ekunde said
Hi, guys!

 

What are your thoughs to Acts 2:29-32 as proof about an ancient empty tomb tradition? Does It make sense?  

It is not likely that his disciples witnessed the crucifixion or that they went back weeks later to investigate when and how the remains were removed from the cross, if at all. They probably just reasoned backwards: They had visions, accordingly he was risen. He was risen, because he  died. If he died, he was buried in some way.  Legend just continued to develop these elements into the various canonical versions, in which there would have to be an empty tomb and witnesses as a final proof.

Stephen said
They had visions…

It does seem the best explanation, doesn’t it?  Especially when we find out from neuroscientists and psychologists that visual hallucinations of recently departed loved ones are actually relatively common.  (I have a cousin who claims to have seen his father sitting at the foot of his bed one morning not long after the funeral.  He didn’t say anything and after several minutes he was gone.)  It wouldn’t have to have been everyone of course.  Most of the believers in the history of the Church have believed without seeing.

But for personal reasons I can’t help but wonder, was is only visions?  Back in 2011 I had a very close loved one die unexpectedly.  It was a complete shock.  This person was younger than me, living 600 miles away.  We kept in regular contact; we had talked  just a few days before with no hint of distress.  I got one of those terrible late night phone calls.

About a month after the funeral I had an extraordinary dream.  I have the same sort of dreams as everyone else.  Some you remember; some you forget.  This one was different.  I wouldn’t hesitate to call it visionary. 

I’m in a public place.  A farmer’s market?  An art festival?  This person just walks up to me.  I take them in my arms.  I can feel the warmth of their body. 

“How can you be here?  You’re dead!”

“Yes I  am dead.  But I’m still here.”

I am filled with a sense of comfort and peace.  And I wake up.   

Now truth be told, I’m a modern secularist.  I’m not a religious believer.  I’m perfectly satisfied with a materialist, psychological explanation for what happened, that I had an experience because I needed to have it.  But if I were a first century Jewish apocalypticist?  Part of tight knit group of people who were devastated at the shocking death of their beloved Master?  I could see myself easily believing that I had had a divine vision.   I felt the warmth of my loved one’s body.  “But I’m still here.”  

A fascinating report. It is similar to what very many others have reported. Also, the person one encounters in a vivid dream does not have to be diseased! Just someone whose relationship to you has been deep and perhaps broken.

It is possible to discuss the nature of such experiences, just like near death experiences. Are they the result of brain chemistry, or is it a visit from a plane of existence above physics and chemistry? If something similar was at work in our topic, the exact explanation does not matter. Jesus was not raised as one unit from bones, flesh and mind, leaving an empty tomb.

Stephen said
They had visions…

It does seem the best explanation, doesn’t it?  Especially when we find out from neuroscientists and psychologists that visual hallucinations of recently departed loved ones are actually relatively common.  (I have a cousin who claims to have seen his father sitting at the foot of his bed one morning not long after the funeral.  He didn’t say anything and after several minutes he was gone.)  It wouldn’t have to have been everyone of course.  Most of the believers in the history of the Church have believed without seeing.

But for personal reasons I can’t help but wonder, was is only visions?  Back in 2011 I had a very close loved one die unexpectedly.  It was a complete shock.  This person was younger than me, living 600 miles away.  We kept in regular contact; we had talked  just a few days before with no hint of distress.  I got one of those terrible late night phone calls.

About a month after the funeral I had an extraordinary dream.  I have the same sort of dreams as everyone else.  Some you remember; some you forget.  This one was different.  I wouldn’t hesitate to call it visionary. 

I’m in a public place.  A farmer’s market?  An art festival?  This person just walks up to me.  I take them in my arms.  I can feel the warmth of their body. 

“How can you be here?  You’re dead!”

“Yes I  am dead.  But I’m still here.”

I am filled with a sense of comfort and peace.  And I wake up.   

Now truth be told, I’m a modern secularist.  I’m not a religious believer.  I’m perfectly satisfied with a materialist, psychological explanation for what happened, that I had an experience because I needed to have it.  But if I were a first century Jewish apocalypticist?  Part of tight knit group of people who were devastated at the shocking death of their beloved Master?  I could see myself easily believing that I had had a divine vision.   I felt the warmth of my loved one’s body.  “But I’m still here.”  

Getting back to the original post in this thread . . . . 

Even if “the appearances” of Jesus were something like hallucinations or visions (which is certainly well possible), it doesn’t address the burial, which I personally find interesting … and about which I think Ehrman is wrong.

Gavriel argues that the apostles, who weren’t at the crucifixion, “probably reasoned backwards,” that is: “They had visions,” meaning he had to have risen from the dead, and that means he have been “buried in some way” first.  And that develops into an empty tomb story with witnesses as final proof.

But there are major problems with this theory.  First and foremost, the central tenet of the story is not merely that Jesus rose, but that he rose “on the third day.”  Indeed, this is pretty much the oldest tradition in Christianity.  If Jesus having risen is based strictly on visions and nothing else, why the centrality of the “third day”?

What’s more: Would a First Century Palestinian Jew interpret visions of a recently deceased loved one, without something more as corroboration, to be a resurrection?  I hate to go with arguments from authority, but pretty much every historian for Second Temple Judaism says the answer to that is “no.”  That’s because First Century Palestinian Jews routinely had visions of the departed — there is literature about it — and/but those visions are never associated with resurrection.

Then there are the early anti-Christian polemics against the historicity of the resurrection.  Note what the polemics argue: not that Jesus did not die or was not buried …. BUT THAT THE APOSTLES STOLE THE BODY.  Wouldn’t the most natural polemic against the claims of a resurrected messiah simply be that his followers were lying about corpse reanimating, and simply point to the corpse?  But that’s not what the polemicists argue; instead their arguments seem to concede that the body is missing, after having been previously buried.

There are obviously also arguments about the female witnesses of the empty tomb and the creedal claim of burial in 1 Corinthian 15, both of which I find persuasive.  But on the whole, what I find to be the strongest evidence on a burial and missing body is the centrality of the “third day,” the fact that the visions (assuming that’s what they were) would be interpreted as evidence of resurrection, and the earliest polemics against resurrection, which seem to concede both the burial and the missing corpse.

gavriel said

It seems that everyone agrees that there really was some type of visions that lead to the disciples belief in a resurrection. The reason they interpreted it as a “resurrection”,  contrary to what most other Jews would have done when experiencing visions of their diseased family members, was probably that the idea of “resurrection” already was an established part of their apocalyptic religious doctrines, as attested by Paul. Paul probably did not invent the idea of a rapture of both the living and the dead. Or?

Assuming that the execution came as a great surprise and shock, the resurrection interpretation was perhaps the only way out of their predicament. Next came the idea of the immediate Return, and pretty soon the community was on the rise again.  

The problem here is that resurrection story in Christianity is diametrically in conflict with the apocalyptic doctrine of resurrection during the Second Temple, as reflected in Daniel 12.  And, in addition to the conventional Jewish texts (Daniel, Ezekiel), we have a great deal of Apocalyptic literature from the Second Temple period preserved from the scrolls/fragments found at Qumran.

Second Temple Jews did NOT believe that the messiah would be independently resurrected from the dead.  To the contrary, they believed that the resurrection would happen of the multitudes of deceased Jews, and this would be led by the archangel Michael.

These Second Temple Jews would expect that the “messiah” (“masiah,” meaning “anointed,” as used in the Tanakh, Psalm 2:2  & Leviticus 8:10-12), would be a king-priest or warrior-judge, a kingly figure who restored the nation of Israel.  He would not have been executed prior to restoring Israel, and would not have been independently resurrected.

* * *

On the point about creating the resurrection out of necessity . . . . this is possible, though it’s hard to reconcile with the dramatic spread of the movement, particularly among Jews, for whom an executed messiah would make little sense.

At a minimum, I think you need something like an empty tomb.  For starters, First Century Palestinian Jews aren’t likely to believe that a messiah has been reanimated if his dead corpse is available for all to see.  Second, you have the emphasis on the “third day,” which implies that there was a distinct point in time the body went missing.  And third, you have the earliest polemics against resurrection, from Palestinian Jews, which, rather than arguing that the body never went missing, instead argue that the body was stolen by the followers of Jesus, thus seeming to concede of an empty tomb. 

Stephen said
vergari wrote

Second Temple Jews did NOT believe that the messiah would be independently resurrected from the dead. 

True but the early Christians didn’t seem to believe this either.  In I Cor 15:23 Paul refers to Jesus as the “first fruits” of the resurrection, and in Rev 1:4, the author refers to Jesus as “firstborn of the dead”.  Even with his high Christology Paul still sees Jesus’ resurrection as the beginning of a process that will shortly come to completion in a general resurrection. Mark has Jesus predict the kingdom before some of his disciples die and in Matthew Jesus tells them it will come before they can preach throughout Israel. Assuming as seems likely that this view of the imminence of the kingdom goes back to him, Jesus (and his immediate disciples) had the traditional view.   

I think you’re really pushing the limits of how “first fruits” could be encompassed within a Second Temple understanding of resurrection.  1 Corinthians is 20 years post-crucifixion.  The Revelation of John is at least 50 years post-crucifixion.  I get that early Christians believed in an impending apocalypse.  But believing that Christ’s “resurrection” somehow cohered to a Second Temple understanding of resurrection just doesn’t fit.

Second Temple Jews did not believe in some sort of rolling resurrection process.  Perhaps it would make sense that these visions, on their own, could signal that “the resurrection” (as depicted in Daniel) was upon them …. in the short term.  But certainly by the time the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is formulated, it was very clear to these followers of Jesus that the resurrection they understood from Second Temple Scripture was not taking place.  It, thus, becomes far more difficult to accept the “he was buried” prong of that creed as some sort of collective inference based on visions alone.

Also, by citing to Mark and Matthew, you seem to accept that the beliefs of the early Church (of the Judean variety) are contained in those books.  If that’s the case, then rejecting the empty tomb narrative becomes a little bit dicier.

Stephen said
vergari wrote

He would not have been executed prior to restoring Israel…

No but Jesus didn’t really fit any of the expected Messianic criteria did he?  Much of the NT is an effort to retrofit the traditional concept of the Messiah to accommodate the ministry of Jesus.  I suspect the experience (of whatever nature) of the resurrection was largely responsible for helping the disciples overcome the disconfirmation of the crucifixion. 
 

Fair enough.  But doesn’t that cut in favor of the historicity of the empty tomb?  If the Gospels are chiefly an effort to retrofit the concept of Messiah to fit the available information about Jesus, then why invent an empty tomb narrative, when it would have nothing to do with the concept of Messiah?

Stephen said
vergari wrote

…the dramatic spread of the movement, particularly among Jews…

Did the movement spread dramatically, particularly among Jews?

My perception is that Jewish Christianity was pretty much a non-starter.  In Paul’s day they were a small impoverished group in Jerusalem that probably didn’t survive the first revolt.  If we’re reading John correctly at some point they were kicked out of the synagogues, and by the end of the first century marginalized groups like the Ebionites were considered heretics.
  

Oh, I think we have some pretty strong evidence in favor a fairly rapid spread of Christianity among Jews — though quite possibly not foremost in Jerusalem.  First, Matthew’s Gospel was almost certainly written for an audience of Hellenistic Jews.  Second, Galatians makes it clear that at some point Peter had left Jerusalem to preach the gospel; while Peter certainly would have preached to Gentiles as well, it makes sense that a major target of his would have been Jews living outside Judea.  Along that vein, Rome had a thriving Jewish community — and within a short time also had a thriving Christian community; it just makes sense, particularly given Peter’s relocation to Rome, that many of the Roman Christians had previously been Jews; indeed, Suetonius’s reference to the Jewish expulsion from Rome by Claudius strongly implies strife with the emerging Christian community.  And finally, and just generally, all four Gospels heavily reference Jewish texts (which are referred to as Scripture); the importance of Jewish texts in emerging Christianity makes far more sense if Christianity was spreading among Jewish populations.

Now …. could I be wrong here?  Sure.  But I’m just looking at the evidence; and, to me, there was a very strong Jewish component (and, indeed, Hellenistic Jewish component) to early Christianity.

Note that this is important not because I think that Jews within Judea were heavily converting to Christianity, but rather because the early Christians — indeed, the ones who formulated early doctrines — seemed to be overwhelmingly Jews.  And to these Jews, mere visions of a departed love one would not imply resurrection.

Stephen said
vergari wrote

…you need something like an empty tomb…

I’ll confess I’ve always had a soft spot for the empty tomb story since it struck my imagination as a child.  Only as an adult however do I appreciate Mark’s literary brilliance in portraying Jesus’ resurrection not by presence (an appearance) but by absence (the empty tomb).  It’s such a marvelous literary device that I have come to think 16:8 is the original ending and the story of the empty tomb is a non-historical tradition.  

Using the empty tomb as a literary device is not mutually exclusive to the historicity of the empty tomb.

Just because the phrases “Et tu, Brute?” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” make for wonderful literary devices doesn’t mean that Julius Caesar was not executed in the Roman Senate by Brutus and Cassius or that Marc Antony did not deliver an oration at Caesar’s funeral.

Analyzing historicity based strictly on the literary value of the story would seem to make for terrible history.  Does the assassination of Lincoln by the country’s most famous actor imply that Lincoln was a myth?  Does Napoleon’s escape from Elba and reconstitution of his army, only be defeated at Waterloo (the so-called “Hundred Days”), imply that those events never happened? or that Napoleon never existed?  Does the betrayal by the Hero of Saratoga, plotting to surrender West Point, imply that Benedict Arnold was not really a Revolutionary War general?  I think you see my point.

Sometimes, the seminal moments of history are the very ones which would make for great literary devices: the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire; an illiterate mystic helping to take down a great European dynasty; a disgraced naval minister becoming the savior of Britain; the bastard son from a backwater Caribbean island founding the most powerful financial system the world has ever seen; and so on, and so on.