Hi Gang,
Here is part of an article I came across that defends the resurrection as historical....
From James Patrick Holding
http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nowayjose.html
Below I offer a list of 17 factors to be considered -- places where Christianity "did the wrong thing" in order to be a successful religion. It is my contention that the only way Christianity did succeed is because it was a truly revealed faith -- and because it had the irrefutable witness of the resurrection. I may add more factors as my research continues. For now, this should be enough to keep the skeptics busy if they aren't otherwise engaged in such scholarly pursuits as looking for contradictions between numbers in 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles or digging up obscure and irrelevant pagan figures who sold snake oil. Veteran readers will note that there is little new actually reported in this article that is not found elsewhere on this site; indeed much of what is below is taken verbatim from other articles -- it is only the application that is new.
Factor #1 -- Who Would Buy One Crucified?
1 Cor. 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
1 Cor. 15:12-19 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
With the exception of the Christ-mythers and conspiracy theorists (and I put Muslims in this rank, where this issue is concerned!), few would deny the historical reality of the crucifixion. But once that door is opened, it brings about the first of our problems: Who on earth would believe a religion centered on a crucified man?
As Martin Hengel has amply shown us in his monograph, Crucifixion, the shame of the cross was the result of a fundamental norm of the Greco-Roman Empire. Hengel observes that "crucifixion was an utterly offensive affair, 'obscene' in the original sense of the word." (22) As Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [263-4], crucifixion was a "status degradation ritual" designed to humiliate in every way, including the symbolic pinioning of hands and legs signigfying a loss of power, and loss of ability to control the body in various ways, including befouling one's self with excrement. The process was so offensive that the Gospels turn out to be our most detailed description of a crucifixion from ancient times - the pagan authors were too revolted by the subject to give equally comprehensive descriptions - in spite of the fact that thousands of crucifixions were done at a time on some occasions. "(T)he cultured literary world wanted to have nothing to do with [crucifixion], and as a rule kept silent about it." (38) It was recognized as early as Paul (1 Cor. 1:18; see also Heb. 12:2) that preaching a savior who underwent this disgraceful treatment was folly. This was so for Jews (Gal. 3;13; cf. Deut. 21:23) as well as Gentiles. Justin Martyr later writes in his first Apology 13:4 --
They say that our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God...
Celsus describes Jesus as one who was "bound in the most ignominious fashion" and "executed in a shameful way." Josephus describes crucifixion as "the most wretched of deaths." An oracle of Apollo preserved by Augustine described Jesus as "a god who died in delusions...executed in the prime of life by the worst of deaths, a death bound with iron." (4) And so the opinions go: Seneca, Lucian, Pseudo-Manetho, Plautus. Even the lower classes joined the charade, as demonstrated by a bit of graffiti depicting a man supplicating before a crucified figure with an asses' head - sub-titled, "Alexamenos worships god." (The asses' head being a recognition of Christianity's Jewish roots: A convention of anti-Jewish polemic was that the Jews worshipped an ass in their temple. - 19) Though confused in other matters, Walter Bauer rightly said (ibid.):
The enemies of Christianity always referred to the disgracefulness of the death of Jesus with great emphasis and malicious pleasure. A god or son of god dying on a cross! That was enough to put paid to the new religion.
And DeSilva adds [51]:
No member of the Jewish community or the Greco-Roman society would have come to faith or joined the Christian movement without first accepting that God's perspective on what kind of behavior merits honor differs exceedingly from the perspective of human beings, since the message about Jesus is that both the Jewish and Gentile leaders of Jerusalem evaluated Jesus, his convictions and his deeds as meriting a shameful death, but God overturned their evaluation of Jesus by raising him from the dead and seating him at God's own right hand as Lord.
N. T. Wright makes these points in Resurrection of the Son of God [543, 559, 563]:
The argument at this point procceds in three stages. (i) Early Christianity was thoroughly messianic, shaping itself around the belief that Jesus was God's Messiah, Israel's Messiah. (ii) But Messiahship in Judaism, such as it was, never envisaged someone doing the sort of things Jesus had done, let alone suffering the fate he suffered. (iii) The historian must therefore ask why the early Christians made this claim about Jesus, and why they reordered their lives accordingly.
Jewish beliefs about a coming Messiah, and about the deeds such a figure would be expected to accomplish, came in various shapes and sizes, but they did not include a shameful death which left the Roman empire celebrating its usual victory.
Something has happened to belief in a coming Messiah...It has neither been abandoned or simply reaffirmed wholesale. It has been redefined around Jesus. Why? To this question, of course, the early Christians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah because he was raised bodily from the dead. Nothing else will do.
The message of the cross was an abhorrence, a vulgarity in its social context. Discussing crucifixion was the worst sort of social faux pas; it was akin, in only the thinnest sense, to discussing sewage reclamation techniques over a fine meal - but even worse when associated with an alleged god come to earth. Hengel adds: "A crucified messiah...must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone, Jew, Greek, Roman or barbarian, asked to believe such a claim, and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish." That a god would descend to the realm of matter and suffer in this ignominious fashion "ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people." (10, 4) Announcing a crucified god would be akin to the Southern Baptist Convention announcing that they endorsed pedophilia! If Jesus had truly been a god, then by Roman thinking, the Crucifixion should never have happened. Celsus, an ancient pagan critic of Christianity, writes:
But if (Jesus) was really so great, he ought, in order to display his divinity, to have disappeared suddenly from the cross.
This comment represents not just some skeptical challenge, but is a reflection of an ingrained socio-theological consciousness. The Romans could not envision a god dying like Jesus - period. Just as well to argue that the sky is green, or that pigs fly, only those arguments, at least, would not offend sensibilities to the maximum. We need to emphasize this (for the first but not the last time) from a social perspective because our own society is not as attuned as ancient society to the process of honor. We found it strange to watch Shogun and conceive of men committing suicide for the sake of honor. The Jews, Greeks and Romans would not have found this strange at all. As David DeSilva shows in Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity, that which was honorable was, to the ancients, of primary importance. Honor was placed above one's personal safety and was the key element in deciding courses of action. Isocrates gives behavioral advice based not on what was "right or wrong", but on what was "noble or disgraceful". "The promise of honor and threat of disgrace [were] prominent goads to pursue a certain kind of life and to avoid many alternatives." [24] Christianity, of course, argued in reply that Jesus' death was an honorable act of sacrifice for the good of others -- but that sort of logic only works if you are already convinced by other means!
This being the case, we may fairly ask, for the first time in this essay, why Christianity succeeded at all. The ignominy of a crucified savior was as much a deterrent to Christian belief as it is today - indeed, it was far, far more so! Why, then, were there any Christians at all? At best this should have been a movement that had only a few strange followers, then died out within decades as a footnote, if it was mentioned at all. The historical reality of the crucifixion could not of course be denied. To survive Christianity should have either turned Gnostic (as indeed happened in some offshoots), or else not bothered with Jesus at all, and merely made him into the movement's first martyr for a higher moral ideal within Judaism. It would have been absurd to suggest, to either Jew or Gentile, that a crucified being was worthy of worship or died for our sins.
There can be only one good explanation: Christianity succeeded because from the cross came victory, and after death came resurrection! The shame of the cross turns out to be one of Christianity's most incontrovertible proofs!
Factor #2 -- Neither Here Nor There: Or, A Man from Galilee??
John 1:46 And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?
Acts 21:39 But Paul said, I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city...
What advantage has religion and geography? To the ancients, "much in every way"! Political correctness was 2000 years in the future, and the Greco-Roman world was rife with what we would call prejudices and stereotypes -- which were accepted as "Gospel truth"! Say today that "X are always brutes, gluttons, etc." and you will have half a dozen civil rights groups ringing your doorbell. Say it in Rome and you'll have everyone agreeing with you -- sometimes including the group itself!
Jesus' Jewishness could hardly have been denied by the early Christians, but it was also a major impediment to spreading the Gospel beyond the Jews themselves. Judaism was regarded by the Romans and Gentiles as a superstition. Roman writers like Tacitus willingly reported (not as true, but in the frame of "some say...") all manner of calumnies against Jews as a whole, regarding them as a spiteful and hateful race. Bringing a Jewish savior to the door of the average Roman would have been only less successful bringing one to the door of a Nazi -- though the Roman may not have wanted to kill you; he would certainly have laughed in your face, slammed the door, or given you a violent noogie.
This is made quite clear by Judaism's own limited inroads in terms of Gentile converts. To be sure, this is partly attributable to Judaism not being much of a missionary religion. And yet if Christianity didn't have some cards close to the vest, the Jewishness of Jesus even by itself means that it never should have expanded in the Gentile world much beyond the circle of those Gentiles who were already God-fearers (i.e., Gentile proselytes to Judaism).
Let us stress again the points made by Robert Wilken in The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. The Romans naturally considered their own belief systems to be superior to all others. (57) They also believed that superstitions (such as Judaism and Christianity) undermined the social system established by their religion - and of course they were right. However, the point is that anyone who followed or adopted one of their foreign superstitions would be looked on not only as a religious rebel, but as a social rebel as well. They were breaking with the status quo, upsetting the apple cart, taking part in a 60s style rebellion against the establishment. They upset the Roman concept of piety and were thought to be incapable of it. In those days, things were not pluralistic or "politically correct" and there were no champions of diversity on the college campuses: Today, atheists and theists can debate in a free forum, but back then one of the camps would have the state (and the sword!) on their side - and in the time we're talking about, that wasn't the Christians!
Those who adhered to superstitio therefore found themselves, as a matter of course, associated with bizarre and extreme behaviors - as the Christians did, and as Tacitus also reports of the Jews in his Histories. And it went further: "(B)ecause superstition leads to irrational ideas about the gods, the inevitable consequence is atheism." (61) Since "superstitionists" bucked the established cosmic order, their view of the universe was regarded as capricious and irrational, and this eventually led to the charge by critics like Crescens that Christians were actually atheists (68).
That's just a problem within the Gentile mission, of course. But both there, and even within Judaism, Christianity had to overcome another stigma, exemplified in our comparative quotes above. When Paul mentioned that he was from Tarsus, he didn't do it so he could compare notes about hometowns with the centurion. Being from a major polis like Tarsus signified a high honor rating for the person who laid claim to it -- only marginally matched today in our concepts of "being from the right side of the tracks"! Christianity had a serious handicap in this regard, the stigma of a savior who undeniably hailed from Galilee -- for the Romans and Gentiles, not only a Jewish land, but a hotbed of political sedition; for the Jews, not as bad as Samaria of course, but a land of yokels and farmers without much respect for the Torah, and worst of all, a savior from a puny village of no account. Not even a birth in Bethlehem, or Matthew's suggestion that an origin in Galilee was prophetically ordained, would have unattached such a stigma: Indeed, Jews would not be convinced of this, even as today, unless something else first convinced them that Jesus was divine or the Messiah. The ancients were no less sensitive to the possibility of "spin doctoring" than we are.
There are other minor extensions to this business of stereotyping. Assigning Jesus the work of a carpenter was the wrong thing to do; Cicero noted that such occupations were "vulgar" and compared the work to slavery. Placing Jesus' birth story in the a suspicious context where a charge of illegitimacy would be all too obvious to make would compound the problems as well. If the Gospels were making up these things, how hard would it have been to put Jesus in Sepphoris or even Capernaum (and still take advantage of the prophetic "Galilee" connection) -- and as skeptics are wont to say, wrongly, this would be no easier or harder to check out than Nazareth. How hard would it have been to take an "adoptionist" Christology and give Jesus an indisputably honorable birth (rather than claiming honor by the dubious, on the surface, claim that God was Jesus' Father)? Maybe harder, since more people are less likely to notice one man than in a small town with strong community ties. What it boils down to is that everything about Jesus as a person was all wrong to get people to believe he was deity -- and there must have been something powerful to overcome all the stigmas.
Check out the link for the rest.
Rex
17 reasons why Christianity is a reasonable faith
by Shining One 49 Replies latest watchtower bible
-
Shining One
-
Ianone
Good post. Judaism and Islam both attest to the existence of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately Judaism calls Jesus a bastard and the son of a whore (Jewish Talmud) and Islam calls Jesus nothing better than a prophet. Islam certainly does the better of the two. Nonetheless they both confirm that a Jesus Christ who claimed to be the Son of God, did exist.
-
That Nate Guy
The best response to this sort of fundamentalist/literalist drabble is some probing, critical questioning, followed up by some sold facts, rather than repeated tired worn out cliches.
I see little difference between mainstream fundies and Watchtower fundies, both types are frightened of science, of logical deeply probing questions, and the use of our adult critical thinking faculties when it comes to religion. Thye put their religion in a special compartment to keep it safe from examination, then lash out at others who don't dribble their drabble. Sound familiar? WTBTS! So many Witnesses leave the WTBTS only to become enslaved to a fundy version of the same mental and spiritual bondage in another package.
I have yet to meet a fundamentalist who wanted to be anything else but a fundy, but I will make some recommendations anyway.
How about The Jesus Mysteries bu Freke and Gandy, published by Three Rivers Press. Also Jehovah Unmasked by a terrible rabble rouser named Nathaniel J. Merritt.
http://jcnot4me.com/Items/theology/JEHOVAH_UNMASKED/jehovah_unmasked.htm
Have a riot sled!
Nate -
Shining One
Let's see if you can back yo your loud mouth assertiosn with your own fact, Nate Boy:
>The best response to this sort of fundamentalist/literalist drabble is some probing, critical questioning, followed up by some sold facts, rather than repeated tired worn out cliches.
Why that's a good idea, Nate but what were you doing in the paragraph below?
>I see little difference between mainstream fundies and Watchtower fundies, both types are frightened of science,
How are fundamentalists (your label, not that I accept it as I would be proud to be a 'fundy' but I am really a moderate) 'frightened of scientists'? Typically, creationists use the same evidence as evolutionists and are honest enough to admit that they begin their reasoning with presuppositions. This is what the evolutionists do but rarely admit.
> of logical deeply probing questions,
Where does logic and rational thinking come from in the first place, Nate? What has given us the ability to think above the level of animal instinct? How has 'evolutionary pressure' done this on its own?
>and the use of our adult critical thinking faculties when it comes to religion.
Define this as the presupposition that no miracles have happened because we do not admit they can happen. You can see the views of the infamous, wacked out 'Jesus Seminar' scholars for more detail on that statement.
> Thye put their religion in a special compartment to keep it safe from examination, then lash out at others who don't dribble their drabble.
Actually, we hold skeptics accountable to a truly unbiased view of religion and deny them the right to set the limits of any debate. A liberal believer typically 'caves in' to skeptics demands and presuppositions, giving away the battle before it begins.
> Sound familiar? WTBTS! So many Witnesses leave the WTBTS only to become enslaved to a fundy version of the same mental and spiritual bondage in another package.
Sound familiar? WTBS! So many Witnesses leave the WTBS to become enslaved to sin and deny God, thereby giving up any hope for the abundant life of faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.
>I have yet to meet a fundamentalist who wanted to be anything else but a fundy, but I will make some recommendations anyway.
Don't bother, we have already seen the blasphemous and ridiculous parodies of god that skeptics pass off as 'good to read'.
Hey Nate. Did you notice that you did not do one thing to try and rebut the article that I posted the link for? LOL Go back to 'talk origins' or some other skeptic oasis and get more training. You are a 'piker'.
Rex -
kid-A
Let's see if you can back yo your loud mouth assertiosn with your own fact
What language is this? I thought posts had to be in english? LOL
-
Honesty
Nate's life could change forever within five minutes, as did Paul's, Cornelius' and countless other first century and later persons, if he accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior.
-
tetrapod.sapien
Nate's life could change forever within five minutes, as did Paul's, Cornelius' and countless other first century and later persons, if he accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior.
it could also change immediately if he stopped working for the dark lord Sauron, and the evil wizard Sauroman, and signed on Gandalf and Aragorn and the elves. rex, the problem with your entire post, is that it contains the implicit assertion that xianity is true, and there is nothing wrong with it. you and your other apologists could write reams and reams of essays saying that xianity is defensible, and it would not make it any truer than it already is. just to say something, just to assert something, means crap all unless you can back it up with science. science you ask? yes. you will have to show scientifically that:
- god exists.
- he even cares about us.
- he created us and all things.
- his name is jesus.
before anything else, including this essay, makes even an inkling of sense.
TS
-
kid-A
Nate's life could change forever within five minutes, as did Paul's, Cornelius' and countless other first century and later persons, if he accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior. What a load of tripe!! He could also change his life forever in 5 minutes by switching to Geico!! Amazing how x-tians just cant understand we dont all want to sit around the campfire, hold hands and sing "Kum-Ba-Yah".....LOL
-
The Chuckler
I see Shining One is being dim again. I bet he is good with cabers.
-
kid-A
Dont worry....he'll be back....with a righteous whipping for all of us!!! LOL