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Midrash and the Gospels

Anyone who has done much reading of certain modern skeptics has probably come across the claim that the Gospels are an example of midrash. This line of argument has gained some popularity among the Jesus-myth crowd, fueled by internet atheists masquerading as scholars. So for example Robert Price has a lengthy exposition on what he claims are examples of midrash from each of the four Gospels. One of the complaints from actual scholars about many of these sorts of arguments is that the one making the argument spends little or no time defining midrash or explaining how they are using the term. In the view of critics like Price the Gospel writers read the Old Testament and then made up stories to conform to certain elements in the Scriptures. The implicit view of midrash here is one that was in vogue among earlier critics like Julius Wellhausen but has since been discredited: namely that midrash is a synonym for legend or fable. But this isn’t the case.

Jacob Neusner and other Jewish scholars define midrash as essentially a synonym for exegesis, or interpretation, done by Jewish interpreters on the Hebrew Scriptures. As such, it encompasses a wide range of literary practices and forms, including everything from translations of the Old Testament, to apocalyptic readings of the prophets, to allegorical interpretations. But the idea that the Gospels are essentially midrash has nothing to support it, and in fact there are no examples in Jewish literature of anything like the Gospels, nor of the practice of simply making up stories as some sort of creative interaction with the Old Testament. R.T. France writes in his study on Jewish historiography that “it would certainly be going far beyond the evidence to speak of the imaginative creation of stories out of scripture as a characteristic of any such approach [ie. Jewish historiography], particularly with reference to recent, non-biblical events.”

This is not to say that there might not be midrashic elements within the Gospels. For example, places where the Gospel writers quote an Old Testament passage and then cite an event from the life of Jesus as fulfillment of that Scripture would qualify as midrash. But this does not imply or even hint that the event itself did not actually happen. Indeed in many cases, at least by modern standards, it looks like the Gospel writers have stretched the meaning of the original OT passage in a way that makes it highly unlikely that they created the event to fit the passage.

One example is when Matthew narrates the flight of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to Egypt until after Herod’s death and then writes that this fulfilled Hosea 11:1, “out of Egypt I called my son.” The original context of Hosea was in reference to the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. Price asserts with no evidence that Matthew saw the word “son,” decided it must have been fulfilled as part of some “more or less vague savior myth,” and then made up a story to go along with. This he calls midrashic, even though this does not correspond to anything in Jewish midrash. It is also a stretch to think that early Christian interpreters would have felt the need for some fulfillment of Hosea 11:1, since it was in fact a reference to something that already happened. Instead this is an example of typology, where something from the Old Testament is used as a type of something in the New. In this case Matthew is viewing Israel as a type of Jesus. The idea of fulfillment is not a simple prediction, like “Hosea predicted that Christ would be called out of Egypt,” it is a deeper understanding of how God works in history.

Neusner, writing as a Jewish writer, notes some of the midrashic elements in Matthew but also notes the distinctive of Christianity. In other Jewish midrash, the Old Testament text always stands at the center as the organizational principle. With the Gospels, it is the biography of Jesus that is central. As Neusner insightfully writes, “the biography of the person under discussion serves as the architectonic principle of the compilation of exegeses into a single statement of meaning. . . . No rabbinic composition in antiquity presents the life of an individual person as the principle of editorial cogency, whether of scriptural exegeses or legal teachings, and the uniqueness of Christianity in its Judaic context is seen in these simple compositions of a highly formalized character in Matthew’s Gospel.”

How or why did the Gospel writers come up with this remarkable innovation? The answer is provided by Richard Burridge, whose highly influential book, What Are the Gospels?, helped to sway scholarly opinion to the consensus view today that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greek biography. Burridge writes that this is itself a theological statement. First he notes that there are no examples of biographies of any other Jewish rabbi comparable to the Gospels even though many noteworthy rabbis lived in that time. For the early followers of Jesus, it was not the Torah (the Jewish law) that was central as it was for their Jewish contemporaries. Rather it was Christ himself as the embodiment and fulfillment of the Torah. They were thus forced “to move out from the Jewish tradition of stories and anecdotes to use a Greek genre of continuous biographical narrative. The actual writing of a gospel was a Christological claim in itself.”

So the Gospels are not examples of midrash, and midrash does not mean “a story that someone made up based on inspiration from the Old Testament.” But the modern internet skeptic still gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that they can talk about midrash and be sure that the vast majority of their readers have no idea what they are talking about and thus cannot refute their claims. Meanwhile, actual scholars are too busy with real scholarship to bother with such complete nonsense.

Comments (46)

Seems like there is simply too many examples of the apostles declaring themselves eyewitnesses to Our Lord and His miracles and Resurrection, staking their reputations and even lives on it. Calling midrash seems like a dodge.

Scott,

Calling midrash seems like a dodge.

That's one way of putting it! When I first came across this claim, I didn't know what to make of it because I hadn't studied in the area. When I recently had the opportunity to do some in-depth study on it, I was quite astounded to see how far out to lunch the skeptics really were on it. But since most of their audience is totally ignorant about it, they can get away with saying just about anything.

Another way of putting it: to call the Gospels midrash is pure balderdash.

Nice post, John. Always useful to clear up the devices of these tinpot Internet fulminators.

Robert Price is merely an 'Internet atheist' posing as a real scholar? He has two PhDs and was considered scholarly enough to be one of the contributors to The Historical Jesus: Five Views. William Lane Craig acknowledged Price as a scholar in their debate, even if he vigorously disputed Price's conclusions.

I too suspect that Price is wrong in his conclusions but to refer to him as a non-scholar simply because you disagree with him is the height of arrogance. Do you have 2 PhDs? By all means argue against his conclusions, but you start your post with a degree of discourtesy that just makes you look small and undermines everything else you say in the post. You may be right on the midrash point, but it is hard to take you seriously when you start your argument by being a total jerk.

it is hard to take you seriously when you start your argument by being a total jerk.

Sort of like it's hard for me to take your comment seriously with such an absurd overreaction. This is a blog, not a peer-reviewed journal.

I do, however, stand by my comments. Yes, Price was a contributor to that volume, and received some pretty searching criticism from the other contributors. And honestly, I don't care how many Ph.D.s someone has, Jesus mythicism is not real scholarship.

"Jesus mythicism is not real scholarship"

Okay, I defy you then to address my analysis of the Gospels, which I use as the basis for concluding that Jesus never existed.

Here is my latest work on the subject:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/fictional_jesus.htm

If you don't feel like reading too much then skip to the section titled Creation of the Markan Narrative. Ironically, I would agree with you that the Gospel accounts are no midrash per se, though they may contain some elements of such. As I argue in my works, the Gospel called Mark was originally written as a fictional story, and everyone else simply copied from it. This is, IMO, provable beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the case I make in the above link.

See also my books:
Jesus - A Very Jewish Myth: http://www.lulu.com/shop/rg-price/the-gospel-of-mark-as-reaction-and-allegory/ebook/product-17513519.html
The Gospel of Mark as Reaction and Allegory: http://www.lulu.com/shop/rg-price/the-gospel-of-mark-as-reaction-and-allegory/ebook/product-17513519.html

And no, I'm not Robert M. Price, I'm R.G. Price, a different person (with no Ph.D.)

And honestly, I don't care how many Ph.D.s someone has, Jesus mythicism is not real scholarship.

Precisely.

R.G. Price,

Okay, I defy you then to address my analysis of the Gospels, which I use as the basis for concluding that Jesus never existed.

Okay, let's start with your claim that "Every single narrative about Jesus, canonical and non-canonical, descends directly or indirectly from the Gospel called Mark, making this fictional story the single point of origin for all belief in a real human Jesus."

Problem #1 is that there is no evidence that any of Paul's writings came from Mark, especially since many of Paul's letters were probably written earlier than Mark. Paul's letters contain at least 15 historical facts about Jesus that are corroborated in the Gospel accounts. Skeptics sometimes falsely allege that Paul says nothing about a historical Jesus, but this is false. The amount that Paul says is probably what we would expect since he wasn't writing a Gospel, but letters to churches who already knew the basic story. And speaking of basic story, that takes us to . . .

Problem #2. Even skeptical scholars acknowledge that the creedal formula in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 was circulated among the churches in the mid-30s, long before Mark was written. 1 Cor. was written in the mid-50s, and he was already reminding them of this information which he had delivered to them previously. But more than that he reminded them that these facts about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection were "of first importance," which meant that for Paul this was an essential element of the Gospel message that he preached and likely something he had received very soon after his conversion, which may have been as early as 34 or 35 AD. Again, Mark could not have been the basis for this.

Problem #3. The introduction to Luke's Gospel indicates that many had drawn up accounts of the events around Jesus' life and that they had been handed down by eyewitnesses. The evidence for eyewitness testimony in Luke's writings (Luke and Acts) is extensive and pervasive. While Mark was almost certainly one of the sources for Luke, it was not the only source. Luke and Matthew appear to share a source in common besides Mark (sometimes referred to as Q), and Luke also has some unique material. Mark was not the basis for those materials.

Problem #4. John's Gospel is entirely independent of the Synoptics, and evidently comes from an independent tradition which also affirms eyewitness testimony, and which likewise enjoys substantial internal and external support for that testimony.

Problem #5. The claim that extrabiblical sources were dependent on Mark is simply nonsensical, but even if you claim that they were based on other traditions which were based on a fictional Mark narrative, it's still nonsense. I'll just give the examples of Tacitus and Lucian. Tacitus is considered to be the greatest Roman historian, and was a member of the Senate. Lucian wrote the book (literally) on "How to Write History," including use of good sources and so forth. Both Tacitus and Lucian held Christians in low regard, so neither of them would have been predisposed to simply taking the word of the Christians about the events of Jesus' life and death and treating them as historical if they did not have some good reason to do so. Both Tacitus and Lucian affirm that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities. It is not without reason that historians consider the crucifixion of Jesus to be an indisputable historical fact. I could go more into why the crucifixion itself also substantially supports the general shape of the Gospel narratives, but that's a bit off topic.

I could go on, but these are the first five major problems that I see with your underlying claim. The weight of the evidence is entirely against your thesis. The only way to support such a position is to explain away all of the evidence, but that isn't how history works. You don't start with your theory and then explain away all of the evidence, you start with the evidence and follow it wherever it leads. It does not lead to the conclusion that Jesus did not exist.

Oh, dear, it's the eohippus theory of Mark combined with Jesus mythicism. What a mess. Btw, undesigned coincidences among the gospels make the eohippus view of Mark as the one source on which *even the synoptics* are all dependent clearly false. Luke has undesigned coincidences with John, for example, entirely independent of Mark. There are also confirmations unique to Matthew and confirmations in which Matthew and Mark on the one side intersect with John's gospel on the other.

Of course, adding in mythicism is just taking it out into crazy-land, but even the notion of everybody else just sort of "descending" or "developing" from Mark is false in itself.

Lydia,

I'm glad you brought that up. I thought about throwing in a point about undesigned coincidences, but all of my work in that area has been on coincidences between Paul's letters and Acts, so not much help with the present discussion. But your points are pertinent and I know you and Tim have done a lot on that also.

Another way of putting it: to call the Gospels midrash is pure balderdash.

Btw Paul, I love this line. If it was Facebook I would have clicked "like"!

Lydia, I remember you or your husband having written a piece or two on undesigned coincidences in the Gospel accounts. Would you mind pointing out where those are available?

@John Fraser

You clearly haven't even read the material.

"Problem #1 is that there is no evidence that any of Paul's writings came from Mark"

I never claimed such. In fact the opposite. The writer of Mark was clearly familiar with the letters of Paul and paraphrased them repeatedly. Indeed the "teachings of Jesus" are actually the teachings of Paul.

"Problem #2. Even skeptical scholars acknowledge that the creedal formula in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 was circulated among the churches in the mid-30s, long before Mark was written."

There is no evidence of anything from 30 CE, but that's fine anyway, because I state in my work that these passages in Mark came from the letters of Paul.

"Problem #3. The introduction to Luke's Gospel indicates that many had drawn up accounts of the events around Jesus' life and that they had been handed down by eyewitnesses. "

Please read my actual content. If you have objections to it, then cite the passage you are objecting to. I address these issues directly.

"Problem #4. John's Gospel is entirely independent of the Synoptics, and evidently comes from an independent tradition which also affirms eyewitness testimony, and which likewise enjoys substantial internal and external support for that testimony."

Again, read my actual content. It is easily provable that John is dependent on Mark, as I show.

"Problem #5. The claim that extrabiblical sources were dependent on Mark is simply nonsensical,"

Again...

If you want to object to something then quote the passage from the link you are referring to, don't just make up a bunch of strawmen.

R.G. Price,

You clearly haven't even read the material.

I pretty much stopped after your claim about Mark.

I never claimed such. In fact the opposite. The writer of Mark was clearly familiar with the letters of Paul and paraphrased them repeatedly. Indeed the "teachings of Jesus" are actually the teachings of Paul.

That kind of contradicts your claim that Mark was the start of the whole thing then, doesn't it?

But looking at your argument in favor of the author of Mark being familiar with Paul's letters, I don't even know what to say. Are you serious? You say, "In the Gospel called Mark we find that the three main "disciples" are Peter, James and John (In Mark 3 we are told that Simon is Peter). It "just so happens" that according to Paul, the leaders of the Jesus cult in Israel were Peter, James and John."

This is supposed to be evidence that Mark read Paul's letters? That would be like saying that the fact that two sources on Alexander the Great mention that he had four generals named Ptolemy, Seleucus, Cassander, and Lysimachus, proves that one of the sources copied off of the other. As opposed to, say, evidence that Alexander really did have four generals by those names!

When scholars present evidence that some author has read or been influenced by another, they try to give actual evidence - like verses and passages that are word-for-word the same, that kind of thing. It's how we check for plagiarism today, but in those days they didn't have footnotes so it was a common practice.

You try to give a couple of arguments along those lines, but they completely fail. For example, you say that these passage from Mark and Colossians are evidence of borrowing:

Mark: "Then he said to them, 'The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.'"

Colossians: "Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ."

The only similarity between these verses is the appearance of the word sabbath, except that Paul says sabbaths in the plural. There is nothing in Colossians about the Son of Man being lord of the sabbath or anything remotely like that. The other example I saw was equally bad. To be blunt, when you make an argument like the above and claim that this is evidence that Mark borrowed from Paul, that is an argument that would not be accepted by any credible scholar. It is simply an atrocious argument, and I think I'm being as kind as I can be.

There is no evidence of anything from 30 CE, but that's fine anyway, because I state in my work that these passages in Mark came from the letters of Paul.

Well, yes there is evidence of something from the 30s (not 30, but between 30-40), namely the early creeds which are embedded in Paul's letters in many different places and which we can tell stylistically and linguistically are from earlier sources. But just stating that something in Mark came from Paul doesn't make it so! The testimony of the early church is that Mark came from the preaching of Peter. But I know of no argument that Mark was familiar with any of Paul's letters and you certainly haven't give me any reason to think that you have one. In fact the consensus is that not even Luke had Paul's letters when he wrote his Gospel, which makes the undesigned coincidences between Acts and Paul's letters all the more remarkable, and strong confirmation that Luke's two-part work was based on eyewitness testimony as he said.

Please read my actual content. If you have objections to it, then cite the passage you are objecting to. I address these issues directly.

Tell you what: you explain to me in summary form how your argument refutes what I have written. Honestly, from what I've seen in just a few paragraphs I have no reason to spend any more time on your article. I don't even know who you are, except that you say you don't have a Ph.D. I happen to be working on one, and so I need a reason to add anything like your material to my reading list.

Again, read my actual content. It is easily provable that John is dependent on Mark, as I show.

Again, please present in summary form your argument to the effect that John is dependent upon Mark, contrary to the virtually uniform opinion of New Testament scholarship of every theological persuasion.

Again...

Again . . .

If you want to object to something then quote the passage from the link you are referring to, don't just make up a bunch of strawmen.

I have presented my objections to what I have seen so far, and I'm sorry to tell you that I am quite unimpressed. What I have seen is quite shoddy. I really would need to see something a lot stronger to make me think it's worth my time to look at any of the rest.

R.G. Price,

It just occurred to me one other problem with your argument about Peter, James and John. The James that Paul is talking about is not the same person as the apostle by that name, James son of Zebedee. Paul is referring to James the brother of Jesus. Mark mentions that Jesus had a brother named James (as does Josephus incidentally - did he copy off of Mark too, do you think?), but he isn't a leader in the church or one of the disciples. So not only does your argument fail on its face, closer analysis is even worse for it.

Bernardus and John, Looking around I realize that the larger number of posts and recordings that Tim and I have put out there on the web on undesigned coincidences are indeed on Acts and the Pauline epistles more often than the gospels, though Tim frequently speaks to audiences on the latter.

At this link the first mp3 is a talk by Tim on undesigned coincidences in the gospels.

http://www.apologetics315.com/2012/11/audio-resources-by-tim-mcgrew.html

This book by JJ Blunt has a huge section on undesigned coincidences in the gospels. A few of the ones Blunt gives are based on errors or real textual variants. For example, I gather he is mistaken to make a big deal about the difference between _a_ ship and _the_ ship in one of them, "the second sabbath after the first," which he uses in one, appears to be merely a scribal error, and a few others like that. But the argument is cumulative, and Blunt has a lot of great material:

https://ia601406.us.archive.org/0/items/undesignedcoinci1850blun/undesignedcoinci1850blun.pdf

I am currently tabulating all the gospel undesigned coincidences that I know of that I consider to be good by precisely which gospels they involve (including different versions in the synoptics). In doing this I'm noting that there are a handful for which one side is unique to either Mark or Matthew. There are more that are unique to Luke, and many for John.

Besides undesigned coincidences there are many interesting and relevant wording variants among the gospels which argue for independent sourcing. For example, the descriptions of Joseph of Arimathea after the crucifixion, while in no way contradictory, are a little different in _each_ gospel, including the synoptics. There is an undesigned coincidence there that is unique to Mark (Mark says that he went in "boldly" and asked Jesus' body, without further explanation, and John explains this by saying that he had previously been a disciple in secret for fear). But beyond this, each gospel just has something a little different about him. E.g. Matthew alone states explicitly that he was rich and that the tomb was his own.

I am told that there is more discussion of UC's with the possibility of some additional ones in the gospels in the interview with Frank Turek (third item down on the apologetics315 page).

I wonder if the midrash argument isn't a backhanded compliment regarding the rich theology and coherency of the scriptures. Instead of combing the text for alleged contradictions and attacking the gospel writers as uneducated dolts, the atheist has done a 180 and declared the whole thing to be a brilliantly concocted fiction because of how intricate and Christological its message is.

GW,

the atheist has done a 180 and declared the whole thing to be a brilliantly concocted fiction because of how intricate and Christological its message is.

Your comment reminds me of a quote from Richard Pervo who tried (without success) to argue that Acts was historical fiction partly because of the tension in the results of form criticism that produced a Luke who was "bumbling and incompetent as a historian yet brilliant and creative as an author." Of course, the reason he was considered incompetent as a historian is because all of those stories he included in his work just obviously couldn't have been true - starting with the conclusion and working backwards! However, the evidence shows not only that the Gospels are generically Greek biographies, but the historical evidence shows that Luke was just as excellent of an historian as he was a writer. William Ramsay declared Luke to be a historian of the first rank because of his archaeological research that confirmed even minute details in his accounts over a wide swath of the Roman Empire and a period of 30 years in Acts.

Thank you, Lydia.

In regards to the burial of Jesus it should be pointed out that the narrator of Mark had a strong motivation to present his hero Jesus as receiving a noble rather than a shameful burial, consistent with tendencies in ancient biography.

As for the burial account itself let's start with Joseph of Arimathea.

Mark says he was a respected member of the Council (Sanhedrin). Matthew and John turn Joseph into a "disciple" of Jesus. Matthew says that he laid him in his own tomb and Luke 23:53/John 19:41 notes that it was a tomb "Where no one had ever been laid." All of these are later Haggadic additions to the oldest Gospel Mark. Mark has the body laid in "a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock." Matthew 27:60 has "hewn in the rock." And Luke 23:53 has "rock-hewn tomb."

These are all apologetic attempts to show that Jesus had an honorable burial as opposed to a dishonorable one.

It is extremely improbable that a respected member of the Sanhedrin, which just demanded that Pilate have Jesus killed, would concern himself with the body of a man condemned and executed as a criminal messianic pretender - the King of the Jews.

Do you think a "distinguished councillor" would climb up the cross himself to get a dead body down or is it more likely he had servants do it?

Most crucified criminals were left on the cross to rot then later thrown into a common criminals grave. This was in accordance with the Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5. Therefore, we shall infer this is most likely what happened to Jesus' body.

Moreover, the tradition looks as though it has been invented by a literalistic interpretation of Isaiah 53.9a (“He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death”). Other literalistic interpretations of Hebrew parallelism as though they were twofold prophecies of Jesus are evident in Matthew 21.5 (cf. Zechariah 9: two donkeys!); John 19.23-24 (cf. Psalm 22.18: two different treatments of clothing versus garments!); and Acts 4.25-27 (cf. Psalm 1: two different rulers!).

Expert, if Mark were more concerned with Jesus' honor than the truth then surely his death would have been more honorable as well. Jesus died alone, broken, humble, deserted by God, and shamefully as a common criminal.

Interestingly, we have no evidence that Mark, Luke or Matthew was thinking of Isaiah 53 when reporting on Joseph of Arimathea. None report that this burial was done to "fulfill the scripture" or to "fulfill what the prophet had spoken" as they had elsewhere. None attributed any significance to the burial beyond it being done for sabbatarian purposes.

But by appealing to contrivance you're left with a dilemma you may not realize. Either the account was invented for the purpose of convincing Jews that Jesus is Messiah, but in a subtle way that would only appeal to those learned and devout enough to link the story to Isa 53:9; or if the account is true then it is a piece of evidence which makes the Resurrection hypothesis more compelling since now Isa 53:9 becomes fulfilled prophecy.

Pert, (I'll just call you that for short to compensate for the self-serving moniker that you have chosen)

In regards to the burial of Jesus it should be pointed out that the narrator of Mark had a strong motivation to present his hero Jesus as receiving a noble rather than a shameful burial, consistent with tendencies in ancient biography.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Do you mean that in every instance in ancient biography when the subject was recorded as having received an honorable burial, they actually received a dishonorable one? Or that every sympathetic figure in ancient biographies was falsely reported as receiving an honorable burial? If that's your claim, what's the basis for it? If that isn't your claim, then how is this anything other than baloney?

All of these are later Haggadic additions to the oldest Gospel Mark.

No, I don't think so. For starters, there is no evidence of midrash ever being used on non-canonical texts and Mark could not have been considered canonical by the time the later Gospels were written, a problem that plagued Robert Gundry's theory of Matthew. Furthermore the consensus of scholarship is that John is independent of the Synoptics, and there is certainly nothing to suggest that John has made any use of Mark. Also, the Passion narratives of all four Gospels show the most indications of independence from one another. But you have attempted to make a bare assertion here with no evidence, and that won't fly.

These are all apologetic attempts to show that Jesus had an honorable burial as opposed to a dishonorable one.

You haven't actually given any reason to think that.

Do you think a "distinguished councillor" would climb up the cross himself to get a dead body down or is it more likely he had servants do it?

I guess I don't see that what a 21st-century person thinks was likely in the first century based on pure speculation constitutes much of an argument. Actually, if the story was just made up and it was such an unlikely scenario as you claim, then why wouldn't Mark have made up the story with Joseph's servants taking the body down instead of having the distinguished counselor do it? It seems to me that your argument actually points towards authenticity through the criterion of embarrassment if your supposition is actually correct.

Most crucified criminals were left on the cross to rot then later thrown into a common criminals grave. This was in accordance with the Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5. Therefore, we shall infer this is most likely what happened to Jesus' body.

The problem with your inference is that you are only including the prior probability. I am happy to stipulate that most crucified criminals were thrown into a common grave, and that therefore the prior probability points towards this happening to Jesus also. However, that prior probability can be overturned by evidence in a specific case. To illustrate what I mean, most people are right-handed. Therefore my youngest son is probably right-handed. However, I have watched him write and throw things, always using his left hand. So the evidence actually says he is left-handed, contrary to the probability that he is right-handed. This mistake of confusing prior with posterior probability is one that crops up quite a bit among skeptics I've noticed. Getting back to the burial, we have in fact independent testimony which can be shown to have come from eyewitnesses that Jesus received an honorable burial. There is no evidence whatsoever of him being thrown into a common grave, and if that had happened to him it seems more likely that somebody would have come forward to contradict the claims of the disciples.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Do you mean that in every instance in ancient biography when the subject was recorded as having received an honorable burial, they actually received a dishonorable one? Or that every sympathetic figure in ancient biographies was falsely reported as receiving an honorable burial? If that's your claim, what's the basis for it? If that isn't your claim, then how is this anything other than baloney?

Deified and revered figures were depicted as receiving a proper burial in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish literature. Try not to think too hard
about it.

No, I don't think so. For starters, there is no evidence of midrash ever being used on non-canonical texts and Mark could not have been considered canonical by the time the later Gospels were written, a problem that plagued Robert Gundry's theory of Matthew. Furthermore the consensus of scholarship is that John is independent of the Synoptics, and there is certainly nothing to suggest that John has made any use of Mark. Also, the Passion narratives of all four Gospels show the most indications of independence from one another. But you have attempted to make a bare assertion here with no evidence, and that won't fly.

Evidently you've never read any Roger David Aus. I was talking about the additions to the empty tomb story not the entire Passion narrative. Matthew and Luke copied Mark's account and added details. John's gospel was written at such a late date that the empty tomb story was probably well known by then.

You haven't actually given any reason to think that.

Mark says he was wrapped in a newly purchased linen cloth and has Joseph lay Jesus' body "in a tomb"- (it was illegal to buy things on the sabbath but maybe the author of Mark didn't realize that - oops). Anyway, Matthew 27:60 says that Joseph laid him in HIS OWN tomb and Luke 23:53/John 19:41 notes that it was a tomb "Where no one had ever been laid." Mark 15.47 has Jesus laid "in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock". Matthew 27:60 has the variant "in the tomb, which HE HAD hewn in the rock" - that means Joseph himself or workers commissioned by him hewed out the tomb which is not the case in Mark. All of this is constructed with the intent to show Jesus had an honorable burial just like figures held in high esteem such as Moses.

I guess I don't see that what a 21st-century person thinks was likely in the first century based on pure speculation constitutes much of an argument.

Ancient rich people owned slaves. Matthew in 27:57 says Joseph was rich. Now maybe you see why it's not "pure speculation" anymore.

Actually, if the story was just made up and it was such an unlikely scenario as you claim, then why wouldn't Mark have made up the story with Joseph's servants taking the body down instead of having the distinguished counselor do it? It seems to me that your argument actually points towards authenticity through the criterion of embarrassment if your supposition is actually correct.

Nice try. The criterion of embarrassment wouldn't apply to Joseph of Arimathea as Jesus was the main focus of the author. What you may think of Joseph's "embarrassing" act is irrelevant. The criterion of embarrassment is better employed when trying to distinguish authentic actions/sayings of Jesus from non-authentic ones.

By the way you ignored this:

"It is extremely improbable that a respected member of the Sanhedrin, which just demanded that Pilate have Jesus killed, would concern himself with the body of a man condemned and executed as a criminal messianic pretender - the King of the Jews."

Getting back to the burial, we have in fact independent testimony which can be shown to have come from eyewitnesses that Jesus received an honorable burial.

Oh you mean the account that Matthew and Luke copied (from Mark) and which John drew upon since the story was well known by that time? Sure...
And eyewitnesses huh? Yeah, that's rich. Is that why the Gospels are written in third person by people who never claim to be eyewitnesses and borrow huge chunks of their "eyewitness testimony" from someone else?

There is no evidence whatsoever of him being thrown into a common grave,

Acts 13:29
"When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb."

That fits perfectly well with him being thrown in a common criminal's tomb.

"And they did not bury them in the graves of their fathers, but two burying places were arranged for the Court (Beth Dīn), one for (those) stoned and (those) burned, and one for (those) beheaded and (those) strangled." (Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5)

The Tosefta 9:8-9 states that criminals may not be buried in their ancestral burying grounds but have to be placed in those of the court. This is justified by a quoting of the Psalm of David: "Do not gather my soul with the sinners" (26:9). In b. Sanhedrin 47a - "a wicked man may not be buried beside a righteous one."

The earliest Christians and the author of Mark could have seen in Jesus' body being placed in such a burial site the fulfillment of Isaiah 53:9 "And they (Sanhedrin) made his grave with the wicked and with the rich (Joseph of Arimathea) in his death."

and if that had happened to him it seems more likely that somebody would have come forward to contradict the claims of the disciples

Well, according to Acts they didn't start preaching until 7 weeks later. Good luck identifying a 7 week old corpse in a grave which no one knew the location of evidently, due to the fact that there was no mention of it until it was finally "discovered" in the 4th century by Constantine's mom.

Either the account was invented for the purpose of convincing Jews that Jesus is Messiah, but in a subtle way that would only appeal to those learned and devout enough to link the story to Isa 53:9; or if the account is true then it is a piece of evidence which makes the Resurrection hypothesis more compelling since now Isa 53:9 becomes fulfilled prophecy.

Yeah, except Isaiah 49:3 says the "Servant" was Israel (not Jesus) and that this "Servant" was said to live a long life and look on many of his children (Isaiah 53:10) which obviously doesn't fit the Jesus story at all, since he died young and childless, so these parts of the supposed "prophecy" are ignored. The selective nature of pesher interpretation allowed this kind of cherry-picking of the texts.

Deified and revered figures were depicted as receiving a proper burial in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish literature. Try not to think too hard about it.

You mean just ignore the fact that you have no evidence and haven't shown any cases where any notable figure was falsely reported to have received an honorable burial when in fact they were buried ignominiously? Yeah, I won't think too hard about it.

Evidently you've never read any Roger David Aus.

Aus' view of midrash in the Gospels is susceptible to the same critique as in my o.p., except that Aus also adds to the problem by using rabbinic materials which many scholars believe are much later than the Gospels. So I don't think his theories are any more promising than some others who have tried that route.

I was talking about the additions to the empty tomb story not the entire Passion narrative. Matthew and Luke copied Mark's account and added details.

The empty tomb story is part of the Passion narrative! But Matthew's account is actually quite a bit shorter than Mark's and the wording does not follow Mark nearly as closely as it does in other places. Luke in particular must have had at least one other source given his typical use of Mark, which is to follow him closely when he does follow him and if anything to omit details. And of course none of this touches on John.

Ancient rich people owned slaves. Matthew in 27:57 says Joseph was rich. Now maybe you see why it's not "pure speculation" anymore.

Heh. You would have to read my word quite tendentiously to think that I was questioning whether or not Joseph had servants. Try again, with a little more thought this time.

What you may think of Joseph's "embarrassing" act is irrelevant.

I wasn't the one who was saying it - you were! I was just saying that by your own theory, Mark should have written it with Joseph's servants taking the body down. But this is just hand waving on your part. Are you going to present a serious rebuttal or are you just wasting my time?

By the way you ignored this:

"It is extremely improbable that a respected member of the Sanhedrin, which just demanded that Pilate have Jesus killed, would concern himself with the body of a man condemned and executed as a criminal messianic pretender - the King of the Jews."

How do you figure I ignored it? At the risk of repeating myself, if you are correct then Mark would have been silly to make up a story like that. Try reading my response again and see if you get it the second time around.

And eyewitnesses huh? Yeah, that's rich. Is that why the Gospels are written in third person by people who never claim to be eyewitnesses and borrow huge chunks of their "eyewitness testimony" from someone else?

Well, to get you started I could refer you to Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. Mark and Luke were of course not eyewitnesses (except for those parts of Acts where Luke uses the first person), but I don't understand your point. Do you think that because something is written in the third person by someone else that it doesn't come from eyewitness testimony? Also, the earliest testimony on Mark is that it was written down by John Mark based on Peter's testimony, so it makes sense that Matthew and Luke would use his material. That also explains how Mark's gospel was so revered by the early church, which otherwise is completely inexplicable.

But yes, there is a copious amount of evidence for eyewitness testimony in the Gospels and Acts.

That fits perfectly well with him being thrown in a common criminal's tomb.

Heh. You do realize that Acts was written by the same author who wrote Luke, right?

Well, according to Acts they didn't start preaching until 7 weeks later. Good luck identifying a 7 week old corpse in a grave which no one knew the location of evidently, due to the fact that there was no mention of it until it was finally "discovered" in the 4th century by Constantine's mom.

I think you missed my point. If Jesus had been thrown into a common grave, people would have known about it. The complete absence of any other burial traditions or reports is a big hole in your theory. All you have is a bare assertion that the Gospel writers were copying off of Mark, ignoring the fact that John is an independent tradition, and the fact that the eyewitnesses were around to check. The way to do history is not to make up a theory based on nothing and then explain away all of the evidence, but that's what you have done.

You mean just ignore the fact that you have no evidence and haven't shown any cases where any notable figure was falsely reported to have received an honorable burial when in fact they were buried ignominiously?

We know that in the ancient world the disappearance of people's bodies was used as evidence for their heavenly assumption. The "missing body" motif was quite common in this time period. A Jewish example of the disappearance motif is found in the Testament of Job 39-40, where the bodies of Job's children disappear and are said to have experienced heavenly glorification.

There is also the Greek novel Callirhoe by Chariton, which dates from early to mid-first century, and has its hero Chaereas visiting the tomb of his recently dead wife, saying he "arrived at the tomb at daybreak" where he "found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright." Others are afraid to enter the tomb, but Chaereas goes in and finds his wife's body missing and concludes she has been taken up by the gods.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I won't think too hard about it.

I can tell.

Aus' view of midrash in the Gospels is susceptible to the same critique as in my o.p., except that Aus also adds to the problem by using rabbinic materials which many scholars believe are much later than the Gospels. So I don't think his theories are any more promising than some others who have tried that route.

He also uses a lot of sources older than the Gospels. Try reading "The Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, and the Death, Burial, and Translation of Moses in Judaic Tradition".

But Matthew's account is actually quite a bit shorter than Mark's and the wording does not follow Mark nearly as closely as it does in other places. Luke in particular must have had at least one other source given his typical use of Mark, which is to follow him closely when he does follow him and if anything to omit details. And of course none of this touches on John.

You would just have to prove that Matthew, Luke, and John did not inherit the empty tomb tradition from Mark. Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis are almost universally accepted. Other sources are irrelevant if they still took the original empty tomb motif from Mark and just added details to it. This is not multiple attestation. It's just the same story told in different ways.

How do you figure I ignored it? At the risk of repeating myself, if you are correct then Mark would have been silly to make up a story like that. Try reading my response again and see if you get it the second time around.

It wouldn't have been silly if Mark was creating a narrative that showed Jesus fulfilling Isaiah 53:9. This was one of the main points I made in the first place. Seems when I bring up pretty clear examples of midrash (Matthew 21.5 (cf. Zechariah 9: two donkeys!); John 19.23-24 (cf. Psalm 22.18: two different treatments of clothing versus garments!); and Acts 4.25-27 (cf. Psalm 1: two different rulers!) - they get ignored. That's interesting for a post that's supposed to be about midrash.

Well, to get you started I could refer you to Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. Mark and Luke were of course not eyewitnesses (except for those parts of Acts where Luke uses the first person), but I don't understand your point. Do you think that because something is written in the third person by someone else that it doesn't come from eyewitness testimony? Also, the earliest testimony on Mark is that it was written down by John Mark based on Peter's testimony, so it makes sense that Matthew and Luke would use his material. That also explains how Mark's gospel was so revered by the early church, which otherwise is completely inexplicable.

But yes, there is a copious amount of evidence for eyewitness testimony in the Gospels and Acts.

And all that comes from Eusebius (4th century) quoting Papias from the 2nd century (whose writings no longer survive) trying to vouch for an author writing around 70 CE about supposed events around 30 CE. Sounds legit.

From Maurice Casey's "Jesus of Nazareth" pg. 67-68

"Problems arise with Papias’ use of the tradition that Mark heard Peter teach to establish the accuracy of the whole Gospel, despite the fact that it is not in the order of a historical outline. This indeed it is not, apart from the Cleansing of the Temple and the Passion narrative at the end. An undue proportion of con- flict stories are placed together (Mk 2.1–3.6). A high proportion of parables are placed together in Chapter 4, complete with the quite unconvincing theory that they were told to conceal the mystery of the kingdom of God (Mk 4.10-12), a view contrary to the nature of Jesus’ ministry, but one which has an excellent set- ting in the life of Christians who found the parables difficult to understand. This wondrous theory is immediately followed by a secondary allegorical interpreta- tion of the parable of the sower (Mk 4.14-20), which cannot possibly have been derived from the teaching of Peter. A high proportion of Mark’s eschatological teaching is collected into Chapter 13, and some of that is evidently secondary too.6 It follows that Papias drastically overplayed his hand. While Mark may well have heard Peter teach, and this may have been the source of some of some of his perfectly accurate material, the whole of his Gospel cannot possibly have been derived from this source. Papias has produced a legitimating tradition. Faced with the fact that this Gospel was written by an unknown man called Marcus who never encountered the historical Jesus, he has sought to legitimate the accuracy of the whole of Mark’s Gospel by associating it as closely as he could with the leader of the Twelve during the historic ministry..........The evidence of Papias shows that the Gospel of Mark was written by an unknown Christian called Marcus, who was not present during the historic ministry of Jesus. It is probable that Marcus heard Peter preach, but it is most improbable that he heard him often, and out of the question that he knew him well. We can- not tell from the evidence of the Fathers when or where Marcus wrote his Gospel, because the relatively early external evidence consists of unreliable legitimating traditions."

Does Bauckham admit that the authors of the gospels are anonymous or does he make a case for traditional authorship?

I think you missed my point. If Jesus had been thrown into a common grave, people would have known about it. The complete absence of any other burial traditions or reports is a big hole in your theory. All you have is a bare assertion that the Gospel writers were copying off of Mark, ignoring the fact that John is an independent tradition, and the fact that the eyewitnesses were around to check. The way to do history is not to make up a theory based on nothing and then explain away all of the evidence, but that's what you have done.

There are other traditions that indicate that things were more varied than the canonical gospels might indicate. For example, the Secret Book of James has Jesus refer to how he was "buried in the sand." While the synoptics and John all emphasize that Jesus was laid in a tomb by his followers, Acts, (yes same author of Luke) 13:27-29 records that it was "those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers" who execute Jesus and then says these enemies "took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb." An early variant of John 19:38 also has the Jews taking Jesus away for burial. This is also found in the Gospel of Peter 6:21 and in Justin Martyr: Dialogue 97.1.

We know that in the ancient world the disappearance of people's bodies was used as evidence for their heavenly assumption.

So now you've dropped the honorable burial thing and are talking about disappearing bodies. Well, moving the goalposts won't help you here, nor will rehashing a bunch of bad arguments that you found on some atheist blog. Jesus' body was resurrected, not assumed into heaven. The difference is not trivial.

There is also the Greek novel Callirhoe by Chariton, which dates from early to mid-first century, and has its hero Chaereas visiting the tomb of his recently dead wife, saying he "arrived at the tomb at daybreak" where he "found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright." Others are afraid to enter the tomb, but Chaereas goes in and finds his wife's body missing and concludes she has been taken up by the gods.

That's interesting. The problem is that the eyewitness accounts for the post-resurrection appearances can be dated to the 30s, and Mark is dated to the mid-50s. The parallel here is not strong enough to show borrowing if that's what you're trying to argue for, and even if you could it could just as easily be the case that Chariton borrowed from some version of the Christian story. Although given that in Callirhoe it turns out the wife simply had not died in the first place, this looks like a coincidental similarity.

He also uses a lot of sources older than the Gospels. Try reading "The Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, and the Death, Burial, and Translation of Moses in Judaic Tradition".

That's the book I was talking about. To repeat, his theory is susceptible to the same critique that I have outlined above. Perhaps I should pull your stunt and accuse you of ignoring my arguments. But that would simply be a cheap rhetorical point, wouldn't it?

You would just have to prove that Matthew, Luke, and John did not inherit the empty tomb tradition from Mark.

Sorry, you don't get to assume your conclusion and then make everyone else disprove it. I know that's how skeptics are used to working, but that doesn't work with me. You have to prove your case.

This is not multiple attestation.

In the case of John it certainly is. In the case of Luke, he most likely had additional sources as I indicated. And again, the eyewitnesses were around to check. The idea that these were just late myths and legends has been pretty thoroughly debunked. New Testament scholarship has moved in a consistently conservative direct since the early 20th century because the evidence kept poking holes in the radical critical theories. Or didn't your atheist blogs tell you that?


It wouldn't have been silly if Mark was creating a narrative that showed Jesus fulfilling Isaiah 53:9.

Sorry, but I don't see why - even if Mark was thinking of Is. 53:9 without bothering to mention it - that would in any way be affected if Joseph's servants did the actual handling of the body. Now you're just trying to get out of a point that you made that backfired.

Seems when I bring up pretty clear examples of midrash (Matthew 21.5 (cf. Zechariah 9: two donkeys!); John 19.23-24 (cf. Psalm 22.18: two different treatments of clothing versus garments!); and Acts 4.25-27 (cf. Psalm 1: two different rulers!) - they get ignored.

I'm not really interested in following every red herring of yours, and I address the whole concept of why midrash as "making stuff up to go with a verse in the OT" is mistaken in the o.p. Which, I might add, you haven't even touched.

And all that comes from Eusebius (4th century) quoting Papias from the 2nd century (whose writings no longer survive) trying to vouch for an author writing around 70 CE about supposed events around 30 CE. Sounds legit.

That's a real "scholarly" appraisal. LOL!

As for your quote from Casey, that's not much of an argument. It's particularly strange that he would say that Mark isn't in the order of an historical outline as evidence against Papias' testimony, since Papias specifically says Mark didn't write it down in order. So I don't see much there to make a case for anything - just earlier liberal criticism based on assumptions rather than evidence. Bauckham addresses this pretty incisively in his discussion of Papias.

Does Bauckham admit that the authors of the gospels are anonymous or does he make a case for traditional authorship?

Oh, he makes a very potent case against the claim that the Gospel were anonymous. He argues for the traditional authors except in the case of John, which he thinks was written not by the apostle John bar Zebedee but by a different John, known as John the Elder. But the whole "anonymous Gospels" thing really needs to be put to rest. I don't know of any other field besides New Testament studies where books with all of the attestation of the Gospels would be called anonymous. I know, the names of the authors don't appear in the text. But that's true of lots of ancient works that are not considered anonymous. In my own personal research on this I was surprised at how easy it was to disprove - surprising considering how often this canard gets used by skeptics.

For example, the Secret Book of James has Jesus refer to how he was "buried in the sand."

Who told you that? I looked at two translations of it and saw nothing of the kind.

While the synoptics and John all emphasize that Jesus was laid in a tomb by his followers, Acts, (yes same author of Luke) 13:27-29 records that it was "those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers" who execute Jesus and then says these enemies "took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb."

This is taken from Paul preaching in Caesarea Philippi, but he just says "they laid him in a tomb." What's that supposed to prove? The point of Paul's message had nothing to do with who buried Jesus, just that he was buried. Incidentally, I have another post on that whole topic: http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2015/04/the_apostles_and_the_resurrect_1.html. And again, the author of Acts was the same as the author of Luke. Do you think he forgot what he had written? This is pure silliness.

An early variant of John 19:38 also has the Jews taking Jesus away for burial.

Again, who told you that? The only significant textual variant I see for that is "his body" instead of "the body of Jesus."

This is also found in the Gospel of Peter 6:21 and in Justin Martyr: Dialogue 97.1.

Um, I'm starting to have some real doubts about your sources for this rubbish you're spouting. Here is the Gospel of Peter 6:21-24:

"VI. 21 And then they plucked the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him upon the earth: and the whole earth was shaken, and there came a great fear on all. 22 Then the sun shone forth, and it was found to be the ninth 23 hour. And the Jews rejoiced, and gave his body unto Joseph to bury it, because he had beheld all the good things which 24 he did. And he took the Lord and washed him and wrapped him in linen and brought him unto his own sepulchre, which is called the Garden of Joseph."

It says that Joseph buried Jesus in his own sepulchre! Maybe you should actually check to see if the trash you picked up from your atheist blog is correct. It might save you some embarrassment.

And here is Justin's Dialogue, 97.1:

"For it was not without design that the prophet Moses, when Hur and Aaron upheld his hands, remained in this form until evening. For indeed the Lord remained upon the tree almost until evening, and they buried Him at eventide; then on the third day He rose again."

You're losing credibility rather quickly here.

The statement that the gospels "are anonymous" is confused and anachronistic, applying modern ideas of how an author would indicate his authorship to ancient documents where that was not the assumed norm at all.

Hey, all you have to do is tear the cover and title page off of any book that doesn't have the author's name in the text or preface or anything like that, say that the title page was added later, and the book is actually anonymous. That would make about as much sense.

Yeah, except Isaiah 49:3 says the "Servant" was Israel (not Jesus) and that this "Servant" was said to live a long life and look on many of his children (Isaiah 53:10) which obviously doesn't fit the Jesus story at all, since he died young and childless, so these parts of the supposed "prophecy" are ignored. The selective nature of pesher interpretation allowed this kind of cherry-picking of the texts.

This is a bit of a red herring, my response was to your claim that Isaiah 53:9 influenced a legendary burial account in Mark's gospel, a response you seem not to grasp. Again, once you attribute contrivance to explain away apparent prophetic fulfillment, you necessarily grant that if the alleged contrivance is actually truth then this is evidence of fulfilled prophecy. It's akin to the axiom "one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens," where both parties agree on the conditional premise but differ on the second premise and conclusion, with each denying the other's conclusion and using this as evidence to support his own. If Isaiah 53:9 is used as the evidence for why Mark made up the burial account, then it also true that if Mark did not make up the burial account then Isaiah 53:9 is a compelling prophecy which can be used with other pieces of evidence to make a cumulative case for the Resurrection and Christianity.

Of course one can deny that Isaiah 53:9 and other suffering servant passages are Messianic prophecies, but then one undercuts his argument which portrays the gospel writers as clever and cunning enough to introduce elements of midrash in the gospels as an apologetic for Jesus as the Christ.

Either way, read on in Isaiah 49 to see the servant rescuing Israel. Unless God was going to have Israel rescue itself from itself, I think we should interpret it as a Messianic prophecy just as the rabbis would have in Jesus' day. And yes, Isaiah 53:10 could not have been fulfilled since Jesus died childless, as this passage could in no way be in reference to his resurrection, eternal kingdom, and spiritual descendants.

So now you've dropped the honorable burial thing and are talking about disappearing bodies. Well, moving the goalposts won't help you here, nor will rehashing a bunch of bad arguments that you found on some atheist blog. Jesus' body was resurrected, not assumed into heaven. The difference is not trivial.

Haven't dropped a thing. Just strengthening my cumulative case. All of the statements I've made are based on current scholarship.
https://books.google.com/books?id=XT_nwOG-bwAC&lpg=PP1&dq=david%20edward%20aune&pg=PA170#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.amazon.com/Revisiting-Empty-Tomb-History-Easter/dp/0800697014

The problem is that the eyewitness accounts for the post-resurrection appearances can be dated to the 30s, and Mark is dated to the mid-50s.

Um maybe at conservative seminaries Mark is dated to the 50s. The scholarly consensus, however, dates it to around 70.

Sorry, you don't get to assume your conclusion and then make everyone else disprove it. I know that's how skeptics are used to working, but that doesn't work with me. You have to prove your case.

Sorry, you don't get to overturn Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis (the consensus of modern scholarship) just by hand waving it away. You have to prove your case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2g9j1XKPKw

In the case of John it certainly is. In the case of Luke, he most likely had additional sources as I indicated. And again, the eyewitnesses were around to check. The idea that these were just late myths and legends has been pretty thoroughly debunked. New Testament scholarship has moved in a consistently conservative direct since the early 20th century because the evidence kept poking holes in the radical critical theories.

If John is based on another tradition it is based on one in which "the Jews" take Jesus down from the cross. Again, the "additional sources" are irrelevant if Luke just took the empty tomb motif from Mark and dressed it up a bit. There were no eyewitnesses because all the disciples fled remember? And the women watched from "afar." And actually there are now plenty of NT scholars who don't think the empty tomb story is historical. You really should get out of the conservative evangelical sphere and read some Luedemann, Casey, Ehrman, etc. Here's a good start: https://remnantofgiants.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/caseys-jesus-2-empty-tomb/

Sorry, but I don't see why - even if Mark was thinking of Is. 53:9 without bothering to mention it - that would in any way be affected if Joseph's servants did the actual handling of the body. Now you're just trying to get out of a point that you made that backfired.

You seem to be letting your Dunning-Kruger take over. Nothing ever backfired. In real life - not fantasy fiction land - if a rich distinguished councillor needed to take a body down from a cross he probably would have had his servants do it - that's all I was arguing.

As for your quote from Casey, that's not much of an argument. It's particularly strange that he would say that Mark isn't in the order of an historical outline as evidence against Papias' testimony, since Papias specifically says Mark didn't write it down in order.

You misinterpreted that.

So I don't see much there to make a case for anything - just earlier liberal criticism based on assumptions rather than evidence. Bauckham addresses this pretty incisively in his discussion of Papias.

Point still stands

"And all that comes from Eusebius (4th century) quoting Papias from the 2nd century (whose writings no longer survive) trying to vouch for an author who he didn't know writing around 70 CE about supposed events circa 30 CE."

So by definition, Bauckham's argument rests on hearsay.

Who told you that? I looked at two translations of it and saw nothing of the kind.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/peter_kirby/tomb/burial.html

This is taken from Paul preaching in Caesarea Philippi, but he just says "they laid him in a tomb." What's that supposed to prove?

That "the Jews" buried him. This speaks against the "perhaps later" account of the Christianizing Joseph of Arimathea narrative.

And again, the author of Acts was the same as the author of Luke. Do you think he forgot what he had written? This is pure silliness

Sounds like Luke bunched all of his sources together and didn't realize he was combining conflicting traditions. Makes sense considering he was writing the Gospel around 80-90 CE and I've seen some scholars date Acts around 110-120 CE. http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/actapo358006.shtml

Again, who told you that? The only significant textual variant I see for that is "his body" instead of "the body of Jesus."

What remains at the core of John's tradition is the request of the Jews to Pilate for Jesus' body to be taken down (verse 31) but the request is not granted in the narrative. Verse 38 begins all over again with Joseph's request, and he himself (not the Romans) takes the body from the cross. The part of the narrative which originally concluded verse 31 about the "burial" of Jesus has been broken off and replaced later by the other account of a burial of Jesus by Joseph and Nicodemus (John 19:38-42).

"We cannot get around the impossibility of reconciling the two accounts; they cannot have originally stood side by side...However, there is a possibility that the conclusion of the first has been cut off for the second to be attached; for even the most great-hearted redactor cannot cope with having someone buried twice" - Julius Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Johannis, 90.

Um, I'm starting to have some real doubts about your sources for this rubbish you're spouting.

Maybe you should read the verses again. It says "they" as in "the Jews gave" and "they buried." Notice that's not the same as having Joseph of Arimathea solely burying Jesus as in the synoptics. Moreover, even if there weren't any competing burial traditions that wouldn't make Mark's story true or any more probable than there being no tomb at all due to the the story being based on midrash.

But the whole "anonymous Gospels" thing really needs to be put to rest. I don't know of any other field besides New Testament studies where books with all of the attestation of the Gospels would be called anonymous. I know, the names of the authors don't appear in the text. But that's true of lots of ancient works that are not considered anonymous. In my own personal research on this I was surprised at how easy it was to disprove - surprising considering how often this canard gets used by skeptics.
The statement that the gospels "are anonymous" is confused and anachronistic, applying modern ideas of how an author would indicate his authorship to ancient documents where that was not the assumed norm at all.

"We do not know who wrote the Gospels." - E.P. Sanders "The Historical Figure of Jesus" pg. 63-64

"The four Gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, for example, are all anonymous, written in the third person about Jesus and his companions." - Bart Ehrman "Lost Christianities" pg. 235

"It is noteworthy that a number of the most important books of the Bible are, strictly speaking, anonymous; this is so, for example, with the four Gospels and Acts. Their authorship has to be determined as far as possible by a consideration of the relevant internal and external evidence." - Geoffrey Bromiley "International Standard Bible Encyclopedia" pg. 818

"All four Gospels are anonymous, that is, they themselves do not tell us who their authors were. The Fourth Gospel indicates, as we shall see, that "the disciple Jesus loved," who figures prominently in the second half, was responsible for this Gospel, but even he is anonymous. In the second century the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to the Gospels, and near the end of the century John was identified as the Apostle John. It is unlikely that the Fourth Gospel as we have it was written by an apostle..." - Paul J. Achtemeier "Invitation to the Gospels" pg. 328

"In any case, we must remember that all four canonical Gospels are anonymous" - Ben Witherington "The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci" Pg. 44

"The Fourth Gospel, like the three Synoptic Gospels, is anonymous: it does not bear its author's name. The title "According to John" is a label attached to it when the four Gospels were gathered together and began to circulate as one collection, in order to distinguish it from its three companions." - F. F. Bruce "The Gospel of John: Introduction, Exposition, Notes" pg. 1

"the author did not sign his name to the book. As far as its own author is concerned, the Gospel is anonymous. The same is true of the other Gospels." Patrick J. Flanagan "The Gospel of Mark Made Easy" pg 16

(Published without the links this time)

So now you've dropped the honorable burial thing and are talking about disappearing bodies. Well, moving the goalposts won't help you here, nor will rehashing a bunch of bad arguments that you found on some atheist blog. Jesus' body was resurrected, not assumed into heaven. The difference is not trivial.

Haven't dropped a thing. Just strengthening my cumulative case. All of the statements I've made are based on current scholarship.
See David Edward Aune's Jesus, Gospel Tradition and Paul in the Context of Jewish and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Collected Essays II, Volume 2 pg. 170 (there's a free Google book preview online) and Daniel Smith's Revisiting the Empty Tomb

The problem is that the eyewitness accounts for the post-resurrection appearances can be dated to the 30s, and Mark is dated to the mid-50s.

Um maybe at conservative seminaries Mark is dated to the 50s. The scholarly consensus, however, dates it to around 70.

Sorry, you don't get to assume your conclusion and then make everyone else disprove it. I know that's how skeptics are used to working, but that doesn't work with me. You have to prove your case.

Sorry, you don't get to overturn Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis (the consensus of modern scholarship) just by hand waving it away. You have to prove your case.

In the case of John it certainly is. In the case of Luke, he most likely had additional sources as I indicated. And again, the eyewitnesses were around to check. The idea that these were just late myths and legends has been pretty thoroughly debunked. New Testament scholarship has moved in a consistently conservative direct since the early 20th century because the evidence kept poking holes in the radical critical theories.

If John is based on another tradition it is based on one in which "the Jews" take Jesus down from the cross. Again, the "additional sources" are irrelevant if Luke just took the empty tomb motif from Mark and dressed it up a bit. There were no eyewitnesses because all the disciples fled remember? And the women watched from "afar." And actually there are now plenty of NT scholars who don't think the empty tomb story is historical. You really should get out of the conservative evangelical sphere and read some Luedemann, Casey, Ehrman, etc.

Sorry, but I don't see why - even if Mark was thinking of Is. 53:9 without bothering to mention it - that would in any way be affected if Joseph's servants did the actual handling of the body. Now you're just trying to get out of a point that you made that backfired.

You seem to be letting your Dunning-Kruger take over. Nothing ever backfired. In real life - not fantasy fiction land - if a rich distinguished councillor needed to take a body down from a cross he probably would have had his servants do it - that's all I was arguing.

As for your quote from Casey, that's not much of an argument. It's particularly strange that he would say that Mark isn't in the order of an historical outline as evidence against Papias' testimony, since Papias specifically says Mark didn't write it down in order.

You misinterpreted that.

So I don't see much there to make a case for anything - just earlier liberal criticism based on assumptions rather than evidence. Bauckham addresses this pretty incisively in his discussion of Papias.

Point still stands

"And all that comes from Eusebius (4th century) quoting Papias from the 2nd century (whose writings no longer survive) trying to vouch for an author who he didn't know writing around 70 CE about supposed events circa 30 CE."

So by definition, Bauckham's argument rests on hearsay. And that's being generous.

Who told you that? I looked at two translations of it and saw nothing of the kind.

Search "infidels burial traditions peter kirby" on Google.

This is taken from Paul preaching in Caesarea Philippi, but he just says "they laid him in a tomb." What's that supposed to prove?

That "the Jews" buried him. This speaks against the "perhaps later" account of the Christianizing Joseph of Arimathea narrative.

And again, the author of Acts was the same as the author of Luke. Do you think he forgot what he had written? This is pure silliness

Sounds like Luke bunched all of his sources together and didn't realize he was combining conflicting traditions. Makes sense considering he was writing the Gospel around 80-90 CE and I've seen some scholars date Acts around 110-120 CE with pretty convincing arguments.

Again, who told you that? The only significant textual variant I see for that is "his body" instead of "the body of Jesus."

What remains at the core of John's tradition is the request of the Jews to Pilate for Jesus' body to be taken down (verse 31) but the request is not granted in the narrative. Verse 38 begins all over again with Joseph's request, and he himself (not the Romans) takes the body from the cross. The part of the narrative which originally concluded verse 31 about the "burial" of Jesus has been broken off and replaced later by the other account of a burial of Jesus by Joseph and Nicodemus (John 19:38-42).

"We cannot get around the impossibility of reconciling the two accounts; they cannot have originally stood side by side...However, there is a possibility that the conclusion of the first has been cut off for the second to be attached; for even the most great-hearted redactor cannot cope with having someone buried twice" - Julius Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Johannis, 90.

Um, I'm starting to have some real doubts about your sources for this rubbish you're spouting.

Maybe you should read the verses again. It says "they" as in "the Jews gave" and "they buried." Notice that's not the same as having Joseph of Arimathea solely burying Jesus as in the synoptics. Moreover, even if there weren't any competing burial traditions that wouldn't make Mark's story true or any more probable than there being no tomb at all due to the the story being based on midrash.

Pert,

So you just drop a bunch of quotes from scholars who think the Gospels are anonymous? Why, do you think I'm not familiar with those views? I could give you many more, although your quote of Witherington is completely out of context. He holds essentially to the traditional authorships of the Gospels except for a quirky view on John. I should know, I studied under him. He concedes only that the Gospels are formally anonymous, which is to say that the names of the authors do not appear in the text. He also has a lengthy discourse in his commentary on the pastorals against pseudepigrapha in the New Testament. Please stop wasting my and everyone else's time.


Um maybe at conservative seminaries Mark is dated to the 50s. The scholarly consensus, however, dates it to around 70.

There is no consensus on dating for any of the Gospels, just ranges. Yes, I gave the conservative range for Mark, but it is eminently defensible. A. T. Robinson, a liberal, actually argues for dating the entire New Testament before 70. I don't necessarily agree with his entire argument, but he has a point - namely that the late dating of the NT books is based on presuppositions, not evidence.

Sorry, you don't get to overturn Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis (the consensus of modern scholarship) just by hand waving it away. You have to prove your case.

What are you talking about? I'm perfectly fine with Markan priority and the two-source hypothesis. But that only applies to the Synoptics. You are in way over your head here.

If John is based on another tradition it is based on one in which "the Jews" take Jesus down from the cross.

No, John has Joseph and Nicodemus taking the body down and burying it.

Again, the "additional sources" are irrelevant if Luke just took the empty tomb motif from Mark and dressed it up a bit. There were no eyewitnesses because all the disciples fled remember? And the women watched from "afar."

There were no eyewitnesses because - the women watched from afar! LOL! You can't make this stuff up. Of course, if Joseph and Nicodemus did procure the body, that would make them eyewitnesses also. So there were no eyewitnesses except for the women, Joseph, and Nicodemus. It doesn't matter for the sake of this argument if you believe the story is false, because you have made an argument based on the story being true. And it's a really bad one.

You really should get out of the conservative evangelical sphere and read some Luedemann, Casey, Ehrman, etc.

I don't think you understand. I have written papers arguing against Luedemann, Ehrman, Cadbury, Price, Pervo, Haenchen, and many other critical scholars. Unlike you I don't just rehash arguments that I saw on Wikipedia or on somebody's blog.

Maybe you should read the verses again. It says "they" as in "the Jews gave" and "they buried."

Maybe you should. The Gospel of Peter says Joseph buried the body in his own tomb, Justin doesn't say who buried it, and this nonsense about the Secret Gospel of James saying he was buried in the sand is a complete fabrication.

Yes, I know there were some comments of yours that I didn't respond to. That's because I don't see that they merit a response.

There were no eyewitnesses because - the women watched from afar! LOL! You can't make this stuff up.

Well usually when people watch something from "afar" they don't get the best and most objective look at things. Anyway, this is secondary writing. The disciples would have taken Jesus' female followers along. Women did not travel alone, even in groups, because of banditry and other perils of journey. This means the female "eyewitness" testimony of the exact tomb into which Jesus' body was laid is secondary (15:47). Their "looking on from a distance" in 15:40 is based on imagery of those "standing at a distance to watch" the scapegoat go to its death on the Day of Atonement (m. Yoma 6:5 E).

"I suggest that this combination of "standing at a distance" and "watching" the certain death of the scapegoat, on the part of Jerusalemites, some of whom...provided the background for exactly the same terminology for the Gospel scene of people "standing at a distance" and "watching" the death of Jesus on the Cross. This aspect of the Passion Narrative was thus also formulated by Palestinian Jewish Christians who were well acquainted with the rite of the scapegoat being led out from Jerusalem to its certain death on the Day of Atonement. For them, Jesus was their own scapegoat, whose death on the Cross atoned for the sins of the entire people. The first Palestinian Jewish Christian hearers/readers of this incident would have recognized the scapegoat/DoA imagery here. Unfortunately, it too was soon lost when the Christian Church became almost exclusively Gentile." Roger David Aus, Simon Peter's Denial and Jesus' Commissioning Him as His Successor in John 21:15-19, pgs. 35-36


Of course, if Joseph and Nicodemus did procure the body, that would make them eyewitnesses also. So there were no eyewitnesses except for the women, Joseph, and Nicodemus.

You mean the Nicodemus who isn't mentioned in any of the Synoptics but rather they all have Joseph acting alone?

"If the corpse of Jesus had really been removed by his enemies, the tradition would have grown like this. Jesus was laid in a common grave, like anyone who had been executed. Soon people found this intolerable, but knew that none of his followers had shown him, or could have shown him, the least service of love. A stranger did, and preserved his body from the ultimate shame. Now this could not have been an insignificant stranger, but had to be someone who could dare to go to the court authorities; he had to be a counsellor. The name was to be found in the Gospel tradition, like any other name, and gradually - this last phase is reflected in the Gospels themselves - the pious stranger became a secret...or even an open...disciple of Jesus (Matthew 27:57), someone who did not approve of the counsel and action of the Sanhedrin (Luke 23:50-51)...someone who was a friend not only of Jesus but also of Pilate (Gospel of Peter 3). So the story of Joseph of Arimathea is not completely impossible to invent." Hans Grass, Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte, pg. 180.

Well usually when people watch something from "afar" they don't get the best and most objective look at things.

"Best" I can agree with. "Objective" is silliness. A view from afar is just as objective as a view from up close, you just see less detail. But given the amount of detail given in the account, a view from afar is adequate. Not to mention that - again - Joseph and Nicodemus were up pretty close. Do you think they might have told anyone afterwards? Or do you think they both dropped dead the next day?

Women did not travel alone, even in groups, because of banditry and other perils of journey.

I find that to be a rather dubious claim, to put it mildly.

Their "looking on from a distance" in 15:40 is based on imagery of those "standing at a distance to watch" the scapegoat go to its death on the Day of Atonement (m. Yoma 6:5 E).

Right, because nobody else ever anywhere ever stood at a distance from anything and watched it, and then reported on it later. So there just is no other explanation. It had to have been copied. Obviously. Because midrash.

You mean the Nicodemus who isn't mentioned in any of the Synoptics but rather they all have Joseph acting alone?

Yeah, that's the one. The thing is, just because the other Gospels only mention Joseph doesn't mean he acted alone. And if you think about it, taking the body of an adult male down off of a cross, wrapping it in graveclothes, and then interring it in a tomb would be pretty hard for one guy by himself. What do you think?

I realize this is one of those favorite skeptical arguments from silence (such-and-such a Gospel only mentions so-and-so, which therfore is the same as affirming that so-and-so was alone). The problem is that we know that isn't the case. For example, John only mentions Mary Magdalene of the women going to the tomb, which some critics take to mean that John indicates Mary was alone. But when Mary reports to the disciples, she says "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" So Mary wasn't alone, it's just that John only mentions her by name and not the others. It wasn't an important detail for him. Likewise, in Luke 24:12 it mentions that Peter ran to the tomb to check it out. Does that mean Peter went alone? No, because later in v. 24 the Emmaus disciples are recounting the events and they say, "Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see." Remember, this is from the same chapter of the same book, it isn't two different accounts. But then when you read John's independent account in John 20:3-4, you find out that the beloved disciple ran to the tomb when Peter did. Luke didn't mention the other disciple in the narrative, because it wasn't an important detail. But it shows up in the Emmaus encounter and dovetails nicely with John's account. Which is also a reason why arguments from silence are quite often bad arguments. They also happen to be a staple of Gospel critics.

I suggest that this combination of "standing at a distance" and "watching" the certain death of the scapegoat, on the part of Jerusalemites, some of whom...provided the background for exactly the same terminology for the Gospel scene of people "standing at a distance" and "watching" the death of Jesus on the Cross.

Would these be the same people standing at a distance who jeered at Jesus and said "let him save himself". Kind of hard to be heard at that kind of far distance where you cannot see clearly - since vision carries clearly a LOT farther than voice does.

I'm posting this here because it seems your other post doesn't allow comments anymore. Feel free to move it to the other post. I spent a lot of time on this reply so it should at least be posted. Feel free to have the last word. I'm done here.

Not at all. The analogy Paul uses is of a seed and what grows from the seed, indicating continuity even though the end product has different characteristics. I see no ambiguity at all.

With a seed, the shell is shed and dies. When applied to the body this analogy makes more sense in that the flesh rots in the grave. The "spiritual body" is risen and is different than the "natural body". That makes two bodies.
Clearly, since we arrived at different interpretations Paul's language is unclear. I have a feeling it's because this first century Jew was just making this stuff up and didn't know what he was talking about. That's why it's so confusing.
Again, we can play ping pong with different interpretations of Paul all day but it's not going to get us anywhere.

Just pointing out that some scholar somewhere made an argument is not itself an argument! If you can’t defend your view, then stop wasting my time.

Conservative theologians don't have a monopoly on what Paul meant by the "spiritual body." I've provided two scholarly works that offer plausible alternative readings and there are more. The fact that legitimate PhD scholars
disagree with your interpretation is enough to show that it's disputed.

Yes, I agree that the appearance is similar in at least some respects, and as I have already pointed out the objective and physical nature of the appearances is clear in all of the accounts including Paul’s.

It wasn't entirely "objective" though was it? The companions did not see or hear it properly. Paul was the only one who felt the full force of this "vision". It was a "vision" after all, I mean, that is the word that Luke/Paul used to describe it. Since Paul was happy to equate his vision with the other appearances in 1 Cor 15 (ōphthē) then it follows that they were originally understood as "visions" as well. He does not indicate any difference in quality between his vision and the post-resurrection appearances to the twelve disciples.

I don’t understand this statement. Every single version of the appearances describes something visible. “Revelation” and “visible” are not mutually exclusive categories.

Let me make it easy for you. Paul never met the human Jesus. He had a revelation of the Risen Christ in a "heavenly vision". There were numerous other people who had "visions" in this time period as well but they're regarded as delusions by most. It's just that Paul's vision ended up in a really popular book that a lot of people happen to believe in.

Boy, another argument from silence. But again, this one is a fail. First of all, Phil. 2:9 is part of an early creed which is a pretty clear reference to the ascension. Of course Eph. 4:8-10 is unquestionably a reference to the ascension. I realize many scholars think Ephesians was written by someone other than Paul, but those arguments are based on presuppositions and linguistic arguments which are fundamentally flawed. I could do more digging, but again it doesn’t seem worth it. You have made an assertion based on an argument from silence. All of your arguments to the effect that “Paul (or whoever) makes no clear mention of such-and-such so therefore is developed later” is simply a fallacious argument. But I’ve noticed it’s also one of your favorites, probably because you think you can make a point with no evidence. Sorry, doesn’t work that way.

It's quite hard to argue that Ephesians isn't pseudo-Paul when that's the consensus view but let's grant it anyway. Neither Phil. 2:9 nor Eph. 4:8-10 mention a 40 day period. So how can you be so sure that Paul thought of it that way? Paul never indicates that Christ was first raised to Earth then only later raised to heaven like the Gospels depict. The conception in Paul that Jesus was “raised” envisages nothing more than a simple one-step process, from Jesus’ death to his glorified heavenly existence. As Paul explains elsewhere, Jesus died, then was raised to be at the right hand of God in Heaven, where he will act as a divine intermediary at the final judgment (e.g. Rom. 8.34; Eph. 1.19-23; 2.6-7; Col. 3.1-4; Phil. 2.8-9). This conception – that Jesus ascended directly from death to Heaven – has often been termed “exaltation Christology”, the belief that Jesus went straight “from grave to glory”. As A.W. Zwiep summarizes the belief (in Ascension of the Messiah, 1997: 130):

"the general conviction in the earliest Christian preaching is that, as of the day of his resurrection, Jesus was in heaven, seated at the right hand of God. Resurrection and exaltation were regarded as two sides of one coin…"

You are quick to call out "argument from silence" but don't realize you're committing an anachronism fallacy every time you read something that appears in a later document into an earlier one. Sorry you don't get to do that. Try reading Paul without prematurely reading into his words the later Gospel accounts of the empty tomb.

You have misunderstood Thucydides for starters. He doesn’t say his speeches were fictional, he says he attempted to stay as close as he could to what was actually said while composing speeches appropriate to each occasion. Secondly, Luke’s speeches in Acts show no signs of the kind of rhetorical excesses that characterized some speeches. They are all quite short and condensed summaries. Thirdly, we know from how Luke utilized his sources (such as Mark) that he didn’t embellish speech materials but stayed very close to his sources. So whatever the practices of some ancient historians might have been, we can observe Luke’s first-hand.

This is just apologetic special pleading. Who was taking notes during Peter and Paul's speech? How do we know Luke wasn't "composing speeches appropriate to the occasion" in order to prove a point? Moreover, Luke changed the appearance tradition to Jerusalem. Mark predicted, and Matthew had, the appearances in Galilee. Luke leaves no room for appearances in Galilee and he also rewrote Mark's ending so we actually have evidence that he didn't stay close to his sources sometimes.

Yeah, I already granted that they go back to Paul. But they also all fit the exact same list of criteria that you use to dismiss the accounts of the other appearances – removed by decades after the event, written down by someone who wasn’t there, etc.

I’m afraid you have simply ignored the refutation and restated your original conclusion, but if Paul’s testimonies are to be accepted as authentic then there is no prima facie reason to reject these other speeches.

The speeches don't help your case and now you've been forced to admit that they were sometimes "composed appropriate to the occasion". Luke was basing the speeches off the Septuagint translation of Psalm 16. We can't say Peter or Paul believed in an empty tomb when this could just be reflecting Luke's own beliefs instead of theirs. One thing is for sure, there's no explicit mention of the empty tomb in Acts.

Another argument from silence. I’m just going to have to start flagging these and then ignoring them. You are wasting my time.

So we should just accept your anachronism fallacy? Start reading the documents in the order they were produced without reading in the later developments. It helps.

I never said he saw a corpse, but neither did the other apostles. They saw Jesus alive. Don’t you know what a corpse is? And the reason I know Paul saw Jesus is because he said so himself in 1 Cor. 9:1. THAT is Paul’s firsthand testimony.

Paul saw him in a "vision" yes. Paul's references to and insistence on the fact of the rising of Jesus makes no mention of the evidence of a physical revivification of his dead body that features in some of the later accounts: the empty tomb, discarded grave cloths, people touching Jesus, Jesus eating and his physical form flying up into heaven. For Paul, at this early stage of the development of the story, the risen Jesus is a spiritual concept involving visions, not physical encounters.

I’d say it doesn’t. This is just prejudice.

Ok, so we should just trust other people that claim to have "visions" involving a blinding light and a voice from the sky? Or only when it happens in your holy book?

The “trend” that you should have noticed is that personal visions are clearly distinguished from objective pheneomena in Luke’s account. He also describes Stephen having a vision of Jesus in Acts 8 which was not counted as an appearance. In other words, Luke knew the difference between these different kinds of phenomena and didn’t change visions into objective experiences. He just reported what the eyewitnesses said.

These type of visions are found in the OT, intertestamental Judaism, Greco-Roman writings, etc. Second Temple Judaism was a visionary culture in which people claimed to see appearances of God, angels and such. Surely, you don't think all these claims of "visions" were objective do you? How is saying "Luke knew the difference..." not obvious special pleading?

Beats me, but it’s not relevant to this discussion.

Actually it is. You're arguing that since the visions were experienced by a group that somehow makes them objective. If you're going to be consistent then you must believe the reports I cited as well right?

I think you just shot yourself in the foot. You keep insisting that Acts describes Paul's experience as a vision but now you posit that Luke inserted the companions as a theological device. But in that case, you can't also say that Luke is describing a vision, so you are contraditing yourself. But apart from that, why on earth would this verse in Deut. be evidence that Luke inserted the companions as “stage props”? And why did he feel no need to do anything like that with Stephen’s or Peter’s visions? Earlier you said that the accounts of Paul’s conversions “mitigate against” Luke’s theological perspective which you used as an argument for the genuineness of the accounts. Now you claim that he added the companions for a theological purpose. You are arguing out of both sides of your mouth. If Luke had a theological purpose in YOUR view, he should have described Jesus walking, talking and eating with them all, right? Again, you are simply treating the evidence in a selective, ad hoc manner to fit with your predetermined conclusion.

I'm not claiming that Luke actually did that. I was genuinely asking what you thought of the parallel. It does sound quite similar doesn't it?

Paul says he saw Jesus. And since as I have pointed out in several different ways the experience described by Luke is not a vision (in spite of the fact that Luke is perfectly capable of describing visions if that’s what the eyewitnesses reported), your thesis fails. But if you are simply going to keep ignoring rebuttals and repeating your conclusions ad infinitum, I’m going to have to start dismissing you as a troll.

Sure. Paul's "heavenly vision" wasn't a vision even though that's the exact word Luke/Paul uses to describe it....Luke represents Paul himself saying ‘I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision’ (Acts 26.19). Here Paul is represented as using the same word for ‘vision’ as Paul himself uses for ‘visions . . . of the Lord’ at 2 Cor. 12.1, and the same word as Luke uses for the women at the empty tomb seeing ‘a vision of angels’ (Lk. 24.23). The same word is used in the OT to refer to Daniel's visions and others. It follows that Paul and Luke were both happy to think of Resurrection appearances as "visions." This combined with the way ōphthē was used makes a pretty strong case that these were more "spiritual" encounters as opposed to objective physical ones.

Yep, I covered that angle already. I agree, it points to the authenticity of the accounts. I’m not sure why you’re arguing for something we agree on. It’s just that Luke is also the one who wrote the other accounts, and they are just as credible. You have nothing but hand waving in response to that.

I've now dealt with the speeches. You haven't brought up any other accounts.

Luke and Acts were written at the same time, and the other apostles were converted before Paul came along. He even says that he received the creed in 1 Cor. 15, and that must have been from them. So you are utterly mistaken.

Paul's conversion happened in the 30's did it not? Even if the report was written by Luke, if it is accurate then it must reflect Paul's experience and belief from that time period. As for the creed, what shape or form it was in before Paul received it is a different matter. All we have is what Paul transmitted.

"Paul says that ‘Christ’ died ‘for our sins’. The term ‘Christ’ was applied to Jesus only after his death and Resurrection, and this use of ‘Christ’ on its own with no article is typically Pauline, and not a literal translation from an Aramaic tradition. Moreover, the idea that ‘Christ’ died ‘for our sins’ is a product of the Gentile mission. This means that, however early Paul inherited this tradition, it has been rewritten. We have seen that Paul himself rewrote the tradition about the Last Supper, which he also inherited. The forgiveness of sins was so important that Matthew rewrote Jesus’ word over the cup, adding that Jesus’ blood was shed ‘for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mt. 26.28, expanding Mk 14.24). It follows that we should not believe anything in 1 Cor. 15.3-8 simply because Paul tells us that he inherited the tradition which he handed on." - Casey, Jesus of Nazareth pg. 457

Again, this is a bizarre argument. You treat Paul’s speeches in Acts as firsthand reports and not the other appearances even though they are all found in the same source. And again, Luke-Acts is a single source; it’s a two-part work.

Paul is our only eyewitness per 1 Cor 15. Acts 9, 22, and 26 seem to be a firsthand report from Paul. We do not have a firsthand report from Peter, for instance. There is no clear testimony of Peter's appearance outside of 1 Cor 15:5.

I never said Luke describes the appearance to James. The point is that Luke had the same first-hand reports of all of the apostles, not just Paul.

And why do Luke's accounts differ from Paul's when he himself in 1 Cor 15 equates his experience with that of the others? He indicates no difference but obviously from Luke's writings there are major differences.

“Established”? That Peter and Paul both had visions along with many other people in the Old and New Testament is news to nobody who has read the Bible. If that in your mind discredits them then why are you wasting everyone’s time here? None of that, of course, is any reason to think that James ever had a vision of any kind - "bets" of yours nothwithstanding.

Actually, since Paul uses the same word ōphthē to equate his own and James' "appearance" in 1 Cor 15 then it must mean that Paul believed James had a vision as well.

Even if this were true (which it isn’t), you seem to be assuming that Luke was faithful in reporting what Paul said but then just made up whatever he wanted for everyone else. But you have no reason for such an assumption. As for Luke’s verifiable accuracy as a historian, I recommend Colin J. Hemer’s study, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History.

How about when Luke invents unhistorical details about the census of Quirinius and mixes up the dates of Theudas and Judas the Galilean? Oops...

I’d love to meet even a single historian who calls a story from Acts a primary source and a story from Luke a secondary source. That’s absolute rubbish. What you are doing is arbitrarily counting different parts of the exact same text differently. You can’t count the account of Paul’s appearance as a primary source and the other apostles’ as secondary because they're from the same source. You are making assumptions about the sources that Luke used in writing his work, but you don’t have any evidence for those assumptions. Not only that, but the evidence points to Luke as an accurate historian.

Where are the other accounts in Acts that describe the appearances in the 1st person? Even if we regard all of Acts as secondary it still follows that Paul experienced a vision as he indicates in his own writings.
That's enough to show the gospels are later rewrites. Luke wasn't an accurate historian. He was a committed Christian writing preaching literature and never names his sources. He modeled his entire ascension narrative off of Elijah's assumption
from the OT.

Um, no. I’m treating the accounts consistently according to the evidence. It’s funny to see you resort to a tu quoque as if that’s a good argument though. It’s not an improvement over your arguments from silence.

You're anachronistically reading things into the primary sources in light of your own beliefs and assuming things are there when they are not. This is fallacious exegesis.

As I have shown, this is false even by your own tacit admission above.

Oh sure, the ole' "visions" weren't exactly "visions" trick right? Yup...

No, this is simply wrong. Paul says of the resurrection that we will be “changed.” He doesn’t say that the body will not be raised, but he says it will be transformed into an immortal state: “For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.” In Martin’s interpretation the perishable is simply left behind, but that’s not what Paul says.

Evidently some qualified PhD's disagree with your interpretation. Martin is widely cited in this work among scholars. You can also check out Troels Engberg-Pedersen's Complete and Incomplete Transformation in Paul a Philosophical Reading of Paul on Body and Spirit for another perspective.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove. Even in the New Testament you have the dispute between the Pharisees and the Sadducees about resurrection, because the latter did not believe in resurrection. But Jesus sides with the Pharisees, and Paul himself was a Pharisee and thus held to the view of bodily resurrection.

Yeah but the question is what type of "body"? The wide range of meaning for pneumatikos makes it difficult to pin down exclusively just for your apologetic reading. Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Dale Martin make a good case that Paul was influenced by the stoics. Paul changes his terminology based on who he's addressing so this makes it very difficult to get a consistent view from Paul. Plus he uses vague imagery and metaphor because, evidently, that's the only way he can explain it.

“Inductively true” is a nonsensical phrase. I tried gently pointing that out to you already, but you are simply showing that you don’t know anything about logic. Most arguments from silence are bad. There can be good arguments from silence, but you need a lot more than what you’ve given.

Can't prove history I'm afraid so "inductively true" is the correct phrase. I could start using "more probable than not" if that doesn't upset you as much. Accusing me of arguments from silence doesn't absolve you from simply reading in things that aren't there. Your anachronism fallacies are numerous.

That would refute your contention that Paul didn’t know about it then, wouldn’t it?

I acknowledge that the absence of a detail from Paul does not on its own indicate ahistoricity, given the brief summary nature of his account and the obvious differences with the style of the later narrative accounts. But elements that would have helped Paul's argument greatly are conspicuous by their absence. If Paul was arguing for a physical revivification and knew of an "empty tomb" tradition, for example, it's very strange it gets no mention in 1 Cor 15. The Greek audience he's addressing didn't believe in bodily resurrection. He goes through all that "spiritual body" stuff but not mentioning the empty tomb is quite suspicious.

Since Paul held to the Pharisaical view of resurrection, it involves almost no speculation.

Actually it would involve speculation as well as anachronistic reading. He mentions no Joseph of Arimathea, no women, no angel, no nothing in regards to the empty tomb that shows up in gMark. The fact that Paul was influenced by Greek thought means he wasn't as strict of a Pharisee as you make him out to be. Looks like you left out a response to the definition of egegertai having a wide range of meaning.

Nope, you are simply reading Paul based on your presumptions.

And you are simply reading things that aren't there.

First, there is no evidence that John was influenced by Mark. The consensus is that John is independent of the synoptics. Second, skeptics like to point out the differences in the post-mortem accounts which is actually an indicator of independence. When Matthew and Luke are copying Mark, they stick very close to verbatim. In the post-mortem accounts this isn’t the case. Besides, the earliest testimony about Mark that we have is that he based his account on Peter’s own testimony.

I'm not saying that John was influenced directly by Mark. What I'm saying is that if the empty tomb story was in circulation and well known by John's time, which is very probable, then it's likely that John incorporated that into his gospel. In regards to your second point, Mark doesn't narrate any appearances. Matthew and Luke rewrote the ending as they saw fit but they obviously borrowed the empty tomb motif from Mark. In any case, we do not have verifiable independent attestation of the empty tomb.

The Testament of Job only has 12 chapters.

My two sources say "39-40". Anyway, this is irrelevant. The ideas of missing bodies, raptures, and heavenly assumptions were commonplace in this time period.

Yeah, this another of those canards that seems to make the rounds. I think someone already used that one on a different thread. First of all the dating on this is imprecise and may be as late as the second century. So if there was any connection between this text and Mark, it might well have been Chariton borrowing from the Christian story. But there is no resurrection in Callirhoe, just the discovery of an empty tomb. But just saying that there is another story with an empty tomb is not an argument for anything any more than saying that because there are other stories of shipwrecks that proves that the Titanic is a legend.

Guess again. Most scholars date it to the first half of the first century. G. P. Goold dates it to between 25 BCE and 50 CE based on its non-Atticizing language. Paul Fullmer dates it to the reign of Nero or earlier (58-64 CE) due to it being referenced in a work by the satirist Perseus. Again, I don't need to argue direct dependence on these stories. All I have to show is that the ideas were floating around in Jewish and Greco-Roman literature and I think I've done that.

Furthermore, the gospels also depict people believing that John the Baptist rose from the dead after his execution and even that Jesus was the risen John (see Mark 6:14 and Mark 8:27-28). The idea that John had risen from the dead came from the belief in the coming general resurrection. Obviously, the concept of a prophet rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of the coming kingdom of God was very much in the air when Jesus was executed.

This is a bad argument even if your sourcing is correct. You might make more headway if nobody used round stones prior to 70, but the fact that there were some indicates that Mark’s account is plausible. Furthermore, if the number 4 represents 2% that means that you are dealing with quite a small sample size so the statistical analysis is correspondingly poor. This is a non-starter.

"Of the more than 900 burial caves from the Second Temple period found in and around Jerusalem, only four are known to have used round (disk-shaped) blocking stones." Amos Kloner Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus' Tomb?

So based on the archaeological evidence it is more probable that Jesus was not buried in a tomb sealed by a large rolling stone. This could just be the writer of gMark indicating the kind of tomb in the time he was writing or it could be that the tomb itself, an element conspicuous by its absence in Paul's version, was an addition to the story.

Let me correct some of the nonsense you have spewed here. Funnily enough, someone else on another thread tried posting some of this same garbage, so apparently they dig through the same internet trash pile that you do. First of all, the Secret Book of James, which is available for free on the internet and is quite short, says nothing about Jesus being buried in the sand. I don’t know who started that one, but it is easily debunked.

"nor have you yet been crucified, nor have you yet been buried in the sand, as I myself was"

The translation literally says "buried in the sand." It non-literally means "in shame". The point is that it was a "shameful" burial and mentions no tomb at all. The Gospels do not depict a "shameful" burial.

Lookup The Nag Hammadi Scriptures By Marvin W. Meyer, James M. Robinson pg. 25. There is a free Google preview.

"The summary description of the hardships undergone by Jesus includes that Jesus was buried "in the sand." This Coptic phrase is sometimes translated nonliterally to mean "shamefully," but it should be made clear that the very reason why the burial is shameful is that it is a burial in the sand. To be wrapped in a new linen cloth and placed in a rock-hewn tomb is not the description of a shameful burial. Thus, the Secret Book of James reflects a tradition that Jesus was buried in the sand or, to speak generally, in a dishonorable makeshift shallow grave instead of in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea." - Peter Kirby

Second of all, not only is a member of the council taking the body of Jesus off the cross not unlikely, it is exactly what both Jewish and Roman law would have required in the case of Jesus. First, Deut. 21:23 required that a body hung on a tree had to be buried before nightfall. The categories of the executed that are mentioned in your source are for those executed by stoning, burning, beheading, and strangling. The reason crucifixion is not mentioned is because that was not practiced by Jews; it was a Roman method. The Jews sometimes hanged dead bodies as a public display, not live ones as pointed out by Jodi Magnes in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Since there wouldn’t have been time to dig a grave and since the responsibility for disposing of the body would have fallen on the Sanhedrin, the Gospel accounts are consistent with the archaeological and historical evidence. Roman law dictated that local customs for burial be followed where possible.

Since it was not the Jews who killed Jesus they had no say about when he would be taken down from the cross. Moreover, the Romans who did crucify him had no concern to obey Jewish law and virtually no interest in Jewish sensitivities. Mark's depiction of Pilate granting an executed criminal's body over to the Jews is contrary to what we know about Pilate's policies from history. You should check out Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God chapter 4. Your apologetic arguments have gone stale and are in need of a refreshing.

Oh, and the Gospel of Peter says that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea. Someone tried that one on the other thread also. You should check your sources before trying to use them in an argument.

First, it says "they drew the nails" as in the Jews plural. This is corroborated by Acts 13, John 19:31 "they asked Pilate", an early variant of John 19:38 says "They came and took the body", and the context of Justin Martyr's Dial 97.1 suggests that the "they" refers to the Jewish opponents instead of his disciples. When you have that many accounts saying it was a group of Jews that buried Jesus then that's good evidence that there was a competing burial tradition.

You completely ignored the majority of that argument by the way.

And yet another argument from silence. By this logic, however, nobody came to believe in the empty tomb until the 4th century which is clearly nonsense. The location of the tomb would have been lost after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 in any case, and we simply don’t know what Christians did with the empty tomb before that.

Surely if the earliest Christians went and prayed/venerated at the tomb then there would be some mention of this in Acts. What we do know is we have no record of veneration. Ok so now we need to determine what is the best explanation for this lack of veneration. You would have to show that the lack of veneration is more probable under the assumption that the empty tomb story is historical rather than under the assumption that the location was simply unknown as I have argued. You have provided no evidence that the location would have been lost. Your mere assertion is not convincing.

Other places of significance in Jesus’ life also became venerated during later centuries, such as the alleged site of his conception and so forth. I don’t have any particular view on the current location of the empty tomb, but when saints are venerated the remains are of particular interest to people rather than the burial location. However, none of this constitutes an argument against the authenticity of the empty tomb tradition.

Bodily remains are just a red herring. This completely sidesteps the fact that the site would have significance because it's where the Resurrection happened. We're talking about the only place in the entire universe, as far as we know, where a dead guy literally came back to life from being raised by God. To believe that this location was simply forgotten and fell into obscurity for 300 years, when tomb veneration was quite common, is just absurd. This was no normal tomb and Jesus was no normal Jew according to his followers. To them there could have been no other tomb as important.

So the lack of veneration points in the direction that Jesus' final resting place was simply unknown. This is a devastating argument against the historicity of the empty tomb.

Sorry? What other third day references are you talking about?

Mainly the concept comes from Hosea 6:2 but there were a lot of Jewish writings and beliefs which represented the importance of the third day.

These include:

1. Three days travel from Jerusalem to Galilee (Josephus Vita 269 '52')

2. Three day search for Elijah after his ascension (2 Kings 2:17).

3. Corpse identification only within three days (Mishnah Yebamoth 16:3).

4. Three days of mourning - Bar Qappara in Lev. Rab. Mesora 18/1 on Lev 15:1-2 - "The full force of mourning lasts for three days."

5. Revelation of the Lord on the third day (Exodus 19:11).

6. Jonah in the belly of the fish for three days (Jonah 2:1 cf. Matthew 12:40)

There were many more but you get the idea.

Est.R. IX, 2 comments on Est. 5.1:

"Israel are never left in dire distress for more than three days . . . of Jonah it says ‘And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights’ (Jon. 2.1). The dead also will come to life only after three days, as it says, ‘On the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live before him’ (Hos. 6.2)

If ‘three days’ is interpreted like this, Jesus’ Resurrection could be expected ‘after three days.' This is most likely what the earliest Christians did.

It doesn’t describe a vision which has already been pointed out and refuted multiple times. Visions don’t affect other people. You can say with no evidence that Luke invented the companions, but you can’t claim that he is describing a vision. He describes visions in other places, but not in Paul’s testimony. Also, the point of my argument is apparently going clear over your head. Yes, Paul’s speeches in Acts are supposed to be eyewitness accounts, just like the appearances to the other apostles in Luke, and just like the rest of Luke-Acts. Again, you are treating the evidence selectively and inconsistently. If Luke was able to accurately reproduce Paul’s speeches for his testimony, then he was also able to accurately reproduce a narrative of the experience as well as all of the other speeches. Furthermore, because Luke was a traveling companion of Paul (as you have already admitted), he knew very well what Paul knew about the testimony of the other apostles. Don’t forget that Paul himself checked with the other eyewitnesses, specifically including Peter and James (Gal. 2). So Luke had ample checks on all of his information.

Again, no it does not. At this point you are simply being disingenuous. It is an absolute lie to say that Acts describes Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ as a vision.

I think this is worth repeating:

Sure. Paul's "heavenly vision" wasn't a vision even though that's the exact word Luke/Paul uses to describe it....Luke represents Paul himself saying ‘I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision’ (Acts 26.19). Here Paul is represented as using the same word for ‘vision’ as Paul himself uses for ‘visions . . . of the Lord’ at 2 Cor. 12.1, and the same word as Luke uses for the women at the empty tomb seeing ‘a vision of angels’ (Lk. 24.23). The same word is used in the OT to refer to Daniel's visions and others. It follows that Paul and Luke were both happy to think of Resurrection appearances as "visions." This combined with the way ōphthē was used makes a pretty strong case that these were more "spiritual" encounters as opposed to objective physical ones.

To argue, that Luke/Paul weren't describing a "vision" when that's the exact word they use means you're either purposefully lying or you're so committed to the later Gospel accounts that you can't see through your own cognitive dissonance enough to know you're lying.

No, he doesn’t equate them. He says that Christ appeared to him last of all “as to one untimely born.” This implies that there was something unusual about it, particularly with regard to the timing of it which is consistent with what I have pointed out with respect to the ascension.

Nice try. I have a better explanation.

"The extraordinary metaphor of ‘aborted fetus’ (ektrōma) caused endless trouble to commentators until Nickelsburg worked it out. It presupposes that Paul was called like a prophet from his mother’s womb (Gal. 1.15-16), and was as it were ‘born’ when he became the apostle to the Gentiles. Thus he was as it were ‘an aborted fetus’ when he was persecuting the church before his vocational ‘birth’. As was well known, the appearance of Jesus to him on the Damascus Road marked the point at which he ceased to persecute the churches and began to fulfill his vocation as apostle to the Gentiles." - Casey Jesus of Nazareth pg. 458

Paul makes no distinction, but in fact equates, the Damascus vision of Jesus to him and the appearances to others. The Greek verb Paul uses for all these appearances he mentions is the same one – ὤφθη (Greek - ōphthē) meaning “appeared, was seen” – in each case.

And you're not still anachronistically reading Luke's 40 day ascension into Paul are you? It's time to stop doing that.

Your theory shows growth and legendary accretion. The story not so much.

What about when Matthew adds a great earthquake, descending angels, and all the tombs opening up to let zombies walk around? It's amazing how these claims didn't make it into any other contemporary source. If that's not legendary accretion I don't know what is.

Ok I'm done. Thanks for the exchange. Feel free to have the last word. These replies have taken a lot of my time and I can't devote any more to it (message posting isn't very user friendly). Anyway, take care!

Two of the biggest assumptions that many Christians make regarding the truth claims of Christianity is that, one, eyewitnesses wrote the four gospels. The problem is, however, that the majority of scholars today do not believe this is true. The second big assumption many Christians make is that it would have been impossible for whoever wrote these four books to have invented details in their books, especially in regards to the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection appearances, due to the fact that eyewitnesses to these events would have still been alive when the gospels were written and distributed.

But consider this, dear Reader: Most scholars date the writing of the first gospel, Mark, as circa 70 AD. Who of the eyewitnesses to the death of Jesus and the alleged events after his death were still alive in 70 AD? That is four decades after Jesus' death. During that time period, tens of thousands of people living in Palestine were killed in the Jewish-Roman wars of the mid and late 60's, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem.

How do we know that any eyewitness to the death of Jesus in circa 30 AD was still alive when the first gospel was written and distributed in circa 70 AD? How do we know that any eyewitness to the death of Jesus ever had the opportunity to read the Gospel of Mark and proof read it for accuracy?

I challenge Christians to list in the comment section below, the name of even ONE eyewitness to the death of Jesus who was still alive in 70 AD along with the evidence to support your claim.

If you can't list any names, dear Christian, how can you be sure that details such as the Empty Tomb, the detailed resurrection appearances, and the Ascension ever really occurred? How can you be sure that these details were not simply theological hyperbole...or...the exaggerations and embellishments of superstitious, first century, mostly uneducated people, who had retold these stories thousands of times, between thousands of people, from one language to another, from one country to another, over a period of many decades?

Two of the biggest assumptions that many Christians make regarding the truth claims of Christianity is that, one, eyewitnesses wrote the four gospels.

Um, no, Luke and Mark were associates of eyewitnesses, not eyewitnesses themselves.

I challenge Christians to list in the comment section below, the name of even ONE eyewitness to the death of Jesus who was still alive in 70 AD

John the apostle. According to all patristic tradition, he lived to an old age, eventually in Ephesus. But actually, listing names is not terribly relevant. There's no reason to doubt that *quite a few* of the disciples, plus many other people who aren't named, lived to 70. We're only talking 40 years. We have tons of information about World War II from living history from soldiers at even greater distances than that. Don't people ever talk to their grandparents anymore?

Plus

Most scholars date the writing of the first gospel, Mark, as circa 70 AD. Who of the eyewitnesses to the death of Jesus and the alleged events after his death were still alive in 70 AD? That is four decades after Jesus' death.

There is not strong reason to date Mark that late. "Most scholars" can be wrong. In many cases, these dating conclusions are based upon poor reasoning, including the rejection of prophecy, so that Jesus' apparent prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem are _assumed_ not to be real. Hence the "magic" date of 70, for which otherwise there is no rationale. Acts was probably written in the 60's, and if we're to appeal to "most scholars," then "most scholars" think Luke was dependent on Mark, which places Mark earlier anyway.

But this lowering of the voice and "four decades" nonsense is just confused anyway. Mark was based on the reminiscences of the Apostle Peter, written down by John Mark. Peter was preaching from Pentecost onward! The apostles were telling their story right from the outset, or no church would have even _existed_ for the gospels to be written down for!


MOSES WAS A WAR CRIMINAL

We often hear people say, “If only Jews would return to the Law of Moses!
“Instead, they follow their secular, atheistic, and Zionist ways!”
They express horror at the recent deliberate slaughter of Gazans, particularly the slaughter of women and children. (1)
But haven’t these folks ever read the Bible? Are they unaware of the influence of the Old Testament on Judaism?
Please open your Bible. Turn to the Old Testament. For the moment, focus your attention on the Book of Numbers.
You are about to learn that Moses, the great “law giver,” was a war criminal who ORDERED his followers to commit war crimes. The most heinous were crimes were committed against women and children.
NUMBERS 31:13-18:
(13) Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. (14) But Moses was furious with all the generals and captains [a] who had returned from the battle.
(15) “Why have you let all the women live?” he demanded.
(16) “These are the very ones who followed Balaam’s advice and caused the people of Israel to rebel against the Lord at Mount Peor. They are the ones who caused the plague to strike the Lord’s people.
(17) So kill all the boys and all the women who have had intercourse with a man.
( 18 ) Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.
The rest of Chapter 31 is concerned with distributing the Midianite plunder. Thirty-two thousand (32,000) virgin girls were counted in the booty (Verse 35). Thirty-two of these were given to “the Lord.” That is, 32 of these little girls were set aside for the Levities (heave offerings), to be used as concubines (Verses 40 and 41).
Yes, Numbers 31 says what it says. The Talmud sages used Numbers 31 to justify having sex with children. And since the Talmud sages, along with Christians, regard the Old Testament as “the word of God,” why beat up on the Talmud sages? Why not beat up on Jehovah and Moses, who set the standards?
For further discussion of Jewish teachings on sex with children, see the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yebamoth 60b, Soncino 1961 Edition, page 402. Discussion and links at http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_2.html
It’s true. Moses was a war criminal. The Bible tells you so. Should we be surprised at how women and children were treated in Gaza?
Footnotes
(1) New Evidence of Gaza Child Deaths, BBC, 22 January, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7843307.stm

TORAH JEW JESUS ENDORSES TORAH
For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
Matthew 5:18

JESUS ENDORSED MOSES THE RAPINE MURDERER:
John 5:45 47
"Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, in whom you have put your hope. 46 If you had believed Moses, you would believe Me, because he wrote about Me. 47But since you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?”…

"THE TALMUD IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD”!

The official unabridged Soncino Edition of the Talmud published in 1935 was "Translated into English with Notes, Glossary and Indices" by such eminent Talmudic scholars as Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Daiches, Rabbi Dr. Israel W. Slotki, M.A., Litt.D., The Reverend Dr. A. Cohen, M.A.', Ph.D., Maurice Simon, M.A., and the Very Reverend The Chief Rabbi Dr. J.H. Hertz wrote the "Foreword" for the Soncino Edition of the Talmud. The Very Reverend Rabbi Hertz was at the time the Chief Rabbi of England.

The world's leading authorities on the Talmud confirm that the official unabridged Soncino Edition of the Talmud translated into English follows the original texts with great exactness. It is almost a word-for-word translation of the original texts. In his famous classic "The History of the Talmud," Michael Rodkinson, the leading authority on the Talmud, in collaboration with the celebrated Reverend Dr. Isaac M. Wise states:

"THE TALMUD IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. During the twenty centuries of its existence...IT SURVIVED IN ITS ENTIRETY, and not only has the power of its foes FAILED TO DESTROY EVEN A SINGLE LINE, but it has not even been able materially to weaken its influence for any length of time. IT STILL DOMINATES THE MINDS OF A WHOLE PEOPLE, WHO VENERATE ITS CONTENTS AS DIVINE TRUTH..."

SANHEDRIN, 55b-55a: "What is meant by this? - Rab said: Pederasty with a child below nine years of age is not deemed as pederasty with a child above that. Samuel said: Pederasty with a child below three years is not treated as with a child above that (2) What is the basis of their dispute? - Rab maintains that only he who is able to engage in sexual intercourse, may, as the passive subject of pederasty throw guilt (upon the actual offender); whilst he who is unable to engage in sexual intercourse cannot be a passive subject of pederasty (in that respect) (3). But Samuel maintains: Scriptures writes, (And thou shalt not lie with mankind) as with the lyings of a woman (4). It has been taught in accordance with Rab: Pederasty at the age of nine years and a day; (55a) (he) who commits bestiality, whether naturally or unnaturally: or a woman who causes herself to be bestiality abused, whether naturally or unnaturally, is liable to punishment (5)."

This "divine truth" which "a whole people venerate" of which "not a single letter of it is missing" and today "is flourishing to such a degree as cannot be found in its history" is illustrated by the additional verbatim quotations which follow:

SANHEDRIN, 55b: "A maiden three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband's brother cohabits with her, she becomes his. The penalty of adultery may be incurred through her; (if a niddah) she defiles him who has connection with her, so that he in turn defiles that upon which he lies, as a garment which has lain upon (a person afflicted with gonorrhea)."

(footnotes) "(2) His wife derives no pleasure from this, and hence there is no cleaving. (3) A variant reading of this passage is: Is there anything permitted to a Jew which is forbidden to a heathen. Unnatural connection is permitted to a Jew. (4) By taking the two in conjunction, the latter as illustrating the former, we learn that the guilt of violating the injunction `to his wife but not to his neighbor's wife' is incurred only for natural but not for unnatural intercourse."

SANHEDRIN, 69b "Our rabbis taught: If a woman sported lewdly with her young son (a minor), and he committed the first stage of cohabitation with her, -Beth Shammai says, he thereby renders her unfit for the priesthood (1). Beth Hillel declares her fit...All agree that the connection of a boy nine years and a day is a real connection; whilst that of one less than eight years is not (2); their dispute refers only to one who is eight years old.

KETHUBOTH, 11a-11b. "Rabba said, It means (5) this: When a grown up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing, for when the girl is less than this (6), it is as if one puts the finger in the eye (7), but when a small boy has intercourse with a grown up woman, he makes her as `a girl who is injured by a piece of wood' ".
(footnotes) "(5). Lit., `says'. (6) Lit., `here', that is, less than three years old. (7) Tears come to the eyes again and again, so does virginity come back to the little girl under three years."

KETHUBOTH, 11a-11b. "Rab Judah said that Rab said: A small boy who has intercourse with a grown up woman makes her (as though she were ) injured by a piece of wood (1). Although the intercourse of a small boy is not regarded as a sexual act, nevertheless the woman is injured by it as by a piece of wood."
(footnotes) "(1) Although the intercourse of a small boy is not regarded as a sexual act, nevertheless the woman is injured by it as by a piece of wood."

ABODAH ZARAH, 36b-37a. "R. Naham b. Isaac said: They decreed in connection with a heathen child that it would cause defilement by seminal emission (2) so that an Israelite child should not become accustomed to commit pederasty with it...From what age does a heathen child cause defilement by seminal emission? From the age of nine years and one day. (37a) for inasmuch as he is then capable of the sexual act he likewise defiles by emission. Rabina said: It is therefore to be concluded that a heathen girl (communicates defilement) from the age of three years and one day, for inasmuch as she is then capable of the sexual act she likewise defiles by a flux.

SOTAH, 26b. "R. Papa said: It excludes an animal, because there is not adultery in connection with an animal (4). Raba of Parazika (5) asked R. Ashi, Whence is the statement which the Rabbis made that there is no adultery in connection with an animal? Because it is written, Thou shalt not bring the hire of a harlot or the wages of a dog etc.; (6) and it has been taught: The hire of a dog (7) and the wages of a harlot (8) are permissible, as it is said, Even both of these (9) - the two (specified texts are abominations) but not four (10)...As lying with mankind. (12) But, said Raba, it excludes the case where he warned her against contact of the bodies (13). Abaye said to him, That is merely an obscene act (and not adultery), and did the All-Merciful prohibit (a wife to her husband) for an obscene act?"

Of the "sacred" Talmudic teachings of the "Sages," preserved since 500 A.D. and taught more widely today than ever before in Talmud-Torah schools in the U.S.A., perhaps nothing better illustrates "fools" with "reprobate minds" than the teaching in the Talmud book of Yebamoth that spittle on the top of the bed curtain proves that a wife has been guilty of adultery, as only lying down face upwards could she have spit up on it. Spitting several feet straight up! The Talmud states: "When a peddler leaves a house and the woman within is fastening her sinnar [breech-cloth] … . If spittle is found on the upper part of the curtained bed she must, said Rabbi, go." Footnote: "Even if there were no witnesses that misconduct took place." Further footnote: "Only the woman lying face upwards could have spat on the spot. Intercourse may, there fore, be suspected."

Newsflash: The majority of New Testament scholars no longer believe that eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels. It's not just my opinion, my Christian friends, it is the consensus of scholars.

https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/majority-of-scholars-agree-the-gospels-were-not-written-by-eyewitnesses/

Oh, well, the Consensus of Scholars. (All bow.) I retract it all. My argument is defeated/sarc

Bandwagon much?

Daniel Marsh
6539 Linville Dr
Brighton, MI 48116-9531 USA

Dear Sir/Ms,

There has been a lot of deaths in our families --- My Father ( murdered during a home invasion), My Brother (murdered by a drunk driver on Christmas), Wife's' Mother (decrease and age), My Uncle Joe (murdered by a neighbor), Uncle Glenn (Cancer), and many more.

I had to retire early from Teaching without a pension due to Cancer.

I volunteer in classrooms and teaching Teachers.

I am dealing with health problems related to Cancer, Degenerative Bone Disease and related Surgeries, but God has Blessed me with co-workers like you all in the Lord.

I am the care giver for senior family members -- Walt(wife's dad), Mary(my Mother), Gladys(Wife's Aunt) and Joyce(also related to my wife).

I am excited about learning about the New Testament and Jewish understanding of it.

Is there a copy of anything, everything, floating around anywhere that I may have free of charge, please.

Subjects:
Haggadic Midrash
Ancient Methods of Bible Study
Midrash, Jewish Roots in New Testament books

If you are not able to help me, please ask the publisher send me a copy, free of charge, please.

I serverd in the US military.

Thank You for your Time, Efforts, Prayers and Kindness.
Daniel Marsh

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