(May 2, 2013 at 6:15 pm)Undeceived Wrote: Matthew 28:
Quote:11 While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. 12 When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, 13 telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.
The Roman punishment for letting a prisoner escape was death. It would have been very much in the guards' and the chief priests' interests to "hush up" the resurrection of Jesus. If a man walking around looks and talks exactly like a dead guy you killed, what are you going to do? Deny that it's him. The magistrate will pretend he's witnessed a clever trick, nothing more. If he attempts to arrest Jesus again, he will have admitted that Jesus rose from the dead, thus inviting a Jewish revolt.
It's a conspiracy, maaaan!
First of all, if you had watched Dr. Carrier's presentation, you would have seen that in gMatthew's chiasmic structure, this attempt to suppress Jesus' resurrection is set in symmetry with King Herod's attempt to suppress Jesus' birth. That story in turn was put into the Gospel to cast Jesus as the new Moses (compare with the story of "Pharaoh's" attempt to prevent Moses' birth). It is also used as a narrative reason for Jesus to travel to Egypt and return, thus embodying the origin story of the Jewish people. The passage from Hosea that Matthew quotes ("for out of Egypt I have called my son") is in context a reference to the Israelite nation as a whole, not a prophecy about a man in the future. Jesus thus becomes the founding archetype of a New Israel, the Christian community. Paul echoes this theme when he turns the story of Hagar and Sarah into an esoteric allegory about the earthly Jerusalem and the Heavenly Jerusalem respectively, contrasting "the children of the slave woman" (non-Christian Jews) with "the children of the free woman" (Christians).The tale of guards placed on Jesus' tomb "to keep his followers from stealing his body" makes no sense as a literal narrative. Why? Because Pilate (supposedly) gave Jesus' body to one of his followers (Joseph of Arimathea) in the first place! Jesus' followers wouldn't have to steal his body to fake a resurrection, were they inclined to do so. They already had it!
Second, which one of Jesus' disciples was an eyewitness to this Top Secret Conspiracy between the Jewish leaders and the Romans? Why did the Conspirators invite him to the party?
The fact that the author of gMatthew uses the omniscient perspective as a narrator to relate events that no Christian eyewitnesses could have seen ought to be a clue that he's telling a story, not relating "the facts" handed down from the Apostles.(May 2, 2013 at 6:27 pm)Undeceived Wrote: How is this case any different? If dead people come into town professing Jesus as Lord and Savior would you, the magistrate or political scribe, record that?
The story is set during the Passover, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the Empire were in Jerusalem. Plenty of them would have been literate, and the rest would have returned with tales of the stupendous events they supposedly witnessed. Keep in mind that the "Jesus as Lord and Savior" thing would not have had the kind of well-known talismanic significance at that time that it does now. It would have been a new idea. So, Jews at that time would not have had the kind of automatic adverse "nooooo, not 'Jesus as Lord and Savior!'" reaction that you're imagining here. That reaction is the result of 2,000 years of Christian antagonism and persecution. So, hundreds of thousands of Jews (not to mention all the Greek and Roman pagans) would not have automatically and uniformly leaped to a "Quick! We've got to try to stop Christianity from getting started!" conspiracy. The existence of that sort of narrative only makes sense through the lens of an already-existent and marginalized Christian community for whom the Gospel was being written. In other words, it's a reflection of the time of gMatthew's authorship, not the time of the story's setting.
Realistically, the reaction of Jewish and Roman leaders to the resurrection of a crucified miracle-worker, a horde of dead people crawling out of their tombs, a major earthquake, darkness upon the land and so forth would be something closer to "ERMAGHERD! ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! MOBILIZE THE LEGIONS! CUT THE LIVING DEAD DOWN AND MAKE SURE THEY STAY DEAD THIS TIME! SUMMON EVERY PRIEST AND WIZARD YOU CAN FIND! WE MUST BESEECH THE GODS TO SAVE US!" than "Earthquake? What earthquake? Let's just hush this up, shall we?" Remember, Pilate and the Jewish leaders could not have known that Jesus and his undead army would all just conveniently disappear, remembered only by a handful of followers of a tiny sect. A powerful Necromancer with an army of undead at his command would have been rather more worrisome to the authorities than the prospect of yet another little messianic cult getting started.
(May 2, 2013 at 6:27 pm)Undeceived Wrote: The scripture under scrutiny, Matthew 27:
Quote:51 The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”
In the chiasmic structure of gMatthew, this is set opposite the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In that story, the heavens are split, and the voice of God proclaims Jesus as his Son. In this story, the Earth and the Temple veil are split, and Jesus' Sonship is proclaimed by men. As above, so below. This story only makes sense as a mystic allegory. Roman soldiers would not have been aware of a Christian doctrine of Jesus as the Son of God. They would not even have viewed Yahweh as 'the' big-G "God." To them, he would have been one more deity, like Zeus or Athena or Osiris or Isis. Once again, we are not seeing a realistic, remembered reaction of pagan Roman soldiers to supernatural events, we're seeing a narrative device in a Christian allegory.
Another thing to keep in mind is the Jewish burial custom in New Testament times. The bodies of the dead were placed on benches in rock-cut tombs (for those who could afford such tombs) and allowed to rot. A year or so later, the bones were collected and placed in boxes called ossuaries for more compact permanent storage. So, we are not talking about embalmed and buried corpses being restored to life, but disassembled skeletons packed in boxes. Or to put it another way, this story is an enactment of Ezekiel's vision of the "Valley of Dried Bones", which refers to the rebirth and restoration of the nation of Israel. Placed here by the author of gMatthew, it points to the establishment of the new spiritual Israel, the Christian community.
