Some of the the adults on this thread are emotional children. They will have their magical thinking no matter what!
Enjoyed your post from McCabe! Aside from all the other "resurrections" we have numerous resurrections in the tribal stories of the bible. Stuff and nonsense!
"My dear Christian friend, do you really expect me to take all this seriously? I am accustomed to a critical study of historical documents, and this . . . It is the most appalling jumble of contradictions, and the tale grows under our eyes in the course of the first century. It is as crude as anything in ancient mythology. There is not the slightest pretense of consistency in the various versions and successive additions to the original story. Let us turn to Paul, and see if we can ascertain what the original story was.
We get little help from Acts. The author repeats what he has said in Luke about apparitions, and he enlarges a little upon the ascension; which is not known to any other writer. Jesus, we are asked to believe, took his disciples (as usual) up a "mountain," and from there he rose physically in the air until he disappeared in a cloud. It is perfectly amazing to find people in the twentieth century who regard such statements as historical. It is just the myth of Hercules ascending to heaven in a cloud.
Paul's Epistles are the earliest documents; and they give us to understand that the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection and his appearances to various friends at least a few years after his death. On any serious canon of evidence that is the only witness to the resurrection that we can be asked to consider. The Gospel stories are late, contradictory, and often absurd. Paul's Epistles were, of course, written long after the death of Jesus, but we must clearly put back his belief in the Resurrection to the time of his conversion. He was convinced by the followers of Jesus at Jerusalem that the prophet had risen from the dead and had been seen by Peter and by the whole eleven (somewhere he says twelve) apostles.
There are certain details in Paul which must be considered. The Epistles are very sparing in details-these had not yet been invented-but Acts puts into the mouth of Paul a speech made in the synagogue at Antioch. In this speech Paul plainly says that it was, as we should normally expect, the Jewish authorities who buried Jesus; and in that case his body would be put in the common pit for the burial of crucified criminals. Paul says (Acts xiii 27-29):
For they that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, be cause they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which were read every Sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in condemning him. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulcher.
This flatly denies all the picturesque details in the Gospels. If a companion of Paul wrote this, as all suppose, the first story of the resurrection was quite different from that in the Gospels. Paul was a Jew, and he knew Jewish law; which not a single Gospel writer seems to have done. There was no need whatever to wait until Sunday morning. The Sabbath prohibition of work ended at sunset. The whole Gospel story is a fiction that could only grow and find acceptance amongst foreigners.
Paul, on the other hand, is the only writer who makes Jesus appear to five hundred at a time. It is amusing to find Christian writers emphasizing this "large number" of witnesses to the resurrection. We have not a single witness to the resurrection. None of the women or men who are supposed to have gone to the tomb and seen Jesus has left us any testimony. A late writer forged a Gospel in the name of John. A still later writer forged in the name of Peter a Gospel with such fantastic details about the resurrection that even the early Christians, whose faith was great, rejected it. And evidently this story of an apparition to five hundred, which circulated early, was in the course of time considered too strong, and was abandoned.
In the end, therefore, we come down to the single statement of Paul that the Jewish authorities cast the body of Jesus into the pit, but some of his followers said that Jesus subsequently appeared to them, and so he must have risen from the dead. Some believed this, and others disbelieved. Paul's insistence implies that, and in one place (I Cor. xv 12) he says that some Christians do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. It was, however, generally believed, and it is useless now to ask how the belief arose. Clearly, according to the earliest versions, the apostles scattered when Jesus was arrested, and they returned to their work as fishermen. Later they said that they had seen the Lord"-such details as those about the women are far later in appearance-and they resumed preaching in his name. Is it a novel thing in religious history for enthusiasts to see visions? Quite the contrary. Down to our own time, in Spiritualism, it is the most common of experiences. Scores of Roman Catholic saints claim to have seen Jesus in the flesh; and the Protestant denies every word of it.
The belief in the resurrection is thus a quite normal event; especially as Jesus was held to be the Messiah, and the resurrection of the Messiah was held to have been predicted. But the elaborate story in the Gospels is not merely a myth. It is a fairy tale; and we clearly see the growth of it from 50 A.D. to 120 A.D. Whether or not the world-wide belief in the resurrection of gods disposed the followers of Jesus to believe in his resurrection, the growth of the story, as the decades went on, is plainly influenced by the other myths, and we will consider them more closely." |
