In what way is the Resurrection the best explanation?

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, I can never tell when you're fucking with me.  

No, this has nothing to do with whether or not a resurrection happened.

[EgoDeath]

I'm probably always fucking with you.

In all seriousness, I don't think I understand what you're saying.

Or, you're not explaining yourself very well.

There were plenty of ancient historians who lived back then that did take the resurrection literally.

So what, exactly, are you trying to say by claiming historians don't consider the "resurrection narrative to be a historical detail?"

What exactly am I supposed to take away from that?

[The Grand Nudger]

No worries.  

Lets try it from the other angle.  Assuming that the resurrection was a historic detail would not entail belief that a guy magicked his way into the clouds.  It would only assume that the narrative presents some detail about something that happened to someone in history, somewhere.  

It's not taken as a historic detail by the people who accept the other historic details.  It's taken to be explicitly theological.  Not written down to record historic detail, but to reinforce notions about the mechanics of the supernatural in a specific view that became a part of the orthodoxy at a later date.

[EgoDeath]

No worries.  

Lets try it from the other angle.  Assuming that the resurrection was a historic detail would not entail belief that a guy magicked his way into the clouds.  It would only assume that the narrative presents some detail about something that happened to someone in history, somewhere.  

It's not taken as a historic detail by the people who accept the other historic details.  It's taken to be explicitly theological.  Not written down to record historic detail, but to reinforce notions about the mechanics of the supernatural in a specific view that became a part of the orthodoxy at a later date.

Okay, got it.

What am I supposed to take away from that? That Christians shouldn't be taking the story of the resurrection literally?

[The Grand Nudger]

No.  I'm getting my giggles out of atheists, on an atheist board, coming up with a natural explanation™ for something that the paste eating bible thumpers called "the consensus of scholars" wont even accept as a historic detail in the narrative sense.

[EgoDeath]

No.  I'm getting my giggles out of atheists, on an atheist board, coming up with a natural explanation™ for something that the paste eating bible thumpers called "the consensus of scholars" wont even accept as a historic detail in the narrative sense.

Gotcha.

But, plenty of Christians do take the resurrection very seriously and treat it like it actually happened, so even if it did occur, there'd have to be a natural explanation that doesn't involve someone actually rising from the dead.

Not an exercise I care to take up, either, so I hear you.

I was only joking with Grand, and wasn't suggesting that I believed one way or the other, historically. Just poking fun at Acro and Bel.

[GrandizerII]

Christianity revolves around christ, indeed.  Not some guy named jesus with a body to go missing.  "Paul" heard a voice and saw a vision on a road.  

You can take the time to do your own research on the various groups that survived or didn't into 400ad to become christians and define the movement as we know it.  The short version of the long story is that institutionally useful myths end up being selected for over personally important or "authentic" ones.  Christianity has about as much to do with the beliefs it formed out of as taco bell has to do with mexican food, lol.  It's own records of socially important heresies have been assiduously scrubbed, but their mere existence tells us more than the people who declared them heretical would have ever had us know about how christianity came together.

Some things we only know about because records survive of the orthodoxy arguing against them, and they're probably arguing against a straw version....but they're arguing...so.

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The better version of this question, btw, a natural explanation, is not for how the details of reality can be made to match the story..but in why the group of christians who succeeded in defining that article for the orthodoxy (and in some cases the heterodoxy) felt that they needed to believe in a body.  In a man.  In a sort of divine crucible where a human existence added the necessary currency of the redemptive sacrifice.

It's a story about sympathetic magic, not a missing body.  About beating the shit out of a doll so that it doesn't happen to us.  The better and more lifelike the doll the more effective the spell will be.  This was one of the first articles of christology formally decided.  That he had to be fully man in order for the crucifixion to be effective.  

That's how the universe works in the story, lol.  Thats why god doesn't just say "fuck it, mulligans for everybody"..or just let shit go without fanfare.  Think of how many times people ask -these- questions, as well, as though it were more than the narrative details of a fantasy world.  The natural explanation™ of the force..is midichlorians.  There's no beating around the bush here.  The details of christ in magic book are necessities of the myth, not a garbled report from the frontlines of some real world.  Not only aree they explicitly theological details..right down to ownership of a body and chasing people off a temple step..... they're just wrong.  The people who came up with that idea of how that world worked are just plain and simply wrong.  Their mistake is the basis of further mistakes in category, assumption, and question.

I somewhat agree with what you're saying here, but this still doesn't adequately explain why or how Christians as early as the synoptic Gospels and the earlier Epistles (i.e., in the first century AD) came to believe in a risen Christ. If you want to argue for mythicism, that's fine, but there needs to be some bridge between that and how the Resurrection belief came to be, even if you just come up with a speculative explanation that happens to fit well with the observations and that explains the observations better than a supernatural case. Obviously, it wouldn't be hard to do since we can appeal to common human psychology and the failures that come with that, with lots of examples to boot.

And sure, there were other brands of Christian thinking at the time, but it would still be good to know what led to the early first-century belief that later became the orthodoxy.

Also, about the empty tomb, even early Mark makes a big deal out of it.

[The Grand Nudger]

-And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.

Christian orthodoxy -also- declared what would be the gospel. In any case, I'm not arguing for mythicism at all, the resurrection is not taken to be a historic detail. It is known to be myth, and myths don't need events to explain belief in them. It wasn't actually on account of seeing a lightning bolt that anyone believed in zues, either.

If you dive into the whys of the beliefs and stories accepted, when you can find an answer, it's usually political, and usually to do with competing factions in roman politics. This religion built support as a proxy by offering people an escape from death when death was all around them. That's why they came to believe, and declare other beliefs heresy. The same way that anyone comes to believe absolutely anything. If christ didn't escape death, neither would they. If christ didn't have a body, his sacrifice wouldn't be effective. They had beliefs about sympathetic magic that included a rider. Those things had to be true for the magic to be true.

Think about modern day creationists. Do they believe on account of evidence or an event...however misconstrued, or because they need to believe creationism for their religion to be true?

[EgoDeath]

Regardless of the why, they believe it whole-heartedly, so it's an idea worth dismantling.

[The Grand Nudger]

To continue on a categorically appropriate Natural Explanation™ for resurrection beliefs, we can turn to Heb 2:14, and John 12:27.

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour.

It get's more explicit in Heb 2:17-18

Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

He -had- to have a body, and be a man.  Not because a body went missing, but because these beliefs (not the totality of historic christian or proto christian beliefs), which became the orthodoxy......said so.  This was the purpose, this was the work, this was how it worked.  These things had to be true for their religion to be true.

The explanation for these beliefs, their deconstruction, is not in an event or in human psychology (specifically)...or even in myth. It's in the assumptions required for a piece of sympathetic magic to work under a specific view of supernatural mechanics.

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A fun example of why this is important, for people unfamiliar with sympathetic magic works.  

Imagine that you're at a witches cauldron, and the spell calls for a blue footed booby's leg.  Well, none of those lying around.  So you substitute a chicken leg.  

Will the spell perform as advertised?  Not in the sympathetic view, which is defined by ritual or sacrificial objects/acts/events correspondence, imitation.  Their sympathetic substance as a mechanism for supernatural effectiveness. As above, the man sacrifice had to be a man, not a blue footed booby or a chicken, or it wouldn't be man-effective. I mean, sure, maybe you could trade a chicken leg for one toddlers sins, however small that list was, but you're not going to cover -my- debt with that.