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Isn't John the Baptist an Exception to NT Wright's Argument in the Resurrection of the Son of God?

2/1/2012

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They couldn't have thought that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead in the sense of Resurrection because Jesus and John were contemporaries.  Rather, what people meant was that Jesus had taken on the mantle of John the Baptists ministry just as other had thought that John the Baptist had taken on the mantle of Elijah (WLC). 

FROM AN E-MAIL BY N.T. Wright in response to my asking if he thought Craig's answer above was plausible:

Yes: Herod’s answer is at first sight a puzzle. But the evangelists who report it are also among those who very clearly support the standard Jewish view of resurrection. I think the best answer is that Herod, to be honest, was unlikely to be using language very precisely. He surely did know of Jesus and John – it was an insecure monarch’s daily preoccupation to keep an eye on possibly dangerous men and movements – but having beheaded the one and then getting the other one it’s the kind of bluster someone like him might say. I once spoke in St Mary’s College Baltimore and the Principal, over-enthusiastically, said it was like hearing Raymond Brown come back from the dead. My comment was not that his theology was faulty but that I wondered what Brown had done wrong to be reincarnated as an Anglican bishop. It is likely that Herod was not well informed about the precise nuances of Pharisaic belief about resurrection, and that just as Josephus (who certainly was well informed) could represent the doctrine in ways that conformed more to pagan beliefs in eg reincarnation, so Herod could have thought of ‘resurrection’ as a kind of ‘reincarnation’. One way or another, I don’t find the passage troubling. Mark, after all, goes on in ch 9 to say that the disciples, faced with Jesus’ warning not to tell people about the transfiguration until the Son of Man had been raised from the dead, were puzzled as to what this ‘rising from the dead’ might mean. One person in the middle of history? Surely not…

Hope this helps

Tom Wright

Prof N T Wright

St Andrews

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DOESN’T THE GOSPEL OF MARK HAVE A REVERSAL OF EXPECTATIONS MOTIF?

1/27/2012

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Robert Gundry’s commentary on Mark’s gospel demonstrates that Mark’s gospel is all about the fulfillment of expectations.  The final words spoken at the empty tomb in the gospel of Mark are 'just as he told you'.

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Critiquing Spong's Simple Simon Theory

1/27/2012

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Authorship, Bias, Contradictions, Dating, Eyewitnesses

1/27/2012

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Doesn't Justin Martyr Support the Notion that Early Christians Thought The Resurrection of Jesus Was Borrowed From Pagan Parallels of other dying and rising Gods?

1/27/2012

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Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist, records some of these "parallels" in an attempt to convince the Roman emperor that the Christian's teachings were not that dissimilar from other Roman religions which were favored by the empire.  Justin appealed to various examples, including Aesculapius who was struck by lightning and ascended to heaven, Baccus and Hercules and a few other sons who rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus after having died violent deaths, Ariadne who was “set among the stars,” and finally the cremation of the emperor Augustus in which someone claimed that he saw Augustus’s spirit ascend towards heaven.3  However, Justin’s parallels are extremely unclear.  As Habermas and Licona note, “If we were to consider these as parallels to Jesus’ resurrection, we would also have to consider every ghost story."

Thus, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose Justin Martyr had in writing these things to the Roman Emperors.  The purpose of the Apology is to prove to the emperors, renowned as upright and philosophical men, the importance of Christianity.  When attempting to build bridges with someone who doesn't understand or is very skeptical of your position, you start with any common ground that you dredge up between yourself and the other parties.  There was very little that Christianity had in common with paganism, and Justin Martyr's writing in this case shouldn't be taken as a straightforward statement that the common ground between Christianity and paganism was identical (it is clear from the examples he sites that these pagan myths aren't the same as Jewish Resurrection, nor are they of the same genre of the gospels), but as an attempt to build bridges within a context in which Christians were misunderstood, and sometimes persecuted by Roman Emperors. 
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The Resurrection is absurd because it leaves unanswered the question where Jesus is today?

1/23/2012

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So how should we conceive of Christ's resurrection body today? Christ in his exalted state still has a human nature; he did not "enter back into God's own existence." But Christ has exited this four-dimensional space-time continuum. Therefore, perhaps we might say that his human nature does not now manifest itself corporeally. Compare a tuning fork which is plucked and begins to hum. If the vibrating fork is placed in a vacuum jar, though it continues to vibrate, it does not manifest itself by a humming noise because there is no medium to carry its vibrations. Similarly, Christ's human nature, no longer immersed in spacetime, does not manifest itself as a body. But someday Christ will return and re-enter our four-dimensional space-time continuum, and then his body will become manifest. In the new heavens and the new earth Christ will be corporeally present to his people. Christ, then, has a human nature which is manifested as his physical resurrection body when he exists in a spatio-temporal universe (WLC).

Follow-Up:  It seems to me that Christ’s possessing a human nature in the time between his ascension and return does not necessitate his having a human body during that time, anymore than my possessing a human nature during the intermediate state between my death and resurrection requires that I have a body during that time. Someone whose body has been vaporized in an explosion, for example, has no body at all during the intermediate state, not even a dead one, yet he is still a human being. Why? Perhaps we could say that he is a human being because his soul was united with a human body. For that reason he is not an angelic being or some other sort of being. But we can say exactly the same about Christ in his ascended state. Moreover, as the tuning fork illustration makes clear, Christ’s human nature is not at all incomplete in such as state; it’s just that he’s not in the environment (namely spacetime) in which his human nature would manifest itself as a body.
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Is it unlikely that Joseph would have buried Jesus since Jesus' body would have made him unclean?

1/18/2012

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Joseph likely had assistants who helped him, as the phrase "where they laid him" in Mk 16:6 suggests. That Mk 15:46 says "he [Joseph] took him down" does not necessarily mean that Joseph literally got up there himself and pulled out the nails. As has often been pointed out, the society of Jesus' time considered an action that a person had done through emissaries to be his/her own. Hence, Joseph did not necessarily defile himself by performing the burial.
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Wasn't it illegal to bury crucified criminal in a grave thus making it unlikely that Jesus could have been buried in a tomb?

1/18/2012

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Craig elsewhere writes, "...the Jews always buried the dead (II Sam. 2:12-14; Tobit 1:17-19; 2:3-7; 12:12-13; Sirach 7:33; 38:16), even the dead of their enemies (Josh. 8:29; 10:27; Josephus Jewish War 3.377)" [WLC.ANTE 172].  The Temple Scroll (IIQTemple) records a command to bury the body of one who has been crucified on the same day, and applies it to both dead and live crucifixions.  Josephus mentions not only the Dt 21 passage in the Antiquities passage, but in Josephus' account of the Zealots' abuse of dead bodies during the seizure of the Temple in the First Roman War, he notes that "the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset" [Jewish War 4. 317].   So while one could concede that the Romans often did not grant burial to crucifixion victims, Jewish attitudes toward burial would have likely assured that Jesus was buried. While this does not argue specifically for a tomb burial, this consideration, combined with the very early ICor 15 creed which attests Jesus' burial, provides a fatal blow to the arguments of Crossan and the Seminar that Jesus was probably left to hang on the cross, to be reduced to bird feed. 
 
See Biblical Studies / The Historical Case For The Resurrection /

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Assessing Plantinga's Dwindling Probabilites Argument

1/15/2012

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The basic error in Plantinga's argument is that he misunderstands the structure of the argument.  One shouldn't begin with the Total Evidence for Christianity and then add various hypotheses to theism in order to arrive at Christianity, but rather, one begins with a sort of minimal set of evidence on which theism is probable, and then you keep heaping on additional evidence as one argues for the resurrection, and the truth of Christianity, and in so doing one doesn't confront a problem of dwindling probabilities. 
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Helpful Considerations for Defeating Attempted 'Parity' Arguments Against the Resurrection

1/13/2012

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