12 Unbelievably Bad Marketers in Jerusalem

[Firefighter01]

Ok, about it banging on about a messiah and Isaiah 52:13–53:12 supposedly being a prophecy of the death and exaltation of Jesus? Yes, but it's a stretch. It doesn't get that specific IMO to be "according to the scriptures". Unless the writer was trying to push that barrow?

[Redoubtable]

When I speak to Christians, they say no one would die for a scam and therefore the stories about Jesus must be true. Thoughts?

To me, this line of reasoning is silly because it assumes a miracle to be the most likely answer when in actuality miracles are generally, even by believers, to be considered the least likely of events to occur. Nearly any alternative explanation is more persuasive and more credible than the one Christians give.

There are some peculiar elements in the resurrection stories that to me raise red flags. First off, in three of the gospels, John, Mark, and Luke, you see this phenomenon of Jesus being implied to look different in some way to the point of his followers not being able to immediately recognize him after he is resurrected. The common Christian answer to this is that the resurrected Jesus had some kind of glorified body shrouded in mystery. To me however, I see such oddities in the narrative as a means of hiding something, or smudging the past in order to construct a convenient story and hide inconvenient truths.

If we assume Jesus had a ministry somewhat like the gospels depict and was subsequently executed and entombed, this is how I think things might have played out: the apostles were in hiding for days since the night Jesus was arrested. After Jesus was entombed other followers of his (he had many who were not at apostle status) took the body from the tomb and buried it in a secret place to give birth to the resurrection rumor.

[Brief Interlude: The gospel of Matthew conveniently contains a short anecdote to try and refute this claim, where Roman soldiers, allegedly sent to guard the tomb, witness the resurrection, and rather than report this to their Roman commanders, they instead go to the Jewish chief priests!? They then conspire with the chief priests to keep the story quiet in exchange for money by saying that Jesus' followers took the body while they were sleeping on duty. But even so far there are problems here, mainly that falling asleep at your post had draconian punishments in the Roman army, if caught you would be beaten severely and often die as a result. But once again this anecdote in Matthew has a convenient excuse to get around this problem: the Jewish chief priests promise to also bribe the Roman governor in case he finds out that they were said to be asleep at the tomb. No loose ends in this excuse of a story, it offers a convenient apologist's answer to critics by saying the evil Jewish priests bribed the soldiers into saying they were asleep and the resurrection didn't happen when in actuality that is probably the most likely thing to have happened, soldiers sleeping or being away from post on duty.]


Followers of Jesus caught up in a mix of severe dejection over his death and religious hysteria over the possibility of his resurrection were "seeing" Jesus everywhere in their attempt to identify the supposedly risen Christ, a la an ancient version of "Where's Waldo?". Some delusional impostors familiar with Jesus' teachings probably started walking around claiming to see or even claiming to be the resurrected Jesus. The apostles eventually encountered such a person, didn't recognize them as Jesus, but were so desperate for any reason to believe that they hadn't just wasted their lives on a fiction that they just rolled with the story on a leap of faith, thinking there was some mystical sense in which Christ was resurrected; maybe he looked like a different person now (different look after regeneration resurrection like in Doctor Who xD), maybe he displayed himself in different people at different times, whatever the case may be this concept of a resurrected Jesus appearing to the apostles in such a way that they did not recognize him at first is a common feature in three of the four gospels. I think this feature is best explained by the Apostles unwillingness to believe their work was in vain and chose to believe a far-fetched rumor that Jesus had been risen as a way to legitimize their work and their beliefs.

One of the things that makes believe this is likely is because of how little the gospels speak of what happened after Jesus was supposedly resurrected. Matthew and Luke spend only one chapter's length on the resurrection and what happened afterwards, John spends two chapters, and Mark spends the least of any, where if we look at the original shorter ending to Mark the resurrection and its aftermath occupy a few lines of text. The resurrection is the climactic moment of Jesus' life and yet the gospels spend so little time on it compared to the rest of the story. Why? I think the most likely answer is that where was no risen Jesus to write about. The stories we do have about the risen Jesus show a very different type of character than the one present pre-crucifixion. Working from an extremely basic oral tradition the writers of the gospels constructed these final stories on the basis of religious algebra, they had heard oral stories about how the apostles claimed to be witnesses to the risen Christ, but also heard about how Jesus looked different to them and they were unable to recognize him as they once did, so they tried to craft concise conclusions to these stories of Jesus that served as crude bookends to the narratives. Example: Peter denied Jesus three times, but Peter continued being an apostle and having a place in the missionary work of the early Christian church, how is this resolved? Solution: write about a post-resurrection encounter where Jesus meets with Peter, forgives him personally by having him profess his love for Christ three times to cancel out his three denials. ...and this is exactly what appears in the Gospel of John. The stories after the Resurrection simply serve as a means to abruptly tie up the loose ends in justifying the continued work of Jesus' followers.

So would the apostles have died for this? Yes, if they sincerely got themselves to believe in their message. They didn't have to be outright liars, they could have been emotional, ideologically driven, fallible humans, who chose to take a leap of faith on a far-fetched story to give their lives continued meaning, and ultimately use that as the basis to brave martyrdom.

[Firefighter01]

When I speak to Christians, they say no one would die for a scam and therefore the stories about Jesus must be true. Thoughts?

So would the apostles have died for this? Yes, if they sincerely got themselves to believe in their message. They didn't have to be outright liars, they could have been emotional, ideologically driven, fallible humans, who chose to take a leap of faith on a far-fetched story to give their lives continued meaning, and ultimately use that as the basis to brave martyrdom.

What makes you think any of them had to brave martyrdom or even existed at all? All you have is sketchy evidence in the Bible.

[Pat Mustard]

and Mark spends the least of any, where if we look at the original shorter ending to Mark the resurrection and its aftermath occupy a few lines of text.

Actually there's no resurrection at all in Mark, until the late addition to bring it into line with John. It ends with the empty tomb, no announcements, no angels, not even a single word about Yeshua coming again. And we can be pretty certain this addition was post-Nicene, because neither Vaticanus nor Sinaiticus go past Mark 16:8, and they are both bibles written under the rules implemented after the council of Nicaea.

So we've got the the oldest (and most likely to contain any accuracies) version of the bible not having a resurrection until 4th century CE. That actually lends support to the whole Yeshua being yhwh angle being a later invention by the likes of Saul of Tarsus who looked at a failed ultra-orthodox jewish cult and saw in it the germs of an opportunity to scam people, by melding the original cultic and anti-Roman leader with a version of the mystery religions that were becoming increasingly popular in the Roman world in the early Principate. That is the most reasonable theory as to why you've got a whole lot of Hellenistic mythology, symbolism, god becoming man and resurrection ideas melded onto a story of a man who was telling all and sundry that they must be more jewish, cleave more closely to the sanhedric and toranic laws and become even more fundamentalist (think the equivalent of the settler communities today stealing land from the Palestinians).

[Redoubtable]

What makes you think any of them had to brave martyrdom or even existed at all? All you have is sketchy evidence in the Bible.

That is a good point to bring up which I think is a great objection to the argument that says: the Resurrection is true otherwise the apostles wouldn't have died for it.

Even more interesting however is that the Bible doesn't record the martyrdom of any apostle besides James the Greater. Now my reply to martyrdom argument is that first off, we don't really know that all of the apostles (except John) were martyred. All our evidence comes from Christian sources (Notably Eusebius' "Church History") which have a vested interest in portraying the apostles in a positive light. So right from the get go, we know that anything we are told about their deaths will reflect positively on Christianity. And what better way to have the death of an apostle reflect positively on Christianity than by creating martyrdom narratives that imitate the martyrdom of Christ?

[Firefighter01]

What makes you think any of them had to brave martyrdom or even existed at all? All you have is sketchy evidence in the Bible.

That is a good point to bring up which I think is a great objection to the argument that says: the Resurrection is true otherwise the apostles wouldn't have died for it.

Even more interesting however is that the Bible doesn't record the martyrdom of any apostle besides James the Greater. Now my reply to martyrdom argument is that first off, we don't really know that all of the apostles (except John) were martyred. All our evidence comes from Christian sources (Notably Eusebius' "Church History") which have a vested interest in portraying the apostles in a positive light. So right from the get go, we know that anything we are told about their deaths will reflect positively on Christianity. And what better way to have the death of an apostle reflect positively on Christianity than by creating martyrdom narratives that imitate the martyrdom of Christ?

Yes, but didn't John die of natural causes? Christians just LOVE martyrdoms like being supposedly all the Xtians continually fed to the lions.