Proof of Jesus' Resurrection

real life wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:

annoyed111 wrote:

Is there physical proof that Jesus resurrected from the dead? (Such as an empty tomb?)

No. Of course not. Besides, I don't know about you, but it would take a lot more than an empty tomb to convince me that someone rose from the dead.

If a stranger you met today told you that he saw someone rise from the dead, you would assume he was crazy. Yet when someone tells you he read the exact same story in an old book, millions of people believe it's true.

Why? Because they trust the person who read the book? He wasn't there either.

Because they trust the book itself? It's just a book, and it's not the original, and it's been translated by people who weren't there either.

Because they trust in a higher power which made the book infalable? The book is the thing which proposes the higher power in the first place.

Because they trust their hearts to tell them the truth? Maybe. Maybe it's just as simple as that. No logic, no reason, just a simple gut choice.

Ros,

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that you actually did see someone who had risen from the dead. You not only saw him, you ate dinner with him and talked with him.

What 'proof' would you have?

First hand, personal experience, as opposed to what we have now, which is zero.

What you have now is the eyewitness testimonies of some who did have that first hand personal experience of seeing Jesus after He rose from the dead, ate dinner and talked with Him.

Ever play that game "telephone" when you were a kid, where one person whispers a sentence to the next one, who whispers it to the next, and so on, all around the room? When the last person is reached, he has to say aloud what he just heard, and the difference between that and the original sentence is usually hilarious.

So here we have "eyewitness accounts" that have been repeated and/or distorted down through two millenia, and yet people are claiming that this obvious lulu of a fairy tale is what was experienced by eyewitnesses!

The myth of a dead body magically rising to heaven cannot be accepted on the basis of logic, or supposedly accurate accounts by "eyewitnesses." For the people who do accept this story, there is clearly an emotional need to do so, which overrides any kind of logical thinking. Once I asked a fundamentalist Christian neighbor how he, an otherwise intelligent, educated man, can believe such stories, and his answer was, "That's where faith comes in."

So asking for "proof" is meaningless. With or without proof, those with a need to believe the myth will find a rationale for believing it.

Yes, but eyewitness accounts aren't very reliable, which is why historians rely on exceptionally more than four.

Eyewitnesses play a critical role in our criminal justice system. They are often essential to identifying, charging, and ultimately convicting perpetrators of crime and in some cases may provide the sole piece of evidence against those individuals. For these reasons, the value of accurate and reliable eyewitness evidence cannot be overstated.

Cases in which DNA testing has exonerated individuals convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony tend to make headlines, but in actuality, the frequency of mistaken eyewitness identifications is quite small. The vast majority of eyewitness identifications are accurate and provide trustworthy evidence for the trier of fact.........

real life wrote:

What you have now is the eyewitness testimonies of some who did have that first hand personal experience of seeing Jesus after He rose from the dead, ate dinner and talked with Him.

What we have is an unsubstantiated story, nothing more. That's not good enough. Not nearly good enough.

If someone was standing riight in front of me and told me that someone rose from the dead, I wouldn't believe them.

There are many historical events that you take for granted with NO eyewitness testimony to cite. What you have read is often many sources removed from eyewitnesses.

Only trouble with that reasoning is, if you saw someone rise from the dead yourself, you'd knock yourself out trying to explain it before accepting it as someone rising from the dead.

You assume, in hindsight, that Roman and Jewish authorities should have recorded information about such a notable figure as Jesus, whose legacy has literally reshaped the world.

Josephus' Silence
Historically, Herod, to put it mildly, did not have a peaceful reign. His many sons and wives were involved in bitter rivalry for his throne. Herod was not a man to hold family relation sacred. He had three of his sons executed for conspiracy. He executed his brother-in-law, Joseph. At the urging of Joseph's widow, Salome, he murdered his own wife, Mariamme. If he treated his own family badly, his opponents and enemies were given even more ferocious handling. He murdered the Jewish High Priest, Aristobolus III and forty five members of the Sanhedrin for their support of the Hasmoneans. These are just samplings of Herod's atrocities. He was therefore a kind of man that could have committed the crime Matthew attributed to him.

The atrocities listed above are taken from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. From Josephus' own writings, we can tell that he hated Herod, for he obviously took pleasure in noting down every crime and atrocities that was attributed to the Idumean king. Many of the crimes described by Josephus were far less "wicked" than the slaughter of the innocents described by Matthew. Now Josephus' list was very detailed. Had the slaughter actually occurred it would have been an event well known enough for the Jewish historian to have heard of it. Yet the silence of Josephus and the absence of any reference to it in any contemporary secular writings (Jewish, Greek or Roman) cannot be explained if the event was historical. The conclusion forces itself on us, it never happened.

The Fulfilment of an Old Testament Prophecy
Note also that Matthew claimed that this fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15). We noted earlier how the early Christians used the Hebrew Scriptures as a happy hunting ground for allusions to their saviour. Their attitude was: if it was prophesied in the Old Testament about the messiah then it must have happened to Jesus.

Its Midrash-like Similarity to Moses' Nativity
Furthermore, the story in Matthew is very similar to the Old Testament story of the baby Moses' escape from the pharaoh slaughter of the Israelite children:
Exodus 1:15-16,22
Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives..."When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him...Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile..."

Just like the escape of Moses from the clutches of the pharaoh's slaughter, so was Jesus to escape from the grip of Herod's massacre. The midrash-like parallel in these two stories is strongly suggestive of Matthew's dependence on the Exodus episode for this portion of his nativity. [1]

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/herod.html

I'm hardly an expert on this subject, but to my knowledge no one ever claimed to have actually seen Jesus rising from the dead. All they saw at the tomb was a stone rolled away and the body gone.

Afterwards, some of his disciples apparently had a mass hallunication (and who knows what they were smoking, or eating?) in which Jesus appeared to them and rebuked them for doubting that he still lived. This may offend the believers here, but it sounds pretty much like those people who kept seeing Elvis "alive" for years after his death. This delusion in the face of unbearable grief seems to be a common human phenomenon.

People are easily led, and when taught these stories as the "truth" from childhood on, some are only too eager to continue propagating the myth. It answers emotional needs.

real life wrote:

You assume, in hindsight, that Roman and Jewish authorities should have recorded information about such a notable figure as Jesus, whose legacy has literally reshaped the world.

It's not just missing information about Jesus.


Matthew 2:16-18
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.

Is there any mention of this in historical documents? Looks like somebody would have noticed and written about it. Same thing with the plagues in Egypt. The cattle dying and the Nile turning to blood? It just wasn't considered noteworthy?
P

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Quote:

Josephus' Silence
Historically, Herod, to put it mildly, did not have a peaceful reign. His many sons and wives were involved in bitter rivalry for his throne. Herod was not a man to hold family relation sacred. He had three of his sons executed for conspiracy. He executed his brother-in-law, Joseph. At the urging of Joseph's widow, Salome, he murdered his own wife, Mariamme. If he treated his own family badly, his opponents and enemies were given even more ferocious handling. He murdered the Jewish High Priest, Aristobolus III and forty five members of the Sanhedrin for their support of the Hasmoneans. These are just samplings of Herod's atrocities. He was therefore a kind of man that could have committed the crime Matthew attributed to him.

The atrocities listed above are taken from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. From Josephus' own writings, we can tell that he hated Herod, for he obviously took pleasure in noting down every crime and atrocities that was attributed to the Idumean king. Many of the crimes described by Josephus were far less "wicked" than the slaughter of the innocents described by Matthew. Now Josephus' list was very detailed. Had the slaughter actually occurred it would have been an event well known enough for the Jewish historian to have heard of it. Yet the silence of Josephus and the absence of any reference to it in any contemporary secular writings (Jewish, Greek or Roman) cannot be explained if the event was historical. The conclusion forces itself on us, it never happened.

The Fulfilment of an Old Testament Prophecy
Note also that Matthew claimed that this fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15). We noted earlier how the early Christians used the Hebrew Scriptures as a happy hunting ground for allusions to their saviour. Their attitude was: if it was prophesied in the Old Testament about the messiah then it must have happened to Jesus.

Its Midrash-like Similarity to Moses' Nativity
Furthermore, the story in Matthew is very similar to the Old Testament story of the baby Moses' escape from the pharaoh slaughter of the Israelite children:
Exodus 1:15-16,22
Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives..."When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him...Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile..."

Just like the escape of Moses from the clutches of the pharaoh's slaughter, so was Jesus to escape from the grip of Herod's massacre. The midrash-like parallel in these two stories is strongly suggestive of Matthew's dependence on the Exodus episode for this portion of his nativity. [1]

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/herod.html

snood wrote:

Only trouble with that reasoning is, if you saw someone rise from the dead yourself, you'd knock yourself out trying to explain it before accepting it as someone rising from the dead.

That's not "trouble with reasoning", that's the very essence of reason.

Before I will ever believe that anyone, or anything can rise from the dead, I will need lots of empirical evidence, multiple perspectives, and clear definitions of "dead" and "rise from".

When a magician makes hundreds of people believe that the statue of liberty has disappeared, I'm impressed, but I still know that the statue of liberty didn't really disappear.

Just as a side note/question. I thought that the Shroud of Turin was usually considered some kind of hard evidence towards the claim of Jesus' death and rebirth. That seems like pretty hard evidence to me.

Good grief, Ros.

You need a definition of 'dead'?

Take a few weeks off, my friend. You've been working too hard.