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.
Monday, July 31, 2006
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:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The "many raised saints" story is an interesting one. I have a few pieces on the web concerning it and the questions it raises:
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to the resurrected saints?
More about the resurrected saints
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE RESURRECTED SAINTS? The "Christian Think Tank" Response
One interesting tidbit about the tale of the "many raised saints" found only in Matthew is the probable insertion of the phrase "after his resurrection" which appears to have been inserted so awkwardly into the Greek that it makes the sentences read as though the tombs were opened and the saints raised at Jesus's death, but then they lingered about until "after his resurrection" a day and a half later when they finally "entered the holy city."
Some of course don't think that those two little verses about the anonymous "many raised saints" are historical at all but merely midrash added by Matthew, just as Matthew appears to have added incidents in Jesus's birth and childhood filling in gaps in knowledge with tales composed to add understanding in a similarly midrashic fashion. (One prominent inerrantist scholar was voted out of the Evangelical Theological Society in the 1980s for acknowledging that there was indeed a case to be made for Matthew's use of midrash in his telling of the Jesus story.)
As for inerrantist Christian apologists on the web who acknowledge the ancient use of midrash and even pesher to help try and explain the way some Gospel authors stretched the meanings of Old Testament verses to suit their prior view of "who Jesus was," please read "The Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah" which includes comments from Christian apologists at the end.
On this topic of the Gospel author's use of midrash and pesher, even J. P. Holding has listed it among "leading Christian myths" that "OT prophecy fulfillment is a good apologetic. It actually isn't useful in the way it was at first. We need to understand (as do Skeptics) Jewish exegesis of the first century. It is not so much that the OT predicted the NT events as that the NT writers looked at history and sought OT passages that echoed what they had seen. This does not mean that there is not actual predictive prophecy at all (for even then God may have orchestrated the pattern) but rather that we cannot present an apologetic on this basis as we normally have; or else we are forced into a corner of explaining ie, why the NT allegedly uses OT passages "out of context."
Personally, I suspect that the ancient world was generally more mysterious and wondrous than today's and average people were more capable of believing stories or weird strange tales, and capable of repeating them and embellishing them as well. The story of many raised saints, the story of a bodily ascension, the story of a resurrection. I don't doubt that Christians were motivated in their beliefs, nor that Christians were motivated to compose not one, but three additional variant endings to Mark's Gospel, none of them apparently original to that Gospel, and continued to compose additional Gospels and Acts. Truth telling does not seem to have been as important as convincing themselves and others of their beliefs. But certainties are more difficult to come by once Christianity began being examined by more rigorous standards. Historians are not easily cowed by partisan stories of miracles, or by miraculous partisan tales of how various religions allegedly began. Jerusalem itself was turned into rubble in 70 A.D. but the Romans, rubble such that Josephus pointed out if they hadn't left the towers of the city standing, one might even doubt that such an immense proud city such as Jerusalem ever had stood on that same spot. So there's no evidence, and no non-partisan writings aside from Josephus's mention of Jesus, and even he would have gotten his brief paragraph of info from partisan believers not from actually having seen Jesus himself. The Gospels themselves are written without the author's identifying themselves, and one could read all of the inerrantist and non-inerrantist historians one wants to try and guess who wrote them, and remain uncertain. (And I say that having read Holding's collection of arguments for traditional authorship.)
Nuff said for now, I doubt any single argument can change another person's mind that has built up connections with other arguments in a web-like fashion over time, or relieve them of the doubts they may have.
Cheers,
Ed