(September 16, 2019 at 10:43 am)Grandizer Wrote: Yes, and all that takes is seeing an empty tomb where they thought Jesus' body was supposed to be and a viral faith-based interpretation of that. Note that in the earliest copies of Mark, no one witnessed the risen Jesus; they believed on faith.
Thats not what the earliest copies of Mark indicated. Mark indicated he had risen, and he was going before the disciples, in Galilee. Mark closes without narrating that encounter. But he acknowledges that the disciples did witness the risen Jesus.
The earlier followers of Jesus, his disciples strongly believed in the reality of the resurrection, just as strongly, if nor more strongly than christians today. They staked their life, and their communities life on it.
Quote:Um, no, not necessarily.
See Millerism and the Seventh-day Adventists. If there is enough trigger(s) to keep the community's faith going, then the community can recover in no time and be even more strengthened in their faith. You should read Influence by Cialdini, where he tells a story among many of how a faith-based group will go out of their way to validate their faith after a crisis of disappointment and falsified prophecy and be even more strengthened in terms of their faith.
What followed Miller’s failure, was The Great Disappointment, this disillusionment of his followers, many of whom who abandoned him, or offshoot into other traditions like the SDA. Miller pretty much died along with his failed prophecies. But they did have the additional of being built of Christianity, that most of his followers were able to settle back into some version of Christianity in his demise.
Some of his followers tried to still desperately cling on to Miller, reinterpretating his failure differently, but it was severely wounded, but they were patients on life support. Their fervor commitments didn’t increase after the failure of its vision, they evaporated, and took a severe being, were diminished significantly by it.
No other messiah claimant at the time, came back from his demise, the communities that followed them, lost hope as soon as they were strung up and died. Not only did the followers of Christ buck that trend, but took whatever death blow his crucification had, and survived not as haggard disillusioned community, but profoundly reawakened community. No matter how you want to look at it, it defied all expectations, even those of Rome. No one has ever imagined the Roman Cross as a symbol of hope, but the absolute Power of Rome.
In fact if it wasn’t for our views of supernatural events, if we believe they were just as possible as natural events, we’d easily conclude that Jesus did resurrect as we would do that he existed.
It’s only because of precommitments, that we’s unlikely to accept this explanation. It’s only based on commitments like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, that ordinary evidence isn’t sufficient.
Quote:Nice try but this has nothing to do about relieving anxiety (maybe for you it is, but not for me). For me, this is about intellectual honesty. If we don't have enough details to go by, we can't come up with a confident conclusion.
It has nothing to do with intellectual honesty. It has everything to do with our presuppositions, not honesty. The resurrection defies all naturalistic explanations. Every attempt to paint it into any natural pathology, fails. Whatever transpired after Christs death, looked nothing like failed expectations, like the impact of disillisonement, or anything that ever took place from a messiah claimant getting strung up.
Now you might reject that it was supernatural still, but you can perhaps concede that?
