Ann wrote:
The four Gospels all tell completely different stories of how Jesus showed himself to other people after his resurrection. Not one Gospel confirms a single post-surrection story of another Gospel. There can be different explanations for this. One possible reason, however, could be that the stories of how people met the risen Christ began circulating gradually, and that they were based on rumors, not hard facts like the details of the crucifiction, which are pretty consistent. Anyway, if you really don't know what Jesus looked like and have no way of ever finding out, how can you be sure that you haven't met him? And how can you know that another person who tells a story about meeting Jesus is not telling the truth?
Hmm. The resurrection story circulated gradually? Really? Then why did the disciples, all of whom (except a few women) ran away in fear and hid at the crucifixion, yet just a few weeks later were - at the risk of their own lives - loudly proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Why did the vast majority of these men and women, when faced with the choice of dying or recanting their belief in Jesus' resurrection, refuse to change their tune?
Let me ask another question. Why didn't the Jews just take the body of Jesus out of the grave, tie it to a wagon, and parade it around Jerusalem?
That would have squelched the rumor pretty quickly, I'd think, but they didn't do that. The two obvious answers are 1) the disciples stole the body so they could hoodwink the people or 2) Jesus really was resurrected.
If you pick the first choice, you have two other questions which you must answer. 1) If the disciples were going to run a con game on the people, what did they get out of it? There are no indications in any contemporary history that any of them got rich off proclaiming that the Christ was alive again. 2) Why would the disciples willingly die for something they
knew was a lie? Because sane people don't do that. Even a habitual con man will fess up rather than die for his lie.
And if you assert that the disciples were all mentally unbalanced, you need to explain how they could all have traveled with a man for more than three years, seen what He did, heard what He said, and witnessed how He died, and all told basically the same story. Insane people don't share their pathologies on that level of detail. They never have.
Your objection isn't original, Ann. Others have put forth similar theories, but they simply aren't supported by the evidence. The behavior of the disciples is reasonable, rational, and logical -
if they saw and knew the resurrected Jesus.
