The Empty Tomb

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Today seems like the best day for this discussion, being Easter and all that.

According to the Bible, Christ was crucified by Roman Authorities and entombed only to be resurrected. This is the basic foundation of Christianity. The entire Religion is based upon this premise. If Christ died and was not resurrected, then there is no divinity in Christ, for he failed to make good upon his promise to return after death. Christ would remain probably the most influential person to ever walk the earth, but no longer a saviour of the world.

Let us examine this pivotal event in Human history and see if we can come up with a conclusion of the likelihoods of this happening.

Most everyone can agree that Christ existed, and that he was indeed killed by Roman and Jewish authorities. There are people who don't beleive this fact, but then again there are people that don't beleive in the holocaust.

There are several theories out there, however that try to debunk the divinity of Christ by attacking his resurrection. One such theory is the "Wrong Tomb Theory". Meaning that The two women who, going to see Christ's tomb, found it open and empty, were mistaken and went to the wrong tomb. Of course, this is nonsense, as it would mean that not only were the two women mistaken, but the disciples who came back went to the wrong tomb, the Roman Guards were posted at the wrong tomb, and the Jewish authorities did not correct this myth instantly by producing the body of Christ.
Another such theory is the "Swoon theory". This one is actually hilarious. Some suggest that Christ merely fainted after hours on the cross and blood loss only to re awake in the tomb and his awakening was considered a resurrection. Of course, this means he would have had to have survived 3 days in a cold tomb, after having been stuck up on a cross for a long time and having been pierced by a spear. He would also, in his weakened position have to roll a large rock out of the way to exit the tomb and convince his disciples that he was indeed resurrection.
The most popular theory is the "Stolen Body Theory". This theory being that the Disciples of Christ returned to the tomb while the Roman Guards, posted by the Jewish authorities, slept and stole the body. However, think hard about this. The disciples of Christ scattered to the wind as soon as Christ was taken by the Romans. They fled for their lives, some of them denying they knew him. Would these cowardly men then return to challenge a Roman guard and face death? Also, look at what happened to them years later after Christ is supposed to have revealed himself to them. They were martyred. They were willing to die for something they believed. Would any man die for something he knew was a lie or fabrication? What of the 500 witnesses of Christ? Did they exist? It would certainly help explain the quick spread of Christianity as they spread news of this Resurrection far and wide. The accounts have stood the test of time, and 2,000 years later this act of resurrection is still celebrated by billions.

There seems to be too much evidence to suggest that it never happened or that it was indeed falsified.

[Dayman]

There seems to be too much evidence to suggest that it never happened or that it was indeed falsified.

What evidence was that again?

Besides the gospels written ~50-100 years afterwards? (Which can be argued as a mythified version of Jesus not the real man.)

[basics]

Boeing,

Jesus died when He was 33 years of age or thereabouts, the gospels are accorded as being written some 20 odd years later, the last some 60 odd years assuming what we have are the originals.

That's a huge assumption given the seriousness of the argument that some 3,000 were added to His church at Pentecost by some miraculous happenings not that many days later. Are we really to believe that not one made record of what was happening during those days?

We know that letters were being sent to churches as they were being established and certainly not of the time scale you would have us believe and as was the rule what was received was usually read, perhaps copied, and distributed along the line. Indeed it is written in one of the books that these were the instructions.

I find it astonishing that you want to accept the notion that those who had been with Jesus, and those that came to know them, only had afterthought to put on parchment their recollections of an event of such magnitude, based on what parchments are available, given that that material deteriorated quickly, after such a long time.

[Dayman]

Boeing,

Jesus died when He was 33 years of age or thereabouts, the gospels are accorded as being written some 20 odd years later, the last some 60 odd years assuming what we have are the originals.

That's a huge assumption given the seriousness of the argument that some 3,000 were added to His church at Pentecost by some miraculous happenings not that many days later. Are we really to believe that not one made record of what was happening during those days?

We know that letters were being sent to churches as they were being established and certainly not of the time scale you would have us believe and as was the rule what was received was usually read, perhaps copied, and distributed along the line. Indeed it is written in one of the books that these were the instructions.

I find it astonishing that you want to accept the notion that those who had been with Jesus, and those that came to know them, only had afterthought to put on parchment their recollections of an event of such magnitude, based on what parchments are available, given that that material deteriorated quickly, after such a long time.

The gospels were not written by the apostles, basics.

[basics]

Boeing,

It's quite possible that the Apostles couldn't write at all but that doesn't mean that someone else didn't do the writing for them as they dictated. That could fill in many aspersions as to why some books have different styles.

[Dayman]

Boeing,

It's quite possible that the Apostles couldn't write at all but that doesn't mean that someone else didn't do the writing for them as they dictated. That could fill in many aspersions as to why some books have different styles.

It's pretty much established by the general consensus of biblical scholars that none of them really wrote anything.

Tho closest may be Luke, who apparently may have interviewed one or two of them late in life.

well a human could enter a death like coma for 3 days and then seem to rise again... its often been a theory that the roman who gave jesus vinegar was actually giving hima drug so he would appear dead on the cross, since in that time pharmacy was often mixed into solutions of vinegar.

Or you could throw Occam's Razor at it and do away with the whole resurrection deal in the first place.

this case we actually have accounts of his resurection.

No, we have tales of it. There are no firsthand accounts, only anecdotes.

[Richard]

What evidence was that again?

Besides the gospels written ~50-100 years afterwards? (Which can be argued as a mythified version of Jesus not the real man.)

Exactly, there's not really any evidence for or against.

[Irishman]

There seems to be too much evidence to suggest that it never happened or that it was indeed falsified.

So you believe that elvis is still living too?

I second boeing's question, what evidence do we have (assuming that the bible is a myth)?

[Oldgamer]

So you believe that elvis is still living too?

I second boeing's question, what evidence do we have (assuming that the bible is a myth)?

Irishman, the Bible isn't a myth. I have one on my desk, right now!

However ...

I Corinthians 15:12-20 Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.  Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.

NKJV

The above is the primary reason so many unbelievers find it absolutely necessary to attack the validity of the Scriptural account. If Jesus didn't exist, or if He wasn't resurrected, or if it was all some sort of scam (which the Apostles were willing to die for), then the very basis of the Christian faith is undermined entirely.

Not only does Christianity need Christ, and His Teachings, but it needs Christ on the Cross, dead, and then buried. It needs His Resurrection. Without these central elements of Christianity, we might as well turn our churches into bingo parlors.

The Nicene Creed sums up the totality of my faith. And I certainly believe that my faith has more validity than the seriously undermined faith of the global warming crowd ...

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

The above is the primary reason so many unbelievers find it absolutely necessary to attack the validity of the Scriptural account. If Jesus didn't exist, or if He wasn't resurrected, or if it was all some sort of scam (which the Apostles were willing to die for), then the very basis of the Christian faith is undermined entirely.

Some Christians disagree with you. They argue that you can reject the physical resurrection of Jesus as an actual historical event and still accept it as a spiritual truth. I can't say that really grabs me, but it works for them apparently.

And I highly doubt it was any "scam" by the apostles. Apologists are fond of the hoary old argument that they all died for their belief in the Resurrection and so it must have happened, but this founders on three points:

(i) We actually have no solid evidence that any of the Apostles died for their faith.

(ii) Even if they did (and they certainly may have), we can't be certain that the "faith" they died for was the same as that of later Christianity - their idea of what "Jesus is risen" meant could well have been very different to the meaning of that phrase for 21st, 4th or even 2nd Century Christians

and

(iii) Just because they believed this miracle occured, doesn't mean it did. Many Catholics genuinely believe they have seen the Virgin Mary and would die for that belief. I doubt this cuts much much ice with most Protestants. Ditto for Shi'ites who claim to have seen visions of martyrs of their sects. They'd probably die for that belief too, but does that convince you they are right?

The idea that Jesus was, in some sense, "risen" is more likely to have arisen as a way of coping with the sudden shock of his arrest and execution and the demoralising shattering of their expectations of a glorious coming of the kingship of Yahwheh. They had to try to find a way that this seeming disaster could somehow been seen to be a fulfillment of their previous expections.

The conclusion they came to was that this had actually been what Yahweh and Jesus had intended all along (thus all those passages in the gospels where Jesus tells them this and they, for some odd reason, are too dumb to get what he's saying). Using passages from Isaiah, Psalms and Daniel, they decided that Jesus' death was the first stage in the immanent Kingship of Yahweh and he was to return, as the mystical Son of Man, any day now in the final fulfillment.

The idea that he was, in some sense, "risen" developed from a mystical concept to the visions and "appearances" of Paul's account to the various (and contradictory) more concrete stories of the later gospels.

No "scam" is required. Apocalyptic cults whose expectations of eschatological fulfillment are dashed tend to reinterpret their expectations to fit their new situation. Many sociological case studies show that, for example, when the doomsday cult finds that the aliens haven't come in flying saucers to rescue them and the Earth hasn't exploded, they simply change their beliefs to say that their faith averted the disaster and the aliens will come to take them away as a reward some time in the future.

What they don't do is say "Ooops - we were totally wrong! Aren't we a pack of idiots? Let's all go home and get laughed at by everyone we know."

It is my understanding that the Josephus writings are forgeries.

The passage in question has clearly been doctored and added to, but the scholarly consensus is that it is not a total interpolation. Josephus seems to have noted something about Jesus' career and that he was executed by Pilate. But the stuff about how he was "the Christ" and how he rose from the dead can't have been written by Josephus, since he was a devout Jew, and was clearly added later in a clumsy attempt at propping up Christian claims about Jesus.

[basics]

ThiudareiksGunthigg,

Couldn't you have picked a shorter name or was it done so that cripples like me would get exhausted before finishing a reply?

You know when I read your posts I see so much of God in them that I too am surprised that His hand has not touched you. However that said I have to disagree that you include regenerate men and women with crazy cults and even mainline religion.

But you are correct in saying that the original church and what it became not that long after Pentecost is something not readily considered by people today and I feel that is why there perhaps are so many cranky versions of Christianity assuming that each is regenerate.

By that I mean that at Pentecost not one on whom the Spirit fell had any doubts as to who Jesus Christ was and they cried it to all and sundry. Yet a few years down the line here were men supposedly representing God some of them not knowing that Jesus was that God.

My own opinion is that when the Jewishness, that is the influence delivered by the Apostles, died out, much of the Gospel truth was lost. Thus leaving the churches open to influences without any knowledge of the why's and wherefore's upon which the Gospel was built, coming mostly from the Greek element that replaced them.

Not a big sermon. Comments?

[Oldgamer]

Some Christians disagree with you.

Very few. It is generally held by Christians that the faith itself is not valid, if Jesus is not risen. I know about those who disagree with with the historicity of the Resurrection, and yes, their "spiritual truth" works for them.

My friend, there is a social left, a political left, and a religious left in the Christian world. Although there is not necessarily an overlap between the three, it is usually the case that there is. The religious left, like the social and political left, has serious doubts about the validity of Christianity. They lean towards agnosticism, for the most part. Many of them cross over the line into agnosticism and atheism (which brings up the question of how they can be atheists and Christians at the same time ... I call them small "c" christians).

As to the rest of your post, I won't even try to refute it. It makes as much sense to me as my saying, "When you show me Julius Caesar's bones, I'll believe that he existed." And yet, we can deduce the fact of Caesar's existence by the rest of Rome's history, just as we can deduce the existence of Alexander by the existence of a Greek world, stretching from Greece through Persia, and from Asia Minor to Egypt, when the Romans came there.

The point is that something happened as the result of Alexander's life, as well as Gaius Julius Caesar. The whole world changed. But did the world change because a carpenter was nailed to a cross by the Romans in Judea, circa 30ad? Why would such an event change the history of the world?

Without the historicity of Christ's Resurrection, there is no validity to the Christian faith.

By the way, I rather agree with Basics about the Hand of God working in your life. It shows, although it is sometimes difficult to dig out of your posts. I sometimes feel like a "post archaeologist".

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

Very few. It is generally held by Christians that the faith itself is not valid, if Jesus is not risen. I know about those who disagree with with the historicity of the Resurrection, and yes, their "spiritual truth" works for them.

All true. But I was simply pointing out that there are alternative ways of looking at this stuff and still remaining a Christian. Though a "liberal" one! (*cowers in horror* )

As to the rest of your post, I won't even try to refute it. It makes as much sense to me as my saying, "When you show me Julius Caesar's bones, I'll believe that he existed." And yet, we can deduce the fact of Caesar's existence by the rest of Rome's history, just as we can deduce the existence of Alexander by the existence of a Greek world, stretching from Greece through Persia, and from Asia Minor to Egypt, when the Romans came there.

Er, no. It's nothing like displaying the level of scepticism of saying I won't believe in Caesar until I see his bones. Quite the opposite: it's actually the equivalent of applying the level of critical analysis a historian would bring to any ancient texts. If Caesar's Gallic War makes a claim about one of Caesar's exploits but this is contradicted by Suetonius and Plutarch, then I have good reason to examine Caesar's claim about himself more sceptically. Suetonius and Plutarach may have their biases on the matter as well, but Caesar's desire for self-promotion when he wrote the Gallic War would immediately make me suspect his account is not to be entirely trusted. I could then look at the three accounts and try to work out how they arose and where the truth may lie.

This is all I'm doing with the gospel accounts. The only reason you don't do the same is that your religious affliation puts you in a critical straitjacket and requires you to hold one opinion on these texts only: that they are historically true and can be trusted as such. If they were Muslim texts, however, or Roman ones with nothing to do with Jesus, you'd be free of that restriction.

In other words, people like you and basics are the very last people anyone should turn to for sound historical analysis of these matters.

But did the world change because a carpenter was nailed to a cross by the Romans in Judea, circa 30ad? Why would such an event change the history of the world?

Because of how people reacted to it. Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 triggered a vast and catastrophic war. Does that make Princip or his action in themselves vastly significant? Not really - in other political and diplomatic circumstances he would have been just another assassin. It was those circumstances and the way they caused people to react to the assassination that keeps it from being an obscure footnote in history. Ditto for Jesus and the belief that he - in some sense - "rose from the dead".

And yes, you can argue that those circumstances and reactions were all put in place by God as part of his divine plan etc. And a Muslim or a Mormon could argue the same about the success of their religions. How much ice does that argument cut with you when they try it?

Exactly.

By the way, I rather agree with Basics about the Hand of God working in your life. It shows, although it is sometimes difficult to dig out of your posts. I sometimes feel like a "post archaeologist".

This isn't that condescending "deep down you really want to be a Christian" crap is it? Because that stuff is usually a sign of insecurity on the part of the Christian.

[beranas]

Why must we assume that it is falsified? You have no statements to the contrary from contemporaneous sources, the alternatives are both silly and irrational (ie. swoon theory, empty tomb theory), and the motives for the apostles to endure martyrdom for a lie are also irrational.
The idea that the gospels were exaggerated stories of the life of Jesus is disproven if it was to come from a first-hand account. The gospel of John, though the last gospel to be written may still have been written by the Apostle John on Patmos. He did live to be a very old man. Apart from the that, the miracles that Jesus performed would have been true if he were really the Son of God, and there is mention of him by Josephus and either Pliny of Tactitus as a "miracle man". Coming from a Roman source does lend the case some objectivity. But the debate over the miracles of Jesus is irrelevant. Realists (which I assume most of the people here are) are not convinced by miracles. If a realist doesn't believe in God, he won't believe in miracles. But if a person does believe in God, it is easy then to believe in miracles. The miracles don't force belief, the belief forces the miracles.

[Dayman]

Why must we assume that it is falsified?

Because of the inconsistencies, the contradictions, and the physically impossible feats.

[beranas]

You disregarded the rest that I said. The physical argument is irrelevant.

[Ruin]

The idea that the gospels were exaggerated stories of the life of Jesus is disproven if it was to come from a first-hand account.

People can exaggerate what they've seen... so no.

Apart from the that, the miracles that Jesus performed would have been true if he were really the Son of God, and there is mention of him by Josephus and either Pliny of Tactitus as a "miracle man".

I was a "miracle", I passed my college entrance exam when predicted unable to by many. Being a "miracle man" could mean a vast number of things, only one being actually performing miracles.

Coming from a Roman source does lend the case some objectivity. But the debate over the miracles of Jesus is irrelevant. Realists (which I assume most of the people here are) are not convinced by miracles. If a realist doesn't believe in God, he won't believe in miracles. But if a person does believe in God, it is easy then to believe in miracles. The miracles don't force belief, the belief forces the miracles.

Agreed, but there are some believers in God who disbelieve in miracles, thinking that God would not intervene on the Earthly plane (which is quite believable if you were a believer)

[Flavius Nevitta]

The most popular theory is the "Stolen Body Theory". This theory being that the Disciples of Christ returned to the tomb while the Roman Guards, posted by the Jewish authorities, slept and stole the body.

I'm quite sure there were no Roman guards. Police and guardwork was done by local troops. 2nd thing is that there was no reason to place a guard. No one did that, so why there? The executioners were busy as long as the person was alive. after he was dead the job was over. Do you really believe the Romans would say: "So we executed another of the 10000 jewish prophets and sect leaders, we'll guard his tomb now" What for? Relatives or anyone who cared burried him and that's it. the "roman guard" is just in the text to make it more "believable2 that no one stole the body.

However, think hard about this. Would these cowardly men then return to challenge a Roman guard and face death? Also, look at what happened to them years later after Christ is supposed to have revealed himself to them. They were martyred. They were willing to die for something they believed.

Their martyrdom is fake. Neither Paul nor Peter were executed for their believe. The vast majority of all martyr stories were faked by christian writers.

[basics]

L.C.Cinna,

It is written that guards were placed at the tomb because the religious leaders were suspicious that something might happen and happen because they knew the prophecies besides experiencing many who had claimed to be Messiah in times before.

Moreso, never had any one of these done what this man had done and this obviously gave them occasion for worry. Placing guards at the tomb gave them cause to relax. The point being that dead men don't rise but the prophecies spoke of one who would rise hence on this occasion guards.

Now as regards Peter and Paul, the former I cannot comment on since there is little evidence as to where he did die, but there is some as to how he would die and if crucifixion was the method one doesn't get that for no reason.

As for Paul, I think you lack logic by saying he was not martyred for his faith for enough is written as to how and why he did die and if that was not for what he believed then what was it? To say that their martyrdom was fake is a pretty strong outburst without any material evidence whatsoever since you have no idea, as does anyone else, what they thought or felt in their last days.

[Flavius Nevitta]

There is no reliable evidence that Peter and Paul were executed