Stephen said
There is ZERO doubt that the creed in 1 Corinthians predates Mark. Zero doubt. This is a creed that was already well established in the Church by the time 1 Corinthians is composed circa CE 55. The use of the word “buried: in this creed strongly implies, based on Jewish law and postmortem rituals practices, the placement of a dead body into a tomb.
The statement in 1 Cor is not inconsistent with a burial in a mass grave which historically is much more likely. It’s not clear at all that Paul envisioned the Resurrection as a resuscitation. I doubt that Mark “created” the Empty Tomb story but neither is there any evidence that it goes back to Paul either.
I have never seen any evidence of any kind that a First Century Jew would consider the dumping of a corpse into mass pit post-crucifixion to be “buried.”
Is there anything you can cite in support of that?
Josephus writes quite a few things about the treatment of the dead post-crucifixion, and I cannot recall anytime that he refers such a mass grave disposal as a “burial.”
Combining that with the rising on the third day (also from 1 Corinthians 15) — to wit: why would the Romans have taken such care to ensure that a discarded crucified corpse was deposited into a mass grave on the day of death — and I just don’t see how one can reasonably infer something different that a customary Jewish burial.
There’s no reason to assume all Palestianian Jewish Christians were illiterate. Scarce, definitely–literacy being the exception in all groups, including pagans. So there wouldn’t be a large literature, it would have fairly limited circulation, and it would be vulnerable to being lost, for lack of interest in copying it, later on. How would the early church have stayed in touch with Jerusalem, the original administrative center of the cult, if there weren’t Christian scribes to maintain communications? We’re not talking about something written down immediately after the crucifixion. Decades after, but decades before the gospels we have.
What do you think happened to Augustus’ memoirs? We know they existed. The most famous and powerful man in the western world. No copy has survived, just a few fragments. You can believe that happened, and not that a handful of sparsely copied Aramaic texts related to an obscure Jewish cult most Romans had never even heard of were lost? Explain.
As to there being ‘no evidence’–we were just talking about Papias recently. He is quoted as to there being such a literature, that the gospel authors drew upon. Not the most reliable source one could wish for–but that is evidence.
There is a large scholarly body of opinion that Aramaic sources did exist–and what is hard to believe about there being texts about Jesus in the only language he’s known to have spoken?
What is your specific objection to this, and don’t pretend you don’t have one. Fundamentalists are hardly champions of there being gospels before the gospels, since they want to believe the Greek texts were written much earlier than they were, by eyewitnesses. That can’t be your reason. So……?
Ahhhh—you want to believe Mark is just a beautiful story, and that the real Jesus was nothing like that. Yes, he existed, but he was nothing much. Go on, tell me I’m wrong. You like that. 🙂
Again–how many brilliant storytellers, theologians, and proselytizers are we supposed to believe gathered around the memory of a ‘naive religious fanatic’ who died a criminal’s death on the cross, and was probably never as popular as John the Baptist? Why did Jesus attract so much talent?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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