Roman Joe was asking, is there a historical event, reflection on which should compel one to become a Christian? Is the resurrection that event? Joe asked for people’s views. I said I thought the traditional account of the Passion and Resurrection is not credible.
Now we’re on page four of the thread. Here is my attempt to pull together thoughts.
1. Intrinsic probability. Some apologists write about hypotheses that vie to explain the early Christians’ “resurrection faith,” among which is the hypothesis that Jesus was literally raised from the dead.
  There is NO basis for treating the Resurrection hypothesis as though it shares a rough degree of probability with other hypotheses. The Resurrection hypothesis has almost ZERO probability EXCEPT on the assumption that God works such miracles. That assumption stands outside the methodology of history. The probability that someone who was actually dead – not in a swoon – for c. 36 hours would come back to life and walk long distances and carry on learned discussions is nil. Rigor mortis sets in betw two to six hours after death. What brain functions are left after a day and a half? To affirm the resurrection of Jesus is an act of faith. It begs the question to use a hypothesis about the resurrection as evidence *for* faith.
   On the other hand, the hypothesis that a religion’s origins would involve visions and/or fraud is strong, We know religions that pretty clearly originated from visions and/or fraud: Mormonism, Scientology, Heaven’s Gate, Seventh-Day Adventism (White’s visions may not have been so) ... Islam? There is some probability that visions and/or fraud lay at the origin of Christianity, but virtually zero proability that Christianity began because a dead person came to life after 36 hours.
 
2. Alternative hypotheses. As I said earlier, if there is no single, well-supported alternative hypothesis, it does not follow that the resurrection hypothesis is left standing as the best explanation of the origin of Christianity. A hypothesis of almost zero probability is weaker than any hypothesis of greater probability.
    The skeptic does not need to hammer out the one, secure alternative hypothesis in order to have strong grounds for declining to accept the resurrection hypothesis. As I said earlier, our lack of a single, cogent hypothesis for the origin of the mystery cult of Dionysos in Greece does not leave the Bacchae standing as the historical account.
 
3. Some scholars have deemed the passion-resurrection story of Mark and other gospels as substantially fictitious--*not* as mostly historical with but a few controversial miraculous parts. Support for that view, not exhaustive:
A. more likely that Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem was in fall, i.e. at Succoth, than in spring, because Succoth is festival for palm branches (only last year’s dried fronds are available in spring), and Succoth looks forward to messianic king. But moving the events to Passover allows the equation, Jesus as Passover Lamb. On this see Hyam Maccoby.
B. Gethsemane story is strange. Since those sent to arrest Jesus expected his followers to be armed seditionists, why did they allow ALL his followers to escape? In John there is even a Roman cohort; bad job for them to allow all the followers to escape. Presumption of such incompetence is fishy.
C. Sanhedrin not legally convened for a trial at night. (This is “corrected” by Luke.)
D. No independent attestion of a governor’s releasing at a festival any prisoner the crowd asked for, and this doesn’t seem likely, esp. in an incendiary province. Why should we think that Pilate would negotiate personally with a rabble about freeing a seditionist (Barrabas)?
E. Incompatibility between chief priests’ demand for crucifixion on eve of sabbath and their objection to bodies hanging on crosses overnight (cf. Deut. 21:23; discussed upthread)
F. Not likely that a governor would release to friends/family the body of a seditionist crucified for opposition to Caesar (discussed upthread)
G. No attestation that Arimathea was a place.
H. Contradiction betw gMark and Luke, where Joseph of A takes down body, and John, where soldiers take it down. Not major but increases fishiness.
I. St. John Chrysostom says that myrrh glues the shroud to the corpse. gJohn says that Joseph of A and Nicodemus packed Jesus’ body in a 100 weight of spices, including myrrh. This if true would make Jesus’ exit from the tomb all the less likely on any swoon theory.
  But -- II Chronicles 16:14 describes the funeral of the king, Asa. He was buried in a tomb that he'd had cut out of rock and was laid on a couch which was filled with spices and aromatics compounded into an ointment. This compound is like the compound of myrrh and aloe of John. John's description highlights Jesus' role as king. This OT story may be a prototype of the spice part of the Easter story; that is, John wants to depict Jesus as a king so he takes inspiration from this story of spices.
J. Confllicting, alternative traditions about Jesus’ burial: buried by the same Jewish leaders who denounced Jesus to Pilate, i.e. by Jesus’ enemies (Acts 13:27-29); buried in sand (Secret Book of James).
K. Contradictions among gospels about Jesus’ appearances, their locations and audiences
L. Alternative traditions about location of the empty tomb – why, if there *was* an empty tomb?
M. Nothing in Paul about the Romans crucifying Jesus; the impetus is attributed to demons, i.e. “rulers of this age” (so Strong’s Concordance re I Cor 2:8), and secondarily to Jews. One might infer Roman involvement from references to the cross, but no trace of trial and subsequent negotiations betw Jewish leaders and Roman governor. An argument from silence but carries some weight 
N. Although not every detail of the passion/Easter story is linked to an OT passage, many are, and we are told that Jesus’ story matched the scriptures (Luke 24:27). The hypothesis that many details were inspired/invented from OT prototypes explains much.
O. Enthusiasm about visions can spread within a group of fanatical believers, as can belief in the founder’s triumph over death. This existed in the Vedanta group my parents belonged to and many others.
P. Jesus reported as appearing only to members of the group
Q. Only records of testimony come from the group and only after a generation or more
R. Mass conversions in Jerusalem numbering thousands but recorded only in Acts
S. No apparent response of the Romans to widespread fervor about resurrection of a man they had crucified as a criminal
PQRS ensure that the testimony cannot be checked. 

 
Just going on probabilities that we can assess by natural methodologies, I think it far more likely that the story *as an ensemble* arose from a mix of invention, visions, etc., than that it records actual events. If our methodology allows for singular divine miracles, we have already made a faith commitment. Which is what belief in Jesus’ resurrection is, and that's fine from motives of faith. On the other hand, affirming singular miracles is not in the purview of the methodology of history. Those who don’t find the evidence cogent enough to overcome the enormous probability against resurrection after 36 hours may decline to affirm faith in this central Christian doctrine.

Last edited by ficino (8/09/2018 6:10 am)

RomanJoe wrote:

Freakazoid wrote:

RomanJoe wrote:

Any reading suggestions? I've read some of Bart Ehrman's work, William Lane Craig's (excluding his massive tome), Gary Habermas' and Michael Licona's. Dale Allison seems promising.

Is there any topic in particular that you are interested in or are you looking for a broad survey?
 

Just any reading that addresses whether or not we could rightly appeal to a miracle during our historical investigation of the origin of Christianity.

I don't really have much to add beyond what others have said.  Tim McGrew is excellent on miracles.
 

Freakazoid wrote:

 follow this link from Larry Hurtado.
https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/paul-on-jesus-resurrection-a-new-study/
 

Thank you for the link. Ware's article, which Hurtado praises in the linked blog post, is good because it adds depth to the range of meaning of ἐγείρω. Some hunting around has only turned up one response to Ware's article, but I'm sure there are others. In the response I found, James H. Charlesworth (“Paul, the Jewish Apocalypses, and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and Carlos A. Segovia, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016, 83-105: 104 n. 48) does not accept Ware’s conclusion that Jesus was resurrected with his crucified body. Charlesworth argues against Ware that 15:35-50 makes clear that it’s not a terrestrial (15:40) or physical (15:44) body but a celestial body (15:40) and a spiritual body (15:44).  

N.T. Wright has observed that when something changes, a substrate remains that undergoes the change. As I pointed out earlier about μετασχηματίσει in Philippians, however, that verb is used by Aristotle and Plato when an agent causes Y to be *generated* from a previous X, not merely altered in its accidents. So it's not clear to me that Paul is not saying that a body governed by pneuma takes the place of the body that was governed by soul, psyche. I don't think it need follow, if that is Paul's view, that he thinks Jesus' fleshy body was rotting in the grave at the same time that the risen Jesus in his pneuma body was appearing to people. 

Two caveats: It is methodologically backwards to try to establish what the generality of first-century Jews believed and then read that construction back into Paul. It's also not justified to go immediately from "Paul means X" to "believers earlier than or alongside Paul meant X." That latter inference rests on assumed premises that may or may not be justified. 

Maybe this matter is one of those in Paul where the apostle's rhetorical but not always precise language just leaves ambiguity. 

Anyway, thanks for the link. BTW it's interesting how in the comboxes Hurtado characterizes Wright's massive tome as an apologetical work.

Last edited by ficino (8/09/2018 11:17 am)

ficino wrote:

Dave wrote:

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.

The place to start in an attempt to interpret a writer is what the writer himself/herself says. For a more cautious approach to the problem of teasing out whether Paul's "spiritual body" in resurrection bespeaks a two-body conception--unlike the later gospel stories--or a one-body conception--like those stories (esp. John)-- see the work of the late Alan F. Segal. Segal inclines to think Paul's view is that the body of flesh is changed into a spirit body in the resurrection. Using the phrase "two-body" doesn't imply, though, two at once; Segal doesn't talk about fleshy bodies still in their graves while spirit bodies are resurrected. But he talks about the spirit body as not being a body of flesh anymore. cf. his Life After Death, e.g. 430 ff.

And what's Segal's basis for that interpretation? Does it have any precedent in pre-Christian Judaism? Does it serve as an explanation of post-Pauline theology?

As far as I can tell, most of the justification for this hypothesis comes from the obscurity of the terminology used by Paul and his Pharasaic predecessors. But sorting through all that muddle, we find clear affirmations of resurrection of the body, and no clear affirmations of any "spiritual resurrection" of the sort that would allow us to drive a wedge between Paul and the Gospel narratives. There's no reason to think that any second temple era Jew ever contemplated a "resurrection" that left the body in the grave. That's just not what the concept was about. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it.

Look, the only contrast Paul himself gives us is that between "soul" and "spirit." If either one of those were supposed to be somehow incorporeal, it would have been the former, not the latter. Paying attention to Paul's words doesn't give us a "two body" concept. It just gives us a "renewed body" concept - the idea that the resurrection body will have a different animating force. Paul's words positively exclude the idea that some "soul" could provide the basis for preserving personal identity - a naive interpretation of his words suggests that the soul gets replaced by the Breath of God. If the soul survives resurrection - and it's not at all clear that Paul would allow that it does - it clearly takes on a humbler station.

I do not share what seems to your confidence in a fairly traditional chronology.

What, that Mark was written c. AD 70, John c. 100, and the other gospels during the intervening period? What do you propose as an alternative, and for what reasons?

In addition, I am not sure how much credence you put in details of the passion-Easter stories like, e.g., the risen Jesus' eating fish. Wright says that such details are so unexpected that we should believe their historicity[1]. Wright needs the gospel narratives to be substantially reliable for his arguments to work[2]. But again, that's an assumption. People like Crossan, on the other hand (or Segal), as I'm sure you know, think the whole Markan story[3] is pretty much invention, as also many other details like the Emmaus story in Luke.[4]

1. This is true, as far as it goes. More specifically, Wright argues that the Gospel resurrection narratives don't make sense as a mere back-projection of the proto-orthodox church, or of Pauline theology. He also argues that they don't make sense as a mere product of pre-Christian Jewish ideas. However, he also argues that they do make sense as a narration of the events that prompted the shift from Judaism to Christianity... If they happened as narrated.

2. In what sense? It's been a couple years since I last read RTSG, but from what I recall, reliability was a conclusion, not a premise.

3. If you're referring to the last dozen or so verses, yes I am aware that they were likely interpolated. Though it seems to me that the scribe just summarized the other gospels, and tacked the amalgam at the end. Certainly, we aren't seeing any kind of theological novelty. In any case, the shiny dudes at the empty tomb basically promise that the disciples will meet Jesus later, so it's not like Mark the Evangelist thought that there were no post-resurrection appearances.

4. I'm aware that many critics think that the Gospels (or substantial portions thereof) were made up out of whole cloth, then passed off as genuine works by particular figures. I would contend that the Early Church just wasn't the kind of place where that kind of thing could have been pulled off in the time allotted, and I have evidence for this contention in the works of Paul and the earliest figures in Church history.

Reading I Corinthians and Galatians, Paul's favored rhetorical strategy when it comes to key points of doctrine seems to be, "I don't need to appeal to anyone else, because I got this from Christ Himself. That being said, the other apostles do agree with me." If this were, in fact, the sort of argument that would have worked in his time, and if that general attitude survived into the second and third centuries, it would explain Irenaeus' emphasis on apostolic succession and catholicity (universality) of doctrine. And, of course, various tidbits about those in the intervening years - men like Papias, who devoted his life to seeking out the "living and abiding voice" of the apostles and their immediate successors - only reinforce the conclusion that the the proto-orthodox faction was precisely what it claimed to have been all along: the faction interested in faithfully holding to what Christ and his apostles actually said.

Other facts about Paul's writings only reinforce the point, albeit rather less directly. In I Corinthians, he complains about cliqueishness - how people were identifying with their favored teachers, such as Peter and Apollos. People of that time seem to have been more interested in particular figures than in anonymous whispers - certainly it was thus in Corinth!

And then there's the long list of greetings at the end of Romans. One can be forgiven for getting the impression that Paul knew just about everybody in a church he had never visited personally. It seems like the Church was a rather tight knit place - everybody knew everybody.

Finally, there's the simple fact that Paul's correspondence with the churches was just that - a correspondence. The churches - especially the Church at Corinth - appear to have had the resources to send letters (and thus people) to Paul himself. This represents a surprising geographical mobility on the part of the Early Christian community.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. To all appearances, the church in Paul's day had the means, motive, and opportunity to figure out what the apostles actually said about Christ. More to the point, the apostles themselves seem to have had a tendency towards being proactive in correcting errors - in addition to the fact that Paul's letters were often meant for precisely that purpose, we know that "men from James" turned up in Antioch during the Circumcision Controversy.

In a matter of decades, a set of four books purporting to have been about Christ would begin circulating. These books would have many of the characteristics of the bioi genre, but would be stylistically more similar to the Septuagint than to anything else - in other words, they were more or less what we would expect a Greek-speaking Jew to produce if they wanted to write about the life of a religiously significant historical figure. By 170 AD, two of these works had been attributed to the apostles Matthew and John, and the other two to companions of the apostles Peter and Paul (Mark and Luke, respectively). This happened in a community which, to all appearances, was intensely interested in what the apostles had to say, and was entirely capable of figuring out what they did say.

In short, the traditional orthodox view seems to be supported by the evidence, whereas views in which the Church underwent a phase when anonymous whispers could be passed off as the words of major figures do not seem to seem to be supported by the evidence. Those who suggest that the Gospels are the product of a long history of theologically motivated redactions will need to provide evidence that the Church was the kind of place where that could actually happen.

Last edited by Dave (8/09/2018 1:15 pm)

Callum wrote:

RomanJoe wrote:

Freakazoid wrote:

I don't really have much to add beyond what others have said.  Tim McGrew is excellent on miracles.
 

I'm becoming cautious of reading books that investigate the history of early Christianity and its origin. It seems like an area that is just rife with unconscious bias, everyone having a theological axe to grind. I'm looking to get back into reading more but I'm afraid I'm becoming too skeptical of the research itself because, unfortunately, it is conducted by fallible human beings.

You should be clear on what the issue(s) could be. Methodological? Historical evidence and miracles? The background presuppositions each person brings to the investigation? These all would be grouped away from a more historic investigation that deals with the data.

It's the background presuppositions.