Earliest Accounts Of Christ's Resurrection - Lee Strobel

Addresses secular and Christian accounts from the time of Christ.

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Todd Tyszka
www.toddtyszka.com



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[StaceyC123]

So now you're claiming that there was not one, not two, but THREE "angels"; I guess consistency doesn't matter when you're allowed to make things up anyway, right? This still contradicts the accounts given in the other stories, which say nothing about seeing an "angel" come down to roll the stone away, but claim that they simply found the stone rolled away when they got to the tomb. As I've said before, this story has got so many contradictions in it, no court in the world would accept it.

[toddtyszka]

You're taking this WAY too seriously and being irrational. Whether or not the angel who rolled away the stone was also one of the angels inside is irrelevant, and you are clearly just trying to be argumentative. Go ahead and cry to Jesus that He didn't preserve the stories in the Bible to your satisfaction. Guess He shouldn't have used humans to write it, huh? You're going to feel like the biggest idiot... Your expectations really are ridiculous!

[StaceyC123]

@Vincentaneous

Also, I'd expect that if the author of "Matthew" was a Jew, he would know that Jews are prohibited from both a) handling a body after it has been placed in a grave or tomb, and b) handling a body of the opposite sex; since these are integral aspects of the fairy tale as presented, it's pretty clear that this author wasn't as familiar with Jewish ritual as one might think.

[StaceyC123]

@Vincentaneous

"Matthew" DOES stand out unusually from the other versions of this fairy tale, in that it both copies verbatim and wholesale from "Mark" AND adds a large number of other supernatural claims that aren't supported by any of the rest (earthquake, seeing "angels" come down to "roll the stone away", and so on). The author of this part of the Christians' little magic book may well have been well-travelled for his time, but to claim much else is pure conjecture.

[Vincentaneous]

@StaceyC123 OK, I'll let it go here. But please look up information about the gospel of Matthew for example in wikipedia. Find information about the scholarly interpretation of Matthew and you'll see there is a consensus that the gospel of Matthew was likely written by a Jew. When you read it in Greek it is clear that this person is not part of the Greek cultural tradition and he writes in a strange form of Greek.

[StaceyC123]

@Vincentaneous

Claiming that the unknown author of "Matthew" was a Greek-speaking Jew seems to be an absolute leap in logic/leap of faith here; at the time when these stories were being spread around the eastern Mediterranean, women were actually claiming to be equals (to the point that "Paul" took them to task for it, telling them to be quiet in church, that they were the property of their husbands, etc). This stil casts doubt on the fairy tale of the "resurrection".

[Vincentaneous]

@StaceyC123 Of course that's plausible. Only remember the author of Matthew likely was a Greek-speaking Jew. Now, was he really the disciple named Matthew? Probably not. But, the style and content of Matthew is very Jewish and there are a lot of "Hebraisms" in Matthew - i.e., strange Greek phrasing and terms that Jews used. But, to add to what you were saying, not only did these predominantly Greek writers show ignorance of Jewish culture, they also botched Roman customs and political culture.

[StaceyC123]

@Vincentaneous

This raises yet MORE questions about this aspect of the fairy tale; since these accounts all come to us from early Greek converts, and not actual eyewitnesses (who would have written them in Hebrew or Aramaic), it is likely that the people telling these stories simply didn't realize the inferior position that women would have held at that time and place, as well as not realizing that women would have been PROHIBITED from doing what was claimed ("anointing a dead male body").

[Vincentaneous]

@StaceyC123 I am an atheist, but I just want to throw this in: IF someone were going to make up the story, they would not have had two women (or three) as the first witnesses of Jesus' empty tomb. As you said, it was strange to have women there anyway. That kind of strangeness could mean the account has a core of truth - an embarrassing truth. Did Jesus really come back from the dead? No. The mindset of these women would have been very fertile ground for hallucinations and misapprehensions.

[Vincentaneous]

@toddtyszka Ask any investigator: Eyewitness accounts are the worst form of evidence. Our legal system relies on it only because often it's the only evidence available. Of course the followers of Jesus thought they saw Jesus after his death, but there are people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or even people who have seen Elvis after his supposed death. The followers of Jesus were uneducated people with strong religious passions. That kind of mindset often makes a bad eyewitness.

[Vincentaneous]

@krwhite02 Scholars are deeply skeptical of ANYTHING that ancient people wrote. There is strong evidence for a revolutionary rabbi named Yeshua who came from Nazareth and preached a controversial teaching, created a disturbance in the temple at Jerusalem, preached against the temple authorities, was arrested and executed for sedition by the Romans. The accounts of his miracles and his resurrection are spectacular claims that require more evidence than ancient documents can provide.

[StaceyC123]

@scorchhunter

"Corrupt"? I'm only looking at what your little magic book itself says, so if there's anything "corrupt" about this fairy tale, that's the fault of your little magic book. If this same sort of fishy nonsense was presented as "proof" of the truth of any OTHER cult, you would doubtless be pointing out that this is nothing more than a self-contradictory fairy tale, so why do you have special rules only for your own cult?