Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls What do you believe in?

Okay, Terry, I need to get into more detail about this.

Who were "the disciples" who were loudly claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Jesus had twelve disciples that we know by their names, and certainly many others. What exactly do the Gospels say about the behaviour of the different disciples?

Matthew starts off in chapter 27 by saying that Pilate had Jesus' grave sealed by a large stone, and he also posted a guard:

I find this account unlikely for many reasons. Would Pilate seriously think that there was even a possibility that Jesus would rise from the dead? But if he really thought that that might have happened, I really don't think he would have dared to have Jesus crucified at all.

Also, Pilate says that there is a risk that the body of Jesus might be stolen. But to the Jews graves were unclean places and were not to be entered. Please note the behaviour of Jesus himself as he, according to John 11:38-45, resurrected Lazarus:

Jesus himself doesn't enter Lazarus' grave. The reason why he doesn't is that graves were unclean places to the Jews, so that they were forbidden to enter them.

By the way, the raising of Lazaraus is a most sensational miracle, but the story is only told in the Gospel of John, even though it says in the passage that I quoted that there was a "crowd" of people there who must have seen the resurrection taking place. Why didn't the story spread so that Matthew, Mark and Luke also heard it and recorded it for posterity? My answer is that the resurrection of Lazarus never happened, and the story was told by John as a means of "setting the stage" for Jesus' own resurrection. Please note the similar details, the stone in front of the opening of the grave, and the dead person wrapped in strips of cloth. And Lazarus is said to have been dead for four days, while Jesus was said to have been dead for three days before his resurrection.

I find it completely unreasonable that just one out of four Gospels would report this fantastic miracle if it had really happened, but I also note that Jesus never entered Lazarus' grave, almost certainly because Jews regarded graves as unclean places.

Let's return to Matthew. Pilate has supposedly sealed Jesus' grave with a stone and posted a guard. Now this is what Matthew tells us:

The women have come to Jesus' grave to look at it, not to enter it. When they were there there was an earthquake and an angel came down from the heavens and rolled back the stone. The guards faint when they see the angel. The angel tells the women that Jesus has risen from the dead and is no longer in his tomb. The angel commands the women to enter the tomb to see that it is empty, and he commands them to tell Jesus' disciples that Jesus is risen. He also sends the message that the disciples are ordered to go to Galilee, because there is where his disciples will see him.

Jesus shows himself to the women.

The soldiers who have seen the resurrection of Jesus are bribed to keep quiet. Note that the soldiers are nameless.

The eleven disciples went to Galilee to see Jesus. They worshipped him, but some doubted. How could they doubt? If they had seen Jesus die and if they now saw him alive, how oculd they doubt?

Matthew doesn't name a single disciple who, as you put it, loudly proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Let's go on to Mark. This is what Mark says:

Note how this differs from the story of Matthew. Mark says that the women went to Jesus' grave specifically to anoint Jesus' body, while the women in Matthew just went there to look at the grave. But it is likely that a body that had been dead for a few days would have begun to smell already, so why would anyone bother to anoint it? Particularly since graves were unclean places that Jews were not supposed to enter?

Also note that the women went to Jesus' grave with the purpose of entering it even though they didn't know how they would be able to remove the stone in front of the entrance.

The stone has been rolled away and the women enter the tomb just like that. Inside the tomb they see a young man "dressed in a white robe" sitting in there.

The man in the white robe commands the women to do the same thing as the angel told the women in the Gospel of Matthew: Go and tell his disciples that he has risen and go to Galilee where you will see him.

In Mark, one disciple is mentioned by name, and that disciple is Peter. Mark doesn't say that the women themselves saw Jesus, but instead he says that the women were too afraid to tell anyone about the empty grave and the message from the young man in white clothes.

As for the remaining verses of chapter 16 of Mark, this is what www.biblegateway.com says about them:

So verses 16:9-20 of Mark would be a later addition.

So far, in Matthew and Mark, we have not seen any disciple at all proclaim anything at all about the resurrection of Jesus.

This is what Luke says:

As in Mark, the women go to the grave specifically to enter it in order to anoint Jesus' body, not worrying about entering an unclean place and not wondering how to remove the stone from the entrance. They see two men in shining clothes, not one, and the two men tell them that Jesus is risen. But these men don't tell the women that they should go to Galilee to see Jesus, but instead they talk about what Jesus had told his disciples while he was till with them in Galilee.

The women don't see Jesus themselves. They tell the disciples about the empty grave and the men in shining clothes, but the disciples don't believe them.

But Peter goes to the grave and sees the strips of linen.

Then follows a lengthy story of how Jesus showed himself to two men on their way to Emmaus.

They don't recognize him. Only one of the two men is given a name at all.

But when the stranger breaks the bread, the two men recognize him as Jesus and he immediately disappears. Only Luke tells of these sudden disappearing acts on the parts of the risen Jesus.

The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon... but we are not told any details about it.

It is very interesting that Jesus goes to such pains to prove to his disciples that his body is alive. Today, when we think of life after death, we very rarely (if ever) think of our bodies being alive after death. To the Jews, however, the soul was not separable from the body, so Jesus couldn't rise from the dead unless his body was also alive.

Jesus commands his disciples to stay in Jerusalem. This is different from Matthew and Mark, where the disciples are commanded to go to Galilee.

After Jesus has finished talking to his disciples, this is what happens:

Jesus ascends to Heaven before their eyes. Nothing like this happens in the other Gospels. As for the disciples, they don't go out in the world to tell the world about Jesus, but instead they stay at the temple all the time to praise God.

This is what happens in John:

Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb herself, apparently just to look at it. She is distraught when she finds that the stone has been removed. She runs to Peter to tell him that the body of Jesus has been stolen.

One disciple is fearful of entering the grave, but Peter enters it and finds strips of linen and a burial cloth. There is no man in shining clothes in the grave.

Jesus shows himself to Mary, but she does not recognize him. I find that quite astounding, since she was supposedly one of the women who regularly followed Jesus.

Jesus tells her to let go of him and to go and tell his "brothers" (disciples?) that he has risen from the dead and that he will soon go to Heaven.

Afterwards, Jesus shows himself to several of his disciples. This is what happened afterwards:

Thomas would not believe that Jesus had really risen from the dead, so Jesus showed him his hands and his side.

Very interestingly, there really exists a "Gospel according to Thomas", an apocryphic gospel that is not recognized by the church. The gospel exists, however, and it appears to be as old as the other gospels. In the Gospel according to Thomas, Jesus is seen only as a teacher. Jesus does not perform any miracles in this gospel, and he isn't crucified and doesn't rise from the dead. Personally I believe that it was well known among people who lived at the time of early Christianity that the Gospel of Thomas existed, and that it said nothing about Jesus' resurrection from the dead. The story of how Thomas meets the risen Christ is not told in Mark, Matthew or Luke, which is why I believe that it never happened. Instead, this little episode in the Gospel of John would be John's way of saying that Thomas knew very well that Jesus had risen from the dead, but he just wouldn't admit it. Or to put it more bluntly: I believe that John made up the story about Thomas to bring home a point.

The Gospel of John continues like this:

Fascinating. Jesus shows himself to Peter, Thomas and several other disciples. Thomas, at least, has definitely seen the risen Jesus before, at least according to the Gospel of John. Yet no one recognizes Jesus. They don't recognize his visual appearance and they don't recognize his voice, even though they must know Jesus so well, and even though they have seen his risen self before.

Isn't it possible that Jesus has already been "transformed" in preparation for his ascent to Heaven? But if so, he doesn't look particularly beautiful or heavenly. His appearance has not been "improved". He just looks and sounds like another person altogether - well, he must do that, since his closest disciples don't recognize him. To me this is utterly, utterly weird and totally improbable.

The Gospel of John ends by saying that the author of the Gospel was himself one of Jesus' disciples. Apart from that testimony, however, the Gospel of John doesn't say that any of the disciples "proclaimed loudly" that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Terry, you asked this question:

Why didn't the Jews take the body of Jesus out of the grave, tie it to a wagon and parade it around Jerusalem? I have already answered that - because they would have to enter the grave of Jesus, which was an unclean place. And it could be that I am wrong, but I can't remember any stories from the Bible where Jewish people batter and humiliate bodies of enemies that are already dead. (The only possible exception would be the humiliation of the dead body of the hated Queen Jezebel - it is typical, perhaps, that it would be the dead body of a woman that was so humiliated. Still, the defamation of her dead body lasted very briefly, while the flagrant mocking of the dead body of Jesus that you described would be a very protracted affair, and it would deeply shock all religious Jews.)

And I certainly can't remember that anyone in the Bible ever goes into a grave to steal a body out of that grave to display that once-buried body in public.

It seems certain, however, that the body of Jesus disappeared from his tomb. As for what happened to his body afterwards, we don't know. No court of law could rule that Jesus had risen from the dead based on the evidence presented by the Gospels.

Terry, you also wrote:

The Gospels say little about what the disciples did after Jesus had been resurrected. I know that the Acts of the Apostles says a lot more, but I have a confession to make - as I was reading the Bible, the Acts bored me almost out of my skull (and it could be that I reacted so negatively because I was deadly tired of people who tried to save me with religious lectures), so, frankly, I only skimmed the Acts. Therefore I don't know too much about it.

Obviously, however, Peter strongly believed that Jesus had risen, and a few other disciples also helped spread that message. I'm not accusing them of running a con game, Terry. I'm not accusing them of being crazy either, although I do think that Peter had a habit of having all sorts of weird visions or hallucinations. Therefore I don't think that Peter would have made a very good impression on a modern court of law.

But the thing is that I'm convinced that many of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries really believed in the resurrection of Jesus, except that they believed in it in a different way that almost all modern Christians believe in it. The way I see it, those of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries who believed in the resurrection of Jesus didn't do it because they thought that Jesus was their personal saviour. No, I'm convinced that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus because it meant that the Day of Judgement was imminent. The Jews were waiting for the Day of Judgement, when every Jew who had ever lived would be judged by the Lord and would either go into the Kingdom of Heaven or into the burning Gehenna. Jesus himself had certainly preached, over and over, that the Kingdom of Heaven was approaching. But first God must judge ever Jew, so that everyone could be sent either to "heaven" or to "hell".

I said before that the Jews regarded the soul as inseparable from the body. Therefore, if God was to judge those Jews who were already dead, he had to raise them from the dead so he could judge them. The dead had to literally rise out of their graves, walking somewhat like zombies into the land of the living, leaving their burial strips and burial cloth behind them in their vacated resting places.

The thing is that the dead had to be resurrected in order to be judged, and they had to rise with their bodies as well as with their souls. Otherwise they couldn't be judged, and the Kingdom of Heaven couldn't come.

This is what you can read in the Book of Daniel, chapter 12, verse 2:

So the Book of Daniel doesn't say that everybody who is dead will be raised in order to be judged, but it does say that multitudes will be raised from their graves. Small difference.

Why do the gospels of Luke and John tell us that Jesus took pains to prove to his disciples that he had risen with his body? The way I see it, Luke and John did this because they, too, waited for the time when everybody (or multitudes) would rise out of their graves to be judged by God on the Day of Judgement, so that those who had lived their lives according to the wishes of God could find their reward in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I believe that this was the message of the first disciples, Terry. They told people around them that the resurrection of the dead that would come before the Judgement Day had already started, and Jesus was just the first person that had been resurrected, so that he was really just "the first little pebble that had started rolling down the hill of resurrection", so to speak. Soon there would be an avalanche of other "resurrectees". This would have been a very powerful message to the Jewish population of that time, much more so than a message that Jesus had risen from the dead because he was everybody's personal saviour.

When the story of Jesus was "exported" to the Roman Empire, the story took on a different meaning. The Romans strongly believed that the body and soul were perfectly separable. To them it wasn't necessary to have people rise out of their graves for a resurrection to take place. To them life after death could be something that wasn't visible to people on the Earth, since it was only the dead people's souls that rose from the dead to the invisible and otherworldly Kingdom of Heaven. No Judgement Day was strictly necessary, since everyone went to their appointed place immediately after death. Now Jesus became the necessary means of gaining entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, since Paul insisted that you couldn't come to Heaven without believing in Jesus as your personal saviour (yes, I know that the Gospel of John says the same thing).

Anyway, by the time that Christianity had really gained a foothold in the Roman Empire, it would have been obvious that dead people weren't rising out of their graves all over the place. So the resurrection of Jesus, if it had happened at all, must mean something different to the Roman Christians than it had meant to the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus.

To the Roman Christians it would have been easy and alluring to latch onto the idea that Jesus was literally the Son of God. To the Jews, this idea would be anathema, yet the idea of Jesus' specialness originated with them. The Jews were waiting not only for "a general resurrection" and the Judgement Day and the Kingdom of Heaven, they also waited for the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to be the great new Jewish King who would liberate Jerusalem and the Children of Israel:

The Messiah that the Jews were waiting for had to be a descendant of David, and therefore it would be difficult and embarrassing for Jesus to claim this title for himself. The reason why Jesus wouldn't qualify as the Messiah was that those who knew his family regarded him as a person born out of wedlock. This meant that his paternity was unknown, so that he couldn't be generally accepted by the Jewish people as a "son of David". But the idea that he might be the Messiah, the King that would liberate Jerusalem, nevertheless circulated among the Jews. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, there was a crowd of people waiting for him who cheered for him as if he was indeed the Messiah they had been waiting for:

Interestingly, "Hosanna" is a Hebrew expression that means "save". The crowd of people were cheering for Jesus, but they were also crying out to him to be the Messiah they were waiting for and to save them from the Romans.

But Jesus was hesitant to claim Messiah-hood for himself. He usually called himself the Son of Man instead. But he also referred to God as "Father". To the Jews, this would have meant that he acknowledged that God was the father of everyone and that God was a benevolent father who wanted to save his children.

Unlike the Jews, the Romans had no objections to the idea that Jesus might literally be the only Son of God. The Romans were used to the idea that gods could have children with human women, and Hercules, son of Zeus and a human woman, was the perfect example of a "son of a god" who carried out amazing feats of strength and heroism on the Earth. Please note that Hercules also "rose from the dead" and was taken into "the Kingdom of the Roman God Heaven" to live with the other Roman gods there. It was easy for the Romans to think of Jesus in much the same way as they thought of Hercules, except that Jesus, unlike Hercules, was the faithful ones' personal saviour. To the Jews, by contrast, Jesus couldn't possibly be the Son of God, since their God would never have children, and certainly not by a human woman. But to the Romans Jesus was the "Hercules" who died and rose from the dead and went to heaven, but unlike Hercules he did so in order to save the souls of those who believed in him. That is what the resurrection of Jesus would have meant to the Roman Christians.

Interestingly, the first Jewish believers in the risen Jesus were known as Nazarenes, because they believed in the resurrection of a man from Nazareth. As you can see, the most important fact about Jesus himself, apart from the fact that he was thought to have risen from the dead, was that he hailed from the town of Nazareth. That is not particularly heroic. But the first Romans who accepted the resurrection of Jesus were soon called Christians. "Christ" is the Latin translation of "Messiah", which means "The Anointed One". The Jews waited for a Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans here on this Earth, but no such Messiah had appeared. To the Roman Christians, however, Jesus was the Son of God who was also the Anointed One because he was everybody's personal saviour in the life that awaited them after death.

So all in all, Terry, I think that there is little or no evidence that Jesus ever rose from the dead for real, but there were strong reasons for his Jewish contemporaries as well as for the first Christians in Rome to believe that he had risen from the dead. Interestingly and somewhat ironically, I think that the reasons of the Jews and the Romans to believe in a mighty saviour were remarkably similar - their reasons had to do with their situations on the Earth. The Jews were an oppressed people who regarded their occupiers, the Romans, as tyrants, and they wanted a saviour who defeated the Romans for them. The Romans, obviuously, didn't want to have another people's saviour who would defeat them, the Romans! Instead they wanted a saviour who would guarantee the power of the Roman Empire, and Paul's Letter to the Romans all but promised them that the mighty power of the Roman Empire was God-given:

So if there is a Roman Empire, it is there because it has been established by God.

And the powerful backing that the mighty Roman Empire gave to Christianity once it had become the state religion of Rome in the fourth century explains why the story of the resurrection of Jesus could be told all over the world.

Ann

Terry,

After reading your post, I edited my definition of YEC up above. I hope it is more accurate now.

My own views:

I grew up being taught that evolution was not only true, but had been unequivocally proven by science to be true. I was in a program called “Advanced Studies” in High School, and I was taking college-level science courses. In college itself, I was a Biology major. I never once doubted the science of evolution. On the contrary, I was amazed at how knowledgeable and, really, incredibly intelligent, the scientists were, and especially at how much they could ascertain from the often sparse fossil evidence available to them.

When, as an adult, I became a Christian, I began attending a very liberal church which taught that although the Bible is “true”, some of these truths are found deep within fictional stories – parables and such - and that a perfect example of this is the creation story in Genesis. I became a theistic evolutionist.

Years later, I had my “emperor’s new clothes” moment. I was watching a video showing an artist’s rendition of a small animal up on a tree branch. About the size of a mouse, it had huge round eyes, striped fur, and a long tail. It was said to occupy a position on the evolutionary path leading up to humans, and described as “shy and nocturnal”. Yet, the only fossil evidence available for this particular animal is one solitary tooth, the size of a grain of rice. It was at that moment that the scales fell from my eyes. That was the moment I decided to look with a critical eye at everything I had been taught.

The more I study, the more ridiculous the theory of evolution becomes, and I mean that from a scientific point of view. Frankly, the discovery of the genetic code *should have* been the death knell for evolution. Now, scientists are discovering sub-routines within the master code. Amazing.

As for the poll, I did not know what option to pick. I no longer believe in evolution, so all options referencing that are out.

Unfortunately, the choice for Intelligent Design was defined in such a way that I could not, in all honestly, pick that option, either. I could not pick the option about believing in a 6-day creation 6,000 years ago, because I honestly do not know. I cannot rule it out, but I cannot say definitively that it is so. I’m still reading both sides on that argument (OEC vs. YEC).

I do believe in science, and I do believe God made the universe to be knowable. How ironic that today we are told that Christianity and science are at odds, when it was the conviction that God had created laws for nature just as He had laws for man, which led to the search to determine, in a systematic way, just what these laws of nature were. It is only in the recent past that evolutionists have redefined science in such a way that the greatest scientists ever known, the very pillars of modern science, if they were alive today, would be told that their work was not science at all. Evolution, on the other hand, *is* considered science, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because every scientific fallacy known to man is incorporated into the so-called “proof” of evolution.

Anywho… back to the poll. Because of the way the poll options were written, the scientific theory which best describes my beliefs was not included, but my personal, religious belief was. The only option on the poll, as written, that I can unequivocally say I believe to be true is that the Bible is the Word of God, and God never lies. So that was the answer I chose.

Regarding the circular argument about dating:
There are several methods of dating what you find in a stratum:
1) Going by well-known and common fossils (index fossils) which have been dated several times and can be pinpointed to a certain time. (Famous examples for this are the several thousand species of trilobites and ammonites.) So, if you find a rock with an unknown fossil side by side with a cerartarges trilobite (which is very distinctive), you can say two things about the rock: It's from a certain area in Morocco (which is where that trilobite lived, and that the fossil is from the Middle to Late Devonian which is when said trilobite lived.
2) Going by radiometric dating methods (which cannot always be used to date rock, as you and I already pointed out - see explanation below).
3) In sediments, it's pretty much possible to say which strata came before and which after one certain stratum. It's also possible to estimate from the material of the stratum in which way and in which amount of time it was formed.

So, to sum things up, you did what I've seen many a creationist do: Take a scientific statement and simplify (or, in many other cases, falsify) it out of all recognition to make it sound ridiculous.

Also, your example of the young volcanic rocks is nice, but it only proves what I already stated, that material from the core cannot be dated reliably using radiometric dating methods. Especially K-Ar dating cannot be done with volcanic rocks because magma contains gases, argon among them. So, not all of the argon within the sample must have been produced in situ by 40K decay, which means that the measurements cannot be correct. And just as an aside, K-Ar dating isn't supposed to be used for rocks younger than 100,000 years because of the long half-life of 40K.

Science is not only about how a method is applied to find out something, it's also about when that method can be applied to give a reliable result.

I also looked up uranium once again, and this is what I found:
1) You need to keep track of your zeros - 235U has a half life of 700,000,000 years, not 700,000 years. Still, the ratio of of 238U to 235U is too high (on the 238U part), so there must be other factors at work.
2) Both isotopes of uranium are still constantly produced at distinct rates from other radioactive isotopes. Although I could find some of the rates with the probability of exactly that type of reaction, I was too lazy too look up everything known about all the radioisotopes of the world (which is pretty much what I would have had to do), and I wasn't willing to go through the maths right now even if I had all the facts. It would have been pages of forumlas. Offer: You get me all the numbers and decay products, and I'll do the maths.

Vicky, believing every artist's impression is like believing every prophet telling you to repent because the world will end tomorrow (at the latest). Also, taking what you see on TV for truth - well, we all have seen a flying man on TV. We've also seen him shoot beams from his eyes (which is according to a theory of how our eyes work that has been formulated by the ancient Greeks, and proven incorrect I-don't-know-when, only that it was waaaay before Superman.) TV is not the most trustworthy of sources at the best of times.

Your response to this and my previous post indicates to me that we clearly are not communicating, so I think it best to just leave it at you believe in evolution and I do not.


(Edited by me after giving more thought to my original response.)

Oh, my goodness Mellie, that link you gave me about creationist astronomy!!!!

The creationist physicist D. Russel Humphreys makes this argument:

The Earth is near the center of the universe! Right!

And there is more. Since the Earth, according to Humphreys, is near the center of the universe, we are also at the bottom of an enormous cosmic gravity well:

And where gravity is stronger, time passes more slowly. So, since the gravity would be enormous on the Earth, since we are at the center of the universe, time would pass incomparably more slowly here than in most of the universe:

So because of the humongous gravity here on the Earth, only a week went by on the Earth while billions of years passed out in the cosmos. So the light from the stars didn't get here until the fourth day, the same day that God created all the stars! Of course, the Bible tells us that God created not only all the other stars but also our own Sun on the fourth day, after the Earth was already a green and living planet full of herbs and fruit trees! But I guess that the gravity of the Earth was so overwhelming that the light from the Sun, eight light minutes from the Earth, took four days to reach us?

As for the statement that the Earth is very near the center of the universe so that gravity is much higher here than anywhere else in the cosmos, please take a look at this picture of a distant galaxy cluster:



At the two o'clock position in this picture you can see an enormous elliptical galaxy, a so called class D galaxy. This monster galaxy is surrounded by a swarm of other, smaller galaxies, all of them yellowish in color. But you can also see a number of long thin drawn-out lines or arcs. The long arcs are galaxies far in the background of the cluster of yellow galaxies. (The background galaxies are mostly either blue, because they are full of extremely hot young stars, or red, because they are very distant and have had their light severely reddened by the stretching of the expanding universe.)

But why do the background galaxies have such weird, drawn-out shapes? The reason why they look like that is that the light they sent out has been distorted and "bent" by the enormously deep cosmic "gravity well" of the massive yellow galaxy cluster in front of them. Einstein predicted that background galaxies would have their visual appearance bent into long arcs by a massive foreground cluster, so the arcs you can see in this picture beautifully confirm Einstein's thory of relativity, and they also bear witness to the enormous mass and gravity of the foreground cluster.

Do you still think that the Earth is not only at the center of the universe, but that the cosmic gravity is higher near the Earth than anywhere else in the cosmos?

Ann

Anyway, if we are sitting at the rock bottom of the deepest gravity well in the universe, shouldn't all other galaxies have their apparent shapes bent and distorted when their light fell into our gravity well? Surely we could never see symmetrical and undistorted galaxies in the sky as seen from the Earth?

M74, a symmetrical galaxy.

Surely symmetrical-looking galaxies like M74 are impossible, if we are sitting at the bottom of the deepest gravity well of the universe?

Bottom of a well

Things do look different from the bottom of a well!

Ann

I'm in the Intelligent Design camp. I honestly believe that evolution has, and still does, occur in the world. But I believe that evolution occurs at the command of God.