by jam 12 Replies latest jw friends
Matt.27;51-53. Behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two,
from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split;
the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints was
rasied, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection( they)
went into the holy city and appeared to many.
What,s the WT view regarding this. I have heard the earthquake
cause the bodies in the grave to be unearth only, not A resurrection.
I don't know what the Watchtower's spin on it is...but I'm sure they have some elaborate explanation predicated upon a highly selective interpretation of certain key words such as "they" or "in".
What I do know is that this conspicuous passage in Matthew only bolsters my suspicion of the illegitimacy of Matthew's gospel. This incident is never mentioned in any of the other gospels, which only adds to its dubious nature.
The other gospel accounts parallel Matthew's gospel both immediatley before and after this supposed miracle of the dead rising from their tombs and walking about in Jerusalem, yet none of them aside from Matthew make any mention of it..
Of all the miraculous things which supposedly transpired on that fateful day, the most astonishing of all, and the most easily verifable evidence of Jesus' resurrection, would be a bunch of people rising from their graves and walking about throughout the city. If these people's memorial tombs were split open, and the people of Jerusalem and the surrouning countryside saw dead people rising from out of the ground and started walking around and talking like a scene out of the music video of "Killer", quite a bit of an uproar would have ensued, and there would have been no denying Jesus' claim to being the Messiah.
I believe the book Acts makes the claim that 500 people were eye witnesses of Jesus' ascenscion into Heaven. The other accounts in the gospels claim that he only appeared to a select few, all of whom were his disciples. Being that his disciples had a vested interest in propogating a favorable myth about his resurrection, their testimony would be highly suspect...
Yet if hundreds of thousands of impartial observers with no link to Jesus' following witnessed something as jaw-dropping as dozens or perhaps even hundreds of dead people rising from the grave...now THAT would be good evidence of Jesus' resurrection...
So considering the above..why do the other three gospel writers all neglect to mention the most convincing point of evidence in their claim - the proverbial smoking gun?
And if this event happened, there would have been upwards of 100,000 eyewitnesses to this miracle and subsequent events (such as when the dead and now resurrected people decided to show up at their job the next day, or when a dead guy went back to his home to reclaim his wife who by this time had already remarried..or the guy who returns to his land or his business only to be told that his land was sold off, and the ownership of his business had been legally transferred to another..etc)
So...if so many thousands of people witnessed such a miraculous occurence that has never been seen before or since...then why is there no historical record of such thing ever having taken place?? And as I said before..if it happened, then why didn't the other gospel writers make mention of it?
Answer = It never happened!!!!
And if a book or testimony contains errors, falsehoods, or factual and historical innacuracies (aka - myths)..then it is IMPERFECT and therefore cannot be the inspired work of God..
Matthew's gospel is chock full of such ridiculous things, such as when he misinterprets the Hebrew prophecy regarding the coming of the Messiah as riding on an ass AND a colt at the same time.
The writer of Matthew was always trying to connect some aspect of Jesus' life to anything in the Hebrew scriptures that could concievably be construed as a "messianic prophecy"..It may be that he made up the myth of the resurrected saints in order to manufacture a fullfillment of a prophecy in Daniel...or he could have been trying to fabricate a connection with Jesus' prophecy when he stated that "soon the time is coming when those in the memorial tombs will come out"..
Either way...the story was a made up fantasy...
Doubtful: Agree, that,s one of those scriptures religious leaders
wish it was left out. They way it was explain to me, A great
earthquake which cause bodies to be unearth and roll down
the city streets, becoming visible to all. Can you imagine your
long dead mother rolling in the streets of the city. I don,t know
whats worst, people coming to life and walking in the city streets
or dead bodies rolling in the streets.
The Society claims (in a 10/15/1975 QFR) that the passage is not talking about a resurrection per se, but a casting up of corpses on account of the earthquake. The NWT was rendered with this interpretation in mind: "And the memorial tombs were opened and many bodies of the holy ones that had fallen asleep were raised up, (and persons, coming out from among the memorial tombs after his being raised up, entered into the holy city) and they became visible to many people. The 1975 article also cited Johannes Greber's spiritualist paraphrase for support.
This interpretation can be criticized on a number of grounds. First of all, the noun εγερσιν "the rousing" in v. 53, which has reference to Jesus' resurrection, is a form of the same verb occurring in the previous verse with reference to the bodies in the graves, ηγερθη "roused"; it is thus unlikely that it has a different meaning (e.g. a standing up of an inanimate object), especially since the bodies of the saints are also described as those who are κεκοιμημενων "sleeping" (v. 52). The rousing is one more likely a rousing from sleep (i.e. a bodily resurrection), and tombs are the traditional location of such resurrection in Jewish apolcayptic. Second, v. 53 attributes to following actions to the saints: they "came out" (εξελθοντες, masculine plural in agreement with "saints" in v. 52) of the tombs, they "came into" (εισηλθον) the city, and then they "appeared" (ενεφανισθησαν) to many. These actions presume an agency not attributable to inanimate bodies, not even by assuming that others picked them up and carried them into the city. This motivates the NWT's insertion of "persons" into the text to make the reference to the first two actions attributable to conscious agents, even tho there is no basis for "persons" in the text. Another contrivance is the statement that these persons were "coming out from among the memorial tombs", which implies they were on the surface walking between the tombs, whereas they clearly are exiting the tombs themselves (εξελθοντες εξ "came out out from").
That's the text as it stands. But it is also a difficult text, which is why many scholars believe that it has been redacted. Even the Society suggests that this is a possibility (Watchtower, 1/1/1961, p. 30). The passage contains unusual language used elsewhere by Paul in reference to the resurrection, all of which is theologically loaded: "bodies" (used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:35-44), "saints" (widely used by Paul to refer to the faithful), and "who had fallen asleep" (used in reference to those who will be resurrected in 1 Corinthians 15:20 and 1 Thessalonians 4:14). The noun εγερσις is also nowhere else applied to Jesus' resurrection in the NT (as opposed to the usual term αναστασις), although the verbal form is commonly used. The motivation for the revision can be found in Paul: "But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep...All men will be brought to life in Christ but all of them in their proper order: Christ as the first-fruits and then after the coming of Christ, those who belong to him" (1 Corinthians 15:20-23). This would explain why the text was glossed: Christ must first rise and leave his tomb prior to the saints, who only do so "after his resurrection". This however is a contrivance: they are still raised at the moment the temple veil is torn, they inexplicably wait in their graves until Easter Sunday, and the Matthean account has the centurion exclaim "This was the son of God" in amazement in the very next verse. The centurion is not only commenting on the earthquake, but "the earthquake and the things that happened". The likely original account thus would have contradicted Paul and have the resurrection of the saints occur at that very moment, climaxing the events leading to the confession by the centurion.
There is also textual evidence that the text in Matthew may have been altered. One of its earliest witnesses was the Diatesseron, a gospel harmony produced by Tatian towards the end of the second century. This harmony was in turn based on the one produced by Justin Martyr several decades earlier. The Pepysian Harmony and the Ephrem Commentary both attest the Diatessaron reading as follows:
And with that, the veil that hung in the temple before the high altar burst in two pieces, the earth quaked, and the stones burst, and the dead men arose out of their graves. And entering the holy city, they appeared to many. And the centurion and those with him, who stood facing Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, and said with awe, "Truly this was the Son of God!"
Here the gloss does not appear and the appearance of the risen dead in Jerusalem occurs at the same time as Jesus' death and was witnessed by the centurion. This reading makes better sense with the context. It also omits the greater detail of the canonical account in this passage, lacking the Pauline-like language described earlier.
There is also an open question of whether the tradition underlying the passage is relevant to the claim by Hymenaeus and Philetus that "the resurrection has already taken place" (2 Timothy 2:16-17), as the present passage on its face would seem to make a similar claim. Others see a connection with traditions of the harrowing of hell during Jesus' death and resurrection.
Thanks Leolaia; I knew someone would come thru , thanks again.
The key to understanding this is knowing what the "Holy City" actually is.
Those who go into the Holy City are able to travel between the realms of the dead and the living.
The saint,s body was not resurrected into A glorified imperishable
state as was Jesus,s body. After Christ,s resurrection, the bodies
of the Saints were rasied, correct. It seems that they were
resuscitated into their previous mortal bodies, which would
mean they would die again. In other words, the "saints" would
have looked like normal people- like Lazarus, so only family
members and closest friends would recognize them. It would
not make A lot of sense if they were raised and strolling in the
streets and no one new who they were.
Doubtful mention, if the word would have spread among some
in Jerusalem about these Saints being raised, surely the other
gospel would have mention it, you think.
@jam:
[Matt.27:51-53]. Behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints was [raised], and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection( they) went into the holy city and appeared to many.
[What's] the WT view regarding this. I have heard the earthquake cause the bodies in the grave to be unearth only, not A resurrection.
@doubtful:
So...if so many thousands of people witnessed such a miraculous [occurrence] that has never been seen before or since...then why is there no historical record of such thing ever having taken place?? And as I said before..if it happened, then why didn't the other gospel writers make mention of it?
Answer = It never happened!!!!
Well, this event to which Matthew 27:51-53 refers is about an earthquake, which caused many of the bodies that had been interred to be tossed from where they had been laid onto the open where they became visible to all passersby on their way to the temple in Jerusalem since this earthquake occurred about on Nisan 14 at 3:00 pm immediately after Jesus' death, about three hours before Nisan 15 began, when people came to see many of these cadavers while passing through toward the temple in Jerusalem to observe the high sabbath (the first day of the festival of unfermented cakes), which bodies were in plain view of those passersby on their way to the temple
While there is much ambiguity in the text and every Bible translator has its own take on how these verses should be translated, we know from other scriptures in the Bible what didn't happen at Matthew 27:51-53. We know that there was no resurrection of the "holy ones," which suggests that Matthew had a bit of help here and there is nothing in this text to suggest that anyone had been raised up before Jesus' resurrection on the morning of Nisan 16.
The other gospel accounts parallel Matthew's gospel both [immediately] before and after this supposed miracle of the dead rising from their tombs and walking about in Jerusalem, yet none of them aside from Matthew make any mention of it.... And if this event happened, there would have been upwards of 100,000 eyewitnesses to this miracle....
There is no mention in this passage as to the number of people that saw the Bible strewn about in plain view near where they had formerly laid following this earthquake (so I have no idea where you came up with "100,000"), and as to this non-issue that was raised here about no other gospel writers including this account, Matthew's gospel is a narrative containing some of the same details as to the life of Jesus Christ as is Mark's, Luke's or John's gospel, and John's gospel itself contains information that is not contained in any of the other three gospels. John 20:26-29 is when Jesus makes a special appearance for Thomas' sake, permitting him, if he wanted to, to put his finger in the nail wounds and to stick his hand into his side, to put to rest the doubts he had as to the veracity of the report he had received from his fellow disciples of Jesus' resurrection. During an earlier visit referred to at John 20:19, Jesus made an appearance to all but one of apostles, for, as John 20:24 indicates, Thomas "was not there not present with them when Jesus came."
No mention is made in John's gospel, however, of the fact that upon Jesus' first appearance after his resurrection, they were quite frightened when Jesus materialized in the room where that had all been gathered without knocking on the door to be invited in the room, so that, according to Luke 21:36-43, they became frightened and imagined that they were looking at a "spirit" (a demon). (Luke 24:37) However, Jesus pointed out to them that it isn't possible to see a spirit, and yet they were able to see that he had hands, feet, flesh and bones, and to further settle them down, Jesus asks then if they had something to eat, and after being handed a piece of fish, he went on to eat it, which action must have finally convinced them that this was the resurrected Jesus in their midst and not a demon . (Luke 24:41-43) None of the detail mentioned by Luke in his gospel is mentioned in John's gospel, nor is it mentioned in Matthew or Luke's gospel either since they are eyewitness accounts that may recount many of the same things, but not everything. Otherwise these gospels would not each of them be unique.
Either way...the story was a made up fantasy...
Ok.
@djeggnog
Either way...the story was a made up fantasy...
More likely a natural event
Interestingly the super-volcano at Taupo, New Zealand erupted very expolsively at about this time and remains the largest eruption in the world over the last 5000 years
Material was ejected high into the atmosphere and carried around the globe (interestingly Mathew also reports the sky became dark) the seismic energy released from this explosion would also have been transmitted around the entire earths surface.
Pity there were only tax collectors and crystal ball gazers around . . . ie; no geologists
Well, this event to which Matthew 27:51-53 refers is about an earthquake, which caused many of the bodies that had been interred to be tossed from where they had been laid onto the open where they became visible to all passersby on their way to the temple in Jerusalem since this earthquake occurred about on Nisan 14 at 3:00 pm immediately after Jesus' death, about three hours before Nisan 15 began, when people came to see many of these cadavers while passing through toward the temple in Jerusalem to observe the high sabbath (the first day of the festival of unfermented cakes), which bodies were in plain view of those passersby on their way to the temple
While there is much ambiguity in the text and every Bible translator has its own take on how these verses should be translated, we know from other scriptures in the Bible what didn't happen at Matthew 27:51-53.
First of all, it is not good exegesis to let other texts override what the present text says (on the presumption that there could not be contradiction between them), much less on account of the other texts are silent about (wrt the lack of mention of the event in the other gospels). Each text should be taken on their own terms and the interpretation you give here is expressly contrary to what is stated in the text itself. There is no mention in the text of passerbys on their way to the temple and this reference to them presumes the NWT's "persons coming out from among the memorial tombs after his being raised up entered into the holy city". The word "persons" has no basis in the text and is inserted in order to make the actions of coming out (a masculine plural participle) and entering pertain to some other subject than the "holy ones" (masculine plural) mentioned in the prior verse. The interpretation that these actions pertain to passerbys rests on something that is not in the text and without presuming some other unstated subject for these verbs one would have to conclude that the holy ones exited the tombs and entered into the city (something inanimate corpses thrown up in an earthquake would not be able to do). Another contrivance as I pointed out above is the illegitimate rendering of εξελθοντες εκ των μνημειων as "coming out from among the memorial tombs", as if these persons are walking on top the surface of the ground en route to Jerusalem (but why would the pilgrimage route take passerbys right through a cemetary rather than a road?), when the sense instead is "exiting from the tombs" (cf. Ezekiel 37:12 LXX, ανοιγω τα μνηματα και αναξω εκ των μνηματων "I am opening your tombs and will bring you out of your tombs"). This is not an ambiguity and the word "among" is another word added in the translation (as if the text had εκ μεσου instead of εκ).
