(September 16, 2019 at 8:44 am)Acrobat Wrote: There's seem to be no real motivation for making this story up. Jesus would have been the worst messiah claimant to suggest a rebellion against Rome. He seemed to be entirely uninterested in the Roman Political order at all, let alone exhibiting any indication that he wanted to over throw it. There were plenty of other Messiah claimant that would have been more useful for this purpose.
In the first scenario I describe, nothing was made up. Things just happened naturally whereby Joseph just let the others come up with their own interpretations of what happened without having to correct them. Perhaps he was too distraught to bother to correct them.
In the second scenario, Joseph of Arimathea "who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God" (Mark 15) may have been disappointed that Jesus was unable to bring near the kingdom of God. So Joseph decided to take things into his own hands in the hopes of achieving this goal (by using Jesus' purported resurrection as that spark) but things didn't go as exactly planned, even when the other disciples nevertheless ended up believing that Jesus did rise from the dead (because of the empty tomb and women witnesses and all).
Quote:Secondly when Messiah claimant dies, their communities and followers tended to die along with them. There's no coming back from the Cross, hence why the cross was such an effective tool of Roman power.
Tended is the key word. Plus, I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make here.
Ultimately, however, as I said in the OP, we don't have sufficient relevant information to go by to make any confident claims about what may have happened back then. Even if we were to be very charitable and grant that supernatural events are possible and that the Gospels were not entirely myths. We can speculate, but that's about all one can do. The case for the Resurrection just doesn't have a good basis, and it doesn't help that it's supposed to be a supernatural event (even if we grant that such events can be possible).
