ficino wrote:

Can you elaborate on what the *grammar* demonstrates about the identity of the resurrected body?

The subject of the verbs Paul uses to describe the resurrection event is the body of flesh and bones.  The way he uses it means that the body is revived and transformed, not replaced with something spiritual.  
Furthermore, ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω, when used in conjunction with resurrection, imply a physical movement upward.  Jews understood resurrection as physical.  Paul was a Pharisee and would have agreed that the resurrection was physical. Pagans also thought that the resurrection was physical.The semantics of ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω and surrounding cultural beliefs imply that Paul and other Christians would think of the resurrection as physical, which would also entail an empty tomb.

I'm not sure whether you understand the problem of applying the criteria of authenticity. The point made by those who have abandoned them is not that the gospels are not coherent presentations of a message about Jesus. The point is that the criteria are not reliable tools for a method by which one can identify nuggets of historical truth in the gospels and without circularity detach them from the framing of the "presentation."

I understand it just fine.  People would use the criteria of authenticity in conjunction with assumptions about how early Christians handled early traditions unreliable in order to judge the gospels guilty until proven innocent.  The criteria let you get behind the gospels and see what Jesus was really like.  But without the criteria, you can’t get behind the gospels.  And those other assumptions about handling traditions don’t really hold anymore.  Now both sides have to make an argument.  If you want to say that the empty tomb is historical or unhistorical, you’ll have to argue for it.


It might be that the women are in the story because they were in fact the first to report that the tomb was empty. The CoE provides a weak argument for that thesis.

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Can you show where the Digest establishes that bodies of crucified seditionists were released to friends? It seems to problematize that conclusion here: " =21.3333pxet nonnumquam non permittitur, maxime maiestatis causa damnatorum" (48.24.1)

"Today, however, the corpses of executed people are buried as if permission had been asked for and granted, with some exceptions, especially when the charge was high treason."


Jesus wasn’t executed for high treason.  He wasn’t even a Roman citizen.  The Jewish Council wanted him dead on account of blasphemy, and they got the Romans to kill him on account of either troublemaking or sedition.  The Romans obliged out of a sense of political expediency.  Most examples in book 48 involve serious violence.  Jesus didn’t do anything of the sort.  He wouldn't fall under the exceptions described in book 48


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I don't know the details of that burial.  It would be worth knowing more about who buried the possible slave and under what conditions. As to the relevance of these two cases, was either man a seditionist? I don't think we'll know.

I can’t remember offhand, but there is at least one or two other examples.  But that’s not really significant.  We wouldn’t expect to find much like these remains since bones marked by crucifixion don’t  stay together over time.  What we do have, however, is a significant number of nails from tombs and ossuaries that have traces of human bone on them.  These people were probably crucifixion victims as well.


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You make a lot of assumptions here. As far as Ehrman goes, yes, he is not an ancient historian but rather, a biblical scholar who seeks to use methods used by historians. He recently wrote about Philo and Josephus, thinking that their remarks do not fit the case of Jesus. He has several posts, as I am sure you are aware, including this from January:

They aren’t my assumptions.  They are what the majority think on the matter.  The reason why I say Ehrman is unreliable is that he wrote the book in question without ever interacting with people who on experts on the subject of crucifixion and burial.  Instead, he relied on people who weren’t experts.  He has a bad habit of ignoring or marginalizing people who disagree with him.  So I don’t really care what he writes on his blog to try and cover up his mistakes because this is work he should have done already.  Craig Evans covers a lot of what I’ve already said.  There's too much stuff for me to go over all at once.
https://www.hbu.edu/news-and-events/2016/05/04/craig-evans-resurrection-jesus-light-jewish-burial-p-ractices/


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I haven't done a survey. My rough sense is that I'm seeing more late daters of Luke-Acts. A lot of what you say above is not relevant to the problem of dating.

I am familiar with how books in the New Testament are dated and most scholar's opinion on the matter.  There are more late-daters than before, but they are still a very small percentage.  And what I said is perfectly relevant.  The reason you dated Luke to the second century was that he supposedly used Josephus.  But the fact of the matter is that Luke almost never seems to do anything to reference Josephus.  They actually disagree the mere total of three points where they supposedly intersect, which calls into question if Luke used Josephus in the first place.  What's the difference between not using Josephus and using him badly?  If they both agreed you would have a stronger case but they don’t.  It’s far more likely that Luke is using earlier sources that are now lost to us.

 

Last edited by Freakazoid (8/07/2018 10:50 pm)

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.

Last edited by RomanJoe (8/08/2018 10:19 am)

Freakazoid wrote:

ficino wrote:

Can you elaborate on what the *grammar* demonstrates about the identity of the resurrected body?

The subject of the verbs Paul uses to describe the resurrection event is the body of flesh and bones.  The way he uses it means that the body is revived and transformed, not replaced with something spiritual.  
Furthermore, ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω, when used in conjunction with resurrection, imply a physical movement upward.  Jews understood resurrection as physical.  Paul was a Pharisee and would have agreed that the resurrection was physical. Pagans also thought that the resurrection was physical.The semantics of ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω and surrounding cultural beliefs imply that Paul and other Christians would think of the resurrection as physical, which would also entail an empty tomb.

Good point about the imagery of "upward." In I Cor and Philippians, however, it is clear that the σῶμα πνευματικόν is not a body of flesh and blood. Paul explicitly says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God - that's the kingdom of the resurrected, already initiated by the resurrected Jesus. Paul's argument by analogy from seeds sets out the seed as a bare husk, and God as supplying "its own body" to the new plant - not a seed coming up out of the ground, but a shoot. By the time we get to Luke 24, however, the resurrected Jesus tells the amazed disciples that his is a body of flesh and bones, and he eats fish to prove this. In John Jesus displays his wounds. It's not clear that Paul's notion of the "pneumatic" resurrected body is identical to the flesh body to this degree. So far I agree with Alan F. Segal that there is development from the time of Paul to the later gospels: a development from the notion of a spiritual body that is different from the body of the flesh to the notion of the body of flesh resurrected. I don't think it follows, though, that Paul imagines a corpse still in the grave while the pneumatic body is rising; that seems to go against Phil. 3:20-21 and the idea of a new form of the identical person, though it need not. As often, Paul's colorful language raises questions that the passage does not always solve.

Anyway, I remain suspicious about ὤφθη as the verb used for all the appearances of the risen Jesus, including His appearance to Paul. If Paul saw what he thought was Jesus' spiritual body, it's consistent that he thinks the earlier disciples saw the same. I don't think you can pull the empty tomb out of Paul - it's at most consistent with Paul if already accepted from the gospels. But those stories are later. A lot of weight has to be put on assumptions about earlier oral tradition.

Jesus wasn’t executed for high treason.  He wasn’t even a Roman citizen.  The Jewish Council wanted him dead on account of blasphemy, and they got the Romans to kill him on account of either troublemaking or sedition.  The Romans obliged out of a sense of political expediency.  Most examples in book 48 involve serious violence.  Jesus didn’t do anything of the sort.  He wouldn't fall under the exceptions described in book 48.

As to the Digest: thanks for the link to Evans' post. I don't work on Roman law. So far I'm not convinced that "laesa maiestas" was not the crime for which Jesus was supposed to have been crucified. Forgive me if you know the following already, but on the "crimen maiestatis," Adolf Berger in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law says, "A crimen maiestatis could be committed not only by Roman citizens and not only on Roman territory. Several kinds of wrongs were termed crimen maiestatis: high treason, sedition, criminal attack against a magistrate, desertion, and the like. Under the Principate the term was extended to any offense where the safety of the emperor or his family is involved. In the later period, the term maiestas covered the sphere of perduellio, hence a distinction between the two crimes can hardly be made. The profession of Christianity was termed a crimen maiestatis." 
   Perduellio was "treason." Berger quotes, "one is guilty of perduellio who is inspired by a hostile mind against the state and the emperor (D. 48.4.11)... Perduellio embraced various criminal acts, such as joining the enemy, rousing an enemy against the Roman state, delivering a Roman citizen to the enemy, desertion on the battlefield, and the like. Later, perduellio was gradually absorbed by the crimen maiestatis." Berger here doesn't say whether that absorption occurred by the time of Ulpian; I can't research it more now.

In any case, the charges against Jesus made by the priests, acc to Luke 23, included opposing the payment of taxes to Caesar and calling himself a king. The crowd and priests, if we combine gospel stories, call for Jesus' crucifixion, as though he is guilty of a crime meriting that punishment. Jesus is substituted for a criminal who was to be crucified for στάσιν καὶ φόνον. Στάσις is revolution or insurrection. Pilate, though he is shown as deeming Jesus not guilty of insurrection, nevertheless provides the titulus This is the King of the Jews. It's clear, I think, that Jesus is being crucified as though he is guilty of the crimen maiestatis - seeking to take control from Caesar and make himself king.

 So I remain unconvinced that Pilate would have had reason to release Jesus' body - though I can't prove that Pilate wasn't just ornery enough to do whatever he wanted at any given time.

As to majority opinion of scholars, when the scholars in question are mostly seminary biblical professors, and they're talking about doctrines to which they have professional and confessional allegiance, then they are both practising a discipline other than history and working within institutional constraints. On the other hand, ancient historians rarely get deeply into questions about "the historical Jesus", just as they rarely get into "the historical Socrates" - a realm populated mostly by ancient philosophy types. Everyone does the best s/he can. My own field is Classics, esp. textual criticism and ancient philosophy and rhetoric. So I am not a trained ancient historian. I am trained to try to weigh sources and clarify assumptions.



 

Last edited by ficino (8/08/2018 7:27 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.

This a question of the methodology of history, it's relationship (if any with miracles) and other philosophy of history questions.

This is a good start;

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Gv8Fw_fFE

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mAZLnhv5APw&t=2364s

RomanJoe wrote:

Just real quick, Ficino what do you make of Romans 8:11?

"And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you."

Or Philippians 3:21
"Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself."

Paul seems to imply continuity between the mortal body and the resurrected body.

Hello Joe, in the spirit of your "real quick" I'd say that Phi 3:20-21 can be read consistently with either view. "Change" in "change our vile body" is μετασχηματίσει. As a verbal prefix, μετα- often gives the sense, "cause a new/different X afterwards," as in metamorphosis, giving a form different from the form the matter had before. So we get a qualitatively new thing (e.g. butterfly not larva). The first two citations in LSJ are of a passage in Plato and one in Aristotle in which a new substance is generated when an efficient cause reconfigures matter. I don't know whether Paul had a conception of matter. Paul's image in I Cor 15 depicts a seed dying in the ground, and a living plant, not a *special kind of seed*, coming out of the ground. From that I read Paul as saying that in the resurrection, believers will get a new kind of body. I think he leaves it vague exactly what constitutes the element of identity betw old and new physical form, but the meta- form is qualitatively different. So I don't know that Paul holds a doctrine that the resurrected body will be of flesh and bone as ours is, though in Luke and John it's clear that Jesus' resurrected body is identical to his flesh and bone body.

The Romans passage follows the lament of Romans 7 that the speaker cannot do the works of the law. Chapter 8 brings the answer: we become spiritually alive in the Christian life through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Believers "walk" in the Spirit, not in the flesh. Here as you say, "flesh" designates the sphere of separation from an indwelling Holy Spirit. He goes on to say, "if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." Paul uses "dead body" in verse 10, not literally - his audience is not corpses - but spiritually, to designate the life of the spiritually dead person who knows the law but cannot obey it w/o the Spirit's power. "He will make alive your mortal bodies through His Spirit living in you" would mean that Christ will transform the life of the believer, who "in the flesh" is unable to do righteous works, into a righteous life in the Spirit. The resurrected Christ is the forerunner, but I don't see details here describing the body in the future "anastasis" except that it won't be mortal. So I don't see material explicit enough in Romans 8 to help nail down how "spiritual body" relates to "soul body" in I Cor 15. 

Yikes, this was not so quick.

ETA: when Luke 23 makes an issue of the fact that the risen Jesus is not a πνεῦμα, usu. translated as "ghost," and that a πνεῦμα does not have flesh and bones as he has, I almost get the impression that the author is "correcting" an earlier, Pauline view that the resurrected body is πνευματικόν and not ψυχικόν, not a "soul body." I have read that gLuke evinces concern over what looks like the delay of the Parousia. That would put it considerably later than gMark and a fortiori, even later than I Corinthians.
 

Last edited by ficino (8/08/2018 1:02 pm)