Is it possible that when Jesus was taken down from the cross he wasn't clinically dead ? He might have stopped breathing, perhaps he had no discernible pulse either (severe loss of blood, vertical position), but not clinically dead. Subsequent revival after being taken down would certainly be possible.
The Roman's crucified a lot of people, I would think they had the system pretty well down.
In general what you are talking about is Euhemerism, trying to figure out the "real story" behind myths/religious stories and my understanding is it is pretty poorly regarded these days.
Because it ignores the fact that sometimes people make up bullshit for power or control and other people believe it because they were illiterate commoners from thousands of years ago.
Once again I want to make it clear I'm just an interested layman, not a historian and claim no expertise on all this. I think the problem is you are picking and choosing what you think is true from a given text, and then offering up an explanation that you can neither prove nor falsify. To use a less touchy example let's say I wanted to come up with a Euhemeristic explanation for the Minotaur. Well obviously Pasiphaë didn't really get pregnant from a bull, so maybe instead she just gives birth to a deformed child. And the child can't literally have horns, so maybe he just had gigantism and some sort of weird growths on his head. And Athen's presumably wasn't really sacrificing 14 youths to be eaten by this person so maybe the king just demanded Athens supply a bride for his deformed child. And the Minotaur couldn't have really lived in an elaborate maze so maybe Theseus just sneaked into the palace and stabbed the dude.
Well now I have a reasonablish explanation of the "real story" behind the myth, a deformed child is born to a king who rejects him, an unwilling bride is almost forced to marry him, and then Theseus sneaks in and stabs him. But someone else could come up with a fairly different "real story" for all of this based on what they picked and chose from. And neither of our stories would have any real proof, or provide any real insight in the lives of the ancient Greeks.
The story itself does provide insight on what the people who told it thought about the world, what they thought was moral and immoral, heroic and cowardly etc. So the myth/religious text on it's own does have historical value.
> Once again I want to make it clear I'm just an interested layman, not a historian and claim no expertise on all this.
I am the same here (and not even a Christian, just a curious observer). I think you went overboard in your accusations here
> I think the problem is you are picking and choosing what you think is true from a given text, and then offering up an explanation that you can neither prove nor falsify.
I would have to be informed enough in the first place to be able to pick and choose. Seems I have stirred up a hornets nest. Given the situation, I have no further intention to participate in the thread.
Regardless,
> offering up an explanation that you can neither prove nor falsify
this I will eagerly concede. I just did not realize my off-hand thinking aloud would be an object of such scrutiny. I should have known better.
Historians do try to figure out the "real story", and much have been written about the "historical Jesus", but the practice of finding natural explanations of supernatural events is not well regarded because it is often purely speculation.
I used the example of Jesus walking on water in another thread. A natural explanation might be it was a cold day and there was actually ice on the lake. Sure this is a possible explanation, but there is absolutely no evidence and no way to substantiate such a theory, and it is clear our closest sources did believe he walked on water. So from a historians standpoint the ice-explanation is useless.
Furthermore these natural explanations often are a bit naive since they take the stories at face values and just try to explain away the supernatural aspects. Isn't it actually more plausible the event s just a legend or myth rather than Jesus actually walked on ice?
As for the resurrection, which the "swoon theory" tries to explain naturally, be aware that the oldest known version of the oldest Gospels doesn't even feature a resurrected Jesus. Just an unidentified white-clad guy which says Jesus is resurrected. You don't really medical explanations for how this could come to happen.
Is it? My impression is that this is quite common, where "real story" is some reductionistic account of something biblical (e.g., Reza Aslan's "Zealot").
It is quite popular in fiction, bit it is not well-regarded in history or theology. The reason is it is pure speculation. Eg. you might posit when Jesus walked on water, it was actually ice. Sure, this makes the story more believable, but you have no way of proving this was the case, and it is clear our best sources did believe he actually walked on water.
You might just as well claim the event never happened at all and is just a legend - you cant prove that either, but it is just as believable (if not more).
How many of these botched death-penalty executions you speak of resulted in the person living and living in such a way that the authorities did not know the person was alive?
1. If a Roman soldier let a capital prisoner escape, including by bungling a crucifixion, that soldier would be killed.
2. The Roman soldier didn't break Jesus's legs. So he was sure he was dead.
3. The eyewitness account says that blood and water flowed from Jesus's pierced heart, which means collapse of the lungs and death by suffocation.
4. The body was wound in sheets.
5. The turnabout in behavior by his disciples. Before, they were in hiding. Afterward, they died for saying that Jesus rose from the dead.
6. There were Roman guards at the tomb, again who would be put to death if they let the body be stolen.
7. How would a half-dead person move the boulder of the tomb?
--- The Handbook of Christian Apologetics, by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli
The Swoon Theory eventually dovetails into a theory of conspiracy, by the disciples and authors of the texts in the Bible. This theory also is addressed by that book and others. For the sake of not getting too far off topic, I leave it to anyone to read in their own time. Besides, as others have pointed out, the resurrection that this article is about is the resurrection of all dead at the end of the age.
"Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water."
Breaking the person leg, the the person cruxcified will die asphyxiated (without the legs to sustain, the body will be sustained by the arms, turning hard/impossible breathe). But the soldier saw Jesus dead, and dont break the legs, (its harder break bones), just piercing with the spear is easier and it will die via bleeding anyway.
So, here we got a testimony from a Roman Soldier (in theory a neutral watcher) about the dead of Jesus.
It is possible, and of course impossible to prove it didn't happen like this. But it is much more likely he just died, just like anybody else who got publicly executed would.
If you think this might explain the account of the resurrection, note that the account emphasizes that the apostles doesn't recognize the resurrected Jesus. If it was actually Jesus who had survived, surely they would recognize him. Furthermore the resurrected Jesus does not seem to have an ordinary physical body - he is able to walk through walls for example. Given this I don't think a "not clinically dead"-theory explains anything.
I don't think the ability to appear in a closed room is necessarily walking through walls, and I don't think it was a function of the resurrection, rather that it was a miracle. Similar miracles of transport are recorded for angels, Philip, and Enoch.
Jesus was dead, all right. But after death he did not decay, thus allowing him to be resurrected. The Church of the Better Resurrection website has posted considerable evidence showing that the only ones to be resurrected at the second coming will be the cryonicists, who will stave off post-death decay via liquid nitrogen, which also allows preservation of the word of god inside the brain.
See here:
Berean Literal Bible Corinthians 15 50 Now I say this, brothers, that flesh and blood is not able to inherit the kingdom of God, nor does decay inherit immortality.
Acts 2 27 (World English Bible) “because you will not leave my soul in Hades, neither will you allow your Holy One to see decay.”
Acts 2 31 (World English Bible) explains how Jesus fought against decay and thus was able to be resurrected:
“he foreseeing this spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that neither was his soul left in Hades, nor did his flesh see decay.”
Acts 13 35 (World English Bible): “Therefore he says also in another psalm, ‘You will not allow your Holy One to see decay.’”
Of the four gospels, it is generally said that Mark was written first, and John was written last.
The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark do not mention the resurrection at all.
Later manuscripts have verses tacked on, in what is nowadays called Mark 16. You can read about this online, there is several centuries worth of discussion about it.
> The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark do not mention the resurrection at all.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the earliest manuscripts end at Mark 16:8, which ends with the women finding the empty tomb and being told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus has risen.
EDIT: the undisputed ending of Mark, which is up to verse 8 (Catholic version):
5 On entering the tomb they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right-hand side, and they were struck with amazement.
6 But he said to them, 'There is no need to be so amazed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he has risen, he is not here. See, here is the place where they laid him.
7 But you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you to Galilee; that is where you will see him, just as he told you." '
8 And the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Although I might be mistaken because I am sure there is a lot of misinformation out there on this topic, I was under the impression that there is pretty good evidence that there was at least a Jewish profit named Jesus who lived at the time. Maybe someone else elaborate.
Yeah, to call the theory of an invented Jesus 'simpler' is quite a stretch, since you then would have to explain both the rise of Christianity, the gospel writings, and the records of Josephus the Jewish historian who did write about a prophet named Jesus. Simpler would in this case assuming there did indeed exist such a man.
There is some evidence but not "pretty good" evidence. There isn't much evidence written in the time he was supposed to have been alive. Most of it was written long after the fact by 3rd parties.
Insofar as human history, there is pretty good textual evidence that a guy running around Palestine called Jesus attracted followers and was executed by the Roman state. We have as much evidence for that guy as we do many other historical figures. I shouldn't have to mention this, but I feel compelled: the claim of historical Jesus is not any kind of theological, religious, or supernatural claim (i.e. that any miracles occured).
The problem is that intelligent autodidacts confuse the disciplines of science (developing theories and performing experiments to provide potentially disprovable evidence of universal, timeless laws of nature) and history (the study of written texts about events that occurred in the past) and the types of evidence acceptable to both fields. Hint: they're completely different.
The problem is that, if you want to advance a historical theory claiming that there was no historical guy called Jesus who inspired the gospel, you have to come up with a compelling theory, based on historical (written records from the past) evidence describing who built the first churches, who wrote the first gospels, why they made up a story about a Palestinian Jew who was crucified 300 years ago, and why that story was so compelling it caught on with the masses and elites alike.
Or you could just go with the idea that there was a guy running around the middle east 2,000 years ago, who pissed of the Jewish and Roman elite, so much to the point that he was executed. And about whom miracles were claimed to have been performed.
The thing is, for all religions developing where we have iron-clad evidence (Mormonism, Scientology, etc), it always starts with a charismatic leader who attracts a following. Throw a rock in India, and you can find any number of gurus who are said to be capable of levitating, not eating for long periods of time, etc. etc. There is nothing really extraordinary about the story of Jesus, comparatively speaking.
If you're going to make a historical theory that Jesus never existed, but instead was invented by someone else, you have to identify that someone else. In fleshing out your theory, you'll probably want to say why they invented it, and why it caught on, when many other small cults and gurus petered out.
Christianity didn't arise out of nowhere in, say, England in 1500.
I guess these terms are subjective qualifiers, but by any standard of evidence for the existence of historical figures, the evidence is comparatively better than most.
As to timeframe:
A lot of key written evidence of Jesus was authored within a century of his life, which comparatively is "pretty good" as far as these things go. Much written evidence of historical events or people that we have wasn't contemporary to the subject in question either, but authored by historians, sometimes far later than a century. By that standard, the contemporaneousness is "pretty good".
As to Sources:
In addition to the synoptic gospels, you also have non-Christian, non-sympathetic sources such as Tacitus referring to the Crucifixion of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Or Josephus. This represents a variation of disconnected sources (not informed by each other), that by any standard is comparatively better than most.
So the quality of the evidence is built upon not only the _quantity_ of accounts, but the variation of sources, and the general agreement of even basic facts (existence, death). This quality is better evidence than we have of many historical figures that we assume to be real. And as another comment pointed out, the simplest explanation is that this doesn't represent a grand conspiracy of disconnected ancients.
>Much written evidence of historical events or people that we have wasn't contemporary to the subject in question either, but authored by historians, sometimes far later than a century.
Thats not an argument for the accuracy of the story, thats an argument against the accuracy of the rest of history.
I may be as well, but am also under the impression there is more textual evidence of Jesus' existence (more surviving independently written accounts) than of many other historical figures or events of that time whose existence we just take for granted.
Doubtful. Consider how condemned gladiators were treated:
The body of a gladiator who had died well was placed on a couch of Libitina and removed with dignity to the arena morgue, where the corpse was stripped of armour, and probably had its throat cut to prove that dead was dead. The Christian author Tertullian, commenting on ludi meridiani in Roman Carthage during the peak era of the games, describes a more humiliating method of removal. One arena official, dressed as the "brother of Jove", Dis Pater (god of the underworld) strikes the corpse with a mallet. Another, dressed as Mercury, tests for life-signs with a heated "wand"; once confirmed as dead, the body is dragged from the arena.[108]
The Bible stories borrow heavily from Egyptian religious myths and beliefs regarding gods and pharaohs. Same stories, rebooted with new cast members that are more relatable. Any new diety had to demonstrate similar power supernatural abilities as a pharaoh to be legit, and the one big closing act of every pharoah is resurrection followed by deification. Same story, new cast members. Ancient story tellers also made reboots.
Why not? People invent all kinds of stories. That type of story doesn't even take much imagination. Telling people that they are deficient in some intangible way and that you have the only cure is a very common way to con people.
"Same stories, rebooted with new cast members that are more relatable." This isn't true at all and I'm curious at what gave you that idea? Specifically I mean of stories with the names changed between Egyptian religion and Christianity/Judaism.
It's the recent "Zeitgiest" conspiracy theory "documentaries" that float around on the internet. They just note similarities with the New Testament and old Egypto-Greco-Roman myths/cultic practices and say "See? This is where it came from".
You're right; it's not based on and scholarship or methodology. It's just simple associational reasoning. "These two things are similar, so therefore they are the same".
When you think about the era Boyle lived 1627-1691, it was time of the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) and start for search for universally accepted religious truths or 'natural religious truths'.
People (mostly highly educated upper class) started to rely more of their own thinking than dogma that lead to horrible religious wars, sectarian conflicts and widespread misery. Different forms of deism started to replace belief in bible interpreted by priests.
Once you transfer from from Catholicism everywhere to different forms of protestant beliefs, next natural question to ask is if protestants hold the truth. This leads to abstract philosophical thinking and critical deism or atheism.
56 comments
[ 55.5 ms ] story [ 3923 ms ] thread> pretty poorly regarded these days.
Why is that ? Because it is a touchy subject ? That I can certainly understand
Well now I have a reasonablish explanation of the "real story" behind the myth, a deformed child is born to a king who rejects him, an unwilling bride is almost forced to marry him, and then Theseus sneaks in and stabs him. But someone else could come up with a fairly different "real story" for all of this based on what they picked and chose from. And neither of our stories would have any real proof, or provide any real insight in the lives of the ancient Greeks. The story itself does provide insight on what the people who told it thought about the world, what they thought was moral and immoral, heroic and cowardly etc. So the myth/religious text on it's own does have historical value.
I am the same here (and not even a Christian, just a curious observer). I think you went overboard in your accusations here
> I think the problem is you are picking and choosing what you think is true from a given text, and then offering up an explanation that you can neither prove nor falsify.
I would have to be informed enough in the first place to be able to pick and choose. Seems I have stirred up a hornets nest. Given the situation, I have no further intention to participate in the thread.
Regardless,
> offering up an explanation that you can neither prove nor falsify
this I will eagerly concede. I just did not realize my off-hand thinking aloud would be an object of such scrutiny. I should have known better.
I used the example of Jesus walking on water in another thread. A natural explanation might be it was a cold day and there was actually ice on the lake. Sure this is a possible explanation, but there is absolutely no evidence and no way to substantiate such a theory, and it is clear our closest sources did believe he walked on water. So from a historians standpoint the ice-explanation is useless.
Furthermore these natural explanations often are a bit naive since they take the stories at face values and just try to explain away the supernatural aspects. Isn't it actually more plausible the event s just a legend or myth rather than Jesus actually walked on ice?
As for the resurrection, which the "swoon theory" tries to explain naturally, be aware that the oldest known version of the oldest Gospels doesn't even feature a resurrected Jesus. Just an unidentified white-clad guy which says Jesus is resurrected. You don't really medical explanations for how this could come to happen.
You might just as well claim the event never happened at all and is just a legend - you cant prove that either, but it is just as believable (if not more).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_hypothesis
1. If a Roman soldier let a capital prisoner escape, including by bungling a crucifixion, that soldier would be killed.
2. The Roman soldier didn't break Jesus's legs. So he was sure he was dead.
3. The eyewitness account says that blood and water flowed from Jesus's pierced heart, which means collapse of the lungs and death by suffocation.
4. The body was wound in sheets.
5. The turnabout in behavior by his disciples. Before, they were in hiding. Afterward, they died for saying that Jesus rose from the dead.
6. There were Roman guards at the tomb, again who would be put to death if they let the body be stolen.
7. How would a half-dead person move the boulder of the tomb?
--- The Handbook of Christian Apologetics, by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli
The Swoon Theory eventually dovetails into a theory of conspiracy, by the disciples and authors of the texts in the Bible. This theory also is addressed by that book and others. For the sake of not getting too far off topic, I leave it to anyone to read in their own time. Besides, as others have pointed out, the resurrection that this article is about is the resurrection of all dead at the end of the age.
I don't think it is fair to call anything in the Bible an "eyewitness account".
The eyewitness accounts are more likely to be reliable than the other historical documents of that age we have.
"Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water."
Breaking the person leg, the the person cruxcified will die asphyxiated (without the legs to sustain, the body will be sustained by the arms, turning hard/impossible breathe). But the soldier saw Jesus dead, and dont break the legs, (its harder break bones), just piercing with the spear is easier and it will die via bleeding anyway. So, here we got a testimony from a Roman Soldier (in theory a neutral watcher) about the dead of Jesus.
If you think this might explain the account of the resurrection, note that the account emphasizes that the apostles doesn't recognize the resurrected Jesus. If it was actually Jesus who had survived, surely they would recognize him. Furthermore the resurrected Jesus does not seem to have an ordinary physical body - he is able to walk through walls for example. Given this I don't think a "not clinically dead"-theory explains anything.
See here:
Berean Literal Bible Corinthians 15 50 Now I say this, brothers, that flesh and blood is not able to inherit the kingdom of God, nor does decay inherit immortality.
Acts 2 27 (World English Bible) “because you will not leave my soul in Hades, neither will you allow your Holy One to see decay.”
Acts 2 31 (World English Bible) explains how Jesus fought against decay and thus was able to be resurrected: “he foreseeing this spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that neither was his soul left in Hades, nor did his flesh see decay.”
Acts 13 35 (World English Bible): “Therefore he says also in another psalm, ‘You will not allow your Holy One to see decay.’”
The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark do not mention the resurrection at all.
Later manuscripts have verses tacked on, in what is nowadays called Mark 16. You can read about this online, there is several centuries worth of discussion about it.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the earliest manuscripts end at Mark 16:8, which ends with the women finding the empty tomb and being told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus has risen.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_16#Significance_of_ending...
and
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+16&version...
EDIT: the undisputed ending of Mark, which is up to verse 8 (Catholic version):
5 On entering the tomb they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right-hand side, and they were struck with amazement.
6 But he said to them, 'There is no need to be so amazed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he has risen, he is not here. See, here is the place where they laid him.
7 But you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you to Galilee; that is where you will see him, just as he told you." '
8 And the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
But an even simpler explanation is that Jesus himself was invented too.
The problem is that intelligent autodidacts confuse the disciplines of science (developing theories and performing experiments to provide potentially disprovable evidence of universal, timeless laws of nature) and history (the study of written texts about events that occurred in the past) and the types of evidence acceptable to both fields. Hint: they're completely different.
The problem is that, if you want to advance a historical theory claiming that there was no historical guy called Jesus who inspired the gospel, you have to come up with a compelling theory, based on historical (written records from the past) evidence describing who built the first churches, who wrote the first gospels, why they made up a story about a Palestinian Jew who was crucified 300 years ago, and why that story was so compelling it caught on with the masses and elites alike.
Or you could just go with the idea that there was a guy running around the middle east 2,000 years ago, who pissed of the Jewish and Roman elite, so much to the point that he was executed. And about whom miracles were claimed to have been performed.
The thing is, for all religions developing where we have iron-clad evidence (Mormonism, Scientology, etc), it always starts with a charismatic leader who attracts a following. Throw a rock in India, and you can find any number of gurus who are said to be capable of levitating, not eating for long periods of time, etc. etc. There is nothing really extraordinary about the story of Jesus, comparatively speaking.
If you're going to make a historical theory that Jesus never existed, but instead was invented by someone else, you have to identify that someone else. In fleshing out your theory, you'll probably want to say why they invented it, and why it caught on, when many other small cults and gurus petered out.
Christianity didn't arise out of nowhere in, say, England in 1500.
As to timeframe: A lot of key written evidence of Jesus was authored within a century of his life, which comparatively is "pretty good" as far as these things go. Much written evidence of historical events or people that we have wasn't contemporary to the subject in question either, but authored by historians, sometimes far later than a century. By that standard, the contemporaneousness is "pretty good".
As to Sources: In addition to the synoptic gospels, you also have non-Christian, non-sympathetic sources such as Tacitus referring to the Crucifixion of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Or Josephus. This represents a variation of disconnected sources (not informed by each other), that by any standard is comparatively better than most.
So the quality of the evidence is built upon not only the _quantity_ of accounts, but the variation of sources, and the general agreement of even basic facts (existence, death). This quality is better evidence than we have of many historical figures that we assume to be real. And as another comment pointed out, the simplest explanation is that this doesn't represent a grand conspiracy of disconnected ancients.
Thats not an argument for the accuracy of the story, thats an argument against the accuracy of the rest of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
:)
The body of a gladiator who had died well was placed on a couch of Libitina and removed with dignity to the arena morgue, where the corpse was stripped of armour, and probably had its throat cut to prove that dead was dead. The Christian author Tertullian, commenting on ludi meridiani in Roman Carthage during the peak era of the games, describes a more humiliating method of removal. One arena official, dressed as the "brother of Jove", Dis Pater (god of the underworld) strikes the corpse with a mallet. Another, dressed as Mercury, tests for life-signs with a heated "wand"; once confirmed as dead, the body is dragged from the arena.[108]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Death_and_disposal
Boyle wasn't speaking about Jesus' ressurection.
You're right; it's not based on and scholarship or methodology. It's just simple associational reasoning. "These two things are similar, so therefore they are the same".
People (mostly highly educated upper class) started to rely more of their own thinking than dogma that lead to horrible religious wars, sectarian conflicts and widespread misery. Different forms of deism started to replace belief in bible interpreted by priests.
Once you transfer from from Catholicism everywhere to different forms of protestant beliefs, next natural question to ask is if protestants hold the truth. This leads to abstract philosophical thinking and critical deism or atheism.