J.P. Holding And Matthew Green

Last week, Matthew Green of Debunking Christianity posted another article on the resurrection. It's a response to J.P. Holding, and I've only read portions of the discussions they've been having, so I can't comment on those discussions in much depth. However, a reader has brought this thread at TheologyWeb to my attention. He said that many of the issues Matthew Green raises in his article were already discussed in the TheologyWeb thread linked above. He also wrote:

1. While I would not presume to speak for Holding, I believe Green has overstated when he says that the “core” of Holding’s argument revolves upon the meaning of anastasis. It seems rather to be a minor accessory in an overall argument making use of Jewish beliefs, psychological expectations, and simple logic. We would note that a member of the discussion thread who is an expert in Koine Greek advised Green (message #99) to be cautious in his pursuit of his point trying to link the words anistemi and anistasis too closely.

2. Questions such as, “Why would God resuscitate a prophet temporarily, only to have that prophet die and then raise him up, transphysically, at the general resurrection from the dead?” may be of historical and speculative interest but are not an argument. Arguably there are practical considerations that would forbid allowing a resurrected person to travel the earth, but in the end, questions of motive require greater explication of relevance to become more than simply interesting questions.

3. Green has not related his expectations adequately to the Jewish conception of general resurrection as an end-of-the-age event. This is the primary difficulty in Jesus’ disciples believing that he could be risen from the dead prior to any general resurrection, not that the dead could not be raised by God’s power. As a result, Green improperly conflates categories.

4. It is not improbable, if the Jewish belief Holding reports about angels is true, that the first persons seeing eg, the Gospel of Matthew’s saints risen from the dead, upon initial impression thought that these persons were angels and not the persons they seemed to be, but it demands too much from the text to have it reported how any witnesses were disabused of that specific notion.