“Standing up for righteousness”
A press release from the presumptiously-named Christian Voice calls for all Christians to boycott the Co-op bank for its ethical stance against homophobia.
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said today: “The decision from the Co-operative Bank fits a pattern where politically-correct bully-boys try to attack Christian organisations, Christian symbols, the Bible, and in the case of Jerry Springer the Opera and BBC2, even the person of our Saviour.”
It quotes from the Co-op letter which gave CV the bad news, and includes Green’s retort:
Standing up for righteousness is what we do. In fact you could say there are dozens of such pronouncements in my own book “The Sexual Dead-End”, which was published in 1992.
Green is clearly still quite proud of this book, which includes the allegation that 20% of gay men regularly have sex with live gerbils.
Explaining the reasons for CV choosing the Co-op bank in the first place, the press release goes on,
At the time, there was no mention by them that people who believe that homosexual acts are sinful would not be welcome. We feel let down, frankly, and the whole business has left a sour taste in the mouth.
Snigger.
We are now calling upon Christians who bank with and shop at the Co-op to withdraw their business until such time as this bank’s unethical and discriminatory attitude changes. Clearly, and on their own admission, the Co-op is not the bank for those who honour the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There you go.
As I said elsewhere
In my view, Green is guilty, and the Co-op is also guilty.
Both seem to want to be in the business of trying to be holier than thou, and doing what they can to shut people up. Green is trying to shut up the BBC and anyone else who “offends” Christianity. The Co-op, for whatever reason is trying (indirectly) to shut up Green, and using its power to try and achieve that.
Green wants to shut up people, but he isn’t very happy when people want to shut HIM up, by some means. The Co-op bank, really ought to know better.
The Co-op are really worried about the CV boycott. No, I’m kidding. The reaction from their customers appears to have been excellent.
It’s wrong to say the Co-op wants to silence Green. All it’s done is told him where he can deposit his bank account. All companies have policies on the question of whom they do business with. There were mass boycotts of South African companies, a gesture that eventually helped to end apartheid. While it would be morally iffy to do business with companies that supported an apartheid regime, no one ought to say that someone who believed in apartheid should not be allowed to voice his/her opinions. If I wandered into my local Co-op with a banner saying ‘Wogs are Scum’, I’d expect to be evicted. The Co-op Bank has merely evicted Mr Green’s bank account.
I expect this has been asked before, but …
Whom does Stephen Green represent, other than his own form of religious blackmail and the sound of his own voice?
He claims to represent a pressure group, with a loud presence, but how many actual members?
Green is very coy about the size of his membership. The only article to put a figure on it in recent months is one from the Observer, which says “under 1,000”. But the number of supporters you have is irrelevant when you are speaking on behalf of “Almighty God”.
Well – exactly. Even if there were only one member, s/he could still be right and the others wrong. Headcount never has determined truth and never could – nobody could believe it does. Christianity has more followers than any other philosophy, but does that make it true? Of course not. Its truth (if there is any) is founded on quite other grounds.
That’s absolutely right christoher, but having a tiny membership does give the lie to the name Christian Voice, with its implications of speaking for all christians. There’s over a billion christians in the world. his membership is clearly below a thousand, which means that he speaks for less than 1 millionth of the worlds christians (or a microchrist, if you will)
Dr Shell wrote:
” Its truth (if there is any) is founded on quite other grounds. ”
Be assured.
There isn’t any.
Hi Shaun
We can speak of small topics in few words or big topics in many. To try and cover big topics in few words only shows a lack of appreciation of the complexities. Im sure I am guilty of this too sometimes.
Hi Tom – your statistics are semi-accurate.
If by ‘speaks for’ you mean ‘is the mandated representative of’ you are right.
If you mean ‘expresses the position of’, then you are currently wrong, since, internationally speaking, all the geographical areas full of Christians are full of orthodox/biblical Christians.
But Christopher, Shaun’s statement was (fundamentally) correct. There is (essentially) no truth in christianity.
Fair enough there may have been a Jesus who is the fellow described in the non-fantasy bits of the nu testament, but he cannot have been the son of god, for there is no god. Given that the inherent basis of christianity is about worshipping and following the teachings of the son of god (who also was god in human form), then there is no fundamental truth behind it.
Jesus didn’t have enough to say about modern life to be the son, of an omnipotent, all knowing deity, for whom time and space is his to command. Modern life, in the form of travel, communications, (virtually instant across the world) current medical knowledge, is so far removed from anything remotely conceivable in His time, it was competely BEYOND his human imagination. If he really was the Son of God, he would know about, and have lots to say about modern things, and the way they interact with our lives. He’d have been able to discriminate between what he thought was wrong, and what was truly wrong. He would have been well aware of the misery imposed on others in His name, and would have condemned it in advance, to ensure it did not happen.
2000 years, and he ain’t shown yet…
We kept the seat warm, and the table’s set…
Another fish head in the dustbin
Another loser in the queue for the soup kitchen
Another reason for a visit
We think you’d better come down
Another nigger on the woodpile
Another honky on the dole
Another trip from off the 15th floor
The greatest story ever told
Was so wrong, so wrong
’cos you promised milk and honey
With an everlasting life
And we listened with our ears closed
And a blindness in our eyes
But we heard them as they nailed you
And we saw you crucified
The second coming of the holy ghost
We need a pocketful of miracles
Two thousand years and he ain’t shown yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the last supper
Another guru in the money
Another mantra in the mail
An easy way from rags to riches
God’s little acre’s up for sale
The time is right for ressurection
We think you’d better come down
The church don’t ring with hallelujahs
You haven’t been for so long
So long, so long
Two thousand years and he ain’t shown yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the last supper
Kevin Godley and Lol Creme with 10CC
Crumbs, Shaun, I thought it was only religious ppl who ascribed exaggerated worth to sentiments that were accompanied by beguiling, reinforcing music. The poetry is good, but neither the music nor the quality of the poetry can make up for lack of historical understanding. Popular songwriters who have done any appreciable research into the historical data in question are rare indeed.
Tom – Im not sure of how you are defining ‘Son of God’. In the days of Jesus, all sorts of wonderworkers, kings, angels etc had this title. Jesus, uniquely, was given the definite article: ‘The Son of God’. But since we are obviously not talking of biological sonship, then it’s not clear which particular definition of ‘Son of God’ you are denying.
Various elements combined to give Jesus the title ‘Son of God’:
(1) his use of ‘Abba’ for God, something previously unknown;
(2) the amount of time he referred to God as ‘Father’ – proportionately more than any other Jewish thinker;
(3) reflection on the Cross suggested to some that Jesus played the role of Isaac and God that of Abraham: hence, the ‘only Son’ language.
(4) It is also something of a default title: the highest that can be ascribed to a human being without actually calling them ‘God’.
The quasi-biological formulations came later, and are not part of the New Testament. (Same goes for trinitarian theory – albeit it is usually based on some New Testament basis.) Even the ‘begotten’ in the Creed is based on a mistranslation of ‘monogenes’ in John 1.18, which means ‘unique’/’one of a kind’ / ‘one and only dear’: it’s a strong and emotional way of expressing uniqueness: compare Isaac’s relationship to Abraham, and Jephthah’s daughter’s relationship to her father in the book of Judges.
‘God’ language is also used of Jesus – in fact, many times in the New Testament. I would estimate that 500 verses in the New Testament assume some kind of divinity for Jesus. Preposterous, one might think – until one realises that one wouldn’t either recognise divinity if one saw it, or easily be able to define it if asked. Those who say ‘X is obviously not divine’ are talking as though they have lunch with gods every day of the week, and so can easily recognise who is and ins’t divine. But since the word ‘divine’ doesn’t equate either to ‘supernatural’ (and Jesus was in any case supernormal), or to ‘able to create out of nothing’, or to any other word, there is a problem in defining it.
There’s also the problem that in the world of Jesus all sorts of humans were honoured as divine: miracle workers like Apollonius of Tyana; emperors like Augustus; legendary heroes like Romulus (I think Im right in saying). To fail to speak of Jesus as ‘theos’ (god) would suggest he was somehow lesser than these.
But only in a Hellenistic context. In a Jewish context calling him ‘God’ or ‘god’ proved to be another kettle of fish. This situation is reflected in John’s gospel (esp. chapters 5, 10). This gospel defends the existing (possibly instinctive) worship of Jesus as divine by positing Jesus’s oneness with God in being and action. He proves this by doing creative works (various miracles) such as only God could do.
Jesus calling god father does not show at all that he is the son of god. If he genuinely believed he was the son of god, then all it shows is that he was a seriously deluded, possibly mentally ill individual, there being no such thing as god.
you’ll note that i too used the definite article.
christianity is based on the flawed belief that jesus was the son of god, fathered by the holy spirit and given birth to by mary, previously a virgin. he died for our sins and then rose again on the third day, coming back to life as zombie jesus, with the strength of many men (to roll the stone out of the way).
Correct me if i’m wrong, but that’s essentially the crux of it. And it’s this belief in the supernatural, rather than following of his teachings that makes christianity a religion rather than a philosophy.
Fair enough, you personally may choose to see him as a human, whose teachings you follow, with the fantasy bits as just that, but that certainly ain’t catholicism, nor most other christianity, neither
“his use of ‘Abba’ for God” – does this mean that female and camp male australians are the direct descendents of god?
I wasnt arguing for Jesus being the Son of God. I was indicating how that title came to be used of him.
The title is not necessarily inaccurately applied to him, given that everyone agrees we are not speaking of biological sonship anyway.
The resurrection is a separate question. There are all sorts of positive circumstantial arguments for it. There is only one good & powerful negative argument against it known to me: the obvious one that such things do not and cannot physically happen. There is also a negative circumstantial argument for it: namely, that none of the alternative scenarii proposed so far have been all that plausible. This is the sort of debate I enjoy, so if anyone has a good alternative scenario I would be pleased to assess it.
Alternative scenario 1: the gospels are a mixture of fact and fiction. The resurrection story is one of the fictional bits.
So far so good – but what Im asking for is an alternative scenario for what did happen instead, rather than an assertion that something didnt happen.
Alternative scenario? Righto: The jesus who was crucified was eaten by worms and his bones eventually crumbled into dust.
Admittedly the worms hypothesis is highly flawed, since he wasn’t interred in the british sense. It was more likely to be bacteria. Given that it’s quite warm in the middle east around easter, he may even have exploded with the build up of gas if his holes were plugged, you never know.
This begs the following questions:
(1) The gospels talk of a specific individual called Joseph of Arimathea who asked Pilate for permission to bury the body. How do we account for this?
(2) Given that the body must then have disappeared (since all agree that it did) who do we account for that?
(3) If the authorities took it, why did they not then produce it?
(4) If the disciples took it, why were they willing to die for the sake of a lie?
(5) If the disciples took it, why were their lives transformed so that illiterate fishermen became movers and shakers in the Mediterranean world?
(1) The gospels talk of a specific individual called Joseph of Arimathea who asked Pilate for permission to bury the body. How do we account for this?
(2) Given that the body must then have disappeared (since all agree that it did) who do we account for that?
This really does beg the question (in the logical sense). We are questioning the veracity of the gospel stories. Yet all your questions assume as their premise the veracity of the gospel stories.
Tsk tsk. From a self proclaimed logician as well.
No – that’s a misunderstanding. I am assuming nothing – Im not assuming the truth of the stories nor the falsehood of the stories.
You on the other hand are assuming the falsehood. Some arguments for this position are in order.
The body must have disappeared because all the gospels agree that it did?
That looks like a rather large assumption to me – the assumption that whatever the gospels agree on must be true.
Not just (a) because they agree, but also (b) because the subsequent career of the disciples and rise of the church on the basis of the resurrection would then make no sense, unless the disciples were totally dishonest. In which case, they would not have had the strength of mind to be martyred.
All that was necessary for the disciples to have the “strength of mind” to be martyred (if indeed any were – there is scant reliable evidence for this too), was the belief that Christ had been resurrected and that they would be too.
Never heard of anyone martyring themselves because of a religious belief? Quite a common occurence, even today.
What evidence was their belief based on? If they fled from him at the Cross (and if they didnt why would they make up a detail so demeaning?) then what caused them to believe in the resurrection later?
Belief does not have to be based on evidence. If you think people believe something only when they have good evidence for that belief, then you have a very poor understanding of human nature.
Agreed, totally. But considering that they believed the opposite at the time of Jesus’s death (granted that the embarrassing detail of their flight would not have been invented – why would they needlessly embarrass themselves by saying something that was not true anyway?), they will have needed evidence in order to change their minds.
Why?
Jesus’s body disappeared? My ass. It was probably stolen by some disciple who figured it won’t rot because it’s holy… preposterous notion? No more so than the statement that it rose to heaven.
These were simple people. In today’s society if a body gets moved there’s evidence left that we can detect. And let remember that they (the followers) WANTED to believe that this was all true. Lots of people believe that Michael Jackson was guilty, even though the jury decided otherwise. Take any modern miscarriage of justice – oftentimes people continue to beleive on side or the other because it suits them – even when all the empirical evidence says otherwise.
If I believe the God’s a china teapot orbitting the sun and has told me to murder all Christians I’ll get locked away. However, take away the murder aspect and I’m just a harmless loony.
But wait – who’s to say that God isn’t a china teapot? There’s no evidence (empirical or otherwise) to prove that. We have now way to see it; no way to measure God’s gravitation effect. If I believe it – does that make it true?
Now consider this: is this notion of a china teapot any more absurd than believing in a 2000-odd year old text written and edited by a bunch of self-obsessed, deluded and power-hungry mages?
These are the people who recorded a virgin birth with no way to tell if the so-called virgin really was virgo-intacto; that men rose from he dead – without any way to detect death until the corpse starts to rot; that would proclaim that a woman had visions of god – without any knowledge of pyschosis?
These are people who have forced their beliefs on millions of us by force or coercion. Fear them, follow them and agree with them or be censored. Don’t use contraception (make more Christians); don’t be gay (make more Christians); spread the word (make more Christians).
And when it goes a bit pear-shaped like the overpopulation and AIDS crisis in the third-world; or you create a monster like Voodoo (yes, Christianity combined with ancient mysticism did that) – just claim it’s the will of some dude who works in mysterious ways. Pass the buck!
Well I’m a humanist and the buck stops here!
Hi Marc
It’s a matter of proper historical enquiry. Our proposed scenario must fit in (a) with the surviving evidence, (b) with the historical background, and (c) with logical probability.
One can take the scientific-hypothesis approach: simply propose a theory, test it against such tests as a-c, and see which one comes out best.
To continue…
You are so right when you say that ppl often ‘believe’ what they want to believe. That is a reality which I come up against every day. In proper debate, ppl don’t even know what they believe until they have first examined and debated the evidence. Even then, all their beliefs are merely provisional.
What Im trying to do is find a believable alternative scenario for the resurrection. There are plenty of questions that haven’t yet been answered:
(1) Where is the evidence that the Joseph of Arimathea story is a fiction? People may want to believe that, but the issue is not wants but evidence. In its favour we have 4 documents, not all necessarily dependent on one another. We have the name of a specific person whose existence and deeds could have been confirmed or disconfirmed by his associates and family at the time all of the 4 gospels were written (around 70-85 AD). We have the name of his town of origin. It is not the first town one would choose if one were making the whole thing up. We have details about the tomb: it was ‘new’ and ‘cut out of the rock’. What specific evidence is there against this account?
(2) If Jesus’s body was stolen, it was stolen either by his friends or by his enemies. His enemies could have produced it in evidence, but never did. His friends became considerably stronger characters afterwards, whereas if their lives had been built on a lie they would have become considerably weaker characters.
There you go begging the question again. Using Joseph of Arimethea and the “empty tomb” to argue for the veracity of the resurrection story is like using Dorothy (the homely girl from Kansas) and the Yellow Brick Road to argue for the existence of the Wizard of Oz. They are part of the same story – and the earlilest Christian writings (the epistles of Paul) don’t mention either of them.
Within ancient Jewish thought (or msot other thought, in fact), how is it possible to have a resurrection without an empty tomb?
Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? How are you defining ‘resurrection’?
Re: Wizard of Oz: Can you name one scholar who classifies the gospels’ genre as fiction?
While you are on Paul, one can cross-check historical details from Paul with those from Acts.
This means Acts is -to that extent- historically based.
But Acts is only the 2nd part of a 2 volume work. Are you saying that the first part is fiction and the second more historical?
Then again, Luke is the final gospel to be written. If it is historical (or as historical as Acts is, which Paul’s writings tend to confirm) how much more historical does that make the other 3 gospels?
The gospels and Acts are full of historical characters. Where are the historical characters in The Wizard of Oz?
That’s why Im confused about how you arrived at the ‘Wizard of Oz’ comparison in the first place. It’s not one that ever surfaces in the scholarly world, and that world is a mixture of Christians, atheists, agnostics, Jews, etc etc.. And while the scholarly world is not 100% open-minded, a given scholar is committed by his/her profession to be open-minded in a way one does not find in non-scholars.
Much of the Gospels is quite clearly fiction, especially the resurection story….. it is not actually possible for a man to die and to come back to life.
The purpose of the Wizard of Oz analogy was not to suggest the 100% fictionality of the gospels (we are only talking about the resurrection stories anyway). The purpose was to demonstrate the circularity of your reasoning.
Turns out it was hardly necessary, when you do such a beautiful job of it yourself:
Within ancient Jewish thought (or msot other thought, in fact), how is it possible to have a resurrection without an empty tomb?
Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
LOL. First you say “if there was no resurrection, how do you explain the empty tomb?” – to which the reply is “what empty tomb? That’s part of the same story.” Then, to argue for the reality of the empty tomb you say “how can there have been a resurrection without one?”
Don’t you make yourself dizzy thinking like that? Or is that how all Christians think in “the scholarly world”?
Don’t you believe it!! In the 1960s and 1970s there were all sorts of people who argued for the resurrection without believing in an empty tomb. They called it ‘spiritual resurrection’.
No – my point was that you cited St Paul. You said, quite rightly, that Paul’s documents are probably the earliest in the New Testament. Paul is always going on about the resurrection (Acts 17.18 suggests that his two favourite words were ‘Jesus’ and ‘Resurrection’).
So if the very earliest Christian writer is brim-full of the Resurrection… [you complete the sentence].
..but doesn’t mention Joseph of Arimethea or “the empty tomb”… [you complete the sentence]
Joseph of Arimathea?
Contrary to the propaganda on this thread, no such place name has been discovered. In fact, John has several towns whose existence has not been confirmed.
There is lots of stuff on the Bible at http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/christ.htm
http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm takes the methods Christians use to analyse the Koran and the Book of Mormo and sees if they are applicable to the Gospels.
http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/ gives us the Alpha Challenge, which asks how God managed to forsake God on the Cross, when there is only one God.
It also asks how Jesus became a life-giving spirit, according to Paul.
The Christian answers on the page are pretty pathetic.
And, of course, it is a lie that the disciples were prepared to die.
And even according to the Bible, they were *not* transformed by any resurrection, not even when they saw Moses and Elijah, and not when they saw Jesus.
They went back to fishing. (as you would when you saw God returned from the grave 🙂
Matthew 28:17 says that they still doubted. Clearly apologetic spin to cover up the fact that it was known that were not transformed.
Interesting stuff there, Steven. No such place as Arimathea? That would cast some doubt on the existence of this Joseph fellow. And Shell – you made up the stuff about the disciples being transformed? So much for the “scientific-hypothesis approach”.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I’m curious, Mr Shell. Do you claim the bible is historical fact – and if so, which bits? Old or new testament? The bible is arguably the most edited and re-imagined book on the face of the Earth. History (and the bible has some basis in history or historical events) is written by the winners.
Take a for instance: if Hitler and his Nazis had won WWII, we’d all be speaking German (probably not having this argument) and would know horrible dread tales of the vicious English concentration camps. The jews wouldn’t exist and we’d all be blonde-haired and blue-eyed. History from a Nazi perspective would be a very different history to the one we know today.
The same is true of the bible, only its editors are rather more liberal with the truth. We really don’t know what happened to Jesus when he was a kid or a young adult! We know he was probably born, was probably nailed to a cross by the Romans but that’s about it. He might, for all we know, have been as camp as a bunch of boy scout leaders. But this doesn’t suit religious shcolars – it doesn’t sit well with ancient teaching so you’d just paint over that. If you look really closely, we have no testable historical record other than the various bible that Jesus even existed as described; or indeed at all. He may be a mere compilation of many figures around about that time.
As for resurection… *if* the body dissapeared there is more likely a worldly argument for this; and the same applies equally to this laughable notion of a virgin birth. (Try and pull a trick like that today and you’ll be laughed out of Dodge.)
So maybe the body mumified in the heat, as seems likely, and the spirit ascended to heaven – that’s a good explanation because it totally removes any possible observable proof. It’s all smoke and mirrors – anything that can’t be proven must be divine; but in my book, divine == bullsh*t. I read somewhere that someone witnessed Jesus ascending to heaven. Ahum. There are more reasonable ways to explain this; creative writing comes to mind, but it could equally be plain lies put about to save face or pehaps (and this is pushing it) a shared psycosis/hypnosis; such things are not unheard of.
Over the centuries, the established church has become well-known for air-brushing out whatever it doesn’t like or aplogising for what it can’t cover up centuries later; Spanish inquistion anyone? Or how about the crusades? Very Christian that – nipping overseas to chop up people who don’t agree with you.
A long time ago, this country was once a happy, non-Christian place. Sure, we weren’t beyond killing each other, sacking neighbours or raping the odd young maiden. We were even fettered by our own idiotic multi-theistic notions. So how did the Christians get into power? By invading, and that’s exactly what these snake-oil salesmen are trying to do again. And when they do, they’ll just re-write history all nice and happy-clappy as if we were all too happy to embrace THEIR way of thinking.
Even modern bible Scholars can’t seem to make up their mind about some so-called facts. 666 (as popularised by Holywood) has now been interpreted several different ways.
Then just look at the poor bastards dying of Aids and starvation through overpopulation in the third world and tell me that one man hasn’t got the power to help stop its interminable rise. But he won’t. He won’t because his way makes more little Christians and there’s strength in numbers, no matter what the cost in pestilence, disease and agonising death.
If this wonderful invention you call Jesus was alive today do you think we’d take him seriously? And if we did, do you honestly think he’d tell us it’s better to have more children than you can feed than teach the children how to feed themselves.
Furthermore, if I were a Christian, I know I’d be a better one than Stephen Green whose name should appear beside any decent definition of homophobia, because I don’t judge my gay friends as sinners. Your own Jesus states “not to judge others lest ye be judged also.” or words along those lines; yes, any idiot can write pseudo-scripture.
The whole point about this rant is simple: Christians have an untestable hypothesis based on a book which has been subject to myriad revisions and editions steered as much by politics as by faith. For practically every argument the book puts up, the same book has a counter argument if you can be bothered to find it. Men guided by God? More likely men guided by greed for power; for if you control a man’s (notional) soul you control the man.
This, I expect, is true of the Alpha Course. More smoke and mirrors to scare the crap out of people and then give them an answer to make them feel better. This is the same despicable boilerplate dispensed by so-called mediums who claim to talk to the dead, only Alpha sugar-coats it. Neither of these life-after-death answers stands up to any intelligent scrutiny; any more than any biblical events do. We’re 2000 years smarter, and still just as scared of dying. The thing all religions fear more than anything is someone finding a cure to death, because if death is not inevitable, what else is there to fear?
The stronger people believe in an afterlife the less they fear death; a fact demonstrated on a daily basis in Iraq today. This, I suspect, is the true price of mortality.
Well, I have a life of sorts, so it’s back to it.
Hi Marc
On ‘revisions and editions’, we are fortunate that there are about 30 times as many manuscripts surviving of the New Testament as of any other ancient book. That means that the text of the New Testament is presumably the most accurate of any ancient book,since we can draw up a family tree of manuscripts and work from there.
You mentioned that you read somewhere that Jesus’s ascension into heaven was witnessed. This comment does show that your knowledge of the New Testament documents is a bit vague. That being the case, you are not yet in a position to comment on them as you do above. What say you read through the 4 gospels and then come back to me? Supposing you know any other ancient books (Homer, Virgil, or whatever – or even some parts of the Old Testament) ask where you think the gospels fit in on the fact/fiction spectrum.
Anyway, must dash – off to do a bit of Spanish inquisitioning (my daily pastime, in common with the rest of the Christians in this country).
In all seriousness – do get back to me on this if you wish.
Sadly, the very number of the NT manuscripts shows that Christians were perfectly willing to change the stories of the Last Supper, crucifixion and resurrection to suit their own personal agendas.
See http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/reli2.htm for copious documentation.
And surely the NT does say the ascension was witnessed acts 1.
Acts even claims that Stephen died for a vision of the resurrected Jesus in Heaven (although nowhere in the speech is it suggested that Jesus did not go straight to Heaven after he died)
Hi Steven-
Exactly: both Luke 24 and Acts 1. Marc was vague about this, which is why I suggested he has a good read.
The very fact that we have so many MSS makes any such changes irrelevant, because the more MSS one has, the easier it is to construct a family tree and eliminate the MSS with later changes and additions. This would be easy even if we had just 1000 MSS – with 25000 it’s comparatively a doddle. It’s generally the case that any change which a naughty scribe makes cannot possibly affect all other MSS the world over. How could it? Consequently, such changes are easliy rooted out.
An easy way to see this is to compare translations. All translations of the New Testament are made on the basis of MSS in the original Greek. The translations will come up with the same sense the vast majority of the time. There will, of course be plenty of times that they differ from one another because the Greek itself is ambiguous. Or because they prefer a different modern-English rendering, while still assuming the same Greek original. Almost every New Testament translation will highlight exactly the same disputed verses in footnotes. This gives one some idea of how many verses are disputed. Even then, the possible senses/readings have usually been narrowed down to just two.
Textual criticism is quite a science. The obvious example is that if cheating has gone on in an assigment, the teacher who knows any principles of textual criticism will always be able to draw up an accurate family tree of who has copied from whom. There are so many micro-signals that give the game away. Such a teacher can easily highlight what is a change and what is an addition. And such a teacher can easily identify which script is the most original.
To bring us back to the discussion – ie the veracity of the resurrection stories – this is where we stand. Your two main arguments in favour have been answered:
1) Citing Joseph of Arimethea and the empty tomb is no good because it is circular reasoning; there is no evidence for either outside the (later) resurrection stories themselves – indeed, as Steven points out, there is no evidence that a place called Arimethea existed.
2) Pointing to the “transformation” of the disciples as evidence is no good either, because it appears you simply made this up (or perhaps repeated it, ready made-up by someone else).
Again, you are quite correct that we can see what are later changes to the text.
so bye bye Son of God in Mark 1:1, Jesus being comforted by angels, the Eucharistic formuala in Luke, visit to the tomb in Luke…..
etc etc
See http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/reli2.htm for details.
It is pointless saying that the text is reliable, when the reliable reveals how much Christians were prepared to add.
Of course, the fact that we have no evidence of a place called Arimathea does not mean that there was no such place.
However that would have been true in the 1st century as well.
People finding things about the stories that they could not check out, would not assume that they were false.
Hi Monitor-
One might equally well argue that the fact that Arimathea is hard to identify is evidence of good close first-century knowledge (not that there is any dispute that Mark was written by 75 AD anyway). Who would mention such a name (or the name Dalmanutha, equally unidentified, in Mark 8) unless they had good knowledge of Palestine? If Mark was making up a fictitious character (and it’s important that you present one positive piece of evidence in favour of this before taking up such a stance) then why would he choose to make that fictitious character come from an obscure place?
The transformation of the disciples is based on the data that:
(a) they deserted Jesus and were not present at his death (this can scarcely be a lie, since they would not make up a version of history that was simultaneously untrue and reflected badly on themselves for no reason);
(b) they recovered to lead a movement that transformed the Mediterranean world within a generation, despite their lack of education.
What it is important that you provide is detailed points / argumentation to show that these points are incorrect and/or that some alternative scenario is better evidenced.
Steven-
Precisely my point: the angel in the garden, the ‘Son of God’ (Mark 1.1), the visit to the tomb in Luke – these are just the sort of examples I had in mind when I said that the things that appear as alternatives in the footnotes to NT translations are the same every time. Count them – they are not very many, which is why ppl tend to end up citing the same examples.
My provisional conclusion is that the first of the three which I mentioned is inauthentic, and the other two are authentic. But I am not fully confident about the authenticity of either: I just find it more than 50% likely. The last of the three is one of a class called ‘Western non-interpolations’.
The eucharistic formula in Luke is bound to have been altered by someone who knew another formula better. The problem then is to work out which of the two versions was Luke’s own.
A high percentage of the smaller gospel discrepancies can be accounted for by scribes conforming one gospel to another (usually Matthew). In doing so, they thought they were being faithful in the sense that they were getting back closer to the original Jesus. This was far more important to them than the integrity of the text of one particular gospel.
As the resurrection story contains elements contrary to the laws of nature, the rational default stance towards it is skepticism. Therefore it is not up to the skeptic to prove that any particular part of that story is untrue, but rather it’s the believer who has the burden of proof. Yet you persist in circularly reasoning from J of A (a non-supernatural element admittedly, but part of the same story nonetheless) to evidence the truth of the resurrection.
As for the allegedly transformed disciples, you appear to be assuming that they wrote the gospel stories – a rather large assumption.
Never mind. Here’s an alternative scenario for you, as you’ve been asking for one for so long.
Cognitive dissonance is a common psychological phenomenon – especially among religious believers. When someone you believe to be the messiah is suddenly and humiliatingly executed, that comes as quite a shock. It would be natural for the more devoted followers to construct a scenario which would allow them to continue to believe. The case of a 17th century Jewish “messiah” Sabbatai Zevi is an illustrative example. He amassed a large following before shockingly converting to Islam, at which point many followers deserted him – but others constructed an elaborate apologetic to allow them to continue believing. The case of UFO cult leader Marian Keech in the Skepdic link above is another example.
So, there’s Jesus hanging dead and decomposing on the cross (the Romans did not allow burial of victims of this most humiliating punishment). What do his believing followers think? “He can’t be dead. He’s not dead! He had to die to save us. Now he’s gone up to heaven and he’ll come back soon!”. Having convinced themselves of this, they go about proselytising with renewed enthusiasm (just like Keech’s followers did after the UFO no-show). The story spreads, and gets embellished – as stories do. Eventually, 45 years (a couple of generations) later – by which time no one can prove any different – the story of Jesus has developed into a full blown physical resurrection, with added nativity tale of wise men and virgin birth.
The scenario is more probable than the “it really happened” scenario for the following reasons:
1) it fits with known human psychology
2) it fits with the written evidence (no J of A or empty tomb in the earliest Christian writings)
and, most importantly
3) it fits with the laws of nature.
Now, gentle readers, observe the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in action as Dr Shell strives to demonstrate his belief that the physical resurrection actually happened is more plausible than this scenario.