JESUS' RESURRECTION: Good News, Fake News or Alternative Facts (original) (raw)
Reinterpretations of the Historical Jesus
1996
In addition to the major historical approaches presented in the last chapter, many have attempted to write more-or-less popular lives of Jesus. These authors often advocate unorthodox interpretations: Jesus never died on the cross; he was connected with the Qumran community; someone else changed his message to fit their own desires; he traveled to various parts of the word during the so called "silent years" or even after the crucifixion. Reinterpretations of the Historical Jesus While such works are given virtually no attention by careful scholars, these attempts are sometimes very popular with those who are unfamiliar with the data behind such questions. Many are bothered by nonfactual or illogical presentations, but are not quite able to locate the problems involved. This is the major reason that these approaches are included in this book. We will investigate several of the most popular recent attempts to present unorthodox pictures of Jesus' life. The Rise of the Swoon Theory Each of the fictitious lives of Jesus surveyed in Chapter 1 taught that Jesus survived death on the cross and was later revived. His "appearances" to his disciples were not miraculous, of course, for he had never died in the first place. The swoon theory, espoused by Heinrich Paulus and others during the heyday of the Liberal naturalistic theories, was quite popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was disproven by the facts and indicted by Liberals like David Strauss. Before examining this view, it will be helpful to present an overview of two contemporary attempts to write similar lives of Jesus. Hugh Schonfield's The Passover Plot created quite a sensation when it appeared.(1) However, very few readers were aware of the similarity between this book and earlier fictitious lives of Jesus. For Schonfield, Jesus had carefully planned his career of public ministry in accordance with his belief that he was Israel's Messiah.(2) Accordingly, he plotted events such as his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, on which occasion Lazarus helped him make the appropriate arrangements.(3) Jesus made especially intricate plans concerning his upcoming crucifixion, which required especially accurate timing. On this occasion his chief confidant was Joseph of Arimathea.(4) While Jesus was on the cross, Joseph made arrangements for an unidentified man to give Jesus a drink that had been drugged. As a result, Jesus slipped quickly into a state of unconsciousness, which made him appear dead. Nonetheless, Jesus was in a very serious condition when he was removed from the cross, especially complicated by John's report of the spear wound in his chest.(5) On Saturday, Jesus' body was removed from the tomb, after which he regained consciousness briefly, but died shortly thereafter and was reburied.(6) At this point, Schonfield turns to his proposed reconstruction of events that account for the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection. The unidentified man at the cross who administered the drug is the key figure in this reconstruction. He helped carry Jesus to the tomb, then returned on Saturday to rescue him. During Jesus' brief period of consciousness, Jesus asked this man to convey to his disciples that he had risen from the dead. However, Jesus died shortly after and this person helped bury him. It is also this anonymous person who was present in the tomb when the women came early on Sunday morning and was the one mistaken by Mary Magdalene as the gardener. Later this same man visited the disciples on the road to Emmaus, at the seashore and in Galilee. The disciples mistook this stranger for Jesus and proclaimed his resurrection from the dead.(7) It should be obvious to the reasonably impartial reader that this incredible sequence of events, where an unidentified man simply "appears" very conveniently whenever there is a need to explain anything away, is extremely questionable, to say the least. The entire plot closely parallels the fictitious lives of Jesus which are now so outdated and ignored by serious scholars. Indeed, even Schonfield admits that much of his account "is an imaginative reconstruction."(8) Later he explains that "We are nowhere claiming for our reconstruction that it represents what actually happened."(9) According to John A. T. Robinson, The Passover Plot is an example of a popularistic book which is factually groundless enough that, if the public were not so interested in virtually anyone who writes on Christianity, it "would be laughed out of court."(10) Therefore, we assert that there is a very high improbability against Schonfield's reconstruction of Jesus' life. One other example of the swoon theory in popular literature is Donovan Joyce's The Jesus Scroll.(11) The thesis of this book, which contains an even more incredible string of improbabilities than Schonfield's, will be left for a later section of this chapter. However, Joyce's account of the swoon theory is discussed here.
The ultimate miracle? The historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus
This contribution compares two views of the Resurrection of Christ; a traditional view that assumes that at the Resurrection, the dead body of Christ was transformed with the result that after the Resurrection, the grave was empty, and a revised view that assumes that the grave was not empty and that the Resurrection of Christ is not something that happened in this world, but in heaven. On the basis of a consideration of arguments for and against both views, the author argues for the traditional view. He goes on to show, however, that the traditional view cannot be adopted by historians who apply the principle of analogy. He argues, moreover, that this principle cannot be abandoned altogether. In the case of alleged singular events or miracles, however, this principle cannot be applied. This means that even if, as the author argues, the Resurrection is Geschichte (it really happened in this world, and the grave was empty), it falls outside the scope of Historie (it cannot be ascertained by the methods of strict historiography).
The Historical Jesus ? T&T Clark, 2008
In conformity with the appropriate method, the study proceeds through four chapters of unequal length. 1. The chosen starting point is the present Eucharist. It is as far as possible from the historical Jesus, but at the same time it is the most real element of Christianity: a presence of Jesus Christ and the formation of a community through the fulfilment of a certain Scripture, here and now. This evidently involves a vision of the human being, which it is necessary to clarify. In addition, it is a matter of an institution, that is to say precisely of a structure or of a model, which brings together by agreement a group of elements in which Scripture holds a privileged place. These elements will subsequently be explained in detail one by one, and then analyzed by going back in time. 2. At the other extremity are found the rather remote Jewish realities that surrounded Jesus in the first century, for which the work of Flavius Josephus constitutes a first-rate source. They are gathered together under two headings: first the sacred library, which was not at all at that time an archive rigidly set for centuries, but a still fluid collection with flexible contours; then Galilee, a small rural province with strong Pharisaic and Babylonian ties, as distrustful of Rome as of Jerusalem. 3. Between the two preceding poles appear the four canonical gospels that effectively resist all attempts at harmonization. In order to gauge the gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ that was later preached, they are first examined from a limited angle, by seeking to determine how the disciples became apostles. The conclusion that emerges is that the Gospel of John is the most Jewish and that of Mark to be the least useful in assessing the original milieu, which makes it necessary to reconsider certain current theories on the formation of the Gospels. 4. After these points as well as some others on the way the New Testament is used, to which other sources can be added, we finally reach the life of Jesus. We begin with the elements essential for the confession of the Christian faith (origin, baptism and passion of Jesus), and deal only at the end with his activity and his teaching, on which the Epistles and the Credo are remarkably silent. The conclusion is very modest, but precise: if we remain hesitant or ignorant in regard to the material details of many of the facts, we see on the contrary very well – and this is the essential – how they escaped being forgotten, that is to say how they have given rise to a word, because they have been understood, memorized and especially transmitted. Taken in a very broad sense, the fulfilment of Scripture has played – and still plays – an essential role. Abraham gives us this to understand in the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus (Luke. 16:31): “If they do not listen to Moses or the Prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There are finally two Appendices. The first proposes a collection of non-biblical texts that help in being more specific about the silhouette of Jesus and of his circle. The second provides elements of a French bibliography; in fact, to lighten the presentation, all annotation has been omitted and the technical discussions have been reduced to a minimum, but most of the considerations and the options presented here have been studied and justified in more detail elsewhere; it is fair to add that many are subject to controversy. The chosen starting point indicates clearly that nothing can be demonstrated more geometrico. It is a matter first of all of reflections of a believer for believers. In regard to non-believers or of “misinformed-believers,” the only really useful Christian apologetic is a mixture of testimony and announcement of the Gospel, which moreover necessarily gives rise to objections. Even if it has long been asserted – and Paul recalls this – that the human being has the natural capacity to know God, it is evident that a positive mind can declare, in good faith and with good arguments, that Christianity is a deception, or at least an illusion. Such a one should congratulate herself/himself, since the Christian language offers its services, like a parable; it honours the demands of reason, but it cannot be imposed for fear of reducing the Gospel to a theorem, namely a cultural fact to master.
In the years following the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, a group of people who claimed to be his followers, later to be called Christians, established the Christian church. When asked why this happened, they often responded with the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead despite the fact that it initially would have sounded just as surprising and unlikely to Jews and Gentiles alike. These followers of Jesus seem stubbornly to have persisted with their claims, expecting to be taken seriously and even appealing to named eyewitnesses. But why were these claims made? What did they mean? Why did these Christians stubbornly persist with them? What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth? (pp. 3-4) Answering these questions form the heart of Christopher Bryans' 432 pages, 937 endnote volume: The Resurrection of the Messiah. Bryan covers Second Temple Judaism, the Greco-Roman world (with e.g. interesting discussions about the legend of Alcestis), 1 Corinthians 15 and the four canonical gospels to answer these questions. Following this, he discusses five modern objections/ alternative explanations to the claim that Jesus rose from the grave in a transformed body, claiming to debunk all of them (especially the views of Bultmann, Borg, Crossan, and Lüdemann), followed by the implications of Jesus' resurrection. The main contributions of this work are probably: i) the way in which it makes serious and often technical scholarship more digestible for the relatively uninformed reader; ii) some kind of middle ground position somewhere between the likes of Richard Bauckham and N.T. Wright on the one hand, and others like David Catchpole and C.H. Dodd on the other; iii) his academic rigor in the extensive endnotes (a full 146 pages!); iv) and also his creative and constant interaction with Anglo-Catholic liturgy, Reformed music, and poetry.
Visions and Voices: Jesus' Resurrection and a New Socio-Scientific Epistemology
Pharos Journal of Theology, 2020
This article appraises current resurrection research methodology in South African New Testament scholarship while suggesting a new epistemology for understanding resurrection appearances. In this paper I critique the traditional/confessional and historical-critical methodologies to expose inherent flaws within them. I then propose that the only type of epistemology that considers the fundamental cultural differences between the western 21st century and ancient Mediterranean where the resurrection visions are concerned is the social-scientific historiography. Notwithstanding the value of social-scientific methodology in general, I contend that there are at least two orientations within the social-scientific epistemologies, one of which is crucial to the understanding of resurrection visions reported by the early church and discourses that they claimed to have had with the resurrected Jesus. My conclusion is that the social-scientific version, which utilizes fieldwork in general and p...
The memorable invention of the death of Jesus
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2016
1.Allison has attempted to produce a more common-sense investigation by attempting to show that Paul knew a pre-Markan narrative. He is not persuaded by Crossan's argument that the passion narrative is 'prophecy historicised'. He sees the evidence from Paul correlating with what he can determine from the later Gospel materials. Allison never considers the texture of the evidence in the pre-Pauline material and in the Gospel narratives. He would see indications of historical events from Paul and the Gospels. He does not consider how the pre-Pauline memories and the Gospel narratives were invented. He neglects the possibility that ancient memory had particular repertoires and structures. 2.The graffito shows a man standing in front of a donkey-headed victim on a T-shaped cross. The Greek text scrawls 'Alexamenos worships his god.' This mocking carving may well represent either an anti-Jewish or an anti-Jesus slur. The bloodstone intaglio shows a crucified Jesus, tied to a T-shaped cross. The Greek text invokes: 'Son, Father, Jesus Anointed'. 3.While there are images of Jesus as teacher and healer, there is nothing until the fifth century CE. The death story of Jesus of Nazareth has traditionally been understood as a matter of historical fact. The various versions of the story would seem to confirm a documented death scene. Nevertheless, critical appraisals of this material have raised numerous questions regarding the passion story. This article considers how the very structure of the story is a vital clue to the way in which the death of Jesus was invented. The Jewish tale of the suffering and vindication of the innocent one provides the memory locus for discovering meaning in the fate of Jesus. We find that the basic fact of the death tale of Jesus is that it was a fiction, authorising further elaborations for those who understood the craft of memory. The memorable invention of the death of Jesus Read online:
The Resurrection and Western Culture
The following masters thesis examines the evidence for and against the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and considers three ways through which one can know the truthfulness of the resurrection, namely, through the testimony of the Holy Spirit, the witness of the Bible, and the historical evidence, including Jesus’ death, burial, the empty tomb, and the early disciples’ belief that they had seen appearances of Jesus resulting in their change from cowardice to martyrdom (i.e. Peter), the conversion of enemies such as Saul and the conversion of non-believers such as James, the brother of Jesus. Various objections will be considered including a denial of the burial accounts, women as a literary creation and that the gospels were written too late. Several theories to explain these data are considered including the apparent death hypothesis, the conspiracy theory, the hallucination hypothesis, and the resurrection hypothesis. It is argued that there is substantial support for the resurrection of Jesus being an actual historical event. An analysis of western culture is then undertaken considering some of the typical objections that are raised against the resurrection. Western culture is broken down into pre-modern, modern, and postmodern with particular attention to relativism and pluralism. In light of the findings, ways of presenting the case for the resurrection to an individual from a western background will be suggested.