Loading...Readers have given me some tough nuts to crack: Problems with proving the resurrection and with knowing if books of the New Testament may have been scissored and pasted together. Here are intriguing and important questions I’ve received, with my attempts to answer them.
QUESTION:
When I first began to read Bart’s Blog, he was just pointing out textual errors. Now it seems he is trying to destroy Christianity. Christianity lives or dies by the resurrection. That is our hope. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have no hope. In those days, history and events were passed down verbally and by the written word. What was the incentive to pass down a bunch of hoaxes? I can’t think of any, maybe some of the readers can.
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Just curious about any comments you might have about reports I have read describing NDE experiences where the individual describes the room and individuals present even though their brain has flat lined. The writer above laments that the resurrection is a cherished hope of the world if indeed it presents a thermodynamic impossibility.
I wrote my book Heaven and Hell in part because I wanted to read extensively on NDEs, trying to figure them out. I did, at least to my satisfaction. Among other things I became convinced that we cannot verify either “natural” or “supernatural” claims on the basis of anecdotal evidence, and NDEs are invariably anecdotal.
I keep hearing from Christians that they can’t imagine how early Christians would have communicated false information to each other, yet they don’t seem to have trouble imagining that the same could have happened in any of the other religions.
But we don’t even have to flex our imaginations that much. Just look at some examples from our world. Look how differently the stories of the January 6th Capitol riots were told on the left and on the right. And we have VIDEO evidence establishing the facts on that one!
Whatever our politics, it’s clear (or should be clear) to all of us that people are makin’ stuff up.
People are easy to talk into anything. I remember watching the Baltimore riots years ago. Aside from the real facts behind the stories there were some on video. A crowd was gathering incensed and TV interviewer asked why. Person says “my friend was sitting on the porch minding his own business unarmed, and the police came up and shot him and he died.” It turned out the true incident was recorded and on TV. A guy was walking in middle of the street toward police with hands in his pockets refusing to stop or take his hands out. Police did NOT even have guns pointed at him. He suddenly tried to pull his hand out but had a gun and SHOT HIMSELF in the leg with his own illegal gun. It didn’t stop the rioters or stories on the news about police shooting an unarmed man since someone said so, because that was the narrative. We see plenty of examples around us today of group think and no critical thinking, even when technology shows the story is otherwise. How can we literally believe ‘stories’ from ancient times as some people claim?
Good points. But I think dismissing *every* report from antiquity without doing due diligence as a historian is probably not the way to go either….
Aren’t apologists who claim that the Resurrection of Jesus can be proven historically creating a strange new category of thought where someone at least theoretically could assent to the historicity of the Resurrection but make no personal spiritual commitment? Do you suppose that is the intention? Is accepting the Resurrection as a historical fact itself enough to provide salvation? The next time you debate one of these folks would you ask them about it?
My sense is that they think that once they “know” it’s true they’ll commit to it.
This may reflect a gap in my understanding, but I would be grateful for your perspective on the current state of research on the historical Jesus. Do you think the field has, in some sense, reached a point of relative maturity, or do you see it as still very much an open and evolving area of inquiry?
In particular, even in the absence of new manuscript discoveries, do you expect significant new developments to emerge? If so, in which areas are they most likely to occur? Or is the field now moving more toward refining and reinterpreting existing evidence in greater detail?
I actually don’t see much evolving these days. Most “new” insights are pretty much older ones put into different packages. What seems to shift more is scholars persepctives and sensitivies than new information or original thoughts.
One question I cannot quite get out of my mind concerns the motives behind intentional textual changes made by early Christians in writings that later came to be regarded as Scripture.
I can understand such behavior in a political campaign, where people may alter a message for strategic purposes. But how did early Christian scribes or editors understand what they were doing? Did some of them think that changing or adding something was acceptable if it promoted what they believed to be the truth of Christianity, even if the specific wording or detail was not original?
Were some changes driven by anti-Jewish sentiment, doctrinal conflict, apologetic concerns, or the desire to strengthen a particular view of Christ? Or were many additions not really inventions, but written forms of oral traditions already circulating among Christians, or attempts to harmonize one text with another?
What troubles me is that deliberately adding or replacing something one knows to be false seems directly contrary to Christian faith. Apart from ordinary copying mistakes, what do you think were the main motives behind intentional changes to early Christian texts, and how might those Christians have justified them to themselves?
You may want to look at my book Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, where I deal wiht this issue extensively. We obvoiusly cannot crawl into the heads of the copyists who were making these changes, but it is usually thought that intentional changes were made with good intentions — to make the text say what it was taken to mean, or to correct the mistaken alteration of an earlier scribe, or to guide the readers away from an incorrect interpretation, or to put the wording in the form the copyist was most accustomed to hearing it, etc.
Even so, changing the text did change its meaning, and if it was an intentional act it means a scribe was changing the text to make it say what he wanted it to. Yes, this did happen for a range of theological and apologetic reasons.
Or could the Telephone Game have its counterpart in manuscript copying?
A half-century ago I worked on the newspaper of my small community college. One of the reporters in the class ahead of me — a large, voluble, very self-assured guy — was happy to have me edit his work; he once said, “You know what I’m trying to say; just go ahead, you do a better job of it anyway.” But sometimes my editing would reflect _my_ understanding of what he was trying to say — which might not have completely matched his. Repeat for X generations of edits ….
Yup! That’s closely connected with my thesis in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
> closely connected with my thesis in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
I should go back and reread it.
It’s going a little far to think that someone changing a story about Jesus’ life was promoting a hoax. Literacy was low, and spoken versions had to outnumber and precede many written versions of those early stories. Many tellings might have begun by saying, “The way I heard it…”
In those times, facts were not so easily verifiable as today. Perhaps, “facts” were not able to be held to quite the same standard. Many things we easily understand today were explained by evoking unseen, and unknown forces. That kind of thing could be applied to almost any situation. With various early Christian philosophies emerging, a person or group might easily “correct” a story to fit what they believed to be true. So, they would not have thought of adding or deleting something from a telling as promoting a hoax. Later on, the emerging church hierarchy took care of the different versions in circulation by proclaiming some as canonical and others as heretical and apocryphal. To promote their position, some people argued that the apocryphal versions were hoaxes. Some may have been, but I”ll bet most were sincere versions of what their proponents believed to be true.
I strongly agree with the questioner that the resurrection of Jesus lies at the very heart of the Christian faith. Without it, we’re hopelessly lost and to be pitied. Without it, reading the NT, other than as an historical curiosity, is a calamitous waste of time. Jesus’ resurrection was a difficult claim to believe at the time, let alone two millennia later, so faith today is little different from faith back then. The question I must answer as a Christian today needed an answer at the time: Is the available circumstantial evidence credible and sufficient?
Putting aside questions about the historicity of NT books, such as whether we can believe Paul’s comment about 500+ witnesses seeing the risen Jesus (“so go ask ’em!”), does historical analysis confirm or deny – probabilistically, of course – that all Jesus’ disciples died believing in the resurrection and that not one recanted? Is Luke’s account of Paul’s encounter with Jesus en route to Damascus supported by any extant written accounts/interrogations/speculations? Did the earliest followers really accept the testimony of women, which NT accounts of the resurrection discovery imply? Stated negatively, do any historical documents contradict such evidential claims?
I myself don’t think we are to be pitied if the resurrection did not happen.
And the accounts of the disciples being martyred is all late and legendary — nothing in an account that is otherwise considered historical. The fact that our earliest accounts all indicate that some of them (most of them?) “doubted” suggests to me that possibly some (a number?) of them never did believe it.
Must a participle in Greek be translated as a participle in English, to be a good translation? It seems to me “Baptist”, “Baptizer” & “one who baptizes” are all the same in the context of John the Baptist’s name/description. Commonly Baptist means a denomination, but not when preceded by “John the”.
Translating participles is tricky and depends on lots of factors. But it is always a VERBAL adjective; when used with an article, however, it is substantivized. “John the one who baptizes” would be the literal translation.
The question is being framed as “PROVING THE RESURRECTION” instead of “THE EMPTY TOMB”. No one saw the alleged resurrection, so let’s stop insisting on eye-witnesses. The tomb was allegedly guarded by armed men from the High Priest; the corpse of Jesus was missing. Interestingly, a stone slab was found in the village of Nazareth with a message. By order of Imperial Rome, removing a corpse from a tomb is a capital offense under Roman law. In 49 CE, Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because of fighting among themselves at the instigation of “Chrestos” (Seutonius). Heavy-handed unthinking clueless Roman bureaucrats! Grave-robbing in Judea was generating social disorder throughout the Roman empire in the Jewish populations.
At Passover, Jerusalem’s population swelled from 50,000 to 300,000. All of them (and the Roman officials) experienced the midday darkness (Tertullian). Tens of thousands walked inside the EMPTY TOMB. The corpse of Jesus was missing. Crucified as an “enemy of Rome”. He emerged as a disciple of John the Baptist. He became the leader of the social phenomenon that was known as John’s Baptism after John’s death. Now, he was dead but his corpse was missing. Did he fake his death?