(7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)
Loading...On January 29-31, 2016, I gave three talks at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (surprise) Coral Gables, Florida, all on my book, “How Jesus Became God.” I posted the first of the talks last week. Here now is the second.
Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition.
How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 2 of 3:
If you don’t belong yet to the blog, JOIN! You will get lots of posts (5-6 a week), videos, and comments. Tons of stuff, for very little money. And all proceeds go to fight hunger and homelessness.
Another enjoyable experience! But I was amused that the recording ended by cutting you off in mid-sentence.
You told your audience (were there fewer people there than the night before?) that historians have a problem in dealing with the Resurrection claim, because no one can prove or disprove a claimed “miracle.” But you *could* have shaken them up a bit by telling them the *belief* can be explained, *even if one assumes there never was a resurrection* – because it’s known that people really do have “visions” and/or vivid dreams that convince them dead people are, in some sense, “still alive.” Are you going to mention that in Lecture 3?
I still find it hard to accept that the idea of Jesus’s death by crucifixion being an “atoning sacrifice” came about because believers in the importance of his “resurrection” saw no other way of explaining why God would have let His favored one endure such a thing. To me, it seems that there would have been a much more “obvious” explanation: that he had to die in the most public of ways, so no one could claim he hadn’t really been dead. And his followers could have claimed his “victory over Death” was all the more impressive because it was a *victory over execution by the Romans!*
Something that puzzles me: how the earliest Christians explained why the “resurrected” Jesus – supposedly in a newly invulnerable body – didn’t confront the Roman authorities, tell them what he was, and *dare* them to try to kill him again. I assume they had to fall back on the handy explanation that God – and in this case, Jesus – were “testing believers’ faith.”
That makes me think of a great line used by a local TV station in a different context, asserting that their news coverage could be trusted because of its track record: “Trust has to be *earned*, not ‘given.’ “
As Dr Erhman clearly and honestly explained you can’t disprove a claimed miracle and we can verify many early disciples of Christ believed in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead making him equal to God as Paul proclaims in Philippians 2:6-10.
Temp1936, we cannot verify from Paul’s Philippians 2:6-10 that it was historically the case that “many early disciples of Christ believed in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead making him equal to God.” A claim in the New Testament is not evidence that the claim is true. Also, there is no logical or Jewish reason why anyone would leap from a belief that someone had been resurrected to believing that that person was God. If that were true, then, the dead, when they are resurrected, should also be considered “equal to God.”
hello bart
are you not sure it was in sunrise and not surprise because i used to live in s florida