Originally Posted by distraff View Post
Let me make this clear for everyone. This thread is not about the truth of Christianity.
I don't use the term "supernatural". That is your choice. I am a follower of Christ. As such, the incidents surrounding the empty tomb are quite "natural" to me. As an earlier poster suggested, it did not take long for your true colors to be revealed. You're not really interested in discussion from a religious position nor from a position of faith at all. You're simply out to discredit a Christian's faith in God's Word with a sly attempt to disguise it as the desire to have a "meaningful" discussion of the gospels. But in reality, you've done nothing more than apply some double-standard for evidentiary requirements as so many Bible detractors tend to do. Nothing new here. Sadly, "Narrow is the gate and difficult the path that leads to life (and light) and very FEW will find it."There is a difference. We probably don't accept any supernatural claims surrounding that battle. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For example if I said I found a cat in my yard today, you would probably just take my word for it unless you knew I was a dishonest person. Now if I claimed that I found tiny elves in my yard, you would ask for evidence.
And by the way, if three other credible witnesses also reported seeing tiny elves in your yard as well and wrote separate, yet strikingly similar accounts of it.....I'd be forced to ascribe a degree of credibility to the story, regardless of some inconsistencies in minute details.There is a difference. We probably don't accept any supernatural claims surrounding that battle. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For example if I said I found a cat in my yard today, you would probably just take my word for it unless you knew I was a dishonest person. Now if I claimed that I found tiny elves in my yard, you would ask for evidence.
And by the way, if three other credible witnesses also reported seeing tiny elves in your yard as well and wrote separate, yet strikingly similar accounts of it.....I'd be forced to ascribe a degree of credibility to the story, regardless of some inconsistencies in minute details.
The fact that THERE ARE some minor inconsistencies should suggest (to any credible historian) that the witnesses/authors likely did not collaborate when writing their accounts. :shrug:
the consistent account is already there. there is no reason to continue to rehash the issue over again.
if you don't believe it then that if your choice to do so.
I don't have to do something that has already been done. that is what I am trying to tell you, but you don't care about that.
this is another one of those I gottcha you can't prove it threads.
you don't tell me what to do. if you don't like people telling you what already exists to your question and are unwilling to accept that
why do you continue pressing until someone tells you want to hear which is the real issue.
2 of the Gospel writers were known disciples. Matthew and John.
Luke was an apostle of Paul who knew the disciples and being Luke he probably spoke with Mary and other people.
which is why Most people default to luke as he is the most factual and detailed of the 4.
Mark was a disciple of Peter so he knew the disciples as well.
So we have matthew that establishes Christ on Josephs side.
We have Mark that tells a similar story but from a different point of view. still with evidence coming from 1st hand sources.
Luke is the same way but goes a bit further and establishes Christ's lineage on Mary's side which is significant.
Then we have John which establishes exactly who Christ is and was.
Of course, we have to talk about the guard!
Behind the story as Matthew tells it seems to lie a tradition history of Jewish and Christian polemic, a developing pattern of assertion and counter-assertion:{2}
Christian: 'The Lord is risen!'
Jew: 'No, his disciples stole away his body.'
Christian: 'The guard at the tomb would have prevented any such theft.'
Jew: 'No, his disciples stole away his body while the guard slept.'
Christian: 'The chief priests bribed the guard to say this.'
Though Matthew alone of the four evangelists mentions the guard at the tomb (John mentions a guard in connection with Jesus' arrest; cf. Mk. 14. 44), the gospel of Peter also relates the story of the guard at the tomb, and its account may well be independent of Matthew, since the verbal similarities are practically nil.{3}
But perhaps the strongest consideration in favor of the historicity of the guard is the history of polemic presupposed in this story. The Jewish slander that the disciples stole the body was probably the reaction to the Christian proclamation that Jesus was risen.{14} This Jewish allegation is also mentioned in Justin Dialogue with Trypho 108.
But if this is a probable reconstruction of the history of the polemic, then it is very difficult to believe the guard is unhistorical.{15} In the first place it is unlikely that the Christians would invent a fiction like the guard, which everyone, especially their Jewish opponents, would realize never existed. Lies are the most feeble sort of apologetic there could be. Since the Jewish/ Christian controversy no doubt originated in Jerusalem, then it is hard to understand how Christians could have tried to refute their opponents' charge with a falsification which would have been plainly untrue, since there were no guards about who claimed to have been stationed at the tomb. But secondly, it is even more improbable that confronted with this palpable lie, the Jews would, instead of exposing and denouncing it as such, proceed to create another lie, even stupider, that the guard had fallen asleep while the disciples broke into the tomb and absconded with the body. If the existence of the guard were false, then the Jewish polemic would never have taken the course that it did. Rather the controversy would have stopped right there with the renunciation that any such guard had ever been set by the Jews. It would never have come to the point that the Christians had to invent a third lie, that the Jews had bribed the fictional guard. So although there are reasons to doubt the existence of the guard at the tomb, there are also weighty considerations in its favor. It seems best to leave it an open question. Ironically, the value of Matthew's story for the evidence for the resurrection has nothing to do with the guard at all or with his intention of refuting the allegation that the disciples had stolen the body. The conspiracy theory has been universally rejected on moral and psychological grounds, so that the guard story as such is really quite superfluous. Guard or no guard, no critic today believes that the disciples could have robbed the tomb and faked the resurrection. Rather the real value of Matthew's story is the incidental -- and for that reason all the more reliable -- information that Jewish polemic never denied that the tomb was empty, but instead tried to explain it away.
Thus the early opponents of the Christians themselves bear witness to the fact of the empty tomb.{16}
The Guard at the Tomb
If the consistent account is there, why do so many people disagree what that consistent account says?
Please show that the disciple Matthew actually wrote the Gospel of Matthew. Most biblical scholars disagree. Please show that the disciple John wrote John. Most biblical scholars disagree.
It has been set that way for ol the past 2000 years from people that had first hand experience and were closest to the source of the writing.
even today theologians confirm the authorship of the gospels.
Gospel of John Commentary: Who Wrote the Gospel of John and How Historical Is It? - Biblical Archaeology Society
noted theologians throughout the ages maintain that it was indeed the disciple John who penned the famous Biblical book.
Robert Kysar writes the following on the authorship of the Gospel of John (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 3, pp. 919-920):
The supposition that the author was one and the same with the beloved disciple is often advanced as a means of insuring that the evangelist did witness Jesus' ministry. Two other passages are advanced as evidence of the same - 19:35 and 21:24. But both falter under close scrutiny. 19:35 does not claim that the author was the one who witnessed the scene but only that the scene is related on the sound basis of eyewitness. 21:24 is part of the appendix of the gospel and should not be assumed to have come from the same hand as that responsible for the body of the gospel. Neither of these passages, therefore, persuades many Johannine scholars that the author claims eyewitness status.
There is a case to be made that John, the son of Zebedee, had already died long before the Gospel of John came to be written. It is worth noting for its own sake, even though the "beloved disciple" need not be identified with John, the son of Zebedee. In his ninth century Chronicle in the codex Coislinianus, George Hartolos says, "[John] was worth of martyrdom." Hamartolos proceeds to quote Papias to the effect that, "he [John] was killed by the Jews." In the de Boor fragment of an epitome of the fifth century Chronicle of Philip of Side, the author quotes Papias: Papias in the second book says that John the divine and James his brother were killed by Jews. Morton Enslin observes (Christian Beginnings, pp. 369-370): "That PapiasÂ’ source of information is simply an inference from Mark 10:35-40 or its parallel, Matt. 20:20-23, is possible. None the less, this Marcan passage itself affords solid ground. No reasonable interpretation of these words can deny the high probability that by the time these words were written [ca. 70 CE] both brothers had 'drunk the cup' that Jesus had drunk and had been 'baptized with the baptism' with which he had been baptized." Since the patristic tradition is unanimous in identifying the beloved disciple with John, at least this evidence discredits the patristic tradition concerning the authorship of the Gospel of John.
If the author of the Gospel of John were an eyewitness, presumably the author would have known that Jesus and his compatriots were permitted to enter the synagogues. But at one several points it is stated that those who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ during the life of Jesus were put out of the synagogue. This anachronism is inconceivable as the product of an eyewitness.
I have often head the empty tomb used as evidence that Jesus is God. This is based on multiple accounts of the experience of multiple eye witnesses in the four gospels. So I would like to hear a consistent account from someone on this forum of what exactly happened with the finding of the empty tomb by the women close to Jesus and the apostles. That is what I really want to hear, a consistent account from all four gospels.
This debate is only about the consistency of the four gospels that is it. So lets try to make an honest effort to tell a story of the finding of the empty tomb from all four gospels that does not contradict any of the four and brings their accounts together. I am asking for someone to do so because I tried and failed to do this. I looked online and could not find anyone who had done this to my satisfaction.
To make this easy, here are the chapters that talk about the finding of the empty tomb:
Matthew 28
Mark 16
Luke 24
John 20
I hope to have an interesting conversation!
and from Gospel of Matthew
t is the near-universal position of scholarship that the Gospel of Matthew is dependent upon the Gospel of Mark.
From your article: If the author of the Gospel of John were an eyewitness, presumably the author would have known that Jesus and his compatriots were permitted to enter the synagogues. But at one several points it is stated that those who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ during the life of Jesus were put out of the synagogue. This anachronism is inconceivable as the product of an eyewitness.
Horse manure. There's no need to copy Mark.
The Jewish leaders didn't like Jesus or his disciples, so they didn't want them in their synagogue. That's reason enough to cast your point into the garbage heap. Duh.
Yet, which john?? There are reasons to say it is not the disciple john
From Gospel of John
If the author of the Gospel of John were an eyewitness, presumably the author would have known that Jesus and his compatriots were permitted to enter the synagogues. But at one several points it is stated that those who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ during the life of Jesus were put out of the synagogue. This anachronism is inconceivable as the product of an eyewitness.
The gospels of Matthew and John were probably written by men who were not eye witnesses, but who had source material that was written by St. Matthew and St. John.
The Gospel of john, at least to me, seems to be an entirely different line of stories.. When it comes to mathew /luke/Mark, most htink Mark came first.. and Matthew and Luke copied from them. It's quite the jigsaw puzzle, and anybody who says the definitely know is probably wrong. There are missing pieces to the puzzle, and I personally think that it is unlikely that those pieces will be filled in. Weirder things have happened though.
Yet, what you have not been able to do for backing up your claim is show any non-christian source, or any Jewish source from before the late second century that this is so. You can make all the declarations you want, but without being able to back it up with reasonable source, it is meaningless.
When it comes to mathew /luke/Mark, most htink Mark came first.. and Matthew and Luke copied from them.
When it comes to mathew /luke/Mark, most htink Mark came first.. and Matthew and Luke copied from them.
You've got zero actual evidence for that claim, and it doesn't help your cause that Matthew and Luke have a lot of passages that are not in Mark. So give that nonsense claim of yours a rest.
they aren't a single account. there is a single event.
they were written by different people from different points of view.
yet the story is still pretty consistent.
why should I have to tell you something that is already written that you can read for yourself.
No one can produce a truly consistent account, drawn from the four documents. That's just an exercise in mental gymnastics.The point of this debate is to come up with a consistent account of the empty tomb. If you are unable to do so, don't pretend like you think it is so easy to do it is not worth demonstrating. If you do not want to engage in what this thread is about then why don't you find yourself another thread?