Steven Carr's response 09/03/2008

John's words are in bold.


Have I really no idea how to produce any evidence of a resurrection as Steven claims?

Yes.



1The existence of a community founded on the resurrection with a dynamic inexplicable without it


We know early converts to Christianity scoffed at the idea of God choosing to raise corpses.

The Mormon church was founded upon remarkable claims. What does that prove? Would John preach to his parishioners that there must be something in Mormonism, because look at the millions of Mormons who believe it?


2The credibility of the New Testament witness to the resurrection surviving two centuries of critical scholarship with the arguments running onwards



What credibility? The New Testament claims the foetus John the Baptist leapt for joy in the womb when the pregnant Mary entered the room. What credibility does that have?

These 'New Testament witnesss' claimed Jesus ascended into the sky until he reached the clouds. What credibility does that have?



3There is no grave claimed for the founder of Christianity, something even Muslims concur with, so this is obvious to well over half the world today



How is that evidence for anything?




4Throughout history men and women whose living encounter with Jesus led them to face torture and death rather than agree his corpse lies in Palestine



What does that prove? Men and women throughout history have died for Islam. Jews have died rather than eat pork. Is that proof that pigs really are unclean?




5In the New Testament records the change in the disciples is inexplicable without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives



Even the New Testament claims no resurrection caused this. Even the New Testament claims the disciples went back to fishing after seeing the resurrection. Acts claims the disciples needed prodding to do anything. Only when tongues of fire 'appeared' on their heads (opththe, same word as when Jesus 'appeared' to people in 1 Corinthians 15) did these disciples do anything.

When tongues of fire 'appeared', were the disciples heads physically on fire? Or does 'opththe' , which describes how the fire appeared and how Jesus appeared, describe non-physical appearances?

I assume John will give some evidence of the transformation of these disciples. (Evidence, how Christians hate that word). Find one person who knew the disciples who wrote that they were 'transformed'....


6The abandonment by devout Jews of traditions like Friday Sabbath that ran in the face of centuries of tradition within weeks of the claimed resurrection has no rival explanation.




This is fantasy. If Jews in Jerusalem had changed a Sabbath to Sunday, they would have been stoned to death before you can say 'historical anachronism'


But did Christians keep special days?

Galatians 4 - You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.

Paul attacked Christians who kept special days, and never once tells them that there is a special day that they ought to observe.

And Christians were clearly not observing Sunday as a special day , to be contrasted with the way they observed certain months or seasons.

So the claim that very early Christians met every Sunday to observe a resurrection is a fantasy, destroyed by Paul's attack on the very idea that any day ought to be observed.


7Josephus, Pliny and Tacitus give substantial independent back up to the remarkable phenomenon of the growth of the community of the resurrection which is the church



A church , of course, which contained converts scoffing at the idea of God choosing to raise corpses, and one of whose leaders claimed that Jesus had become a spirit, and a church which produced works claiming 'All flesh is grass', despite John's belief that some flesh did not see corruption.

The Mormon church grew remarkably. What does that prove?


8What usually happens doesn’t always happen.


This is not an argument for anything, unless John is claiming that perhaps Jesus body was beamed up by aliens..



9Even if we rightly suspect supernatural claims this one is exceptional in its moral basis in a God who accepts suffering and brings it meaning



This is just theological waffling and is not an argument for anything.



10There is a philosophical basis for particular phenomenon having universal
significance

This is not an argument for anything at all.



I find Steven’s case ironic because the whole thrust of St. Paul’s writings, the earliest Christian documentation, repeats the strain again and again that Jesus Christ was and is raised as first born of the dead (Romans 4:24f, 6:4, 6:9, 7:4, 8:11, 29, 34, 10:9; 1 Corinthians 6:14, 15:4, 12-17, 20, 29, 32, 35, 42-44, 52; 2 Corinthians 1:9, 4:14, 5:15; Galatians 1:1; Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 2:12; 1 Thessalonians 1:10)



Critical biblical scholarship has established these Pauline texts as the earliest evidences of the resurrection followed by the later gospel narratives. The empty tomb narratives are a solid part of this documentation.



What nonsense! Paul never mention an empty tomb, despite all those references to Biblical passages, none of which mention an empty tomb.

Paul preached the destruction of the body, not its salvation.

2 Corinthians 5:1 'For we know that if our earthly dwelling, a tent, should be destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands...';

Paul thought our earthy body could be compared to a tent, which we left to move into a new building.

Paul's other favourite metaphors were our body as a suit of clothes, which we changed for new clothes, or a seed, from which a new plant emerges (leaving the seed-case behind)

Paul's concept of a resurrection was moving from one body to another.

This is something he stressed to the Corinthians when he wrote 'If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body'

Paul only ever argued with people whose model of a resurrection was of a corpse coming back to life. He regarded such ideas as foolish, tells such people 'You do not plant the body that will be...'

Paul then stresses that earthly things are as different from heavenly things as a fish is different to the moon. He goes on to tell the converts to Jesus-worship who did think a resurrection involved a corpse rising, that there are 2 bodies – a natural body, and a spiritual body.

And then Paul trashes the Jesus-worshippers belief that somehow a resurrected body would be made from the dust that corpses become :-

'The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God...'

Paul is clearly trashing the idea that the resurrected Jesus had a body made of flesh and blood. That was Adam's body , made from the dust of the earth. Resurrected Christians would be made from heavenly stuff (whatever that is), and not from flesh and blood.

The people he was writing to did believe that a resurrection had to involve a corpse rising.

But these early converts to Jesus-worship scoffed at the idea of a corpse rising, and so did not believe in a resurrection.


Textual critics have yet to undermine the potentially complementary witness of the seven passages Mark 16:1-8, Matthew 28, Luke 24, John20 and Mark 16:9-13, Acts 1:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.


Is John really claiming that Mark 16:9-13 is authentic? Even many modern translations of the Bible skip those verses as inauthentic.

And John just has to glance at a Bible to see that it contains footnotes pointing out that various parts of Luke are missing from early manuscripts.

Historians have yet to establish anything at all of any significance in any of those chapters.

For example, Acts 1 claims Jesus ascended into the sky, until a cloud took him from view.

But we now know there is nothing above us except space. Ancient writers thought the journey to Heaven involved travelling upwards , and so wrote a story of Jesus doing just that.

We now know that this was make-believe as there is the Solar System once you get past the clouds, not Heaven.

As I have pointed out already, and as John has failed to address, the earliest Gospel is anonymous and has no markers indicating that it was ever meant to be taken as history.

We know from 2 Corinthians 11:4 that Christians were easily fooled by false stories about Jesus.

That is as true then as it is now.