(August 12, 2013 at 7:23 am)Esquilax Wrote: Unknown to you, maybe: The greeks had Asclepius, Achilles, Memnon, Alcmene, Castor, Heracles, Melicertes and Aristeas, to name a few, all of which died human and came back immortal. The last of these even has published eyewitness accounts!
Hell, there's three examples of this happening in the Tanakh, so to say it was unthinkable before Jesus is simply ignoring the times that it happened in Judaic lore. You're just wrong, on this point.
Oranges and hand grenades...please be aware you're trying to answer a rather different argument here.
Firstly, what the Wikipedia entry doesn't detail is that nearly all of these were given divinised status in the stars, or similar. Not came back and ate fish with their friends.
The Aristeas one, and the three in the article from Judaism, are more interesting, and more helpful. They illustrate the broader point I've been trying to make (again, in bold in my original post), which is mentioned further down the Wiki article. None of these were single examples of the general resurrection. None of these imply that the Kingdom of God has arrived. None of these would create a radical revision of belief such as the redundancy of central parts of the Torah. Aristeas is vaguely the nearest equivalent event, and to go from an obscure Greek legend to mandating a complete overhaul of Jewish core beliefs is stretching things so far beyond breaking point that not even unbreakable duct tape will prevent it.
Furthermore, there is no evidence at all of the disciples borrowing ideas from Greek literature to alter Jewish doctrine. They certainly weren't borrowing from Greek beliefs (Acts 17:22-34), which is further supported by what we know about anti-Gentile attitudes in C1 Israel (“Romanes eunt domus”, as the slogan goes).
Quote:Except Judaism still exists. What you have is a splinter group of followers; not all that uncommon, for a religion.
Yes, but why did this splinter group appear with those beliefs?
