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A different world view usually takes along time of debating and discussion until one side wins, that's how culture and worldviews change. But the apostles worldview of resurrection sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus. Their was no process or development. His followers said their beliefs did not come from debating, but that they were telling others what they had seen themselves. It would have been hard to get Jews to form a movement unless their were multiple, plausible, repeated encounters with Jesus after his death. It was blasphemy for Jews to begin worshipping any human being. But hundreds of Jews begin to worship Jesus pretty much overnight. What event broke through all of that Jewish resistance? No other group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it? What changed their worldview so fast and had them willing to die for it, be thrown in prison for it, and preach it through out the cities? What worldly did they gain from preaching Jesus rose from the dead other than the possibility of death?
I'm not sure hundreds of jews did begin to worship Jesus pretty much overnight. Initially, there was a plethora of groups; some of them only believed Jesus was a gifted preacher, not semi-divine. They followed his teachings, and some followed his practices, like meditating in the desert, and living a renunciate life. Some went so far as to advocate and practice celibacy (see the Gospel of Thomas), others didn't. The myth of the Resurrection was created hundreds of years after Jesus' death, and imposed retroactively. How many people actually believed, after his recovery period from his ordeal on the cross, that he'd been resurrected, then gone to heaven, is highly questionable.
Just because church leaders over 300 years after Jesus' death declared, that that's what happened, doesn't mean that a large number of people believed it, at the time the supposed event was said to have occurred. There's scripture, that says Jesus recovered, and spent the rest of his life preaching. IMO, there's no way to know what people really thought back then, and what actually happened. Sources that contradict the Bible were suppressed long ago. We only know of alternative narratives, from accidental finds of ancient scripture, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The tradition of animal sacrifices in the springtime, and beliefs that the spirit of the sacrificed animal goes to heaven to watch over the tribe, goes very far back into prehistory. There were tribes, that still had that practice and belief into the middle of the 20th Century, even. There may be a few left who have that tradition ongoing today. The idea springs from something deep in the human psyche.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 05-09-2019 at 11:37 AM..
I'm not sure hundreds of jews did begin to worship Jesus pretty much overnight. Initially, there was a plethora of groups; some of them only believed Jesus was a gifted preacher, not semi-divine. They followed his teachings, and some followed his practices, like meditating in the desert, and living a renunciate life. The myth of the Resurrection was created hundreds of years after Jesus' death, and imposed retroactively. How many people actually believed, after his recovery period from his ordeal on the cross, that he'd been resurrected, then gone to heaven, is highly questionable.
Just because church leaders over 300 years after Jesus' death declared, that that's what happened, doesn't mean that a large number of people believed it, at the time the supposed event was said to have taken place.
The resurrection was created hundreds of years later? Pauls creed in 1st Corinthians can be dated back to 30s AD. He said
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
5 and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.’
6 ‘After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
7 then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles;’
8 and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
The strong majority of historians acknowledge that the creed dates back to AD 30-35. The creeds a tradition that Paul received after his apostolic call, certainly not later than his visit to Jerusalem in 35 CE, when he saw Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), who, like him, were recipients of appearances. The resurrection was the heart of the early church not something invented hundreds of years later.
The resurrection was created hundreds of years later? Pauls creed in 1st Corinthians can be dated back to 30s AD. He said
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
5 and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.’
6 ‘After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
7 then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles;’
8 and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
The strong majority of historians acknowledge that the creed dates back to AD 30-35. The creeds a tradition that Paul received after his apostolic call, certainly not later than his visit to Jerusalem in 35 CE, when he saw Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), who, like him, were recipients of appearances. The resurrection was the heart of the early church not something invented hundreds of years later.
It is just as likely that if Jesus did exist and was crucified or martyred somehow as a leader of the movement...............
That the "resurrection" was a metaphor for keeping the movement going after his death. And of course, what good messiah wouldn't "rise from the dead if I got killed before he did all he was prophesied to do". Obviously elements of the movement were antithetical to the ethics and actions of the power brokers in both the Jewish and Roman world, and certainly the claims of "messiah" would appeal to iconoclastic Jews of the era.
It's fine to believe in the supernatural aspects of the story but there is no "proof" until Jesus returns as he/they promised. I suspect that it won't happen in yours or my lifetime and after that we can't keep tracking it in order to say "I told you so".
That's how this thing has been perpetuated for 2000ish years and how it will continue to be perpetuated for a couple thousand more.
The resurrection was created hundreds of years later? Pauls creed in 1st Corinthians can be dated back to 30s AD. He said
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
5 and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.’
6 ‘After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
7 then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles;’
8 and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
The strong majority of historians acknowledge that the creed dates back to AD 30-35. The creeds a tradition that Paul received after his apostolic call, certainly not later than his visit to Jerusalem in 35 CE, when he saw Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), who, like him, were recipients of appearances. The resurrection was the heart of the early church not something invented hundreds of years later.
I should have said, it was decided upon as the official dogma hundreds of years after Jesus death. At that point, contradictory gospels were declared heretical, along with the sects, that didn't believe in Jesus' divinity.
The resurrection was created hundreds of years later? Pauls creed in 1st Corinthians can be dated back to 30s AD. He said
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
5 and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.’
6 ‘After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
7 then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles;’
8 and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
The strong majority of historians acknowledge that the creed dates back to AD 30-35. The creeds a tradition that Paul received after his apostolic call, certainly not later than his visit to Jerusalem in 35 CE, when he saw Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), who, like him, were recipients of appearances. The resurrection was the heart of the early church not something invented hundreds of years later.
I know that it's hard to swallow. It is just So Much accepted that the Christian claims are substantially true:
Jesus taught, was crucified (by the Romans, but it was the Jews who were really to blame). Rose again on the 3rd day (as he predicted - but it took forever to convince the disciples), and the apostlic band from the disciples took the story to the gentile world and often got martyred for it.
What's more, Paul passed on the truth of the resurrection and the whole crucifixion for our sins stuff, and whether or not you buy Cephas as the First Pope or not, Rome became the main respository of true Christianity as distinct from those heresies in Egypt and Byzantium.
It was indeed under the first Christian emperor that the gospels Acts, Paul's letter and ..ah that revelation at the end were put together in the present form of the Bible..really just written down accounts of the story that the Apostles gave to Paul.
But that isn't how we see it.
There is no indication of the Jewish 'Christians' going to the gentiles with Good News. This was entirely Paul's idea. Indeed it looks like he got into a squabble with Jesus; actual followers because he kicked out all the Jewish laws from their Christianity to be able to sell it to the Greeks.
Neither was Jesus a god in Paul's view. He was a messiah and that messianic spirit had been in heaven and had gone back there and would come again. And I don't doubt that was what Jesus' disciples taught and believed. But there is no mention of the body getting up and walking. No more than there is any rwason to believe that a single one of the Disciples died for saying this had happened.
Because, when the gospels were first written, there was no walking body appearing to anyone. True there was an empty tomb and the women running away. No angelic message - not in John. No appearance of Jesus
to the women as they ran away (Matthew) Mat mag. on her own after Simon had looked at the empty tomb (John) and a denial that Jesus appeared to the women at all (Luke) because there was no resurrection story originally (Mark) and each had written a contradictory walking Jesus story.
It isn't true, because if it had been, you wouldn't have needed contradictory stories, just as the same with the other fatal contradiction - the nativities of Matthew and Luke.
So the Gospels don't recount the original story that the disciples told Paul. Paul's claim of the messianic spirit descending upon Jesus was transformed in the baptism sequence to God in person descending on Jesus, and never mind that Matthew and Luke swore (in invented tales) that Jesus has been God right from the time the DNA exchanged genes.
The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jewish Rabbi that Simon stumbled around after but a Greek Christian, much concerned with Jewish scripture, true, but mainly to rub in the faces of the Pharisees and to show how they were doing it all wrong.
The present gospels are a Christian-written adaptation of (I do suspect) an actual true story, but taking Paulinist adaptation of what the disciples believed and then going even further than Paul could have stomached.
There may have been a real Paul, real disciples and thus a real Jesus, but the disciples and Jesus were certainly not the people we see in the Gospels. They are Christian -written re-inventions to serve the needs of Gentile Christianity.
A different world view usually takes along time of debating and discussion until one side wins, that's how culture and worldviews change. But the apostles worldview of resurrection sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus. Their was no process or development. His followers said their beliefs did not come from debating, but that they were telling others what they had seen themselves. It would have been hard to get Jews to form a movement unless their were multiple, plausible, repeated encounters with Jesus after his death. It was blasphemy for Jews to begin worshipping any human being. But hundreds of Jews begin to worship Jesus pretty much overnight. What event broke through all of that Jewish resistance? No other group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it? What changed their worldview so fast and had them willing to die for it, be thrown in prison for it, and preach it through out the cities? What worldly did they gain from preaching Jesus rose from the dead other than the possibility of death?
This "different world view" you speak of is not something that spontaneously popped into existence with Jesus. Much of what would become common to Christian doctrine had existed for centuries prior to Jesus in the form of Persian Zoroastrianism. Two thousand years ago Zoroastrianism was one of the dominant beliefs of the Mediterranean region.
Encyclopedia Americana
"Although a definite borrowing is still impossible to prove, the resemblances between Zoroastrianism and Judaism are numerous and probably took shape during the exile. First of all the figure of Satan, originally a servant of God appointed by Him as His prosecutor, came more and more to resemble Ahriman, the enemy of God. Secondly,the figure of the Messiah, originally a future king of Israel who would save his people from oppression evolved,in Deutro-Isaiah for instance, into a universal Savior very similar to the Iranian Saoshyant(Savior). Thirdly, the entities that came to surround Yahweh, such as His wisdom and His spirit are comparable to the arch angels escorting Ahura Mazda; other points of comparison include the doctrine of the millenia; the Last Judgement; the heavenly book in which human actions are inscribed; the resurrection, the final transformation of the Earth; paradise of Heaven on Earth or in Heaven. Christianity seems to owe many features to Iran over and above those inherited from Judaism. Among others are probably the belief in guardian angels, resurrection and the heavenly journey of the soul."(Encyclopedia Americana,"Zoroastrianism" pp.813-815).
The Gospel According to Matthew references Zoroastrian priests (Magi) coming to Israel to worship the newborn Jesus, as the fulfillment of the old Zoroastrian prophecy of the coming birth of a "Saoshyant," or savior, who would come to sit in final judgement of humankind.
Matthew 2:1-2 (Greek Interlinear Translation)
OF-the yet Jesus being born in BETHLEHEM OF-the Judea in DAYS OF-HEROD THE KING lo! magi(magoi) from the east came-along into Jerusalem saying ?-where IS BEING-BROUGHT-FORTH KING OF-THE JUDA-ans WE-PERCEIVED for OF-HIM the star in the east and WE-CAME TO-worship to-Him. http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineI...NTpdf/mat2.pdf
Wikipedia
Magi
Magi (/ˈmeɪdʒaɪ/; singular magus /ˈmeɪɡəs/; from Latin magus) denotes followers of Zoroastrianism or Zoroaster. The earliest known use of the word magi is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius the Great, known as the Behistun Inscription. Old Persian texts, predating the Hellenistic period, refer to a magus as a Zurvanic, and presumably Zoroastrian, priest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magi
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but have nothing to add and a private rep point won't do it...so, both
