Bowman,

I think a one sided discussion would have been more productive that what we are having.

I don’t think people usually come to faith through intellectual arguments but rather by a spiritual revelation and a change of heart as well as a change of mind. Besides, the NT witness doesn’t have a lot of time for unbelief in the church, rather for those in the world who haven’t yet heard.

Pluralist-- Thank you for you diligence on this thread! I hope that the villagers can see that a more one-sided discussion would have been far less productive than the one that we are having.

I asked below about which which understanding of the Resurrection you are criticising because your arguments seem not to be engaging the specific understandings that Stephen, for instance, is mentioning. It would be unfortunate if your efforts came to seen as directed against mere straw man arguments and as ducking the understandings of the Resurrection actually held by villagers who have studied it. I do not agree with your position, but I feel certain that it can be more effectively defended.

To take a small example, the presence of those women in the early Resurrection accounts and their absence from St Paul's account is explained by Tom Wright as an airbrushing of the details of the latter to eliminate a stumbling block for sexist Gentiles. To him, that detail supports a very early date for the Resurrection traditions in the received gospels, since we can be sure that the Jerusalem church traditions were older than those of the missions to the wider Hellenistic world. Perhaps I have misread your comments on this, or perhaps it was not clearly enough explained, but you do not seem to have addressed this point. Do you have a concrete rebuttal of Wright's inference on this point?

Obviously people do not put themselves up to suffer or die for fake beliefs, and that's because they do not think they are fake. In a world of signs and wonders, signs and wonders are very real. Throughout history people have sacrificed themselves for beliefs that, after a cultural shift, have simply been beliefs along the way.

The point about women as witnesses is that they are part of an explanation for why a particular story did not feature - thus the earliest stories of resurrection are appearances and only later did the full importance of being bodily (anti-gnostic) come to have importance in forming proto-orthodoxy.

What I am not saying is that the belief in resurrection was a sophisticated writers' theological construct; I am saying that in the very small community there was a belief, on its own grounds, in presence, and that was understood as strongly as return, but a return others later could not experience, and thus an ascension, and then the belief in the second coming. How that belief in presence is manifested is clouded by the Pauline account. Not everything has to be related back to the Jewish scriptures, and indeed some things that are often get them wrongly cited (but that's another matter). Indeed to some extent you get a breaking away from, a newness from, the past that is already there with the resurrection connection. You start with an 'it's happening' which relies on past understandings, to 'something is different here' that happens as this religion turns into a salvation faith based increasingly on the central being made divine character rather than the actions of God to which he was pointing.

Absolutely the Enlightenment is important, but not only that but everything since that has led to now our practical and pragmatic sociology of knowledge. One form of knowledge, self critical and tested, works, and another does not, as indeed the end time thinking was wrong (simply by fact of continuance) or the idea that messiahs come and make things idealised. Wrong then, wrong in 1844, and other times: all that form of thinking simply produces nothing. Supernatural and magical thinking is nothing but unreliable.

Stephen's last comment makes a subtle methodological point worth underlining-- if we are discussing an historical matter, then we need and can have more than the auxiliary use of history that literary scholars employ. Higher criticism did for biblical scholarship what it did for the Homer scholarship from whence it originally came. But the gospels come to us from a far richer historical context and so it is fair to ask more pointedly historical questions than old-fashioned rationalism dreamed of considering.

E.g.-- If Easter does not explain in considerable detail the transformation of the apostles' hopes from their prior Jewish eschatology (similar to that of the Pharisees) to the full Christian eschatology in their writings, then other explanation does it better? Absent a stronger explanation, a believer in God will find it most reasonable on the evidence we have to believe in the Resurrection as the early Christian writings explain it.

Pluralist

(1) Yes there are clearly some theological points being made in the resurrection appearances (and the eucharistic one in Luke 24 is clearly one of them) but the point I was making was the relative lack of them. The stories are relatively unvarnished theologically certainly when compared to the earlier parts of the gospels. No obvious use of Daniel 12:3, for instance, which you might expect if it were just a theological construction. You haven't really responded to the point about the lack of Old Testament allusions compared to the earlier parts of the gospels or the point about Christian being prepared to die for these fake beliefs.

(2) I don't quite get the point you are making about the women despite reading it several times. Will persevere! Yes they aren't mentioned in Paul's letters of the 50's but I believe there is a strong case for seeing the resurrection accounts as very early, carefully preserved accounts which are then used in the gospels written somewhat later. 

(3) I really don't believe it is just a case of 'any intelligent person should be able to see this and believe it'. What I do believe, however, is that there is a major set on Enlightenment driven assumptions saying what we know cannot have been the case that massively controls the way in which the historical sources are then treated. This means that it really doesn't matter if people use the weakest reconstructions possessing very little historical plausibility because they already know they are right in the first place. I guess what I am saying is that I don't believe you have an open mind on the issue which is often my criticism of conservative evangelicals but as often applies to ardent liberals.   

(4) Another crucial dimension to engage with is the widespread belief in resurrection before Jesus indicated by Martha's comment in John 11:24. Any historical reconstruction of how the early Christians understood Jesus' resurrection has to be placed against this background and yet many liberal scholars refuse to let it have any bearing on their theories of what the early Christians were doing. Once we do look for how the Jewish belief in a future general resurrection and Jesus' resurrection were connected things start looking very different. Tom Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God covers this with meticulous care but the claims he is making are simply not being engaged with by liberals much as the same way in which his claims about Justification are not being heard or engaged with by conservative evangelicals. In both cases fundamentalism is the problem.

More to say but work to do.

How on earth is a conversation about not seeing, that ends with the resurrected man disappearing when they 'see' at a eucharist, be anything other than a story with theological meaning. It is obviously not a normal event. As for the women, it runs both ways, and one way it runs is the story how the community did not hear of a tomb as reinforcement for so long, set against appearances, when the story says that the women were told not to tell anyone? So, yes, it can be used as the perverse use of apparent unreliable witnesses, but suggests why a tomb didn't feature when the language of resurrection was supposed to be bodily and yet the core was apparent experiences that we would call subjective.

I have read material through the years, and I don't think Bauckman has changed the landscape (from what I see); where I have changed my opinion is in the speed that the early Christians added titles to Jesus once they expected him (and not anyone else) to return as messiah.

The problem with these evangelical assumptions is a simple one. If it was all so convincing, then all it would take is any reasonably intelligent person to read the accounts and come to the obvious conclusion of eyewitness sufficiency as support for the theology so that the resurrection is history. But this does not happen. Indeed, theologians, biblical specialists, read the accounts and do not all come to the obvious conclusion. There must be a good reason for this, and the best one is that it didn't happen in the historical sense.

What did not happen was that a man, with his inner consciousness, died and then that same consciousness lived again in some restored form of body, went around visiting former colleagues and then rose up to some literal space (literal enough for a restored body to respiritualise) called heaven. It is a myth about how in a situation of charismatic belief a belief gets changed about as one religious tradition in a moment of excitement becomes a new religion. People believe all sorts of things, but they believed an awful lot of them.

We have a bunch of bishops today who are called 'out of touch' by many, and yet in our country a chap called Bede could refer, in historical terms, to a bishop who carried out miracles as a measure of his authority. People like that don't exist today, and they didn't then.

There are other examples in the world of fast religious change where the history is more accessible, such as the Shia Islam excitement that became Babi and later Bahai. That happened also with an escalation of titles and also rapid changes among supporters to get a new definition of what they were about. And such also involved belief in the return of Jesus Christ, as it happened!

The point is that to overcome the biological objection, you have to have historical access, and there isn't. What you get is patterns of believing, by individuals and groups (especially groups) that get put into narratives, that generate stories of being with you, directing the traffic and handing out authority and legitimacy. That's what it looks like, and as it looks like that it's almost certainly what it is.

David Jenkins the bishop who believed in resurrection and the biblical witness said he could not believe that God would leave us moderns without the same kind of evidence. But that was the point, because for the non-believer there is consistency about the naturalness of all human beings.

But another support of all that is the passion trial narratives that don't add up, and then before the theologised biography the birth narratives in two gospels that are completely made up but made to look biographical.

There is no reliance, therefore, on the final, last miracle, the one where a person who actually died actually started directing the traffic again for a short period before respiritualising from a spiritualised apparently recognisable state. I would rather watch something like Dr. Who for my myth making.

Pluralist - most of these comments are based on very dated, liberal assumptions ('the assured results of critical scholarship') that have been convincingly challenged by more recent work. I don't want to be rude but having challenged you to read Richard Bauckham, I think that based on your comments I need to challenge you to read anything written in the last ten or fifteen years.

To take one point, a crucial feature of the resurrection stories in the gospels is their very lack of theological development, certainly when compared to the earlier sections of the gospels. Yes there is the odd bit that looks like this (perhaps the dead rising from their tombs in Matthew) but very little compared to the earlier sections of the gospels. They instead read like carefully preserved accounts of what happened (or if you prefer what the original eyewitnesses claimed had happened). In the light of this the earlier parts of the gospel do read like more theological accounts (although no less historical for that) seeking to explain why the resurrection of Jesus happened. But the resurrection accounts themselves are remarkably unvarnished theologically (eg very little if any scriptural back up from the Old Testament) suggesting that they are based on primitive accounts preserved before the theological shape of the rest of each gospel was constructed to lead the way to them. A key question is how do we explain the prominence of the women in the stories (very carefully listed at the crucifixion, burial and then empty tomb) if they are later inventions? Why would anyone make that up in an age when women possessed such little status and were regarded as so unreliable? And why also were these Christians going to their deaths within a very few years stating their belief in something that they knew (or at least large numbers of them knew) was completely untrue? All of these factors need much more convincing historical explanations than your reconstructions provide.

And surely Matthew, Mark, John and even Luke do represent thoroughly Jewish Christianity. As does Paul. Even if Luke was a Gentile, like all of these writers his gospel is simply seeping with Old Testament quotations and allusions that he/she clearly understood back to front. Yes Paul's opponents in Galatians were more anti-Gentile but that is quite different from seeing Paul and the Gospel writers as less Jewish. The New Testament is thoroughly Jewish theology but recast around the realisation that Jesus was the fulfilment of the hope of Israel.  

What I know is that the accounts of Paul and accounts of Luke do not match, and that Luke is principally being theological to his audience but using the means of eyewitness form to add to the attempt to convince. The point is that the resurrection account, and indeed the account of spiritual accompaniment, is an internal one, and not one wider known beyond the community, so the pressure is to tell it, but Luke-Acts is the afterwards polished result. We don't kow what happened to Paul or indeed to Peter.

Anyway, as a matter of request, I read the shipwreck account neatly, via NRSV, and ther eason it doesn't strike me as historical is in the soldiers' plan to kill the prisoners and then a centurion wanting to save Paul. It doesn't sound historical to me, and a historian would want to know more.

All the stories of resurrection look theologised and unhistorical to me. It doesn't follow that what is theologised has to be unhistorical, but none of them look like a real event but a told event. There might be some core somewhere.

What we never really get is the primitive Jewish Church, the one closest to Jesus after his death, but this Paul as a cusp culture person and Luke in particular. Mark is too rough and John is on another planet.

ohhh why did i not think of that dave?  on previous post i have quoted malta having been there several times to follow it up. But i guess that again what pluralist is getting at is pauls interptetation of what he saw as much as anything else. He is saying we cannot prove intention. But i think Jesus words clearly state the intention that he instructs people to love one another, and he allowed his self to be crucified because he wanted people to believe they did not need to be judge and jury, the ascention , and ressurection was a way of displaying the spirit. pluralist will tie me up in knots now because i havent explained it as well as i would like. But i think that there is little divide between mind and spirit and they both affect each other, Jesus had a mind that thought peace, and shared how he felt it could be achieved and then showed that people were capable of murdering innocent people for wanting peace. Through all of this the spirit is an experience , it is something you cannot quite identify but fully understand. Jesus has to be more than just an historical figure, just like the spirit no we can not quite identify why but we fully understand the impact.

Angela

Pluralist-- At which understanding of the Resurrection are you flailing away?

Pluralist,

Consider Luke. do you accept that he was a traveling companion of Paul and that in Acts he continued the story from the gospel in the same manner. Is the account of the hearing before Aggripa and the shipwreck on Malta an eyewitness account? How much of the earlier part of Acts stories he heard Paul tell many times. He was also an eyewitness for the council of Jerusalem. This time in Jerusalem gave him the opportunity to hear the first hand story from the Apostles and the "women" The stories of the dispute on who was the greatest and Peter's denial must have come from the disciples. why were they told other than that they were true?

Dave

Again Pluralist i find myself agreeing with one statement which you make.

This time it is the statement "i believe ethically he was as limited as anyone else, this showed when he addressed the gentiles"

I think you are right so far as in at the point of addressing the gentiles he was human, and the "working out" of the spirit was yet to come. As you say nothing can be proved 100% we can get as near as possible and understand intention.

It was Jesus intention to save nations from themselves by creating a new message to that,  we had previously seen in the old testament. We see a bit of this today the worst atrocities in the world are commited by men its usually men as they come from patriarchal societies of belief systems, who defend thier violent acts towards others from the old testament view of religion.

After the crucifixion though such limitations were removed and we see the "working out of the spirit" begin.

Jesus was the catalyst for that. Dont you just wish sometimes pluralist that intellect did not get in the way of faith, do you think it would make life easier or harder?. I used to joke that i thought life was hard because i didnt understand, then i understood and it was more difficult because i understood.

Ie When you dare not to bother whether you agree or disagree or not, understanding is clearer. Jesus did not ask us to agree with him he asked us to hear him.

Angela