Why does God hate babies who have not sinned?

[Reasonable_Jeff]

Actually, that makes sense. Of course, what makes more sense is that there was no "body" and all of this shit is merely the last edition of the dying/resurrected vegetation god which was so prevalent in the ancient world.

The Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians all had them. "Jesus" was nothing new.

N.T. Wright has done an impressive amount of research regarding the resurrection and the cultural milieu it took place in. He notes that the most influential thinker of the time was Homer and as far as Homer was concerned resurrection was just something that didn't happen. Wright provides a helpful summary, "Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection."

The writings of the Greek philosophers like Plato and Cicero portrayed the world in a dualistic view where the body was tainted and the spirit was pure. Those who followed Plato or Cicero did not want a body again; those who followed Homer knew they would not get one.

Wright concludes, "Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus' day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly, and bodily, alive once more."

What about the Jews themselves? What did they believe in regards to resurrection?

The teachings of Judaism were that at the end of the world, when time had come to an end, there would be a general resurrection to life for the righteous. However, the Jews had no conception of a resurrection that would take place in the middle of history for only one person. We often look back on history with our own knowledge reading into the situations of the past with our own biases. Jewish belief always concerned a general resurrection of the people at the end of time, not the resurrection of an isolated individual or in the middle of history.

Also Edwin Yamauchi has done research on the resurrection and concluded that there is no possibility that the idea of a resurrection was borrowed because there is no definitive evidence for the teaching of a deity resurrection in any of the mystery religions prior to the second century...which would have been way after the Christians were believing in it. It would seem that the other religions were actually influenced by Christianity!

*N.T. Wright, "The Resurrection of the Son of God" (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003)
*Edwin Yamauchi, "Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?" Christianity Today, March 15, 1974 and March 29, 1974

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I'm not sure what that has to do with the dead walking the streets and appearing before many people.

Earlier you had said this...

Maybe not. Maybe they didn't believe he was messiah, but wanted to carry on his ideals in the form of a new religion and made fake claims of a ressurrection (among other miracles) to fool people into following teachings they believed to be right.

That's what I was addressing.

I used 'zombie' lightly

So did I

Either that or he was god in human form. Which seems more likely?

It seems to me that given the facts of the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances and the changed convictions of the disciples we have reasonable evidence to believe that Jesus really was who He said He was.

What seems unlikely to me is to posit that all of these events occurred by natural means rather than super-natural given the evidence.

Why did no one of the era write about it?

They did write about it. Letters from the Saul of Tarsus, the historical biographies of Jesus life, they have been found and preserved. These are primarily historical documents.

It wasn't until later that the church compiled these into a book that we now know as the Bible.