It appears John has simply no idea how to produce any evidence of a resurrection. This is not too surprising, as there is no evidence of a resurrection.
His evidence now consists , apparently, in the fact that the Holy Roman Empire made and preserved a lot of copies of the New Testament, while the works of Tacitus were not copied as frequently.
There are literally millions of copies of the Book of Mormon, but I'm sure John would laugh at the claim that every time the Book of Mormon is reprinted, it becomes more and more backed by evidence.
How can the number of times a Gospel was copied possibly count as evidence for it?
His claim that the earliest copy is from 100 AD is simply unfounded. The earliest manuscript is called p52. It does not contain the name 'Jesus', and dates from 125 to 150 AD.
His other claim is that a Christian called Papias alleged that somebody called Mark based his book on what Peter had said.
This is all just hearsay, as meaningless as claims by Mormons that Brigham Young believed that Joseph Smith was a prophet.
It is a plain fact that the Gospel of Mark never identifies any author or any source. It never gives any even half-decent attempt at chronology, or any attempt at showing how the author came to learn things like Pilate thinking it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him , or what Satan said to Jesus in the desert.
It has none of the markers that ancient historians used to indicate that they were writing history.
It is a theological tract , using the Old Testament to create stories about Jesus.
For example, the stories of Elijah and Elisha were plundered by the anonymous author of Mark to create new stories about Jesus.
Take 2 Kings 4:27-37, where a distraught parent of an only child comes to Elisha just as in Mark 5:22-24 (which continues in verses 35-43) a distraught parent of an only child comes to Jesus,pleading for help.
In both stories someone tries to discourage the parent from bothering Elisha and Jesus.
In both stories it is unclear to some people in the story whether the child is dead ,dying or asleep.
In both stories the child is in a house some distance away.
In both stories a second source comes from the house and confirms that the child is dead.
In both stories Jesus and Elisha continue anyway to the house.
In both stories the parent precedes Elisha or Jesus
In both stories Elisha and Jesus seek a high degree of privacy by turning people out of the house before their miracle .
The story in Mark is such an obvious rewrite of the story in Kings that if I remind you that Jairus in Mark 5 falls at Jesus's feet, you can guess what the parent in 2 Kings 4 did.
The name Jairus has 2 meanings. 1 is 'he enlightens'. The other is 'he awakens'. Is not 'he awakens' a remarkably apt name for someone in a resurrection story, where Jesus says that the child is not dead but sleeping?
As confirmation that Mark used 2 Kings 4 for his stories of the feeding of a crowd, and the raising of a dead child, Mark 5:42 says that after the miracle, the parents were 'amazed with great amazement' (exestesan ekstasei megale), while 2 Kings 4:13 we have 'amazed with all amazement' (exestesas... pasan ten ekstasin tauten)
Another example of the Elijah/Elisha miracle stories being recycled to provide material for Mark's book is the feeding of the 5,000.
In 2 Kings 4:42-44, Elisha has a great many people to feed with only a few loaves of bread and a little other food. He delegates the task of feeding. There is a complaint that the quantity is too small. The feeding continues and everyone is fed. There is surplus bread left over. This older story from Kings has exactly the same plot as the feeding of the 5,000 - only the numbers are different.
The feeding of the 5,000 is such an obvious rewrite of the story from Kings that if I remind you that Jesus used barley bread, you can guess what type of bread Elisha used.
On page 176 of the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, written by a raft of Catholic scholars, it says that 2 Kings 4:42-44 is 'obviously the inspiration for the NT multiplication miracles'. I like the word 'obviously'.
It is obvious, isn't it?
Which is more likely, that somebody fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread or that a religion was based on frauds and lies - as every religion throughout history has been based on?
We know from modern experience that when Paul says Jesus 'appeared' to 500 brethren, he means no more than what is meant when followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi claimed that he levitated in front of them.
At least the followers of the Maharishi produced photographs of the Yogi in mid-air. 1 Corinthians 15 doesn't even have anything other than bare claims that Jesus 'appeared'. No details, no confirmation, no dates, no times - this all adds up to no evidence.
John asks me to get back to the facts.
The facts are that early Christians claimed Jesus 'appeared' to them (in much the same way as modern Christians claim Jesus appears on the side of a slice of toast??), but early converts to Jesus-worship simply scoffed at the idea of God choosing to raise a corpse.
From this solid fact, attested to by primary evidence - namely the letters of somebody who was there - we know that early Christians did not spread tales of corpses rising from graves.
Or else early Christians would have believed what had converted them.
What had converted them was vague tales of 'appearances'.
Only when we come to anonymous works, works which plagiarise each other and plagiarise the Old Testament, only then do we come to stories of Jesus eating fish and ascending into the sky.
But there is nothing to back up these anonymous works, or anything which says there are anything other than the fabricated stories we know Christians were making up as early as when Paul was writing 2 Corinthians 11:4.
But if John has any real evidence, then he should start producing some very quickly.....
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In discussion over the truth of the resurrection it's unhelpful to concentrate on demanding hard evidence. Of course hard-evidence for an event that happened in a relatively primitive society 2000 years could almost certainly not exist. Even if we had written testimony dated Easter Sunday AD 33 it would be disputed as imaginary, as even today videoed and photographed events are disputed over forgery and picture quality. It is much more helpful to look at the case for the ressurrection on a par with the case for evolution, for a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs or indeed the big bang. There is no hard proof for any of these things, just enough circumstantial findings that make believing in them reasonable to an averagely intelligent human being. I might say that in these cases there is also ample contradictory evidence which also makes not believing in them equally reasonable.
ReplyDeleteTo look at paragraphs 2-4 of the above response, I cannot but agree that the number of copies of a book does not accredit its truth. That however is not the point of that argument. A high number of copies of a manuscript produced within a relatively short period of time means to the scholar that methods of Textual Criticism and Analysis can accurately decipher what the original texts said with some certainty. On this basis the New Testament is the ancient material with which we can have the most confidence of knowing what was in the original documents. To the philosopher the multiplication of these books speaks of an incredibly powerful ideology spreading quickly and at a grass roots level. Why? What was special about the message? It wasn't imposed distribution as in Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, in fact it was a dangerous thing to be doing in the face of persecution. I would suggest that this significantly adds to the circumstantial case, and on the basis of textual criticism makes the nit-picking in paragraph 5 seem immature considering the context of other supporting copies.
In answer to para's 6-8 I might ask why a large proportion of the public call a violin a 'fiddle', a vacuum cleaner a 'hoover' and so on. Here we have a modern equivalent that shows how the original maker (or writer as in the case of the gospels) can quite accurately be attested to and passed on by the vast majority of the population without the need for this name to written anywhere on the product (or manuscript). I would suggest this makes Mark's authorship extremely reasonable to believe, especially as there are no other contemporary claims or widely held beliefs in the early Church.
To criticise Mark for a lack of chronology shows no understanding for the purpose of the text or the ways in which information was communicated in these times. Firstly Mark is not a 'history' meant to show in order on what dates certain events happened. It was meant, by a means friendly to the oral tradition of short story-telling, to communicate the nature, mission and life of Jesus Christ in a way the average uneducated person would find interesting and understandable. Steven also questions how he could have known what the Devil said to Jesus in the desert, the facetious answer is that Jesus told the disciples, not too hard a leap of faith considering the Gospels are essentially a collection of what Jesus said and did. As for the contention that Mark could not have known that Pilate believed that the Chief priests were envious, I believe he easily could have. Every day our newspapers are covered with leaks and opinion on what our leaders think or feel. Is it unreasonable that a servant could have told the disciples, perhaps Pilate wanted the Chief Priests to know he was on to them? Either way you cannot make a case to doubt the Gospels simply because you don't know where they got their information from.
Moving on in Steven's reply I must say that you have to try hard to make the similarity between Elisha and Jesus reason not to believe the Gospels (Para 9-27). The fact that in both cases the parent of an only child asks for a miracle attests to nothing other than the continuing presence of disease in Israel. To take the points quickly, both houses were a distance away, well prophets had a reputation for keeping away from towns and cities. Someone tries to dissuade the asker, Jesus and Elisha were both well known and seriously respected, some might say famous, the fact that two 'celebrities' both have a minder/bodyguard does not surprise me. The sending of a messenger, the falling at the feet and the request for privacy speak to me of nothing other than common and quite reasonable cultural practise in these circumstances. I am also mystified as to how Steven can think it suspicious that both sets of parents were 'very amazed' having seen their Child raised from the dead. As Hebrew doesn't have a word for flabbergasted or bowled-over I think 'amazed' will do for me. The language comparison is not helpful either as one was written in Hebrew and the other in Greek so comparing the Latin of both is pointless. Also these words can be translated quite reasonably amongst other words as "ecstatic with great ecstasy" which just goes to show how weak Steven's point is.
As we move on to the story of the feeding of the 5,000. A prophet attracting a large number of hungry, poor desperate people is not unlikely. Why should the idea they both had barley bread be suspicious, what should they have had, Hovis Granery? Warboutons Danish? If you were poor in ancient Israel you eat bread and drank water, you didn't get much choice of what bread! The fact that neither Jesus or Elisha had enough bread to hand for small town is not surprising either. I would suggest that all we can draw from the two accounts is that both men, working in the power of God, ministered to the dying and hungry of their day. But then Christians believe God doesn't change, so why should he change the way he works through his servants?
"Which is more likely, that somebody fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread or that a religion was based on frauds and lies - as every religion throughout history has been based on?"
The sheer prejudice of the above statement can be clearly seen and needs no rebuttal. But I'd freely confess its not just unlikely but impossible that a man could have fed 5,000 with a few loaves of bread. Unless of course you believe that there is a God, a loving God who has been involved in human history from the beginning of time. A God who has made himself known though his creation, word and his actions through his servants, and left enough evidence, albeit circumstantial, lying around to make believing in him reasonable, and then by personal relationship confirms his existence in each individual believers experience of him.
As we move to the end of Steven's message above he compares tales of a risen Jesus who eats and talks with his disciples with apparitions on a slice of toast, how can this be a direct comparison? In fact witnesses from around the world testify to seeing the risen Jesus today, particularly in countries where Christianity is persecuted or the Bible unavailable. People who know nothing of the Gospel are confronted by the risen Jesus and testify to that fact, gaining knowledge of the Gospel from Jesus when it is simply not available by natural means. Perhaps you think I've lost my mind, or perhaps this is as much about the experience of the risen Jesus today, which in many ways is a more acceptable evidence than the Gospel accounts. My real suggestion to you Steven is that you seek out some of these people (and yes there will be the insane or attention seeking among them, as there are always weeds among flowers) and ask them why they think Jesus is alive, you would no doubt do it to debunk but I think you'd be surprised.
The vast number of copies copied in a relatively short space of time means that NT scholars can determine that Christians changed the accounts of the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection to suit their own private agendas.
ReplyDeleteSee Changes for details.
But any decent Bible will have footnotes pointing out that early manuscripts do not have this passage, do not have that passage erc.
KEVIN
Also these words can be translated quite reasonably amongst other words as "ecstatic with great ecstasy" which just goes to show how weak Steven's point is.
CARR
It appears that we have a denialist here who simply denies word-for-word copying.
The point is that the words are similar in Greek.
The English translation is there only as a help.
Kevin can translate them how he wishes. He will not change the fact that the Greek words and plot of the story are very similar.
The anonymous author of Mark has people react in exactly the same way as people reacted to similar Old Testament miracles.
in the miracle of the calming of the sea, the disciples remembered to be afraid with great fear, because in Jonah people were afraid with great fear , while in Mark 5, the parents remembered to be amazed with great amazement, because in 2 Kings 4 people were amazed with all amazement.
Possibly the witnesses of Jesus's miracles rushed to the nearest synagogue to look up in the Old Testament how they should react after each miracle.
In Jonah the sailors and Jonah are in a boat during a dreadful storm just as in Mark 4 the disciples and Jesus are on a boat. The sailors look for Jonah and find him asleep. The disciples look for Jesus and find him asleep. This could be a coincidence except that this story is the one and only time Jesus is ever shown sleeping in the entire New Testament. Sleeping in a tiny boat on the point of sinking, during a storm of such severity that experienced sailors were unable to cope, is quite a feat.
One commentary on Matthew in the UK is by J.C.Fenton, who was Principal of Lichfield Theological College. He says about Matthew 8:24 'but he was asleep recalls Jonah 1:5, Jonah ...was fast asleep.'
He says about Matthew 8:25:- 'they went and woke him, saying, Save (soson), Lord (kyrie), we are perishing. (apollymetha) Cf Jonah 1:6, So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your God (Kyrie)! Perhaps your God will give a thought to us. (Greek 'save us' diasose), that we do not perish (apollometha).
He says about Matthew 8:27 'And the men (hoi de anthropoi)... Are they an echo of Jonah 1:16 -Then the men (hoi andres) feared the Lord exceedingly.?' When else does Matthew call the disciples 'the men'?
Mark also is quite aware that the story comes from Jonah, as he also draws heavily upon it.
In both Mark 4 and Jonah the witnesses after the sea-calming miracle are portrayed as afraid and awe-struck.
In Mark 4 'feared with great fear (ephobethesan phobon megan)'. In Jonah (LXX) 'feared the men with great fear' (ephobethesan hoi andres phobon megan)
Coincidence?
Of course not.
This is just plagiarism.
KEVIN
Firstly Mark is not a 'history' meant to show in order on what dates certain events happened.
CARR
No, it isn't a history at all. There is nothing to indicate that it is anything more than a novel, intended to make theological points.
Kevin points out that we don't know where the author of Mark got his information from - perhaps it was a servant, perhaps it was Pilate.
Mark was written at least 20 years after Pilate left in disgrace. How could Pilate have told the author anything?
And Kevin's claim that we can't say where Mark got his information from simply proves my point - it is not history. It was not written by an historian. An historian documents his sources.
It is up to Kevin to show how Mark knew what was in Pilate's mind. After all, he is claiming that Mark is evidence for an amazing miracle, yet Kevin cannot even find evidence for Mark being accurate as to what Pilate knew.
All Kevin can do is say that Mark could have been told.
'Could have' is not enough. Kevin could have stolen a thousand pounds yesterday, but that 'could have' is not evidence that Kevin is a thief.
Finally Kevin shoots himself in the foot with claims that people know Jesus is alive without seeing a corpse rise from the dead.
I would like to thank Kevin for trashing claims that people of 2,000 years ago had to see a risen corpse before believing Jesus was alive.
His other claim is that a Christian called Papias alleged that somebody called Mark based his book on what Peter had said.
ReplyDeleteThis is all just hearsay, as meaningless as claims by Mormons that Brigham Young believed that Joseph Smith was a prophet.
But I do quite believe that Brigham Young believed Joseph Smith to be a prophet, even as I quite believe Ali believed his father in law to be a prophet.
And I believe every copy either of those two religions made of Book of Mormon or Quran make it harder to say Joseph Smith or Mohammed really recieved some quite other messages or wrote some quite other book about ordinary eyewitnessing of miracles as every early copy of a Gospel makes it harder to claim the Gospels had been forged over time or originally not dealt with eywitness accounts of physical miracles, but with revelations.
It is a theological tract , using the Old Testament to create stories about Jesus.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the stories of Elijah and Elisha were plundered by the anonymous author of Mark to create new stories about Jesus.
Take 2 Kings 4:27-37, where a distraught parent of an only child comes to Elisha just as in Mark 5:22-24 (which continues in verses 35-43) a distraught parent of an only child comes to Jesus,pleading for help.
In both stories someone tries to discourage the parent from bothering Elisha and Jesus.
In both stories it is unclear to some people in the story whether the child is dead ,dying or asleep.
In both stories the child is in a house some distance away.
In both stories a second source comes from the house and confirms that the child is dead.
In both stories Jesus and Elisha continue anyway to the house.
In both stories the parent precedes Elisha or Jesus
In both stories Elisha and Jesus seek a high degree of privacy by turning people out of the house before their miracle.
Nice argument - if you start out "knowing" Elisha never raised a child from the dead. If on the other hand he DID, the same God who heard his prayers could very well have used the real parallelism in miracle to prove he were the same God and not doing miracles with the aid of Belsebub.
The name Jairus has 2 meanings. 1 is 'he enlightens'. The other is 'he awakens'. Is not 'he awakens' a remarkably apt name for someone in a resurrection story, where Jesus says that the child is not dead but sleeping?
ReplyDeleteThank you. Did not know.
This might have been a way to keep the real name of the family hidden because of persecutions.
Just as in the story of the Leatherman, he is reported as being a "Jules Bourglay" and having hoped to have for father in law a man whose surname also means robber (Voleur? Brigand? other?). For Bourglay was a French spelling of Burgler, I think.
On page 176 of the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, written by a raft of Catholic scholars, it says that 2 Kings 4:42-44 is 'obviously the inspiration for the NT multiplication miracles'. I like the word 'obviously'.
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious, isn't it?
Obvious enough to atheists, including apostate "Catholics".
Which is more likely, that somebody fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread or that a religion was based on frauds and lies - as every religion throughout history has been based on?
I do not admit that as foundation, only as admixture in the false religions.
We know from modern experience that when Paul says Jesus 'appeared' to 500 brethren, he means no more than what is meant when followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi claimed that he levitated in front of them.
I quite believe the Yogi levitated. But levitation, unlike resurrection need not be from God. I think you can get pop culture examples of devils handling human bodies into the air quite easily (have you seen Soap?), though in a levitation case, he knows how to disguise himself as an angel of light, but in the case of the story behind The Exorcist he did not.