The Bible: Is the Author God, Man or Both?

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But my point is that there is NO basis for their particular belief as it is entirely beyond any previous expectation that they might have had.

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Jesus being executed went beyond their previous expectation, yet I doubt that you would say that they had no basis for believing that it had happened.

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I’m sure we all know of people who have lost someone close to them. They might say that their dead loved ones are with the Lord or that on some way or another they are ok, but they don’t conclude that they are alive again. Also these occurrences are with individuals not with groups of people.

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Of course, in none of these cases is there a very strong religious commitment to that person fulfilling prophecies, that had not yet come to pass. (And it would not surprise me if some of the people who claimed to have seen Elvis Presley after his death believed that he was still alive, even without that element.)

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People then, just as much as people now, know that death is final. The stories that the NT tells concerning the resurrection is outside of what anyone would have anticipated.

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But didn't you claim that the Maccabees were expecting an immediate physical resurrection to go on with their fight?

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Paul’s first letters were within 20 years and Mark was probably compiled within about 30 years of the time of the resurrection. Paul dealt directly with the eye witnesses of the resurrected Jesus and was so convinced that he completely reversed the direction of his life both spiritually and physically.

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As you know perfectly well the Biblical accounts attribute Paul's conversion to a visionary experience. And he says so little about the resurrection event itself that we certainly cannot assume that the people he talked to gave him the stories we see in the Gospels.

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And actually we don’t know how much the disciples had to do with the Gospels. Quite likely they aren’t directly the authors but it is very likely that they had a lot of input into them either orally or from something that they had written.

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Mark was supposedly based on stories told by Peter, but written years after Peter's death and likely without any direct input from any eye-witnesses. Luke and Matthew use Mark as a major source. Q is still hypothetical, although if it existed, it was written in Greek, which suggests that it is not that early.

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Well I believe that I have, it is that just that you don’t accept it. Maybe prior expectation is the wrong term to use so I’ll just say that there would have resolved the conflict with something that would have been consistent with the Jewish understanding of things.

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I'd say that prior expectation is an extreme exaggeration. And if you made an argument for it, then I'd like to know which post.I find it interesting that your quote from N T Wright not only omits the 2 Maccabees reference, it also omits the belief - quite widespread among the Jews of Jesus' time - that there would be a general resurrection in the End Times. IIRC at least one Epistle suggests that Jesus' Resurrection was the "first fruits" of that general resurrection.As for his claim that "a Crucified Messiah is a failed Messiah" this simply illustrates that the situation of the Disciples immediately following the execution WAS likely to provoke cognitive dissonance!So Wright offers no refutation at all.

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If you give any credibility to the accuracy of what is in the Gospels then I just can’t see how there can be ant doubt about the fact that Jesus saw himself in the position of the Son of Man in Daniel’s vision. This is from Matthew 16:

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Firstly the Gospels are far enough removed from events that we cannot be certain of the exact wording at all - a problem compounded by the fact that Jesus would have spoken Aramaic rather than the Greek of the Gospels. One way we can try to reduce errors is to compare parallel accounts. If we look at Mark 8:27-30 we see that there is no reference to the "Son of Man" - Jesus simply asks "who do people say that I am". So we cannot be certain that Jesus used that phrase in the actual event at all.

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From that point of view there is nothing that can be considered relevant in the whole Bible. As for the temporal distance we don’t actually know. We can be pretty certain that the Gospels weren’t compiled in their present form for decades after the resurrection but we have no idea when the writings on which the Gospels were based were written.

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If we accept that Matthew and Luke drew heavily from Mark we can tell that they had no other sources that they considered superior for the parts that they used. We also know that none of the other sources were preserved - we don't even have identifiable references to them. This militates against a large number of revered sources. More likely a large proportion of their sources were oral, some parts may have been derived from OT scripture (e.g. the whole idea of the virgin birth) and in some (but likely few, if any) cases may even have been largely made up by the authors (as I've said before I find the rewritten version of the Olivet Discourse in Luke highly suspicious).

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I don’t doubt that after the resurrection people went back to their scriptures to understand what had happened but the term son of man occurs 83 times in the NT of which 78 times are in the Gospels. (Interesting, I just looked that up.) I think that we are very safe in assuming that Jesus actually applied the term to Himself and that the use of the term is much more significant than it only meant that He was human. The question that needs answering is whether He got it right or not and on that we obviously disagree.

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A simple count can't give you Jesus' interpretation of the phrase. It won't even tell you if the phrase is used to refer to Jesus in each case. You need far more study for that. The fact that your own chosen example is quite likely a case where the phrase was inserted by the author, as seen by comparison with Mark, emphasises the need to show a little more care rather than simpy jumping to conclusions.

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Hardly, it had happened to every other messianic claimant in that era.

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Good, at lest you now concede that beliefs don't have to be based on previous expectations.

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Once again, there were all the other messianic movements including the Maccabees.

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To the best of my knowledge the Maccabees didn't have a particular messianic claimant. And you haven't really produced anything about others, other than we don't really know what happened to their followers.

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No. The Maccabees anticipated their resurrection without specifying a time but in this quote it obviously implies that it would be at the end of time along with all Israel. This is statement on resurrection in Macc. 2:7-13.

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If you were being honest you should have mentioned that back when you raised the point. Instead of waiting until it contradicted another point you were trying to make.

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My point was simply that after they died nobody went around suggesting that they had seen the brothers resurrected.

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And if they weren't to be resurrected until the end of time, in a general resurrection, nobody would expect to. So you are admitting to an attempt to mislead by omitting relevant information.

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Sure he had a visionary experience initially but he then went around preaching a risen Jesus. He obviously would have had considerable contact with the disciples before he took his show on the road.

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Let us be clear. If Paul's conversion was due to a visionary experience, it was NOT due to talking with witnesses of the post-resurrection appearances (there were no witnesses to the actual resurrection event, if there was one).Anyway, DID Paul go off and have detailed discussions with the Disciples after his conversion and before he started preaching ? Acts 9 states that he started preaching in Damascus, only days after his experience. Then, when he went to Jerusalem, the Christians there wouldn't speak to him at first. And he seems to have started preaching immediately, and gone on until the threats against him grew so severe that the Jerusalem church had to pack him off to Tarsus.

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That sounds pretty clear to me.

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Yes, Paul links the resurrection of Jesus to the general resurrection that was widely believed among Jews. So the whole idea that resurrection wasn't part of Jewish belief is wrong. We have a simple extension of an existing belief, not something completely new.

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On what do you base your statement that there was likely no input from eye-witnesses?

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There is certainly no suggestion that there was any input from eyewitnesses. Papias claimed that Mark got the events in the wrong order, and there are geographical problems which support this. Eyewitness input would likely have been able to correct these problems.

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Wright often writes about Maccabees 2. It just wasn’t included in that particular quote. He writes about Maccabees here. The Resurrection of Resurrection. Wright has written extensively on the resurrection including this book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3) which I’m currently reading and is over 700 pages. Please take my word for it that he mentions the fact that there was a belief amongst of some first century Jews of a general resurrection eschatologically.

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Then perhaps you should have mentioned that there was a Jewish belief in resurrection. And Wright should have chosen to deal with that point rather than talking about dying and rising Gods which are more the province of the mythicists (who naturally don't claim that there was any cognitive dissonance involved!)

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I agree that this situation could provoke cognitive dissonance, (except again I would point out that it didn’t in the case of any other messianic movement)...

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That is not a defensible or even rational claim. Of course there would be die-hards who had problems accepting that their "Messiah" was dead. We just don't hear much about them.

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...but my point, which you don’t accept, that the form the accounts took are not plausibly the result of cognitive dissonance.

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I don't accept your point as relevant because as you know perfectly well I don't claim that the form that the post-resurrection accounts take is due to cognitive dissonance...

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Also it is frankly IMHO inconceivable that a movement based on the story of someone rising from the dead is going to have any traction when it starts in a community where many would know the truth of what happened or didn’t happen.

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It is very unlikely that anyone would be in a position to KNOW that there had been no resurrection. So far as I an see the general population would have been in the same situation whether the resurrection were real or not - it's not as if Jesus put in any big public appearances after his death. And, of course, the vast majority of the people in Jerusalem and Galilee or wherever you think that the post-resurrection appearances took place DIDN'T believe it. So I struggle to see how you an possibly believe that you have a valid point there.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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You are making a ridiculous connection where there is none.

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It's a ridiculous argument but you use it, even in this very post.

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One of the brothers claimed that they would be resurrected and that the king wouldn’t be. Once they were dead there is no record of any followers because the movement which had been successful ended.

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And, according to your last post that resurrection was not to be until the end times. Until you can actually show where the cognitive dissonance comes in you don't even have a weak argument.

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Nonsense. Here is what I said.

GDR writes:

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There were other messianic movements that had a much greater impact on the society such as the Maccabean revolt, or the bar Kohkba rebellion etc. The Maccabes even said that they would be resurrected but after their death.... nothing.

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If what I said was nonsense can you point to the part where you mentioned that the Maccabee's resurrection was not supposed to occur until the end times ?
No? How can the truth be nonsense?

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The point was that this was a situation where cognitive dissonance would have been much more likely to occur but it didn’t. The Maccabean revolt had been highly successful as they had defeated the Syrians, established the Hasmonean dynasty which had ruled Judea for 100 years and died heroic deaths.

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WHY would it have been more likely - in fact HOW can it be more likely than a virtual certainty?

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Paul’s conversion was due to a visionary experience his theology was gained from his Pharisaic background and discussions with the disciples.

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Thank you for admitting that you were in error.

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Let’s just compare this ridiculous statement with what Acts 9 actually says.

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Congratulations on being fast enough to copy the pre-edit version, given a window of less than 4 minutes. But I'd rather you used the version current at the time of your reply, not a version that briefly existed more than 2 days earlier.

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Acts 9 from the above quote says, Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus. I doubt they spent a great deal of time discussing the weather. For that matter as he had been persecuting members of the movement he would have already had knowledge of what they were claiming.

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But it DOESN'T say that we talked with any of the Twelve Disciples, only unnamed "disciples" in Damascus - who may well have not seen any of the post-Resurrection appearances. My point stands.The rest is also dealt with in the corrected version, issued within minutes of the original posting as indicated by the timestamps.

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Yes there was a belief that there would be a general resurrection but there is no record of any expectation that an individual would be resurrected ahead of the general resurrection. That has been my point all along and you keep misrepresenting what I’ve written.

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And here you are arguing that a belief must be based on previous expectation, according to you even a quite simple extension of an existing belief should be ruled out.

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Read Josephus, there is a fair bit known about them. They may have had problems accepting that their messiah was dead but they didn’t claim resurrection for them.

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The question is whether they experienced cognitive dissonance, not whether they resolved it in exactly the same way as the early Christians....

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Well you claim that they had some sort of visionary experience but it would take cognitive dissonance to get from that to what they preached.

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My claims have been rather more detailed than that, as you ought to know by now... The only role of cognitive dissonance in my explanation is in the disciples coming to believe that Jesus was alive and in formulating the doctrine of the Second Coming.

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All it would have taken is for one person to display the body and there was no shortage of people who would have wanted to do that.

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Actually we don't know if there were many, or have any idea if they could have had access to a recognisable body by the time they would have wanted it. There are plenty of mundane reasons why they might not.

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That should be clear enough for you but likely not.

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I suppose that you mean the alleged 500 witnesses. An event that is absent from the Gospels and Acts, and reported without any of the details that would allow even the Corinthians to check it. Given these facts, I am inclined to regard it as a vision, perhaps something like those of Fatima, at most - maybe nothing more than an "urban legend". It's hard to imagine it being left out of all the Gospels and Acts unless there was something a little suspect about it, even to the believers who authored those works.