Comments on Earliest Christian History: Resurrection and Scholarly Rhetoric: A Response to...

Have just been reading JSHJ for a course. Found th...

2007-10-05T16:44:00.000Z

Have just been reading JSHJ for a course. Found the exchange between you and Wright very entertaining... I hope you don't mind me saying you seem to run over elements of your arguments very quickly, lest they collapse underneath you. In particular, I lost the thread of your peice when you wanted to maintain that the ressurection narratives are free from jewish embroidery for the sake of "gentiles... entering the Christian community" - how can you hold this when the later Lucan accounts empahsise the importance of fulfilling the Jewish Scriptures, given that they were potentially more significant to gentile audiences. Just a thought.

Everytime I see folks rejecting naturalistic expla...

2007-09-17T05:02:00.000Z

Everytime I see folks rejecting naturalistic explanations as "just-so stories" while accepting the supernatural as totally tenable, it reminds me of a very good scene in a film (from '99 I think) The Messenger, about Joan of Arc. Her voices are played by Dustin Hoffman (who does a killer job). She is insisting that, because she found a sword in a field on that strange day of her "calling", that was validation of her divine mandate. The voices then run through a series of possible natural ways in which the sword could have wound up in that field other than "it was placed there by god for Joan". It's a fantastic film; I highly recommend it.

I find your blog very interesting. I'm sure I'll be reading more of it.

Oh . . . and for what it's worth . . . I vote "Bultmannian", except I think even Bultmann didn't go far enough, but that's for later.

peace

Ó

Nice observation, thanks. I don’t visit your blog ...

2007-08-25T07:44:00.000Z

Nice observation, thanks. I don’t visit your blog every day, but when I
visit your blog I enjoy browsing through your old posts and try to catch up
what I have missed since my last visit.

The usual understanding of tombs cut into rock, wi...

2007-07-23T13:17:00.000Z

The usual understanding of tombs cut into rock, with multiple loculi sealed by stones is that they were the graves of the rich. Bones from the loculi of rock cut tombs were transferred to ossuaries sealed with lids. But the less elaborate trench graves at Qumran also had loculi undercut at the bottom and sealed with stones. The latter are reckoned by such as Magness to be graves of the poor. But clearly they are not the simple earth graves of the poor. Who then buried people in loculi and what was their view of spirits rising?

It seems as though these people believed that they were preserving the spirits of individuals below the earth in the bones of the deceased. Thus the spirits were kept sealed in a waiting place until such a time as they were fit to received their call to rise. To my mind this was the belief of the priests and whoever else sympathised with their view.

By contrast, the prophets believed that the spirit rose at death (Mt.27.50). Thus the prophet was placed 'in' the earth - he had already 'given up' his spirit.

We now have a clue to the identity of the editors of Matthew. They were ex Jewish priests who were creating the new doctrine of resurrection. So in Mt.27.52,53 they wrote: 'The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.' On the original priestly view, they would have written something like: The tombs broke open and the spirits of many holy people were raised.

The residents of Qumran were priests who received the burial of a priest if they died there.

Ant the ex-priestl editors of the NT and Josephus told us themselves that they didn't believe in the resurrection.

If you recall, at his execution, the prophet calle...

2007-07-19T11:53:00.000Z

If you recall, at his execution, the prophet called out to God in a loud voice (Mk.15:34). The editors made out (probably in interpolated text) that those standing near thought he was calling for Elijah. (35). In 36, the man who 'ran' (I suggest) was one of the witnesses who threw the prophet down from the high place for a stoning. Then he said, "Now leave him alone. Let's see if GOD (not Elijah) comes to take him UP (not down)" (meaning let's see if he dies). Hence there is no resurrection story in Mark.

After a brief listing of six features of the gospe...

2007-07-18T19:14:00.000Z

After a brief listing of six features of the gospel narratives of different kinds (a rehearsal of a bit of the JSHJ article) that incline you to "scepticism" regarding the historical resurrection of Jesus, you write: "So no matter how hard Wright pleads, it remains a brute fact that I did explain the argument."

That's fair enough.

I don't know NTW's arguments (don't have the book -- once borrowed Hurtado's copy). The point of this blog comment is this: it takes more than differences in accounts to build a convincing case for the fabrication of a story.

Detour: recently I have been reading volume 3 of C.S. Lewis's collected letters. Since I'm not wasting paper here (only trying James's patience and that of his readers), I'll quote two bits for your enjoyment.

Lewis had fallen in love with Joy Davidman. She was a divorcée, dying rapidly from cancer. He asked a priest friend with a track record in praying for healing, Peter Bide, to come and pray for Joy. He "arrived in Oxford on 20 March 1957, and later gave this account of the visit:

Shortly after my arrival at the Kilns, [Lewis] said to me, 'Peter, I know this isn't fair, but do you think you could marry us? I asked the Bishop; I've asked my parish priest; I've asked all my friends on the Faculty; and they've said no. Joy is dying and she wants the sacrament before she dies.' ... I had myself for some time found the Church's attitude to remarriage in church after divorce difficult ... I aksed Jack to leave me alone for a while and I considered the matter. In the end there seemed only one Court of Appeal. I asked myself what He would have done and that somehow finished the argument.

...On 21 March 1957 Lewis and Joy were married ... by Bide ...." (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 841).

On June 25th (about three months later), Lewis was writing Dorothy Sayers. He included this account of "his news":

I ought to tell you my own news. On examination it turned out that Joy's previous marriage, made in her pre-Christian days, was no marriage: the man had a wife still living. The Bishop of Oxford said it was not the present policy to approve re-marriage in such cases, but that his view did not bind the conscience of any individual priest. Then dear Father Bide (do you know him?) who had come to lay his hands on Joy -- for he has on his record what looks v. like one miracle -- without being asked and merely on being told the situation at once said he wd. marry us. So we had a bedside marriage with a nuptial Mass." (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 861).

Two eye-witnesses, soon after the event, differing in quite significant details -- and these are well educated people with fine memories.

I find it easier to think that Bide's and Lewis's memories reshaped the events than to think the whole bedside marriage thing was a product of fertile imaginations.

Well, obviously that is simply an analogy. But it is meant to pose the possibility of maintaining that unconvergent, differing (whatever!) eyewitness accounts do not lead one inexorably to posit "fabrication".

Is a fair assumption that a your review of Bauckham's recent "eyewitnesses" book is floating around somewhere?

I'll shut up now.

Oh, and nice to find your blog, James. :)

David Reimer

Ref: the Matt 27 ghosts:Isn't it obvious that Matt...

2007-07-10T13:15:00.000Z

Ref: the Matt 27 ghosts:
Isn't it obvious that Matthew has a category of folk-legend material in his gospel (Pilate's wife's dream, the coin and the fish) into which the ghosts fall? This being the case, it is beyond his capacity to check the truth or falsity of the stories: he is merely including them like Herodotus because they have been told him. We in turn may be suspicious about the fact that such motifs turn up in the folk legend (which may or may not be historically accurate in a given case) of various cultures.

If NTW says 'strange things happen' hs is absolutely right, and not least in the case of ghost-reports, which are legion. If anyone denied that 'strange things happen', they would be obviously wrong.

I seem to remember NTW (in the 1980s) scratching his head in puzzlement over the story, and particularly over the question of where all these dead people went next. They are, in that sense, clearly in a different category from Lazarus, Jairus's daughter and the widow's son.

Robert Eisenman would take great delight recognisi...

2007-07-09T09:33:00.000Z

Robert Eisenman would take great delight recognising the language of Acts 7:56 - "I see heaven open". It was the language of the rain-making prophet that Eisenman wrote so much about in his book James the Brother of Jesus. The travelling prophet James (who wrote Acts as an autobiography) didn't see the resurrected Jesus. He saw the Holy Spirit coming down symbolised by rain. The 'stoning of Stephen' was simply an attack on James. That attack was outside the synagogue of the Freedmen in Rome, not Jerusalem. The person giving approval to the attack, was not 'Saul' but the young high priest Ananus, James' eventual nemesis, who had travelled to Rome where he no doubt had his own private residence.

Acts was originally only about worship in the Spir...

2007-07-08T22:12:00.000Z

Acts was originally only about worship in the Spirit, not about worship of Jesus. So 7.55 (about seeing Jesus standing at the right hand of God) is a later Pauline interpolation. 7.54 is probably later interpolation also. Thus 53 wqas originally continued at 56. The prophet was continuing an autobiographical account of his speech, thus: "Look, I see heaven open and the SPIRIT OF GOD COMING." -'COMING' being the key word from 7.52 which was originally about priests killing prophets who proclaimed the 'coming' of the Spirit. The priests had always resisted the the Spirit (7.51). 'Righteous One' and 'And now you have betrayed and murdered him' (7.52) are clearly later interpolations. In 7.53, the prophet was originally saying that the priests had heard the Spirit through the prophets, but had not obeyed it.

steph:Long live Roger Aus in all his work as well ...

2007-07-08T14:37:00.000Z

steph:

Long live Roger Aus in all his work as well as on dead mean rising from their graves originating in Judaic traditions on 1 Samuel 28.

I wonder what Wright thinks of Aus.

Wright takes Crossley to task as follows... 'Again...

2007-07-08T13:50:00.000Z

Wright takes Crossley to task as follows... 'Again, Crossley concludes his key discussion by saying that a (presumably non-bodily) vision ‘would strongly imply that Jesus’ message had been vindicated......third, that a non-bodily vision of someone recently dead would prove nothing about the ‘validity’ or ‘vindication’ of the ideas they had held and taught during their lifetime.’.

Has Wright read the Book of Acts?

Acts 7
54 When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. 55 But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 56 "Look," he said, "I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."

Did Stephen really see a bodily Jesus in Heaven standing at the right had of God?

Or did the author of Acts think that claiming to 'see' Jesus standing at the right hand of God was a vindication of Jesus, and that this 'non-bodily vision' proved that Jesus had been unjustly killed?

so what's the point of a belief in an empty tomb w...

2007-07-07T16:48:00.000Z

so what's the point of a belief in an empty tomb without a belief in a bodily resurrection?

apparently ANON

ANON'If the earliest visions of Jesus after the cr...

2007-07-07T16:01:00.000Z

ANON
'If the earliest visions of Jesus after the crucifixion were interpreted as his bodily resurrection, then it would be assumed that there was an emptied tomb.'

CARR
Then the early converts to Jesus-worship in Corinth would have believed in the resurrection of corpses, and Paul would not have called them idiots even to discuss how corpses are raised.

steph says...It would be dishonest to change the d...

2007-07-07T14:40:00.000Z

steph says...

It would be dishonest to change the date of Mark to post 70 in order to make the empty tomb tradition more straightforward. I'm sure Mark wasn't suggesting that James did that really, but in any case an early date is no less straightforward that a late date.

If the earliest visions of Jesus after the crucifixion were interpreted as his bodily resurrection, then it would be assumed that there was an emptied tomb. Furthermore there is no evidence for the veneration of a real empty tomb (until the recently discovered full Jesus tomb .... not!) Also if the women were in recent memories the only historical witnesses to the crucifixion, Mark would have to have included them in an empty tomb story, adding a heavenly male for an additional and more "convincing" witness. All this I think points to an early belief (not necessarily historical fact) in Jesus' bodily resurrection and makes sense with an early late 30s early 40s Mark.

(Although I think Mark is in his mid to late thirties...)

Is Mark Goodacre's 'post 70 empty tomb tradition' ...

2007-07-07T13:08:00.000Z

Is Mark Goodacre's 'post 70 empty tomb tradition' equivalent to a fabricated empty tomb story? If so, it is certainly straightforward to understand. But I wouldn't mince my words.

Dang you make a whole lot of sense!I am interested...

2007-07-07T07:43:00.000Z

Dang you make a whole lot of sense!

I am interested in reading more of your stuff

Ivan

You wrote:"the fact that such stories would almost...

2007-07-07T00:01:00.000Z

You wrote:
"the fact that such stories would almost certainly be regarded as secondary in a non-Christian context ..."
I'm not quite sure what you mean by secondary, but we have a perhaps equally outrageous account in 'The Autobiography of a Yogi' by Parmahansa Yogananda. The account in question can be found at http://www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/chap1.html
paragraphs 25-38. The account is given in the 3rd person, as having been witnessed by the man through whom Yogananda's father became a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya.

I would appreciate it if you could explain how the above account would be considered secondary.

Thanks,
Be Well,
Bob Griffin

Thanks for an interesting post, James. It's good ...

2007-07-06T21:48:00.000Z

Thanks for an interesting post, James. It's good to see you adding to the number of those doing serious academic responses in the blog medium. I still can't help but think that you would have it easier if you didn't have such an early Mark. A post-70 empty tomb tradition in Mark is so much more straightforward to understand than one within a stone's throw of the events.

Yes, I put that question re Matt. 27.51-53 at the BNTC Jesus Seminar when you gave your response to the book too. What I was interested to try to discover was whether he was willing to distinguish between stories like that one and like the Empty Tomb one, suggesting that one of the tasks of the historian is to weight different evidence differently. His response, if I recall correctly, was a form of "strange things happen", which I do struggle with as an historian, and which you clearly struggle with too.

James wrote: "I find myself coming closer to the v...

2007-07-06T16:36:00.000Z

James wrote:

"I find myself coming closer to the view that I am only really showing that there are countless other explanations which mean we do not necessarily have to resort to the supernatural."

Why does one have to cloud the issue with 'countless other explanations' of the resurrection story when one very simple non-supernatural human explanation will do? Like the birth, betrayal and crucifixion stories, it was a complete Pauline fabrication. It was one aspect in the creation of a new 'Christian' religion out of the original prophetic Christianity that came out of Judea. The new religion was established under Roman imperial control post 70 CE. The cultural context was largely the cult of the emperor, not Judaism.

Mr Grumpy Geoff: congratulations, you read James i...

2007-07-06T14:15:00.000Z

Mr Grumpy Geoff: congratulations, you read James in true Wrightian fashion ie. you completely missed the point.

steph

Since you argue so strongly that the resurrection ...

2007-07-06T13:08:00.000Z

Since you argue so strongly that the resurrection of Jesus never occured, then you should be able to come up with similar arguments that the birth of Jesus did not occur either. After all, impossible claims are made for both. Or do you like to pick and choose which impossible events you keep in your history?

Someone else who likes to have their cake and eat it!

Thank you for this extremely helpful and thought-p...

2007-07-06T12:47:00.000Z

Thank you for this extremely helpful and thought-provoking blog entry! It is interesting that I found myself reflecting on matters of rumor and legend in relation to the resurrection on my own blog yesterday at http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/

There my focus was on insights from social-scientific and personal cross-cultural experiences, which have raised questions about the reliability of information transmitted in such cultural contexts. The signs of development and transformation are such that, even if Bauckham were correct about the ongoing role of eyewitnesses in determining the course of the tradition, this would simply mean that it was the eyewitnesses themselves who reinterpreted their memories, rather than it merely being later authors and interpreters who edited the tradition they inherited. To my thinking, this makes the historical issues more problematic rather than less.

I remember reading through that issue of the Journ...

2007-07-06T01:19:00.000Z

I remember reading through that issue of the Journal, and thinking The Bishop of Durham had completely misunderstood your point about the cultural-determination of vision experiences. As far as I am aware, the view of Steven Katz--that visionary experience is always affected by the mystic's beliefs, practices and expectations--has survived the challenges to it. In any case, Wright seemed to be unaware of what you were alluding to at all.

There is a prevalent bias against visionary experience amongst Protestants, that has a lot more to do with "rationalist Protestant presuppositions" than first century Palestine, as James Tabor noted years ago. This is in stark contrast to Paul's views, for example, who has a lot of trouble telling real life apart from a vision (as Acts 12.9 shows).

Contrast again NT Wright, who isn't afraid to assert that people in the ancient world:
"knew the difference between visions and things that happen in the "real" world"
(Resurrection of the Son of God, 690).
As St Paul demonstrates, let alone the mass of aNE & Greco-Roman evidence, this is quite false. First century Jews were not twenty-first century Protestant rationalists.

WOMEN AND THE RESURRECTIONJames makes the excellen...

2007-07-05T20:49:00.000Z

WOMEN AND THE RESURRECTION

James makes the excellent point that Mark has the resurrection announced by a young man, not by women.

And if Mark's readers knew enough to make the connection that this 'young man' was really an angel, then they were the sort of people who would expect angels to have great authority.

As it happens, the Gospels claim that people would believe in Jesus having heard only the testimony of a woman. See John 4:39.

Wright in his 'John for Everyone' book tries to avoid discussing this early Christian belief that people would believe in Jesus having heard only the testimony of a woman.

And Wright succeeds in avoiding it!

Also, as it happens, Wright's proof-texts that women were not considered reliable witnesses fall apart on examination (not to mention that such prim and proper Jews like Josephus cite women as reliable sources).

For example, women were not considered reliable witnesses on matters of astronomical observations.

But surely this is because women were by and large uneducated on such matters, and not because they were female.

Wright claims that the body of Jesus was 'transphy...

2007-07-05T20:18:00.000Z

Wright claims that the body of Jesus was 'transphysical', and made of a new type of matter never before seen on earth.

Why spend a billion pounds on particle accelarators at CERN, when you can discover new types of matter just by reading an old book?

As it happens, the Gospel of Luke has Jesus trash the disciples mistaken belief that the body of Jesus was made of a material that of its nature could pass through walls.

To Luke, the resurrected body of Jesus was just flesh and bone, presumably the same sort of flesh and bone as that of Philip whose body could also disappear and reappear in Acts 8

As for Wright's claim that all these stories go back to early tradition, we know for a fact from 1 Corinthians 15 that people converted to Jesus-worship and still scoffed at the idea that God would choose to raise a corpse.

What early tradition of corpse-raising had *they* heard of?