on a cross so quickly. Pushing for Pilate to crucify Jesus on the eve of Passover, and worrying that the body would be still on the cross when the festival begins some hours later, are two details that do not cohere.

It's interesting that gMark and gMatt have the Sanhedrin holding the trial during the night. John merely has Jesus interrogated first by Annas, then by Caiaphas. Luke seems to try to correct Mark/Matt by saying that the Sanhedrin convened to try Jesus once day broke. But these details get away from the point about the CoE.



 

FZM

Then what do you propose as an alternative motive for Christian belief?

ficino wrote:

Hello Joe, obviously your question opens up a huge and old debate. Even about the so-called genuine epistles of Paul, there is dispute, whether they present the doctrine that the same corpse of Jesus that was put in a grave came back to life and rose bodily. Some think Paul's statements are consistent with a belief in a spiritual resurrection or creation of a new, spiritual body.

And, as amply demonstrated in N. T. Wright's weighty tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God, such an interpretation ignores the Jewish and Hellenic dialectic that formed the context of any discussion of a resurrection. The notion we find in Paul is the same as that found in the rest of Judaism - that of a bodily resurrection. It's questionable whether anyone believed in any other kind.

The story of Thomas in John is often taken as a theological thrust against the belief that Jesus' resurrected body was not a physical body. If that's true, the belief in some other sort of resurrection would have been current, and who knows how widespread.

Based on the sorts of Gnostic beliefs that started cropping up later, I think it rather probable that the people who believed that Christ's body was non-physical after the resurrection would have believed much the same to be true of his body prior to the resurrection. John wasn't interested in proving the physicality of the resurrection body, he was interested in proving the physicality of body simpliciter.

Once you start digging into the gospels and Acts, I at least find that the rabbit holes go very deep, and the certainty with which I took the traditional story started to evaporate. A non-scholarly "issue" of mine is just, wouldn't the Resurrection have been the most stupendous event in human history? If so, why so much secrecy and confusion about it? The whole world should have been stupefied. Obviously, there are many auxiliary assumptions that can be brought in to explain the secrecy and confusion.

Doesn't stupefication often lead to silence and confusion on the part of those stupefied? And can't confused silence give the appearance of secrecy?

Not sure if these vague generalities line up with your vague generalities in such a way so as to address your issue. But that's the problem with vague generalities: they're vague and general.

At this point I incline to think that there was a historical Jesus, a wandering preacher who thought he was the messiah, who was crucified as a seditionist and later buried in an unknown grave. The argument that the apostles would not have died for what they knew was a lie, so therefore the bodily resurrection must have occurred (to explain the spead of the cult and their constancy even in martyrdom), is circular, in my opinion. That's because assumptions about the spread of Christianity in c. 33-50, and the martyrdoms of the apostles, themselves are drawn from the gospels/Acts and later tradition. And it's the historicity of those documents and traditions that is in question.

If the Epistle of Clement weren't a religious document, everyone would take the martyrdom of Peter and Paul as a fact.

I think that more can be said regarding the reliability of transmission in the early church, but it's getting late. My only suggestion is that you compare the rhetorical choices Paul makes in I Corinthians 15 and Galatians 1-2 to the rhetorical choices made by Irenaeus when combating heretics, and ask yourself for the simplest explanation.

Last edited by Dave (8/07/2018 3:33 am)