MERGED: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 1) & (Part 2)

[Jenny A]

I haven't been holding my breath for the case or any proof. I decided well.

Pilate nailed him to the cross. He's dead and will stay that way.

I say this as a believer.

I agree with you that if there was a historic Jesus, he was crucified, he's dead, and he's going to stay that way. I don't have much emotion bound up in whether he was a real person, and I don't see why you should either. If it's his philosophy that interests you, then whether that philosophy is born out of a historic man later legendised, or and legend later historicised shouldn't affect the value of his philosophy. .

I've been an atheist in a Christian family all my life and it never occurred to me until recently to doubt that there was a historic basis for Jesus. However, the historical evidence for Jesus is to say the least odd, and I'm slowly becoming persuaded that the best explanation for the oddities is the historization of a mythical being rather than the mythalogical amplification of a historical man.

Here in brief is the evidence:

First Paul writes writes in or around 50 C.E. but before the Jewish Wars which began in 66. What we have is seven letters of Paul: 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. The other letters attributed to him appear to be later forgeries. These seven letter of Paul are letters congregations to whom he has preached rather than a straight forward narrative. He does not claim to have seen the live Jesus nor to have learned from those who did. His knowledge of Jesus visionary and decidedly not historic. He tells essentially nothing about Jesus' life. He quotes the OT rather than any utterances of Jesus. Ordinarily historians don't give any credence to the writing of persons who say that their knowledge comes from supernatural means, and so we should give any real credence to Paul.

Outside the Bible, and there is no reason to treat evidence outside the Bible as lesser, the next source we have is 1 Clement in a letter to the Corinthians written in the 60s (as it references the death of Paul as recent event) though there are historians who would like to put it out as late as 95 since that would place it after the Gospels and make it of lessor importance. It may or may not have been written by Clement the Bishop of Rome. It laments the death of Paul in Spain (no Rome as the Gospels state) and like Paul it tells of a decidedly unfleshly, unhistoric Jesus. Like Paul it uses OT quotes as stand-in for what Jesus says, on the rare occasion it mentions what he says. Also like Paul, Clement is all about the resurrection and nothing at all about Jesus' life or teachings. He suggests that Jesus, Noah, Moses, Joshua, David, and Isiah, are all prophets through whom God allowed salvation through repentance.

Next we have the canonical Gospel which were written around 70 C.E. for Mark, Mathew around 80 C.E., Luke and Acts about 90 C.E. and John around 100 C.E. So they follow Paul by 20 to 50 years. These are the first writings to attempt to place Jesus historically. The Jesus they describe lived somewhere during the early first century and died sometime around the 30 C.E. by crucifixion by Pilot, with or without depending on the Gospel the involvement of Herod. The do not agree as to the date or place of Jesus' birth or the date of his death. Most of them have Jesus crucified on Passover which is not something the Hebrews would have done. They include many miracles. And most importantly at least the first three written are so much alike that they really only count as a single source. And unlike His Majesty, I don't suppose I have to remind you that they weren't written by the disciples or Paul's secretary.

Josephus, if you accept that he really wrote about Jesus, doesn't write until 93 C.E.

And based on that I was willing to grant that Jesus probably existed even though the late appearance of the Gospel is rather odd. But then I was introduced to Epiphanius, a 4th century Christian scholar who wrote about heresies and thus unwittingly tells us much about Christian beliefs that would not have otherwise survived. The Panarion heresy describes Christians that believed Jesus lived and died in the time of Alexander Jannaeus. The Babylonian Talmod accepts this particular heretical group as the only Christians they know of. That would place Jesus some one hundred years before the Jesus of the Gospels. This Jesus was known as Ben Stada "Son of the Unfaithful" Mary who is supposed to have slept with a Roman soldier Pandera. This Jesus is tried and executed in Lydda, not Jerusalem by Herod. He was stoned then crucified.

Now, the puzzle of Jesus unstuck in time and contradictory life story deepens. Muddling the dates within a few years might be explainable, but a 100 years? That's hard to believe. That for me at least begins to tip the likelihoods towards historicised myth.

Add that the Christ myth follows a similar pattern to that of: Oedipus, Moses, Theseus, Dionysus, Romulus, Perseus, Hercules, Zeus Bellerphon, Jason, Osiris, Pelops, Aesculapius, and Joseph in that most of them share the majority of these elements: born of a virgin, father was a king or heir of a king, the conception was unusual, he is reputed to be a god, there was an attempt or attempts to kill him as a child, he is taken away as an infant to a strange land or family to escape, we don't know anything else about his childhood, he returns to his kingdom at adulthood, he is crowned or hailed as king, he reigns uneventfully, he loses favor with the gods or his subjects, he is driven from the throne, he dies mysteriously on a high place, he has no children, his body turns up missing and you have a pretty good idea how such a myth might form. It's a story we continued to invent through the Middle Ages as King Arthur fits the basic pattern.

Finally add that other rabbis were preaching a message similar to Jesus and Apollonius preached a similar message after, and myth begins to look much more plausible.

--- All of the above is taken primarily from On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We May Have Reason to Doubt, by Richard Carrier.