With apologies for the length, I offer the following in response to Aractus, retaining all my numbered points for the convenience of the reader:
AR:
You say your explanation will "fit all the evidence", so this is what I will test it on.
RC: I put “facts” in quotation marks because there are very few bits of the NT narrative that can be granted that lofty status. A fact is objective, “something that truly exists or happens : something that has actual existence”. “Evidence” is “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid”. Thus the NT is not “facts”, but mostly apologetics. Not history (as you agree elsewhere), but narrative, often polemic. The weight of evidence – internal as well as external -- is that the story is contrived, at the most a “historical fiction”. I see that you rely heavily in your response on the NT text as providing credible evidence. But you agree that the NT use of Is 7:14 is unsupportable, so you must also agree that there may be other statements from which credence may or must be withheld.
The only “facts” that can be accepted are those credible and external to the NT, and that Jesus was arrested and crucified on or about Passover. If those can be assembled to create a plausible scenario, they must trump the NT by Occam’s Razor. The resurrection story is implausible on its face for violating the laws of nature, so each word must be challenged before admitting it as “evidence” of truth. Taking on faith is not truth.
RC: 1. Jesus was arrested during the night of the Passover, a holy day. The complainants included the officials of the Temple and the aggrieved merchants damaged by Jesus' attacks.
AR:
This is a remarkably simple explanation. Jesus was crucified and died at the exact time that the Passover Lambs were being sacrificed - yet Jesus had in fact already eaten his Passover the night before with his disciples. Now why would the Bible confuse us by recording that Jesus has already eaten the Passover? How can Jesus eat his Passover 24 hours before everyone else? ... So Jesus and the disciples did not eat a Lamb at the last supper - instead Jesus was to be the sacrificial lamb….
RC: First, thanks to Xpastor for his helpful response. Further: I think your response is essentially Johannine Christology, thus crediting the NT where little or no credit is due. The NT/Bible confuses us on many points (in addition to Is 7:14 cf. the two “Davidic genealogies” of Jesus that are utterly phony, mathematically demonstrably not from the same population of human beings, but please don’t go there in this thread). All we can perhaps agree that is “known” or are “facts” is that there was an arrest very close to Passover and a crucifixion, and perhaps an empty tomb. Others on this thread will disagree even with that limited set.
Xpastor’s observation that John portrays Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God shows how his narrative has been molded to fit the Christology, not the other way around; thus it is fiction, ahistorical, and not fact. John also does that elsewhere, such as where Jesus “cleanses” the Temple on a different Passover than that at which he met his end. Bill O’Reilly, unable to see the oddity, has two “cleansings” in his fiction-masquerading-as-history, “Killing Jesus”.
RC: 3. After he was dead Jewish law required removal from the cross, lest the "hanged" one be accursed by remaining overnight. And the Sabbath was approaching.
RC: 4. His body was requested by a member of the Jewish community, or perhaps removal and interment was common practice for low-level criminals.
AR:
By a member of the Jewish community and an early disciple of Jesus (a Christian).
RC: It is plausible and consistent with Jewish law and practice that even the Temple authorities who were wronged would have sought proper burial for a Jew executed by the Romans for a minor crime, so as not to have him hang dead overnight. There surely was a real person responsible for arranging this obligatory burial of Roman-executed criminals, but the name and that he was a follower are at best speculations.
RC: 5. If required, the request was granted. This means the crime was not sedition, for which removal would not have been permitted: examples needed to be set, the body was to be food for the crows.
AR:
Well we don't know that they routinely left bodies to rot on the crosses … But it's likely that in some situations they would.
RC: We do “know”. Check the link. Raymond Brown wrote carefully enough that he got imprimatur.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/p...roman.html. Food for the crows, if the crime was against the state.
RC {bracketed words added}: 6. The day before {Thursday} having been a day of preparation for the Passover (getting rid of leavened stuff, etc.), no graves would have been dug. The holy day {Friday daylight hours}, no graves would have been dug. It's plausible that no vacant grave was available, since the execution would not have been on the calendar. {No graves would have been dug on the Sabbath}.
AR:
… The body is first placed in a tomb, and then later in an ossuary and that ossuary is then placed either in a tomb or a grave. … ossuary’s could be stacked to the ceiling in a family plot or in a communal setting. Jesus was placed in a new, and as yet unused rock-cut tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea ...
RC: Tomb-then-ossuary is an assumption, not a certainty. Direct interment was done. See, inter alia, the link above, and this (my emphasis): “…These tombs were mostly those of the rich, not the poor.
The poor were usually buried in the ground, or in smaller natural caves. Not many of their skeletons have been found. The significance of this point is that it is the poor who are most likely to be crucified, not the wealthy and powerful. Accordingly, those skeletons most likely to provide evidence of crucifixion are the skeletons least likely to survive”. From
http://craigaevans.com/Burial_Traditions.pdf .
So, ossuaries and the rock-hewn tombs with cover stones show how the rich were handled, not a poor Galilean, dead 100km from home. Even if the corpse was placed in a fancy tomb it was more likely an expedient, not one for poor criminals; such entombment was not intended to last long enough to allow rotting to a skeleton, but most plausibly to avoid the onset of the Sabbath. Removal ASAP would have been required, to a more suitable spot, dug or hewn.
RC: 7. The body was placed temporarily in an empty tomb to get past the Sabbath and comply with Jewish law on burial.
RC: 8. Very early Sunday morning, after both the Sabbath and the holy day, the body was removed and buried in a fresh-dug grave. If anyone were to have come to the tomb, it would have been empty, and the whereabouts of the corpse (of an indigent executed as a low criminal) perhaps not easily learned.
AR:
This doesn't fit with the evidence, and is inconsistent with Jewish burial customs in the 1st century.
RC: What evidence is there that there was any consistency with which to be inconsistent? Here is something on Jewish burial customs, indicating various practices. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0004_0_03747.html . Here is more on grave-in-ground, not primary-tomb/secondary-ossuary burial.
http://www.avotaynu.com/books/Chapter1a.pdf “The oldest existing public Jewish cemetery with ground graves is almost certainly the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The mountain has been used as a cemetery since about 2400 BCE, initially by the Jebusites and later by Jews, Christians and then Muslims.”
RC: 9. The mourning followers needed an explanation of how their beloved leader could have ended this way, and a cover story was begun.
AR:
There are too many coincidences in the story for it to be invented.
RC: I would say there are too many contrivances for it to be anything but invented.
AR in reply to Xpastor:
The feast of unleavened bread begins on Nisan 14. … If Jesus was crucified on the Sabbath (Nisan 15), then it would mean that he could not have been crucified on a Friday - for if he was, it would mean that there would be three Sabbaths and the women could not return to embalm his body until the second day of the week - Monday.
RC: Passover begins on 15 Nisan, not on 14 Nisan. “Good Friday” says Friday is the day recognized as the day of crucifixion and death, and necessarily the day of entombment. Thus Friday is the first day, Shabbat is the second, and from sundown on Shabbat began the third day. Thursday was a Passover-preparatory day, no work; Friday the Yom Tov, the holy day, literally the “Good Day” (Thursday evening would have been the start of 15 Nisan. Friday sundown ended the 15th and began Shabbat the 16th).
