Summations Only

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Messianic prophecy is the collection of over 100 predictions (a conservative estimate) in the Old Testament about the future Messiah of the Jewish people.

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Presumably "a conservative estimate" means "an estimate made by conservative Christians". Because I doubt that you would get a number that high counting definite Messianic prophecies.Have you actually checked any of these yourself ? Carefully read them in context ? Investigated further rather than just assuming that the NT accounts are true ?For instance, to start with your first example:

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Born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:21-23)

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The child of Isaiah 7 is to be born to show that the attacks from Israel and Aram will continue for only a few more years (Isaiah 7:16). Jesus is born a few hundred years too late for that. Even the "virgin" birth is based on a dubious translation - and nobody claims a virgin birth at the right time, the reign of Ahaz.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Of course the problem is that even you assume that the Bible is more accurate than is warranted by even a simple internal analysis.In Message 15 you use words supposedly said by Jesus in his post-resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus.But in this post you state that after the Crucifixion the Disciples: and in doing so you implicitly deny the whole Road to Emmaus story, which is founded on the assumption that the Disciples stayed in Jerusalem until the Ascension.If the story of the road to Emmaus is a fiction, how can we trust it to accurately convey Jesus' words ?In fact if the post-Resurrection accounts differ so markedly, how can we trust any of them ?It seems obvious to me that we have two traditions of post-resurrection accounts - the first based in Galilee, the other in Jerusalem, and that these two stories were in competition, each denying the other. But how could that happen if the actual events were so impressive ? If Luke is right, then how could the author of Matthew not know about Pentecost ? If Matthew is right, why would the author of Luke be so insistent in setting the events in and around Jerusalem ?Surely, the correct answer is that neither is right. The original events must have been far less impressive to be so heavily buried by the time of the Gospel writers.And this throws doubt on the whole idea of a bodily resurrection. If the original events were so unimpressive that they were effectively lost by the time of the Gospel writers, how can we suppose that the original "appearances" were not mundane events ? Dreams, the feeling of Jesus' presence, maybe "sightings", like the sightings of Elvis Presley after his death ?

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I'll go back to the car accident analogy. The testimony of different witnesses to an accident will often testify quite honestly about what they saw but their accounts will differ on details. They will however agree on the salient points. I agree that the details differ.

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We know about the shared sources and/or copying between the synoptic Gospels so we aren;t dealing with differing eyewitness accounts, and we should expect fewer and smaller differences. In fact we seem to have a whole different set of accidents !

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I agree that the details differ. It is an open question as to where the disciples were over the 40 day period but it seems pretty clear that they didn't remain in Jerusalem the whole time. Even in Acts Luke has them returning to Jerusalem from Olivet, which has to lead you to understand that Luke is agreeing that they didn't stay in Jerusalem even though he had written in his gospel that they had been told to do so.

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And according to Acts 1 it seems that they had been talking to Jesus there, so it doesn't seem to be against the command they were given. Especially as Olivet is only just outside old Jerusalem (and IN modern Jerusalem). That's very different from a the journey out to Galilee, which is not even hinted at in either Luke or Acts.

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The road to Emmaus story goes into the kind of detail that we might expect of a story that is accurate.

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Which does not change the possibility that the story as we have it is exaggerated or even complete fiction.I would say that the fact that Matthew shows no sign that it happened at all and implies that it did not is far more significant.

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We are talking about a 40 day period so it is absolutely conceivable that the events happened in different locations at different times. The Gospels agree that the initial events happened in Jerusalem but after that the consensus is that they left the city to return after the ascension. As I said also even Luke had the disciples returning from Olivet in Acts.

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Luke has them take a short trip outside the city walls, and with orders to remain in Jerusalem which would rule out much longer trips like a journey to Galilee.Which really makes my point - the difference between you and the inerrantists is one of degree, rather than kind.

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Sure this is the theory as proposed by people like Crossan but frankly it makes no sense to me unless you start out with the idea that we know that it is impossible and so we have to find another explanation no matter how implausible

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It seems to me that my explanation involves no great implausibilities. You're going to have to do better than mere assertion - even Buz can manage that much.

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Why would the disciples devote their lives to a lie?

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That isn't part of my explanation, so that isn't a problem.

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Why would Paul, a well educated highly place Pharisee be so easily duped for something that required a life of virtually constant sacrifice?

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Apparently he had a vision, which was enough to convince him. He doesn't seem to know about the Gospel stories of the post-resurrection appearances, just that there were appearances which he considers on a par with his vision.

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If Jesus’ body was still around surely someone amongst the Romans or Herodians would have produced it if they could have.

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If they were worried about it, and if they could find it, and if it would still be recognisable and if the disciples were preaching about a missing body (and we don't even know THAT much - Paul doesn't mention it).... That's a lot of 'if's'.

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I just wanted to add that the message that the Jesus story could be understood through reference to the scriptures as told in the account told on the road to Emmaus is consistent with the teachings of Jesus throughout the Gospels.

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If you have examples from less doubtful passages, then maybe you should have chosen that rather than an event only mentioned in Luke, and which Matthew implicitly denies.

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Well actually it is pretty much agreed that there are shared sources with likely one of them being Mark. That does not mean that they all used the same sources all the time. Frankly if the accounts were all exactly the same then I would be suspicious as there would be probable collusion. As it is, the fact that differences exist IMHO, actually adds to their credibility. The accident is a metaphor for the resurrection and on that they all agree. It is again the details that differ.

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Of course copying is pretty much equivalent to collusion, and the individual events are pretty much equivalent to an accident. So what you are saying is that the Gospels are far less reliable than eye-witness accounts of an accident, and even the similarities may be due only to copying.

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I agree the accounts don’t agree, but on the assumption they got the resurrection part on which they all agree right, does it really matter that they got the sequence of events as to what happened when and where afterwards right?

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It isn't the "sequence of events" it is the events themselves. And yes, if you are going to quote details of the events as evidence of what Jesus actually believed about himself it does matter if your sources are horribly unreliable.

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I agree that there is at least one common source used for the synoptic but that doesn’t mean that all of one of the authors couldn’t have used a source that the others didn’t have. It seems to me that this event in the life of Cleopas would be something he would have told to many people many times and as a result even with an account written years later there would have been someone who could easily refute it if it was made up or exaggerated to any great degree.

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However, we find that Matthew has a completely different story from Luke, so different that one must be badly wrong. This cannot be explained simply be different but accurate sources.

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It is actually you who are siding with the inerrantists in that if the details don’t all line up then we have to discard what is the major thrust of the story.

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Of course that isn't true. The inerrantists only say that to insist on the inerrancy doctrine - the vast majority are like you - they make up excuses to sweep the errors under the carpet. I am not proposing that a slight error makes the whole thing unreliable - indeed I am not saying that they are more unreliable than you are ! But given unreliable sources I take the best explanation of that unreliability (exaggeration really is to be expected - and the differences are so pervasive that the original story must be lost) and conclude that mundane explanations for the "appearances" are all that is required to account for the evidence. Unlike you and the inerrantists this is a rational approach to the evidence rather than one motivated by faith.

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Through all of the intervening years the story of a resurrected Jesus has been told and both within Israel and also in a much broader context. If anyone could have produced the body, if any of the disciples were to say it didn’t happen or any other way of disproving the accounts the whole movement would have died out.

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My only disagreement is that I am not convinced that producing a body (which was likely impossible by the time it mattered) may not have been near enough. My point is that the actual evidence can easily be explained without invoking the supernatural, so while the disciples may well have believed in some form of resurrection we cannot rationally conclude that the resurrection actually did occur.

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The big implausibility is that the movement was from a start a resurrection movement. It all depended on the resurrection being an historical event.

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Obviously a strong BELIEF in a resurrection is sufficient. Just as a strong BELIEF in Joseph Smith's Golden Plates and his miraculous "translation" was sufficient for the Mormons. Even though it was quite clearly a fraud. And I am not even alleging fraud on the part of the disciples - just a misinterpretation of natural events based on faith hope and a good dash of cognitive dissonance.If it had depended on the Gospel stories then we would find those stories earlier - or at least evidence of them - and we wouldn't see the major discrepancies between Luke and Matthew.

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Yes, these books are written years later so some of the details will not be accurate but so what?

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By some of the "details" you mean events like the whole Road to Emmaus story and Pentecost...

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IMHO there is no plausible explanation that this counter cultural movement would have grown the way it did if your theory on the basis of your theory.

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Perhaps you would like to back our opinion with evidence. You SAY that the history is important but then you ALSO say that pretty much all of it is unimportant details that are bound to be wrong anyway. So it seems that the parts we are discussing CAN'T be the basis of the belief, and can't even be important to the belief in the resurrection.

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He was a contemporary and we know that he was familiar with the movement as he had been busily persecuting its followers. We also know that he had considerable contact with Peter.

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So therefore the fact that he shows no knowledge of the Empty Tomb, or the details of the post-resurrection appearances is pretty good evidence that none of them were that important at the time of his conversion...

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I did in my first post in this thread. Message 15

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And the first of your additional quotes is attributed to John, not Jesus... Which leaves only one quote. Form a source you regard as horribly unreliable. That's not very good evidence, is it ?

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I hardly said that.

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When it is clear that the differences are greater than between eye-witness accounts of an accident, and that we are dealing with written accounts based on common sources - sections of which are largely copied into the text - I don't see what other conclusion can come to

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I don't agree that they are horribly unreliable. I agree that the sequence of events and in a couple of occasions the location of events appear to be in disagreement, but the points that are fundamental to message of and for the early Christian movement are consistent.

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We don't have the same events in a different sequence, we have different events.

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Actually a case can be made for the different accounts to be events that happened at different times in that 40 day span of time.

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Which requires a horrid mix of assuming unreliability to support an assumption of reliability.... It's apologetics, not rational evaluation of the evidence.

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f these stories were all the figment of someone's fertile imagination, it would not only involve a fairly large number of people to be involved in the conspiracy, but it would also require someone as well educated and bright as Paul to be gullible enough to buy the whole thing. It would also require everyone ignoring all those who would have been able to give credible evidence to refute the assertions made, if not in the Gospels but in the Gospel sources.

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Except that no conspiracy is require. And the differences between the Gospels already tell us that there any refutations WERE ignored.

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I would also add that there is no discernible motivation for them to do this in the first place. Your take on this is similar to the 9/11 conspirators today. Things don’t line up perfectly so the suggestion is that there was a conspiracy but it requires a conspiracy involving a large number of people with no particular motive.

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I'm not proposing any conspiracy at all. This is just a nonsensical strawman. The differences between the Gospels exist. I propose that the differences are the product of differing narrative tendencies developing over time. You might as well say that urban legends require a conspiracy to explain.

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As you can see in vs 14 they believed that they would be resurrected by the Father. The Maccabees had triumphed militarily over their enemies, they had ruled for decades and they had died heroically. The movement faded and died with their deaths. No one went around saying that they had seen and physically touched the brothers afterwards. From a human standpoint this has to be the logical place for a resurrection movement. It didn’t happen.

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But that is not true. You need to look not at the beliefs of those who died, but the beliefs of those who follow them. How they dealt with the deaths. You haven't even begun to make a case.

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Instead we have a quiet movement that was not revolutionary in the historical sense, whose followers were not members of the established elite and who went quietly to the cross without establishing an army let alone winning any battles. Yet, what happened afterwards has been the root of the largest religion in the world, as far from perfect as it is.

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And maybe that is because the Maccabees were a military movement while the early Christian were less so - although the Gospels are a little ambiguous on the exact views. And the later success of Christianity is surely due to its establishment as a gentile religion, and moving away from it's Jewish roots, to the point where it would probably be unrecognisable to the Disciples.

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You come to that conclusion just because he didn’t specifically write about them.

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Obviously I come to the conclusion that Paul showed no knowledge of them because he showed no knowledge of them...

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These beliefs were fundamental to the Christian church.

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With the exception of the Empty Tomb they don't seem to be fundamental even at the time of the Gospels, let alone Paul's time....

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They would be a given and certainly Paul would have seen and been aware of the early beliefs in this regard. He disagrees with Peter on how Gentile converts should be dealt with, and if he had any disagreements with Peter on the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances I can’t see it not showing up in his writing. He obviously had to be in agreement with Peter’s testimony.

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Of course we don't know what Peter believed, so your entire argument begs the question. The Empty Tomb story doesn't show up before Mark, generally agreed to have been written after Peter's death. So we have no idea what Peter's view on that matter was at all.

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The early Christian movement was a Kingdom of God movement based on the evidence that Jesus had been endorsed by the Father in His resurrection. The rapid rise of the movement is hardly likely to happen if it had been based on a lie. The first disciples plainly believed and there just as plainly we can see that there was not enough if any contrary information to shake those beliefs.

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All of which is entirely consistent with my views....

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Sure, but again we can look at the conspiracy theories around 9/11. They have developed over time but they all agree that 9/11 happened. Yes the details of what happened between the Easter and the day of the Ascension differ, but they all agree that Jesus appeared a resurrected body. They tell different stories by different authors, even though some of it is probably drawn from common sources.

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If you want to compare the Gospel stories to conspiracy theories, be my guest. Although saying that only the details differ is considerably understating the matter. But OK, say that there is agreement among Christians on this point by 70AD (which is the most that that evidence can get you). How does that help you?

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I don't disagree that the narratives developed somewhat over time but that isn’t the point. It was the resurrection that was the catalyst around which the narratives were constructed.

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Some sort of idea of a resurrection, yes. But the evidence won't take you any further than that.

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That’s my point. The Maccabees actually accomplished a great deal of what a Jews of that era expected of a Jewish messiah, but when they died while claiming that they would be resurrected their movement ended as did the movements of all of the other messianic claimants.

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That isn't what your long quote says. And the Maccabean Revolt DIDN'T fail. It established an independent Israel that was quite successful until the Romans came.

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As for the movement being spread to gentiles we have to ask ourselves why gentiles would all of a sudden start worshipping a Jewish messiah, based on some outlandish story as told by Paul. There would have to be substantial verification of what happened for anyone to accept the resurrection as historical.

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I am sure that they were every bit as skeptical as the early Mormons, Scientologists, Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the members of the Solar Temple, the followers of Heaven,s Gate.....And again, Paul doesn't preach anything about an earthly resurrection that needed to be or even could be confirmed in the letters we do have. But we do know that there were Gentiles attracted to Judaism and that Paul relaxed the requirements of the Jewish law to make the Christian sect far more appealing to such people...

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Paul may not have written about the details of the resurrection other than of his own experience by so what? The empty tomb is part of the resurrection story.

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It is part of the story that we have NOW. We have no evidence that it was part of the resurrection story in Paul's lifetime, and reasons to suspect that it was not.Your quote gives a bare list of "appearances" with no explanation of what happened, the appearance in front of 500 is not easily identifiable with anything in the Gospels or Acts, and Paul places his own visionary experience on the list. It,s not very good evidence if anything supernatural going on.

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Matthew tells the story of the empty tomb and tells us that Peter went there. The gospel tells us that he wondered what had happened. Afterwards Peter preaches a resurrected Jesus. I think it is pretty safe to assume that Peter at that point had figured it out.

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Of course you are just begging the question again and falling into circularity. You can't argue for the historicity often Empty Tomb by assuming that it happened.

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That’s my point. The Maccabean revolt was very successful. They had overthrown their occupiers and they had ruled for decades. They suffered heroic deaths and claimed that God would resurrect them. If there ever was a time when it would seem obvious that someone would begin an ongoing resurrection movement, this would have been the time. It didn’t happen and the same is true of the rebellion in 135 AD.

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Except that it doesn't seem to be. The element of cognitive dissonance seems to be missing. Those executed don't seem to be leaders. The promised resurrection seems to be clearly physical and not satisfied by visions. So it really seems to be less than ideal...The 135AD rebellion is much better, but how do we know that there wasn't something of the sort ? We know about Christianity because it was wildly successful later on - but that was mainly because of Paul - who we know didn't have any direct knowledge of a physical resurrection - and his appeal to the Gentiles who knew even less.

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Nonsense. Paul was a contemporary of the apostles. He knew very well what they meant when they talked about resurrection.

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Indeed he must have. The problem is that WE don't know what the apostles meant when they talked about the resurrection. So you have said absolutely nothing to refute my point.

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Ok then, what idea of resurrection fits the evidence better?

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Well, as we know the appearance stories differ greatly, which makes no sense if there really were impressive post-resurrection appearances. It follows then that the original stories were far less impressive. In the stories Jesus comes and goes mysteriously, which is inconsistent with simple physical survival by any means, natural or supernatural - but is consistent with the stories originating as "sightings", visions, dreams or simply the feeling of Jesus' presence. Let us also note that Jesus failed to fulfil the role expected of him, and when people who are committed to a cause run into this situation there are often die-hards who look to reinterpret and invent ways to keep to their beliefs.I would say therefore that the evidence is more consistent with entirely natural events than with a supernatural resurrection, and given the basic unlikelihood of miracles such an explanation is always to be preferred in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary.

Since there is nothing on-topic, than I am afraid that your ignorant and fallacious assertions will have to go unanswered, unless you wish to start a new thread.