The apologetic rebuttal to Gospel contradictions is that is actually adds to the credibility of the stories, in that it shows that they didn't conspire together to lie. Honest testimonies from different perspectives will often contradict due to imperfections in observations and memory. While I agree with the argument in principle, the question simply becomes to determine what level of contradiction is present – a low level supports the stories' honesty, a high level discredits the stories' accuracy. For this reason, I will be disregarding the minor contradictions and focusing on the big ones.
One point that is import is that Mark 16:9-20 is not part of the original. Conservative theologians agree with this, otherwise I would feel the need to defend this claim.
The Empty Tomb:
In Mark, the women come to the tomb where a young man tells them Jesus is risen. They tell no one (Mark 16:8) – this detail clashes badly with all three other Gospel accounts. How did the disciples hear about the Resurrection? The testimony of the women is only relevant if we know what their story was.
(I have since backed away from this argument.)
In Matthew, the women come to the tomb and speak to an angel on the stone (28:5). Here, the women follow instructions and tell the disciples (28:11).
In Luke, the women report to the disciples (24:9 - note Peter in particular) that they have seen the Resurrected Jesus. This again clashes with Mark 16:8, but it gets far worse when we look at John.
In John, a highly upset Mary Magdalene tells Peter and John that Jesus' body has been stolen. This is not to be confused with Luke 24:9 when all the disciples were present and the news was incredibly good rather than upsetting. Peter and John find Jesus' tomb on their own (20:8). The Mary tells the rest of the disciples. Surely this time much line up with Luke 24:9. But in Luke, they don't believe her, so Peter leaves to check it out for himself (Luke 24:12). In John, Peter has already been to the tomb, because he saw the tomb before Mary sees Jesus (John 20:11). Therefore, either Luke 24:10-12 is fictional, or the classic Sunday School story of “they have taken away my Lord” never happened.
Location of Appearances:
In Matthew, both the angel (28:7) and Jesus (28:10) tell them to tell the disciple specifically to go to Galilee, just as in Mark 16:7. In Luke, the angels remind them that while Jesus was in Galilee, he told them he would be Resurrected (24:6-7). Now, if you're not paying close attention, you just missed like I missed it the first hundred times I heard the story. In Matthew and Mark, the young man/angel/Jesus tell the disciple to go to Galilee, while in Luke, Jesus told them something while he was in Galilee.
Remembering what was said exactly is not that big of a deal. (It's a good rebuttal to the reasons to believe the story as a decent part of the testimony is what was said, but it's not a reason to disbelieve.) The big deal is that Matthew, Luke, and John's Resurrection appearances need these words to be as they appear in each book. In Matthew, Jesus is seen in Galilee, which is fifty miles away from Jerusalem, while in Luke, Jesus is seen in and around Jerusalem.
So did Jesus tell the Marys to tell the disciples to go the Galilee? Notice how wrong one story must be. Matthew repeats the instructions twice and Mark once – if they're wrong, then the accounts of the “young man”, the sighting of an angel, and the sighting of Jesus contain only words that were not actually spoken. If Luke is wrong, then he changed the words of the risen Jesus to make his story flow.
The Story Grows:
The order of writing was Mark, Matthew, Luke, then John. In Mark, there are no Resurrection or angelic appearances, save for the passage which is known to have been added. In Matthew, there is one, in Luke there is three, and in John there are three with far more details.
The Role of Women:
Also, as time goes on, the role of women is demoted. Now, as apologist tell us, women's testimony was not considered to be reliable at this time. The reason apologists tell us this is that the best reason for the Gospel writers to have for including women if it was true. I agree to a point – the Gospel writers didn't make up the stories, but rather used stories that they were circulating. But the testimony of the women is the part of the Resurrection accounts that differ the most sharply, so it's hardly the place to look for strength.
Also, consider the evolution of the stories with time: In Mark, women's testimony is 100% of the evidence. In Matthew, this is thinned out a bit as men see Jesus as well. In Luke, Peter makes it to the tomb himself at the prodding of Mary. In John, Peter and John make it to the tomb before Mary finds out herself. Seen in the light of “women are talebearers,” the story is growing and shows evidence of changing.
Other Details:
Is it not odd that Mark only records Mary talking to a “young man?” A harmonization would require Mary to have spoken to both angels and Jesus himself, yet Mark only bothers to record her conversation with an angel while somehow failing to mention that it was an angel. This falls short of a contradiction, but also short of believable narratives.
Conclusion:
The contortions an apologist must go through to defend the Gospels' reliability are greater than what must be supposed to conclude that many or all of the alleged sightings of Jesus didn't ever occur, and the remainder were whatever it is that all other religions and cults are based on. Once one fully understands why they don't take seriously the miracle stories of any other religion, they will understand my hesitancy to believe the Bible's contradictory accounts of the extraordinary.
It is easier for me to make sense of how an explosive religion could start without the Resurrection than it was for me as a cessationist to make sense of sincere Pentecostals. There are options other than someone is tell the truth, telling a lie, or is insane. Sometimes people are just wrong.
If I place the ideas that the testimonies are/aren't reliable on a 50/50 level, the contradictions point to unreliability. This does not even employ an anti-supernatural bias and overlooks the fact that Christianity has the burden of proof, or at the very least, the burden of evidence.
Even the Biblical accounts give poor evidence for the Resurrection. If Christianity has a strong point, this should have been it. In my case, it was these arguments in particular that broke the camel's back. I became an evidentialist three years ago because I saw the flaws of presuppositionalism. But now I saw that many are presuppositionalists because they see the flaws in an evidential approach.
Now I was neither one.
Well, well, well, you've been busy! Pascal's wager is interesting but I think the Resurrection is pretty much a make or break for Christianity. I'm hoping to pick up a copy of Tom Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" to peruse over the summer. (It's over 800 pages long!) However there's a good hour-long lecture by the man himself http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Multimedia.php entitled "Can a scientist believe the Resurrection?" (very last lecture there) When I get the book I will of course have all the answers to your questions myself
ReplyDelete:-)
PS I recognise a lot of the points you make from the skeptic websites!
Yes, the article I sent you wrote most of this entry.
ReplyDeleteIn retrospect, it probably would have been better if I had directly cited it. Eventually, I'll write a "sources" post to informally list which arguments are mine purely, and which are mostly copied.
Okay, this response is getting bigger and bigger so I'm just posting it in sections of similar relevance.
ReplyDeleteLocation of Appearances:
"In Luke, the angels remind them that while Jesus was in Galilee, he told them he would be Resurrected (24:6-7). Now, if you're not paying close attention, you just missed like I missed it the first hundred times I heard the story. In Matthew and Mark, the young man/angel/Jesus tell the disciple to go to Galilee, while in Luke, Jesus told them something while he was in Galilee."
I think you have misread this part of the gospels (or I’ve misunderstood your paragraph) or (worse!) you just took this from some skeptic website and didn't check out the whole reference! Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem and buried there too; the disciples and women are all in Jerusalem too for the Passover etc. Therefore the first instruction from the angel and Jesus is for the disciples to leave Jerusalem and go back to Galilee (where they all used to hang out together in the good old pre-crucifixion days). In Luke when the angels remind them of what Jesus said while he was in Galilee, he is referring to the numerous times during the pre-crucifixion days when Jesus spoke to them about his death resurrection while he was in Galilee (eg Luke 9:22). (Your first hundred readings were correct...!)
Secondly, about the chats Jesus had with them in Galilee (Matthew 28) and Jerusalem (Acts 1): why is it implausible for him to have had these two (quite different) chats in two different locations? We know from Acts 1:3 that Jesus appeared to them over a period of 40 days and we know from other parts of the gospels that the disciples often travelled up and down from Galilee to Jerusalem. Also, couldn’t this resurrected Jesus who seemed to be able to pass through locked doors (Jn 20:19) be able to appear in both places? (In fact, it wouldn’t even require any supernatural feats!) (Both Matthew and John record Jesus in both locations : Mt 28 v9- Jesus in Jerusalem, v16- Jesus in Galilee; John 20 v9- Jesus in Jerusalem; John 21- Jesus in Galilee).
Yes, Jesus told the Marys to tell the disciples to go to Galilee because at the time they were all in Jerusalem. At some later point they returned to Jerusalem as Luke records Jesus’ ascension there. Although Luke 24 has a flow about it, we know from Acts (also by Luke) that Jesus was around for 40 days so I don’t think Luke 24 all happens on one day. Honestly, I don’t seen any apologetic contortions here.
"In Mark, the women come to the tomb where a young man tells them Jesus is risen. They tell no one (Mark 16:8) – this detail clashes badly with all three other Gospel accounts. How did the disciples hear about the Resurrection? The testimony of the women is only relevant if we know what their story was."
ReplyDeleteRe Mark and the empty tomb etc, I totally concur with you that the 16:9-20 was added later, possible after the completion of Acts as it includes the reference to snakes (Acts 28:4-5) and can be struck from the defence record. However, I think it is fair to say that Mark was himself convinced by the Resurrection of Jesus as he includes references to the Son of Man predicting his suffering, death and resurrection after three days throughout this gospel (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34). He then writes about Jesus’ suffering and his death in detail but ends his gospel quite mysteriously, particularly as the last word in the Greek manuscript is “gar”- a weird word with which to end a book, according to the scholars. This has led some (eg NT Wright) to tentatively suggest that perhaps the original ending Mark intended has been lost. Be that as it may, it is simply not enough to deduce that because Mark includes no “appearance” stories that they were made up at a later date by the other gospel writers to flesh out the story. Furthermore because of the Resurrection discussion by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 (dated quite early because of his assertion that most of the eyewitnesses were still alive) it is clear that the early church was aware of “appearance” stories- so surely Mark was too. Did the women say nothing to anyone- or did they say nothing to anyone *as they were going to the disciples to pass on the message*? I don’t know; however, I can’t write off the whole Resurrection account just because Mark doesn’t mention appearances.
Role of women:
There are two points to bear in mind here: one is that even if we suppose that Mark made up most of his material some time in the 60s at the earliest why would he make up (or re-circulate) an apologetic legend about an empty tomb and have women finding it? Critics of Christianity would have seized on the story of the women and scoffed it; why not invent male witnesses if that was what Mark was doing? “That they did not tells us either that everyone in the early church knew that the women, led by Mary Magdalene, were in fact the first on the scene, or that the early church was not so inventive as critics have routinely imagined, or both. Would the other evangelists have been so ... foolish as to copy the story unless they were convinced that, despite being an apologetic liability, it was historically trustworthy?” (p. 608)
Re the women: I don’t see in Luke 24:9 that the message was “incredibly good rather than upsetting” in comparison to John 20. In fact, Luke writes that their words seemed like nonsense to the disciples (v.11). Luke only mentions Peter entering the tomb which may (at first glance) seem to contradict John 20 (where the disciple Jesus loves also runs there) but then Luke continues with the Road to Emmaus story where the two disciples say that “some of our companions went to the tomb” (v.24), indicating that more than Peter were present. This also points out to us that not all the gospel writers include every event or mention every character. I haven’t got my head around every detail yet but I think the objections you raise are a lot less numerous than I originally feared.
Plus, if these gospels are purely fiction or old wives' tales circulated by hysterical women they leave a lot of unanswered questions (see next post).
As usual, you have raised some interesting points. I hope to address some without resorting to any apologetic “gymnastics” (I was never any good at handstands anyway) and end with a few points of my own that I think merit further consideration. (Almost everything I’ve come up with here can be found in greater detail and with much more clarity in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” (an 800-odd page monster) by N.T. Wright, which must be read by anyone (ie- you! :-) )who wishes to seriously examine the Gospel’s claims about the Resurrection).
ReplyDeleteIt's getting late so I just want to respond with a request for some skeptical contortions to my own queries (copied from Wright of course):
Before addressing specific points I would like to outline what I gather is the skeptics’ theory of how the Resurrection stories came about:
(1) A belief in Jesus’ exaltation arose
(2) The circulation of “Easter legends” about an empty tomb and/or appearances of Jesus began
(3) Mark’s gospel was composed with a mysterious ending; there are no mentions of appearances- just an empty tomb witnessed by terrified women
(4) The other three gospels are written with more embellishments; the women are kept on but men are added as witnesses to add credibility to the story; plus Jesus is seen doing more “bodily” things like eating etc, which leads some skeptics to suggest that these accounts were added to combat docetism (the belief that Jesus was not really fully human; he only appeared to be).
The Surprises in the Resurrection Narratives:
(1) why is there no mention of the OT in the Resurrection narratives? Up to this point the gospels are filled with OT allusions and references and prophecy-fulfilments etc. If the story had been invented because of some wish-fulfilment on the part of some hysterical women and taken on board by the disciples, surely they would have gotten some inspiration from their scriptures. However the risen Jesus they describe is nothing like that in either pagan religions or the Judaism view of resurrection.
(2)Why is the portrait of the risen Jesus so unlike anything in either Judaism or paganism? Jesus has a body yet it is different; he can be recognised but sometimes not (as with Mary and the Road to Emmaus boys). He can pass through locked doors- yet he needs to eat. There is simply no precedent for these stories. People had heard of ghosts back in the day of course yet the Jesus appearance stories while demonstrating some ghostly features (passing through doors; disappearing) is also body. It's as if the three appearance writers can't get the words to describe him. If John were simply writing to combat docetism then why did he include things like Mary not recognising Jesus (20:14), Jesus passing through locked doors (20:19) and the disciples wanting to ask "Who are you?" even though they knew it was the Lord (21:12).
(3) If these stories were a late invention why do they contain no exposition about our own personal hope of future resurrection? Nor do they include any mention of being "with Jesus" after we die. In all canonical resurrection references outside of the gospels and Acts, and in all post-canonical Christian literature, the resurrection is associated with the future hope of Christians- heaven and being with Jesus. But the gospels are silent on this which doesn't make sense if they were a result of cognitive dissonance or wish-fulfilment or wives' tales.
Probably won't be doing any biggie posts for a while but I'll be back...
Greetings Jeffrey,
ReplyDeleteWhen someone asks me which Gospel-account I accept when they contradict one another (not that this sort of thing happens every day), my first response is to ask for the specific "contradiction." After that it's a case-by-case approach. Ofter, what has been considered a "contradiction" is a case of a non-contradictory difference, or a summary-versus-non-summary, or differing arrangements of material.
While on one hand I agree that the existence of contradictions would relieve the authors of the charge of collusion, it would simultaneously find at least one of them guilty of stating an error -- and, as you said, a high level of error would discredit the author's accuracy.
Regarding Mark 16:9-20, I don't grant that these 12 verses are not an original part of the Gospel of Mark. A lot of misinformation about this passages has resulted in a misinformed consensus about it, among conservative and non-conservative commentators alike. For details see the multi-part presentation that begins at
www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html .
J: "In Mark, the women . . . tell no one (Mark 16:8) – this detail clashes badly with all three other Gospel accounts. How did the disciples hear about the Resurrection?"
Mark was forced by some unknown factor (perhaps Roman persecutors knocking on the door) to stop writing at the end of 16:8. His colleagues at Rome added 16:9-20 before releasing the Gospel of Mark. It seems obvious that Mark did not mean for his statement about the women's silence to be understood as a final utter silence on their part; otherwise the obvious question is not how the disciples found out about it, but how Mark found out.
Your description of Matthew's narrative is sufficiently accurate. Although Matthew does not explicitly state that the women reported to the disciples, this is strongly implied.
Your description of Luke's account, though, leaves something to be desired:
J: "In Luke, the women report to the disciples (24:9 - note Peter in particular) that they have seen the Resurrected Jesus."
Not so! Luke 24:9 is about the women's report about angels, not about an encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Cf. Lk. 24:24.
J: "This again clashes with Mark 16:8, but it gets far works when we look at John."
(I will understand "works" as "worse.") Mk. 16:8 should be understood as a description of a temporary silence -- like the silence which messengers were supposed to have until they reached the people for whom the message was for. (Cf. the statement to "greet no one along the road" in Lk. 10:4.)
About harmonizing the account about Mark Magdalene in Luke 24 with the account about Mary Magdalene in John 20: If we just keep the camera on Mary Magdalene, so to speak, I think we can discern that she made two trips to the tomb: the first time, she (with companions) finds the tomb empty and meets the angels. But, whatever her companions think of the angels, and whatever they tell her, she despairingly assumes that her mind is tricking her. After reporting to the disciples about the empty tomb, she follows Peter and John back to the tomb. It's at this point that the narrative in Jn. 20:11 resumes.
(The difficulty can thus be reduced along the following lines when it comes to harmonizing Luke and Matthew: either (a) women unmentioned by Matthew are included in the "them" in Mt. 28:9-10, Mary Magdalene having gone to another group of disciples before rejoining the other women with the main group of disciples -- or (b) Mary Magdalene is among the "they" in Mt. 28:9-10 but, intimidated by self-doubt, initially says nothing about this encounter with Jesus to the disciples. After reporting to the disciples about the empty tomb, she returns to the tomb, where, again, the narrative picks up in Jn. 20:11 without difficulty.
Regarding the location of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances: Luke intentionally keeps the focus on Jerusalem because he plans to tell about how the church began there (in Acts); detailed accounts of Jesus' appearances elsewhere would distract from that progression of events. (Luke may be partly motivated by a desire to show the fulfillment of Psalm 110:2, that the Lord's kingdom began in Jerusalem/Zion.)
J: "The big deal is that Matthew, Luke, and John's Resurrection appearances need these words to be as they appear in each book."
Picturing the disciples staying in Jerusalem for a while (during which time Jesus appears to them), and then picturing some of them going to Galilee for a fishing trip (at which point Jesus appears to the fishermen), and then returning to Jerusalem, where Jesus commissions them before His ascension, all in a 40-day period, does not seem like any sort of problem.
J: "So did Jesus tell the Marys to tell the disciples to go to Galilee?"
Yes, but this does not mean that Jesus did not tell the disciples, when they were in Galilee, that they would rendesvous in Galilee.
J: "If Luke is wrong, then he changed the words of the risen Jesus to make his story flow."
Luke is not necessarily wrong, but I think it is obvious that he wanted to keep the focus on Jerusalem and was willing to accent the angel's statement accordingly, so to speak. (Notice also how Luke does not use Mk. 14:28.)
J: "In Mark, there are no Resurrection or angelic appearances, save for the passage which is known to have been added."
I would contend that Mk. 16:9-20 was added by the same individuals who initially disseminated the book, and that they did not write it on the spot but that it was an earlier bit of material composed by Peter and Mark.
J: "In Mark, women's testimony is 100% of the evidence."
Um, we do still have that bit about the testimony of the young man/angel in Mk. 16:6-7.
J: "Is it not odd that Mark only records Mary talking to a "young man?" A harmonization would require Mary to have spoken to both angels and Jesus himself, yet Mark only bothers to record her conversation with an angel while somehow failing to mention that it was an angel. This falls short of a contradiction, but also short of believable narratives."
The same sort of reference to angels as "men in white" is used by Luke in Acts 1:10. This does not seem like a real problem, just different authors' choice of words.
J: "Luke and Matthew end the story with Jesus speaking pretty much the same words (Act 1:8 & Matthew 28:18-20). The problem is that they are fifty miles apart."
They're not the same words -- and it would not be surprising if Jesus said similar things more than once to His disciples during the 40 days after His resurrection, especially if the apostles were sometimes not all together, and were sometimes accompanied by other followers.
J: "The contortions an apologist must go through to defend the Gospels' reliability are greater than what must be supposed to conclude that many or all of the alleged sightings of Jesus didn't ever occur."
I have not found this to be the case, except to the extent that one must believe that Jesus rose from the dead to believe that any of the sightings occurred.
J: "Once one fully understands why they don't take seriously the miracle stories of any other religion, they will understand my hesitancy to believe the Bible's contradictory accounts of the extraordinary."
This seems like more of a philosophical objection than an objection to a particular alleged contradiction.
J: "There are options other than someone is tell the truth, telling a lie, or is insane. Sometimes people are just wrong."
But how could the apostles' claim that after Jesus had died by crucifixion, they had seen Jesus, felt Jesus, ate with Jesus, and watched Jesus ascend into heaven, be innocently incorrect?
J: "In my case, it was these arguments in particular that broke the camel's back."
Maybe you were riding the wrong camel. Christians pledge their loyalty to a King who called Himself Bread, Water, and a Door. Scientific proof that He is not empirically any of those things should not cause a collapse of faith. Likewise, for people who are committed to walk by faith and not by sight -- people to whom the risen Christ has said, "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed," a failure to see the solution to every imaginable "contradiction" should not cause any spiritual crisis beyonf the minor epiphany that God did not feel obligated to provide us with exhaustive reports about the resurrection and the first post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
Istm that the skeptic has the text in a lose-lose situation: if the accounts could be easily harmonized, he would cry "Collusion!" Since the situation is otherwise, he says, "Unreliable." How did the option of rejecting one account, and accepting the other, elude him? Perhaps because some part of him simply does not want to believe any of the accounts.
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
I'll answer the comments in the order written, (it might be a while James.)
ReplyDeleteRe Claire, 7/4 3:45p (By the way, do people in different time zones see different time stamps? If not, this is a useful way to refer to specific posts. If someone knows how to make the comments have numbers, I'd like to know about it.)
The first thing to keep it mind is that I'm not requiring proof for either side. I'm looking for the best explanation. While a rock solid contradiction would be nice, lower levels of certainty that the accounts are inconsistent are sufficient. The starting point I'm taking is to decide if the differing accounts are differing details and perspectives, or a changing and inconsistent story.
Furthermore, consistent accounts alone are a weak argument for the Resurrection, although it would definitely be the first step in a good argument.
>or (worse!) you just took this from some skeptic website and didn't check out the whole reference!
Nope, not here. I read the skeptical articles once, then set them aside and opened my Bible and looked to see if I could see it without being reminded of what I was supposed to see. Unlike my past experience with most theological/apologetic arguments, I was able to reconstruct them by myself and see how they are the kind of thing that I could have figured out by myself. At this point, I'm losing track of which of these arguments I was pointed to and which arguments I just saw myself, because all of them I see myself.
>Therefore the first instruction from the angel and Jesus is for the disciples to leave Jerusalem and go back to Galilee (where they all used to hang out together in the good old pre-crucifixion days). In Luke when the angels remind them of what Jesus said while he was in Galilee, he is referring to the numerous times during the pre-crucifixion days when Jesus spoke to them about his death resurrection while he was in Galilee
Mark 16:7 - “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”
Luke 24:6b-7 - “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”
You're saying that the statements in Mark and Luke are completely different statements and are consistent. I agree that if both were said they are consistent.
What I'm saying is that they are similar enough on the surface that the better explanation is that the first changed into the second. But behind this surface change is a real change – if only one was said, one of them is really wrong, because the location of the coming appearance stories depend on which way it is.
In lots of places in the Gospels, Jesus says things differently in different books. Apologists (and I) have no trouble accepting the explanation that Greek lacks quote marks, so all quotes are really paraphrases. I keep what I intend to be a perfect quote page of quips my friends and professor have made, but I often mess it up minutes after the fact and end up filling holes with my grammatical style and wording, so I know how much honest testimonies of earwitnesses(?) can vary. But this same argument which gets the Gospels off the hook in so many other places, gets them on the hook here.
As I wrote, “Remembering what was said exactly is not that big of a deal. ... The big deal is that Matthew, Luke, and John's Resurrection appearances need these words to be as they appear in each book.” I'm only making a point of this because of the way it affects or is affected by the rest of the accounts.
It's convenient that the minor differences in the words of the angels and Jesus are the minor differences necessary to make the stories flow. My suggestion is that most/all of what they thought the words of Jesus were were memory holes. Furthermore, that they are not being filled by the neurological misfires of an imperfect memory, but by either an attempt to make the story flow logically or more likely the authors' assumption that the story must be true. This assumption gets carried further and more holes are filled by apologists when they try to harmonize the Gospel accounts.
>Secondly, about the chats Jesus had with them in Galilee (Matthew 28) and Jerusalem (Acts 1): why is it implausible for him to have had these two (quite different) chats in two different locations?
Hmm, they are quite different. I'm not sure what I was thinking here. My best guess is that I did something as stupid as overloading firefox with Biblegateway tabs and then reading Acts 1 twice in different translations while thinking I had just read Acts and Matthew... I'll put this in the if-the-ark-was-300-cubits-how-did-the-priests-carry-it-on-their-shoulders category.
>Yes, Jesus told the Marys to tell the disciples to go to Galilee because at the time they were all in Jerusalem. At some later point they returned to Jerusalem as Luke records Jesus’ ascension there.
This should have been in the original post:
While there is no explicit statement, the most natural reading of Luke is that Jesus ascended into heaven on the day of his Resurrection (24:49-50) giving no time for Galilee.
[James, this is even clearer in the long ending of Mark. Comparisons of Mark and Luke make Mark 16:14 the day of his Resurrection. Without breaking the paragraph, v. 15-18 are day of as well. This is followed by “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven.” Claire, you have no need to answer this.]
Jesus appeared (Luke 24:36-49) to all eleven of them (Luke 24:33) the day of his Resurrection (Luke 24:13,33). So by the time they get to Galilee, they have all already seen the risen Jesus. John counts the appearances (John 21:14) so the appearance in Matthew is either part of the third account in John (unlikely) or appearance number four or higher.
In Matthew, they are told “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10). This makes it sound like the first place they will see him is in Galilee.
This is further supported by Matthew 28:17, “And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some [of the eleven, v.16] doubted. Now, if the disciples had all already seen the risen Jesus eat a fish, why are they doubting? I mean, exactly how dense are these guys? A harmonization of these two stories means that either the Matthew 28:16-20 appearance was not sufficiently clear to convince even a believer, or that both this and Luke 24:36-49 are not only unconvincing as a story of the miraculous, but also unconvincing even to some of the people who were actually there.
Of course, the other possibility is that at least one of the stories didn't even happen, which is what I was getting at in my original post.
Re: Claire 7/4 5:11p
ReplyDelete>I think it is fair to say that Mark was himself convinced by the Resurrection of Jesus
I completely agree.
>This has led some (eg NT Wright) to tentatively suggest that perhaps the original ending Mark intended has been lost.
I'll grant that as likely.
>Be that as it may, it is simply not enough to deduce that because Mark includes no “appearance” stories
Well, the women not telling anyone excludes more empty tomb stories at least. But the possibility of a Matthew-type Galilee appearance in the original Mark is reasonable. I'll accept that the part of my story-growing argument about Mark having no appearances is merely possible, rather than certain.
> it is simply not enough to deduce that because Mark includes no “appearance” stories that they were made up at a later date by the other gospel writers to flesh out the story.
I'll bet the writers believed what they wrote. My position is that they were writing down the stories circulating at the time, and that the circulating stories were growing.
>Furthermore because of the Resurrection discussion by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 ... it is clear that the early church was aware of “appearance” stories- so surely Mark was too.
Being aware of the stories and being able to share their content is not the same thing. When stated so distantly, it is impossible to verify. Could someone check out my claim if I said 500 people at my school, most of which have not yet graduated, saw a UFO? If it happened, I'm surprised Luke wasn't able to track down one of the 500 people who saw Jesus and tell us this story.
>Did the women say nothing to anyone- or did they say nothing to anyone *as they were going to the disciples to pass on the message*?
Immediately after they are told to tell someone (16:7), Mark says they told no one (16:8). It looks like they told no one both in context and out of context. In Matthew 28:8, Luke 24:9, John 20:2, and John 20:18 we have chances to see what the story looks like when someone is told, and in none of these cases would truncation of the story make it look like no one was told.
>why would he [Mark] make up (or re-circulate) an apologetic legend about an empty tomb and have women finding it?
Maybe that's all he had to work with as far as empty tomb stories were concerned.
>Critics of Christianity would have seized on the story of the women and scoffed it; why not invent male witnesses if that was what Mark was doing?
I don't think he was making up stories, but was instead using stories that were already circulating.
>Would the other evangelists have been so ... foolish as to copy the story unless they were convinced that, despite being an apologetic liability, it was historically trustworthy?
People have believed some really cooky things in defense of their religion. People [should] know that L. Ron Hubbard was a sci-fi writer, but that doesn't stop scientologists from accepting an apologetic liability of a sci-fi-sounding religion. Many modern, college-educated Christians flaunt Kent Hovind-style creation science in defense of their faith. Compared to these, circulating stories about what women saw doesn't seem so strange, even in a culture that saw women like children.
>Re the women: I don’t see in Luke 24:9 that the message was “incredibly good rather than upsetting” in comparison to John 20.
I was referring to the emotions of sharing the message rather than the emotions of receiving the message. In Matthew 28:8, we see that the women's emotions were that of “fear and great joy.” This still leaves the question of which of the two news-sharing events of John line up with the one in Luke.
Re Claire 4/4 5:20p
ReplyDelete>“The Resurrection of the Son of God” (an 800-odd page monster) by N.T. Wright, which must be read by anyone (ie- you! :-) )who wishes to seriously examine the Gospel’s claims about the Resurrection).
I'll have to buy that soon. It's doubtful that I'll make it all the way through, but it sounds worth having.
>why is there no mention of the OT in the Resurrection narratives?
Maybe Mark did, and it's part of the lost ending.
It is true that there is no quotation of the OT in the Resurrection accounts. However, on the road to Emmaus, there is:
Luke 24:25-27 - “And He said to them, 'O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?' Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.”
The primary reaction to this appearance is Luke 24:32. “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”
In the next Luke appearance,
Luke 24:44-47 - “Now He said to them, 'These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.' Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.'”
Where in the OT does it say the Christ will rise on the third day? The only reason this isn't an OT quotation is that Jesus seems to be attempting to quote an OT verse that isn't there.
>Why is the portrait of the risen Jesus so unlike anything in either Judaism or paganism?
I don't know that much about paganism which makes it hard for me to either appreciate the strength/weakness of this argument or to come up with an answer that actually responds to the point. However, I've always heard that comparative religion is a “dangerous” field of study for Christians, so I don't think it's too likely that my ignorance here is hurting the case for Christianity.
>But the gospels are silent on this which doesn't make sense if they were a result of cognitive dissonance or wish-fulfilment or wives' tales.
What doesn't make sense about that? Why couldn't a legend focus on events rather than what the events mean? Maybe some of the difference between the four gospels and the later “gospels” is that the first four was written by people who believed what they wrote, and the later ones were written by people who knew their story wasn't real. I haven't read early post-canonical literature, so I'm really just guessing, but I don't see anything amiss in a book that just tells the story, despite the fact that the stories aren't true.
With these last two, I'm really just arguing from ignorance. But it still looks like the Resurrection accounts are contradictory, and neither of those two arguments rebut this point.
>Probably won't be doing any biggie posts for a while but I'll be back...
I'll be looking forward to your return. I need someone to keep me honest...
Hello Pastor James,
ReplyDeleteHow did you hear about my blog? (Btw, I like how clicking on your name connects you to a real person. Internet discussions have a tendency to go up in flames, and I bet it would be better if less people were anonymous.)
Many of your arguments were brought up by Claire, so when appropriate, I'll give the beginning of my response to her so you can ctrl-f for them.
>Regarding Mark 16:9-20, I don't grant that these 12 verses are not an original part of the Gospel of Mark.
As far as I know, a strong majority of conservative Christian scholars disagree. I'll let them fight it out with you. For the sake of argument, I'll grant it when discussing the Gospel accounts with you.
>Mark was forced by some unknown factor (perhaps Roman persecutors knocking on the door) to stop writing at the end of 16:8.
Claire mentioned this too. I wrote: “Immediately after they are told ... ”
>Not so! Luke 24:9 is about the women's report about angels, not about an encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Cf. Lk. 24:24.
If Matthew 28:9 is taken at face value, the Marys had seen both Jesus and the angel, so although it's not in Luke, it's not a stretch either.
>(I will understand "works" as "worse.")
Whoops. It's been fixed.
>Mk. 16:8 should be understood as a description of a temporary silence -- like the silence which messengers were supposed to have until they reached the people for whom the message was for. (Cf. the statement to "greet no one along the road" in Lk. 10:4.)
“Greet no one along the road” shows how the Gospels are capable of communicating clearly when the message is that no one on the way was told. This is to be contrasted with “and they said nothing to anyone.”
>About harmonizing the account about Mark Magdalene in Luke 24 with the account about Mary Magdalene in John 20: ... But, whatever her companions think of the angels, and whatever they tell her, she despairingly assumes that her mind is tricking her.
She saw an angel but still thought Jesus was stolen? That would be far fetched even if it's how John told the story, but it's not. This is a detail that you invented to find a version of the story that is consistent with the Bible. This is what I meant by contortions.
>either (a) women unmentioned by Matthew are included in the "them" in Mt. 28:9-10, Mary Magdalene having gone to another group of disciples before rejoining the other women with the main group of disciples
You're trying to establish that my case is something less than perfect. What I'm trying to do is read the Bible and determine what it says. “Them” in Mt. 28:9-10 can be seen to be the two Marys based on the context of Mt. 28:1.
>or (b) Mary Magdalene is among the "they" in Mt. 28:9-10 but, intimidated by self-doubt, initially says nothing about this encounter with Jesus to the disciples. After reporting to the disciples about the empty tomb, she returns to the tomb, where, again, the narrative picks up in Jn. 20:11 without difficulty.
This would take all the women (including both Marys) seeing the angel, both Marys seeing Jesus, both Marys reporting to the disciples, and still the dominant emotion that John remembers hearing is “they have taken away the Lord.”
>Picturing the disciples staying in Jerusalem for a while (during which time Jesus appears to them), and then picturing some of them going to Galilee for a fishing trip
Claire mentioned this too. I wrote: “While there is no explicit statement ...”
>J: "So did Jesus tell the Marys to tell the disciples to go to Galilee?"
>Yes, but this does not mean that Jesus did not tell the disciples, when they were in Galilee, that they would rendesvous in Galilee.
Claire mentioned this too. I wrote: “You're saying that the statements in Mark ...”
>Um, we do still have that bit about the testimony of the young man/angel in Mk. 16:6-7.
We know about the young man/angel because the women saw him.
>The same sort of reference to angels as "men in white" is used by Luke in Acts 1:10. This does not seem like a real problem, just different authors' choice of words.
“Men in white” is a not-so-subtle implication of angels, while “young man” is not. The same Greek word describes a non-angel in Mark 14:51. Also, much of my objection is the way it's not just Mark mentioning a young man vs. angel, but young man vs. Jesus himself.
>They're [Matthew 28 & Act 1] not the same words ...
I was wrong.
>But how could the apostles' claim that after Jesus had died by crucifixion, they had seen Jesus, felt Jesus, ate with Jesus, and watched Jesus ascend into heaven, be innocently incorrect?
The contradictions point to an unreliability of the details. You need these details for Lewis's Trilimma to be a relevant argument. The disciples could be innocently wrong about a vision of sorts and that story could grow into details like eating with Jesus.
>Likewise, for people who are committed to walk by faith and not by sight -- people to whom the risen Christ has said, "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed,"
While I know exactly what you mean when you say “people to whom the risen Christ has said,” this is the kind of account which could be innocently wrong but stretched into a story of the miraculous.
>a failure to see the solution to every imaginable "contradiction" should not cause any spiritual crisis beyond the minor epiphany that God did not feel obligated to provide us with exhaustive reports about the resurrection and the first post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
The failure to see the solution to an objection was not sufficient for me to reject Christianity. I had to see the Bible be wrong consistently and clearly – this is not limited to the Resurrection accounts.
>How did the option of rejecting one account, and accepting the other, elude him?
Accept only one? But Which Resurrection Account?
James, it's great to see someone else on this blog- do you two know each other in real life? Re time zones, I’m GMT but time stamps are American. Hence, I say I’m getting tired and it comes up as only 5 pm! (Although in fairness, I’m usually tired at that stage of the day too...)
ReplyDeleteFunny comment before I begin- on Sunday, I was explaining to my two and a half year old daughter that Sunday was a special day because we remember when Jesus died and rose again. She looked at me and in the best "Valley-Girl" accent said: "I don't think so." I'm raising a skeptic!!! (Two other classic comments from her: "Mammy, I don't *need* Jesus" and "I love God- but I'm a little bit scared of Moses")
Location argument and poor old Luke.-
You claim to no longer be a pre-suppositionalist- but I think you still are, just playing for a different team! (Mt 28:7/Luke 24:7)“the better explanation is that the first changed into the second”- I don’t see why this is a better explanation than that the angel said both things. Both make sense and are non-contradictory but you are trying to make out that because there is an element of similarity, therefore one comment evolved into the other in order to suit the story Luke was writing? (If a Christian said this in defence of something there’d be fingers pointed and banners waving “Spot the apologetic contortionist!”)
I think that there are flaws in your reasoning here- on the one hand you say that you believe the gospel writers did think they were writing the truth- but on the other hand, filling in memory holes themselves? Also, Luke would probably have had access to Mark (and the elements of similarity in some sections of Matthew/Luke lead some scholars to suggest a preliminary “Q” document) yet you think that the man who claimed to have carefully investigated everything (Luke 1:3) would let a story like this slip in? I think that this is presuppositionalism on your part- why not take the man at his word?
(I’m kinda sticking with Luke here for a while.) Then you also say that the disciples must be dense because they doubt (Matthew) even though they’ve seen him eat fish (Luke). But note that even in Luke while Jesus is in their presence, Luke records that “they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement” (24:41). These guys are not dense- they know as well as we do that dead people do not rise from the dead so they’re struggling to believe it themselves. Also you wonder why Luke didn’t contact any of the 500 people Paul talks about- but he claims that he has made an investigation of the things that have been handed down to him from eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2)- so I’m guessing that he did contact some of them to get the details. Finally, as I’m sure you know, Luke wrote both Luke and Acts and in Acts he says that Jesus was around for 40 days between his resurrection and ascension, so he’s hardly trying to get us to believe that the events in Luke 24 happened in one day? Please credit the man with some brain power- after all, he was a doctor (Col. 4:14) (not like I am and you are gonna be, the physician kind, I reckon).
That's it for now; Gray's anatomy is on...
J- "...I'm looking for the best explanation... [are the] differing accounts.... differing details and perspectives, or a changing and inconsistent story..."
ReplyDeleteI've re-read original posts and the responses and I'd like to propose that (1) while the Mary Magdalene story in John, "They have taken away my Lord" involves some contortionism to fit it into the resurrection story, (2) your other objections (differing locations/story growing/doubts) can be explained pretty easily. Would this be fair? (I know I haven’t adequately explained my point about OT prophecy and therefore the fact that you mention Jesus “making up” a verse that prophesies rising on the third day needs to be addressed too).
So let's take an overall picture and see if the historicity of the Resurrection is the best explanation for ensuing events or if circulating stories/rumours by the women and disciples are the best explanation. (Or some other one).
The reason I mentioned beliefs in paganism is because a common skeptic argument is that the disciples “bought into” the contemporary paganist thinking and that their resurrection stories are parallels to paganist thinking. Similarly, skeptics accuse gospel writers like Matthew of writing the stories about Jesus to match the prophecies in the OT. The reason N.T. Wright’s book is so big (I’ve discovered) is because he carefully investigates exactly what the early Christians’ contemporaries in Judaism and the paganist Greco-Roman world believed about resurrection. His conclusions are that the passage from life to Hades was a one-way ticket; no one expected future bodily resurrection. He also clarifies that the term “resurrection” did not refer to a soul’s immortality or the sleep of death but to bodily coming back to life after the state of death- life after “life after death”, if you will. So, the disciples could not have borrowed this idea of Jesus returning in bodily form from their pagan contemporaries.
Re Judaism, there seems to have been a broad spectrum of belief in second-Temple Judaism (ie post return of exiles) regarding the fate of the dead. Resurrection was not universally believed (as we know from the NT accounts of the Sadducees) but was the dominant strand of belief. Again, resurrection in Judaism referred to the future hope of those who were currently dead that they would in some future time be raised to life (Wright has a ton of references from OT and second-Temple Judaism writers). It is closely tied in with the Jewish belief of God as a good creator of the physical world. However, the Jewish writings are hazy about what this resurrection body would look like: Daniel says the righteous will shine like stars; the Wisdom of Solomon says the righteous will shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble (Wright, p.204-5). Writers expounding these texts were unclear whether the bodies would actually shine like lights or whether this was a metaphor for world rulership. There was no clarity as to what the post-resurrection body would look like. However, the general consensus was that no-one would be resurrected before that great last day. There were no traditions of the Messiah being raised to life (although most Jews hoped both for a Messiah and for resurrection).
Then... along come these followers of a Rabbi called Jesus claiming that (a) he was the Messiah and (b) he had been resurrected in bodily form. There are stories of an empty tomb and a missing corpse; then of physically seeing and touching a man who had been publicly executed. Then we know that these devout Jews started meeting together, not only on the Sabbath, but now also on the first day of the week too. They risk life and limb to proclaim this to fellow Jews, mentioning nothing about future personal hope of resurrection for believers at this stage (Acts 2) but instead proclaiming that Jesus is the Lord and Messiah.
The skeptics’ explanation is that these are stories, initially told by distraught women, who (although considered little more than children) began to be believed by men who then also claimed to have seen this dead man. Stories were circulated and began to be believed- maybe because the people wanted it to be so/ expected it to be so? (They couldn’t have expected it to be so; there was no pagan or Jewish precursor.) Or perhaps the future hope of being “with Jesus” when we die that is found in NT letters was then backtracked and written into the gospels. Which leaves us with the option that Matthew, Luke and John independently writing three very different accounts of the risen Jesus, each account including these unusual traits about Jesus: being recognisable and unrecognisable; doing things ordinary people do and other things ordinary people do not do. Furthermore, none of them refer to his body as shining like a star which would have been expected if they were trying to make up something based on the OT. Also, not one of the gospel writers ever mentions any post mortem hope of Christians, although this had been widely thought of by at least the time of Paul particularly as persecution of Christians was becoming more widespread. Yet we are to believe (if the skeptics are correct) that the gospel writers, writing these rumours independently of each other and filling in holes with their imagination, never alluded to the future hope of Christians in their writings or to specific OT quotes. (Wright includes more but I’m gonna leave this section at this).
What about the other option? And here I quote Wright, p. 611: “Supposing the stories in Matthew, Luke and John- though almost certainly not written down until after Paul had dictated his last letter- were what they were, not because they were a late writing up, or wholesale invention, of what post-Pauline Christians thought ought to have happened, but precisely because they were not. What if they represented, with only light editing, the stories that had been told very early on, without offering theories about what sort of a thing this new, risen body might be, without attempting (except at the level of minor adjustments) to evoke wider theological themes, without adding the element of hope for one’s own resurrection, and in particular without the biblical quotations or allusions that might have done for these stories what was done for so many, so recently in the same books. Supposing the reason nobody evoked Daniel 12 in the Easter stories was that everybody knew that the risen body of Jesus had not shone like a star? Supposing, wider, that the reason nobody evoked the OT in the gospel accounts of the resurrection was that there was no immediately apparent point of connection between Jesus’ resurrection and the narratives of Jewish tradition? Supposing, in other words, that these stories have the puzzled air of someone saying, ‘I didn’t understand it at the time, and I’m not sure I do now, but this is more or less how it was.’
I find this second option enormously more probably at the level of sheer history [Wright continues]. I can understand, as a historian, how stories like this (and perhaps other similar ones which we do not have) would create a puzzle which the best brains of the next generations ould wrestle with, using all their biblical and theological resources. I cannot understand, however, either why anyone would develop that theology and exegesis unless there were stories like this to generate the puzzle, or how that theology and exegesis, formed thus... by a kind of intellectual parthenogenesis would then generate three independent stories from which, in each case, all those developed elements had been carefully removed. The very strong historical probability is that, when Matthew, Luke and John describe the risen Jesus, they are writing down very early oral tradition, representing three different ways in which the original astonished participants told teh stories. These traditions have received only minimal development... for the very good reason that stories as earth-shattering as this, stories ad community-forming as this, once told, are not easily modified. Too much depends on them.”
Personally, despite "They have taken away my Lord" I think that the second explanation- that the gospel narratives are historical and true- is the better one.
Hello Jeffrey,
ReplyDeleteI found your blog because you mentioned Mark 16:9-20. I search blogs for that topic periodically, hoping to slow the stream of misinformation about that passage, and to draw attention to my research on that subject.
Jeffrey: (replying to my claim that Mark unintentionally stopped writing at the end of 16:8) -- “Immediately after they are told to tell someone (16:7), Mark says they told no one (16:8). It looks like they told no one both in context and out of context.”
No it doesn’t. The text requires that they told someone; otherwise Mark would not be telling us. For Mark to have known of the women’s visit, Mark needed to be told about it, either by the women, or by someone the women told.
Jeffrey: (replying to my statement, ““Luke 24:9 is about the women's report about angels, not about an encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Cf. Lk. 24:24.”) “If Matthew 28:9 is taken at face value, the Marys had seen both Jesus and the angel, so although it's not in Luke, it's not a stretch either.”
I was correcting your sentence, “In Luke, the women report to the disciples (24:9 - note Peter in particular) that they have seen the Resurrected Jesus.” That is simply not true, because Luke does not say that the women reported to the disciples that they had seen the resurrected Jesus. Whether it may be inferred that the woman told the disciples about Jesus, at some point (though apparently after the two travelers to Emmaus were no longer on the scene, since they explicitly say that the women did not see Jesus, in Lk. 24:24), the statement that Luke says that the women reported that they had seen the resurrected Jesus is simply not true.
Jeffrey: (replying to my statement, “Mk. 16:8 should be understood as a description of a temporary silence -- like the silence which messengers were supposed to have until they reached the people for whom the message was for. (Cf. the statement to "greet no one along the road" in Lk. 10:4.)”) ““Greet no one along the road” shows how the Gospels are capable of communicating clearly when the message is that no one on the way was told. This is to be contrasted with “and they said nothing to anyone.””
I must make myself more clear: Mk. 16:8’s “and they said nothing to anyone” seems unclear because the text is abruptly truncated at the end of the verse. But, as I mentioned earlier, the women’s silence cannot reasonably be taken as permanent, because a permanent silence would leave Mark himself completely uninformed about the women’s visit to the tomb, about the angel’s message, and about the women’s silence. Meanwhile, Lk. 10:4 gives us a convenient example in which messengers are silent until they reach those to whom they are specifically sent; the silence displayed by the women in Mk. 16:8 seems to have been intended to be a similarly temporary silence (the end of which Mark would have related, if he had not been compelled by circumstances to stop writing).
Jeffrey: “She saw an angel but still thought Jesus was stolen? That would be far fetched even if it's how John told the story, but it's not. This is a detail that you invented to find a version of the story that is consistent with the Bible. This is what I meant by contortions.”
In John 20:13, even after Mary Magdalene sees two angels and hears them ask her why she is crying, her reaction is not anything like, “Wow; angels!” instead, she tells them why she is crying: “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” How is this not how John told the story?
Jeffrey: “What I'm trying to do is read the Bible and determine what it says. “Them” in Mt. 28:9-10 can be seen to be the two Marys based on the context of Mt. 28:1.”
If Matthew 28 were our only evidence, that would be the logical conclusion -- so logical and obvious that the question of the identify of the “them” in 28:9-20 wouldn’t even be a question. But Luke tells us that other women also visited the tomb: not just Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, but also Joanna, and the other women with them. And Luke does not say that the women reported that they had seen Jesus. In addition, the impression of the two travellers, which they share in Lk. 24:23-24, is that the women saw a vision of angels but did not see Jesus. Plus, in John 20, Mary Magdalene visits the disciples twice: the first time, she reports to Peter and the other disciple (in 20:2) simply that “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him.”
Now, to me, this raises some possibilities: first, inasmuch as Mary Magdalene says “we” instead of “I,” in Jn. 20:2, it seems safe to deduce that she was not alone when she visited the tomb in Jn. 20:1. Second, inasmuch as no other women are mentioned in John 20, it seems possible that Mary Magdalene was the only woman on the scene from the time she reported to Peter and the other disciples, to the time when she reported to the disciples in John 20:18. Third, inasmuch as Mary Magdalene left the main group as she ran to report to Peter and the other disciple, it seems possible that she was not in the group which encountered Jesus in Matthew 28:9-20. These three points, together, suggest that Matthew’s account is based on the testimony of the other Mary: she is with Mary Magdalene at the tomb in Mt. 28:1; she sees and hears the angel in Mt. 28:5-7 -- but then, the women split up to share the news with disciples who are not all at the same place: Mary Magdalene (possibly accompanied by others) goes to Peter and the other disciple (a la Jn. 20:20, while the other Mary (and other women, unmentioned by Matthew), goes to another place. While the other Mary and her companions are en route, Jesus meets them (a la Mt. 28:9-20) -- but rather than command them to tell the disciples that they (the women) have seen Him, Jesus tells the women to tell His brethren -- which in this case seems to refer to the disciples, considering Mt. 28:7) -- to go to Galilee, where they will see Him.
Thus Matthew's account and John's account can be harmonized. Harmonization of this with Luke's Gospel is not attempted here, in the interest of brevity. But does the scenario I've presented seem self-consistent to you so far?
Jeffrey: (replying to my phrase, “Picturing the disciples staying in Jerusalem for a while (during which time Jesus appears to them), and then picturing some of them going to Galilee for a fishing trip”) “While there is no explicit statement, the most natural reading of Luke is that Jesus ascended into heaven on the day of his Resurrection (24:49-50) giving no time for Galilee. James, this is even clearer in the long ending of Mark. Comparisons of Mark and Luke make Mark 16:14 the day of his Resurrection. Without breaking the paragraph, v. 15-18 are day of as well. This is followed by “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven.””
All this does is reveal the dangers of considering a particular passage in isolation and then leaning too heavily on “the most natural reading” of it. Luke himself, after presenting Jesus' post-resurrection appearances in a way which *allows* the reader to assume that all the post-resurrection appearances occurred with a day or so after Jesus' resurrection, begins Acts by mentioning that 40 days elapsed between the Jesus' resurrection and His ascension. Only by ignoring some evidence -- Acts 1:3 -- can one maintain the previously "natural" assumption. But is it really natural if it requires that some readily-available evidence be ignored???
In addition, the idea that Jesus ascended into heaven on the day of His resurrection is certainly not "even clearer in the long ending of Mark." The time-markers in Mk. 16:9-20 are pretty flexible. The first one -- on the first day of the week -- and that applies to Jesus' resurrection, not explicitly to His appearances. His appearance to Mary Magdalene is described as subsequent to His resurrection (obviously); his appearance to the two travelers is simply described as "after that," and His appearance to the eleven is "Later, as they say at table." Nothing here requires that all these things happen in a day, or two days -- or in less than a year, for that matter. In addition, we should bear in mind that Mk. 16:9-20 is a summarized account, and this is proven in 16:19-20; Mark related Jesus' ascension, and in the very next verse he mentions that the disciples went out everywhere preaching. But Jerusalem was the apostles' headquarters for years after Jesus’ ascension. Inasmuch as Mark is capable of summing up several years in 16:19-20, he is also capable of summarizing 40 days in 16:9-18.
Jeffrey: (replying to my statement that Luke's presentation of the angel's statement does not preclude the idea, conveyed in Mk. 16:7 and Mt. 28:8, that Jesus had told the apostles that they would rendesvous with Him in Galilee.) “You're saying that the statements in Mark and Luke are completely different statements and are consistent. I agree that if both were said they are consistent. What I'm saying is that they are similar enough on the surface that the better explanation is that the first changed into the second. But behind this surface change is a real change – if only one was said, one of them is really wrong, because the location of the coming appearance stories depend on which way it is.”
If Jesus appeared in Jerusalem and in Galilee, then the only discrepancy concerns what exactly the angel said: was the phrase in question, “Remember how He spoke to you while He was in Galilee,” (Lk. 24:6) or, “Tell His disciples - and Peter - that He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him, as He said to you,” (Mk. 16:7), or “tell His disciples . . . He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him. Behold, I have told you.”? I don’t think any of them are verbatim, while each one conveys to the reader the gist of the message that the angel conveyed to the women. Luke omitted the details that indicated that Jesus would appear in Jerusalem, but that does not make his account “really wrong;” it just reveals his agenda to keep the focus on Jerusalem as the bridge between his Gospel-account and the book of Acts.
Jeffrey: (replying to my statement that “We do still have that bit about the testimony of the young man/angel in Mk. 16:6-7”) “We know about the young man/angel because the women saw him.”
And we know the women saw the young/man angel because Mark tells us. And inasmuch as Mark is perpetuating the remembrances of Peter, this implies more testimony besides the women's testimony, and further events (after Jesus' resurrection) which vindicates the women's report.
Jeffrey: (re. Mk. 16:5 - does it refer to an angel? Arguing that it does, I wrote, “The same sort of reference to angels as "men in white" is used by Luke in Acts 1:10. This does not seem like a real problem, just different authors' choice of words.”) ““Men in white” is a not-so-subtle implication of angels, while “young man” is not.”
In Mark 16:4, the description is not limited to “young man;” the description is “a young man clothed in a long white robe.” If “men in white” is a not-so-subtle implication of angels . . . .
Jeffrey: “Much of my objection is the way it's not just Mark mentioning a young man vs. angel, but young man vs. Jesus himself.”
What exactly is the objection? If an angel, in the form of a young man, encountered the tomb-visitors, then that is what the evangelists were obliged to report. Istm that you may be placing the text in a no-win situation: an angel in the form of a young man in a white robe is not sufficient. But how would a report of Jesus' personal appearance at the tomb be more compelling? Or to put it another way: if you don't believe Matthew's account because Jesus Himself does not appear at the tomb early in the day, why don't you believe John's account, where Jesus Himself does appear at the tomb somewhat later in the day?
Jeffrey: (replying to my question, “But how could the apostles' claim that after Jesus had died by crucifixion, they had seen Jesus, felt Jesus, ate with Jesus, and watched Jesus ascend into heaven, be innocently incorrect?”) The contradictions point to an unreliability of the details. You need these details for Lewis's Trilimma to be a relevant argument. The disciples could be innocently wrong about a vision of sorts and that story could grow into details like eating with Jesus.”
Well, first, I don't grant the premise that what you call contradictions are irreconcilable. I hope that what I've written here adequately shows how the accounts in Matthew and John can be harmonized with one another, when one takes each author's source-traditions into account. Second, I don't grant the logic of your claim. Suppose I have four reports of a very surprising event -- say, a levitating cat. Three of the reports are consistent and only one is particularly difficult to harmonize with the others. As I investigate further, it becomes clear that the difficult-to-harmonize report, though based on eyewitness testimony, is presented by a non-eyewitness, and the difficulties seem to be rooted in his selective treatment of his source-materials. If I don't reject the reports outright on the premise that cats simply do not levitate, and if all the authors appear to be sincere, then do the discrepancies, in and of themselves, really justify the conclusion that the cat did not levitate?
Jeffrey: “While I know exactly what you mean when you say “people to whom the risen Christ has said,” this is the kind of account which could be innocently wrong but stretched into a story of the miraculous.”
But it is miraculous, if “miraculous” describes God's supernatural activity in the natural world. When God reinvigorates your faith, that will be miraculous.
Jeffrey: “The failure to see the solution to an objection was not sufficient for me to reject Christianity. I had to see the Bible be wrong consistently and clearly – this is not limited to the Resurrection accounts.”
When I came in the Resurrection accounts happened to be under discussion, and difficulties with them are sometimes used as a sort of centerpiece by skeptics. Maybe later we can look at other difficulties.
Jeffrey: (replying to my question, “How did the option of rejecting one account, and accepting the other, elude him?”) “Accept only one? But Which Resurrection Account?”
I meant the question rhetorically: we have four accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels. From the outset, we are working with reports of a man rising from the dead. We are being confronted with claims of the miraculous. In addition, we cannot empirically verify any of the accounts. From the outset, we do not know if all the accounts are true, or, if only some of them are true, which ones are true, or, if none of them are true. Now, suppose a person reads the Gospels and thinks that he has found an irreconcilable contradiction. He has, to his satisfaction, eliminated the option that all four accounts are true. Two options remain: (a) some of the accounts are true, and (b) none of the accounts are true. So why do skeptics seem to leap from the discovery of (what they think is) an irreconcilable contradiction to the conclusion that none of the accounts are true? I think that they stop considering the possibility that *some* of the accounts are true because on some level they simply want to reach the conclusion that none of the accounts are true.
On a not-rhetorical level, I would not advocate rejecting any of the Gospels' reports. I advocate taking the authors' motivations, styles, sources, and the precision of those sources, into consideration when comparing them to one another. When this is done equitably, I don't think that any claim of irreconcilable contradiction can be maintained. But if/when other readers disagree, and are unwilling to suspend judgment, I'd advise them, at such difficult points, to go with the earliest stratum of the apostolic tradition, when and where it can be discerned -- which usually means the Gospel of Mark (including 16:9-20), the sayings of Jesus in Matthew, and the “Triple Tradition” of the Synoptics.
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
Claire,
ReplyDeleteSorry it's been a while, although if you spend as much effort as I do writing these comments, I'd bet the break was welcome. Remember this 11 day lag if you ever feel like you're going slowly... Amid work, reading books, and reading and writing quite a few long e-mails, my brain has been shot for a while.
>Both make sense and are non-contradictory but you are trying to make out that because there is an element of similarity, therefore one comment evolved into the other in order to suit the story Luke was writing?
I'll admit that saying the skeptical was better rather than they both make sense was a strained argument. Although my basis for saying one changed into the other was far more than the similarity of the statements themselves, but also the context(s) in which they were stated.
>I think that there are flaws in your reasoning here- on the one hand you say that you believe the gospel writers did think they were writing the truth- but on the other hand, filling in memory holes themselves?
First, filling in memory holes is not always a conscience decision. Even if it was, they could be filling the holes with what they honestly believed to be the case but could not defend as true based on their memories. In Luke's case especially, it could be another's error that he recorded.
If you haven't already, you should read Beyond Born Again chapters 5-7 (that's 33 pages). Plenty of Robert Price's arguments will look familiar, although he can make them much better than I can, because I can't make arguments in my own words based on Greek and Roman literature without pretending to know more than I do. (As you are likely in the same situation with Wright, I will buy his book soon or at least eventually.)
>Also you wonder why Luke didn’t contact any of the 500 people Paul talks about- but he claims that he has made an investigation of the things that have been handed down to him from eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2)- so I’m guessing that he did contact some of them to get the details.
My claim was not that he necessarily contacted none of them, but that he didn't tell us their story. Luke 24:33 mentions others, but nothing in the story suggests a large crowd or that the account is based on anything other than the disciples' testimonies.
> Luke wrote both Luke and Acts and in Acts he says that Jesus was around for 40 days between his resurrection and ascension
I'll drop this point. I started by seeing it in the long ending of Mark (which I still stand by), and then saw it although far less clearly in Luke as well. But taking Luke and Acts without Mark 16:9-20, I agree that Luke deserves the benefit of the doubt. The argument about the long ending of Mark depends in part on the harmonization of Mark with Luke, so if Luke comes up again in my replies to James, that's what's going on.
>I'd like to propose that (1) while the Mary Magdalene story in John, "They have taken away my Lord" involves some contortionism to fit it into the resurrection story, (2) your other objections (differing locations/story growing/doubts) can be explained pretty easily. Would this be fair?
Yes, it would. Locations/story growing arguments are more about putting together an alternative story than refuting the Christian story, and doubts arguments are small enough that I intentionally didn't include them in the original post. Although, I also think the women telling no one in Mark is hard to get around as well.
> Again, resurrection in Judaism referred to the future hope of those who were currently dead that they would in some future time be raised to life
Not in Mark 6:14-16: “And King Herod heard of it, for His name had become well known; and people were saying, 'John the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that is why these miraculous powers are at work in Him.' But others were saying, 'He is Elijah' And others were saying, 'He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.' But when Herod heard of it, he kept saying, 'John, whom I beheaded, has risen!'”
Here, we see how even with no evidence, the idea of a mortal man being bodily resurrected from the dead began circulating among the exact same people group which would soon believe Jesus rose. As many of John's followers became followers of Jesus, it is plausible that some of the first Christians had once believed in John's resurrection.
>There was no clarity as to what the post-resurrection body would look like.
Perhaps many different witnesses all saw different things based on what they expected a resurrected Jesus to look like. If the Gospel writers believed testimonies involving differing concepts of Resurrection, putting them together would result in such an incongruous picture.
>(Quoting Wright) Supposing, wider, that the reason nobody evoked the OT in the gospel accounts of the resurrection was that there was no immediately apparent point of connection between Jesus’ resurrection and the narratives of Jewish tradition?
As I mentioned before, the OT is mentioned several times by characters in Luke's account, including Jesus, although not by Luke as narrator.
>These traditions have received only minimal development... for the very good reason that stories as earth-shattering as this, stories as community-forming as this, once told, are not easily modified. Too much depends on them.
This is a specific claim about how religious movements do not develop. This is an idea whose truth can be checked against cases in which the facts are readily available. Robert Price wrote in his book on pages 67 & 69:
“Gershom Scholem's study of the seventeenth century messianic pretender Sabbatai Sevi provides a productive parallel here. Sevi was able to arouse apocalyptic fervor among Jews all over the Mediterranean during the 1660s. The movement suffered a serious setback when the messiah apostasized to Islam! ... [A]ccording to the apologists, legends should have waited at least a couple of generations till they reared their heads. But Gershom Scholem speaks of 'the sudden and almost explosive surge of miracle stories' concerning Sabbatai Sevi within weeks or even days of his public appearances! ... In this case we know that the chief apostle of the movement, Nathan of Gaza (a contemporary of Sevi), did repeatedly warn the faithful that the messiah would have to merit their belief without doing miracles. But, as we have seen, miracle stories gushed forth without abatement! So in a very analogous case, the efforts of the chief apostle could do nothing to curb the legend-mongering enthusiasm of the faithful.”
I'll have to wait for the book to respond to Wright's argument about no connecting of Jesus' resurrection with future hope. I see what he's saying in the abstract, but this argument's strength depends on knowledge of early Christian writings that I don't have.
Claire,
ReplyDelete>(Quoting Wright) Supposing, wider, that the reason nobody evoked the OT in the gospel accounts of the resurrection was that there was no immediately apparent point of connection between Jesus’ resurrection and the narratives of Jewish tradition?
In addition to the Luke verses I mentioned, there is also John 20:9 "For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead."
>The text requires that they told someone; otherwise Mark would not be telling us. For Mark to have known of the women’s visit, Mark needed to be told about it, either by the women, or by someone the women told.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that the most natural inference is that they told someone eventually. However, the format of Mark 16:7-8 is “The young man said do X. The women didn't do X.” Thus, I conclude that Mark's telling us that they didn't do X for a while at least.
I just noticed one more problem. Your story has one group of women without Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus on their way in Mt. 28:10. Meanwhile, Mary Magdalene has found Peter and returned to the tomb by the time we get to John 20:14, yet Mark 16:9 is still confident that she was the first one to whom Jesus appeared. How does the author know this was first? You see that Mark knows about the women's experience and rightly conclude that a witness told him at some point. But since the author of Mark 16:9 knows who saw Jesus first, it should also be inferred that Jesus' first two appearances did not have an ambiguous chronology, as would be the case if the group split up and were met separately.
>In John 20:13, even after Mary Magdalene sees two angels and hears them ask her why she is crying, her reaction is not anything like, “Wow; angels!” instead, she tells them why she is crying: “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” How is this not how John told the story?
These are two different sightings. In John, Mary does see two angels in white yet continues crying briefly until she sees Jesus. What I'm referring to is that your story has Mary receiving instructions from an angel, following these instructions, and still not believing – this part is not how John tells the story.
>If Matthew 28 were our only evidence, that would be the logical conclusion -- so logical and obvious that the question of the identify of the “them” in 28:9-20 wouldn’t even be a question. But Luke tells us that other women also visited the tomb:
Are saying that a testimony written by inspiration of God does not have the ability to communicate clearly? If the Bible cannot clearly describe events in space and time, what hope is there of figuring out what it's talking about with theological and moral matters?
Of course, God could have set it up so that we need all four accounts to really learn what happened, but this would only make sense together with the doctrine about God's preservation of the Scriptures. The way God allowed the original ending of Mark to be lost in a most unfortunate way that completely reverses the meaning of “they said nothing to anyone” suggests that God has not preserved the Scriptures.
>But does the scenario I've presented seem self-consistent to you so far?
I'll grant that if you begin with the assumption that it must be true, you can find a way to defend it, but that's the case with most stories, true or false. I continue to hold that if you simply try to figure out what each author was saying, you come up with contradictory ideas.
Apologist argue as though we have four accounts that support one another, when they don't – at best there is a chance they are consistent. The primary point of this post was not to come up with irrefutable contradictions, but to pre-empt the majority of apologists' arguments. In many places, the natural reading leads to contradictions, and yet apologists are willing to base arguments on the natural reading of other parts.
>Inasmuch as Mark is capable of summing up several years in 16:19-20, he is also capable of summarizing 40 days in 16:9-18.
Fair enough. Since responding to Claire, I looked at this claim more closely, and you are correct.
>In Mark 16:4, the description is not limited to “young man;” the description is “a young man clothed in a long white robe.” If “men in white” is a not-so-subtle implication of angels . . .
I was wrong. I overlooked the white robe detail in Mark 16:5.
>Jeffrey: “Much of my objection is the way it's not just Mark mentioning a young man vs. angel, but young man vs. Jesus himself.”
James: What exactly is the objection?
My concession that Mark probably didn't mean for his gospel to end at 16:8 makes the accuracy of my point at best unclear, hence not worth making.
>Well, first, I don't grant the premise that what you call contradictions are irreconcilable.
Nor did I say they were. I said that the conclusion that the gospels contradict is more true to the text than the conclusion that the reconciliation is correct. In most historical arguments for the resurrection, Step 1 is arguing for consistency, Step 2 is arguing that the disciples and women in AD 33 really claimed to have seen what is written in the Gospels, Step 3 is the Trilemma, and Step 4 is deciding what to do with the evidence. We are still discussing Step 1. With the understanding that a number of holes must be filled in by the apologist to even give the possibility of consistency, Step 2 is an exceedingly difficult argument to make.
This is a far cry from justifying questions about whether or not I simply don't “want” to believe. Believe what you want about me, but I let go of my faith kicking and screaming. If cognitive dissonance is going on, it's the way I'm finding reasons to be glad it isn't true.
>I hope that what I've written here adequately shows how the accounts in Matthew and John can be harmonized with one another, when one takes each author's source-traditions into account.
Actually, taking the authors' (or at least John's) source-traditions into account was one of the things that lead me to question the Bible's accuracy in the first place. John treats Jesus' words rather like Plato treats Socrates' words. This would mean that Jesus' words in John's gospel are his own theological musings placed into the mouth of Jesus. This isn't dishonest whether or not they accurately reflect what Jesus taught, just as people don't think of Plato's writings as dishonest. But for the sake of historical inquiry into who Jesus really was and what he really said, it does place the value of John on shaky ground. (This is probably a discussion for a new post.)
If I accept neither sides claims about source-traditions, the gospels contradict. If I accept both, it opens up a whole new front of reasons to disbelieve, while only replacing the issue of contradiction with the mere possibility of consistency.
>Second, I don't grant the logic of your claim. Suppose I have four reports of a very surprising event -- say, a levitating cat. Three of the reports are consistent and only one is particularly difficult to harmonize with the others. As I investigate further, it becomes clear that the difficult-to-harmonize report, though based on eyewitness testimony, is presented by a non-eyewitness, and the difficulties seem to be rooted in his selective treatment of his source-materials. If I don't reject the reports outright on the premise that cats simply do not levitate, and if all the authors appear to be sincere, then do the discrepancies, in and of themselves, really justify the conclusion that the cat did not levitate?
If you're critiquing my logic, you shouldn't judge it on the premises that I reject, like the consistency of the first three, or that investigation of the source traditions helps your case.
But even aside from that, I'll stand by my logic. If given no other evidence, I would tell multiple people that they are crazy, misled, or inexplicably wrong before believing cats levitate, even with stories whose consistency was airtight. This would especially be the case if they were known to me as the sort of people likely to claim more reliability than they possess.
Based on your levitating cat analogy, I would be interested to hear your take on the evidence that aliens are whizzing about in the sky. I do not believe aliens are among us. I'm providing it for a comparison of how much evidence there can be for something that is still justifiably thought of as far-fetched. Dare I ask if people disbelieve in UFOs simply because they don't want to believe our safety is in peril?
>But it is miraculous, if “miraculous” describes God's supernatural activity in the natural world. When God reinvigorates your faith, that will be miraculous.
In more precise terms, I doubt you believe your eardrum vibrates when God speaks to you, but the way you worded it, someone who didn't know what you were talking about would think you meant your eardrum vibrated and the air around you carried sound waves. One factor that can keep normal stories in check is that miracles editions are implausible. But with miraculous stories, anything could make sense. Stories of the extraordinary simply have a tendency to grow even without malicious intent or irresponsibility.
>I think that they stop considering the possibility that *some* of the accounts are true because on some level they simply want to reach the conclusion that none of the accounts are true.
Christianity has so many different doctrines, denominations, and movements, that it is unclear what one must believe to be one, or what one must not believe to not be one. It's confusing enough without answering Christian positions that are suggested as hypothetical.
What this one comes down to, is that if consistent accounts were sufficient to believe in the paranormal, I would be a member of every single religion, including the ones the exclude each other. A more liberal version of Lee Strobel could make an argument that Mark and Matthew are for real and prove the Resurrection, while the apocryphal Luke and John should be overlooked. I won't answer the content of this argument until I hear it for the first time.
>But if/when other readers disagree, and are unwilling to suspend judgment, I'd advise them, at such difficult points, to go with the earliest stratum of the apostolic tradition, when and where it can be discerned -- which usually means the Gospel of Mark (including 16:9-20), the sayings of Jesus in Matthew, and the “Triple Tradition” of the Synoptics.
The less you take, the easier step 1 (consistent accounts) becomes. But that also makes the rest of the apologetic argument that much more difficult. It is especially difficult for your position, as the one resurrection appearance you think is the most reliable is rejected by even the majority of Christians.