Outrageously unreasonable to believe they were wrong (not lying) about the death given the circumstances. Here is why. They didn’t have funeral homes and morticians either. Thus the task of prepping the body for entombment fell to the closet family and friends.
Let's got to the tape, shall we? Mark:
43 Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. 44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. 45 When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. 46 So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. 47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.
So, at least according to the author who first wrote the story, it was just one guy doing it all. A "prominent member of the Council" no less, so
really not someone who had too much first hand experience with dead bodies would be my guess.
They witnessed his crucifixion.
All that would have meant is they saw him up on the cross. It doesn't mean that they sat there waiting for him to die as, again, crucifixion typically took several days to kill. Regardless, even if Joseph did sit there the entire time and then, upon seeing Jesus finally
appear to die, he would still--at that point, from afar looking up--have no way to know if he really had died. You continue:
Now they had to physical carry his body to the tomb.
Being a "prominent member of the Council" my further guess would be that he did not personally carry the body like a fireman. In fact, even if he were just another ignorant fisherman, my guess would be he would not have physically carried the body like a fireman. Most probably he had with him some sort of cart or a sled at the very least, but go on:
Physically clean, prep and wrap it. Now I know they were not forensic scientists, but I’m certain they were familiar with the telltale signs of death all the same….. no breathing, no heartbeat, loss of body temp, eventually the open wounds stops bleeding without clotting, loss of bodily fluids, rigor mortis and lividity. They physically handled the body for hours and left him for dead.
OR, Joseph, who already thought Jesus was dead--and by all appearances he looked dead--and in his grief (and due to the fact that he would be careful not to physically touch the body with his bare hands, of course, but instead would always have a cloth or sponge used to clean him) was so focused on the ritual and wrapping the body properly and having never before done such a thing, no idea about clotting or fluids or rigor mortis and lividity, since, you know, he wasn't a forensic scientist, just a rich elder Jew and therefore likely never touched a dead body before in his life to even know what lividity looked like or at what stage rigor sets in, and the whole process was done under duress and sorrow and once wrapped, the body was placed on the cart or the sled, not held in his arms like an infant close to his chest, so, the thought that Jesus might actually be alive but in a coma would have never even crossed Joseph's mind even if he did somehow have such arcane medical knowledge.
Now for your explanation to work we would also need to believe that the crucified Christ, in a coma, could unwrap himself, get up and roll away a ton of tombstone.
Well, evidently it wasn't a "ton" of tombstone, since an old rich dude could move it by himself. As to what happened after Joseph placed Jesus in the cave and moved the rock to close it up, we don't know. What we
do know, however, is the next time it's mentioned, the rock had been moved and a young man was sitting inside the cave. Presumably the same young man that was with Jesus at the arrest. And if an old Jewish Councilman could move the rock, then it's a safe bet a young man could move it too.
So, at the very least, we know from Mark that a young man--possibly a disciple-in-training considering
Mark 14:51--had shown up at some point before the ladies, moved the stone and went inside for some unknown reason not provided.
Considering he says:
6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
So, he evidently knew who they were and what they were doing there and apparently had instructions to inform them as to where to find Jesus and what to do in regard to the disciples. Since this was a young
man and not a divine being, that means he had to have been told to say those things. Which in turn means it had to have been Jesus who told him to tell them those things, since only Jesus would have known where he was going to go and what someone should do in regard to the disciples, etc.
To me your explanation sounds pretty miraculous.
Cute. Trying a false equivalence to make it seem as if perfectly logical non-magical explanations are the same as asserting that magic is real.
Now let’s examine it from the point of the Roman’s.
Oooh, ok. Careful, though, that's a very slippery slope.
The Roman crucifiers were incredibly concerned with the death as well, because it became their turn if they did not cause the death.
Why would that be? Pilate had declared Jesus innocent and was only ordering him crucified because the crowd of Jews wanted him to. He also supposedly just let a murderous seditionist--and therefore someone who had killed Roman
soldiers, if not Roman citizens--go free also at the insistence of the crowd of Jews.
If anything, the Roman soldiers would be plotting Pilate's bloody assassination for being a traitor to Rome and their own fallen brothers at the hands of Barabbas and wouldn't give two shits about an innocent man being crucified just to please the Jews, who they mostly hated and were there to subjugate.
Told you it was slippery.
That is why they broke the legs of those on the cross to bring about the death by suffocation faster if needed.
For those that hadn't died after several days and/or as a mercy and/or after being bribed to do so by family and friends.
When they came to Jesus they had already determined him to be dead.
"Determined"? All we know is that Jesus supposedly yelled out and
(Really it was quite earth shaking they said.)
No, whoever wrote Mark said that.
So they stabbed him in the side and out came blood and water.
No, that was a later embellishment to the story. In Mark it's:
33 At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
35 When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”
36 Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.
37 With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
38 The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. 39 And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
40 Some women were watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joseph,[d] and Salome. 41 In Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs. Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.
So, break that down. No one came anywhere near him except, apparently, a centurion who "saw" how Jesus died; i.e., heard him yell out and then appeared--from his position on the ground looking up at the guy--to have breathed his last, but that too could have easily been Jesus simply passing into a coma. The effect would be the same. His body would have suddenly gone limp and he would have slumped--as much as one could slump while crucified--and for all appearances looked like he had died.
Everyone else was "watching from a distance," so there would be no way for any of them to determine actual death from coma even if they had all been Quincy (dated reference to a TV forensic pathologist).
Since you are using scripture to introduce new evidence (your wonder boy who was with Jesus at his arrest)
That's not "new evidence." That's right there in the text and (presumably) always has been.
I as well would point out that the disciples quickly puzzled through what just happened and remembered that Jesus told them he would rise.
OR, that part was added into the mythology after the facts, considering that Jesus is supposedly Elijah (or Emmanuel or whoever the many different "messiahs" that various earlier Jewish "prophets" supposedly foretold that all seem to get applied to Jesus when it suits) and in none of those stories is it foretold that the messiah will be killed and then bodily resurrect from the dead.
Quite the opposite in fact. When the Jewish Messiah comes (the one and only time he comes), it is to kill everyone unworthy with fire and drowning and all manner of horrific unstoppable divine retribution in order to pave the way for Jehovah to arrive on Earth (not his son or magically triune being, but the Big Kahuna himself).
I don't recall Jesus consuming the unanointed multitudes with fire do you?
See, again, that's why the fact that Jesus' body isn't in the cave poses such a problem. Because it means that he
bodily resurrected from the dead, yet if that were the case--and speaking of both Paul and later embellishments of Mark's story by subsequent authors, or "scripture"--we have the problem of Paul insisting there are two
different types of bodies in regard to resurrection and the whole "doubting Thomas" sequence in John, where Thomas insists he had to stick his fingers in the wounds (for some unknown reason) instead of just looking at the man to know it was Jesus and not some random schmoe the other disciples pulled off the street to try and fool him or something.
It was a point so well known that the Pharisees instructed the Romans to place a guard at the tomb to prevent the disciples from stealing the body and claiming he rose again.
Again, not in Mark, so if you're going to bounce around and cherry-pick elements from the later embellishments, then, again, you have to deal with the consequences of my being able to do same.
Thus your wonder boy might have suffered a few issues there, you think?
Apparently not, according to Mark, so you tell me how a young man managed to be sitting inside an open cave with no Roman soldiers in sight. He overpowered them? Bribed them? Your call.
Also after the tomb as discovered empty the Romans and Jews pushed the spin that the guards fell asleep. Which actually testifies to the tomb being empty despite your weak attempt to transform the angel into wonder boy.
I'm sorry, "my" attempt? As you weakly try to transform a young man into an angel? Tell me, if Mark somehow knew it was an angel, then why did he describe him as a "young man" in a robe? He was mistaken? God didn't tell him that part properly, because we know from what Mark wrote that Mark wasn't there; it was only the women and the young man, so who told Mark there was a young man in a robe sitting in the open cave?
Might I also mention the penalty for falling asleep on guard was the same a failing at a crucifixion……death.
For guarding a
criminal perhaps, but not for guarding a supposedly dead innocent man that Pilate had already given over to Joseph for burial. And, of course, let's examine why in the world Pilate would have ordered Roman guards to stand watch over a dead man, even if he had been somehow convinced by someone that Jesus'
soldiers disciples would try to remove Jesus body in order to fake a resurrection.
That's not how resurrection works. Resurrection is: you die and then you--same body--come back from the dead and get up and walk around. So how exactly were Jesus' disciples going to steal a dead body and reanimate it? Or just steal a dead body and claim it had resurrected? By pointing to an open, empty cave? All anyone needed to say is, "Well, you just took the body out of the cave."
And, further, boy genius, ALL of that would necessarily mean that it was the plan all along, which is why Joseph goes to Pilate to (presumably) bribe him to allow him to take the innocent man down and place him in a
cave to begin with (instead of burying him in the ground).
Pull one string...
It more reasonable to conclude
You have forfeited the right to appeal to reason when you affirm that magic is real.
Even the ultra-critic Bart Ehrman doesn’t deny the death of Jesus at the crucifixion
Appeal to authority. Nice. Except, there is no authority when it comes to speculating about a mythologized/alleged event from two thousand years ago that none of us witnessed.
It more reasonable to conclude that the evidence supports that the tomb was empty
Then you're saying that Mark was wrong.
I was wondering……Why did Jesus know they would come back and instruct the boy to wait for them?
It was customary for mourners and family and friends to visit a grave, so it's no great stretch for him to have awakened from his coma--confused and wondering what had happened--and even had called out (which is when the dutiful young man mourning all night outside the cave of his beloved master, heard the cry, moved the rock that Joseph rolled by himself and rushed in to help Jesus out of the bandages). Jesus naturally would have asked the kid what had happened and the kid told him about how he had "died" and Joseph wrapped him up and put him in the cave, etc., and Jesus then just as naturally would have told the kid what to do if anyone came to the cave, while Jesus took off to find his
soldiers disciples.
The better questions to ask are:
- why were the women going to the cave to anoint Jesus' body at all, since Joseph already did that right in front of them, apparently, when he cleaned and wrapped Jesus' body?
- having already seen the cave with the rock, why did it just occur to them on their way to the cave the question of who would move the rock?
- why did none of them question who the young man was and why he was sitting in the cave to begin with?
The passage merely says:
5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
What were the afraid of, if, as you say, Jesus had foretold he would resurrect? Why did they say "nothing to anyone" when the young man explicitly instructed them (again, presumably relaying Jesus' own instructions) to "tell his disciples and Peter"?
Regardless, they could easily have believed he was dead and then equally believed he resurrected and it still wouldn't constitute a lie or the truth for that matter.
Sorry that does not hold up either.
Quelle surprise (see what I did there?)
They were professing a resurrection.
No, PAUL was.
Observing a Crucified Coma man taking a year to recover would not fit the bill of the resurrection they professed.
First of all, it's not like they had newspapers or TV or the internet back then. But, again, they could have all
believed--including Jesus himself after hearing what had happened to him from his disciples--that Jesus had actually died and Jehovah brought him back.
They would have obviously been lying and would have known it.
How? No one--not even Jesus--would have known or had the advanced medical knowledge of a coma and what that entails. To them, they could have easily believed that Jesus had died and then
must have resurrected, because there he was walking around.
But then we still have the Paul problem.
Regardless, my point stands. They could all--including Jesus--believe that he had died and was miraculously brought back from the dead without that actually having been the case.
So, again, framing it in terms of certain knowledge and/or "lying" is just fallacious reasoning.
Many have died a martyr, believing in a lie, but these men would have known it was a lie.
Again, no they would not, unless you are referring to the idea that it was ALL an elaborate scam and Joseph bribed Pilate (or, more likely, the soldiers) to let him take Jesus down
before he died and they planned the cave and instructed the women to show up as witnesses and told the kid to wait inside etc.
In which case, yeah, they would have all conspired in a lie to save their leader. A very simple and easy to pull off lie, no less, as, again, no Roman soldier would have given two shits about a man who Pilate supposedly found completely innocent and was only crucifying to please the people he was there to brutally subjugate.
A rich, prominent Jew comes up to the centurion and pays him enough money to give him Jesus' body and he reports back that Jesus died already, Pilate wouldn't have even heard the news, let alone given a shit that Jesus had died already. He had washed his hands of the whole thing, remember?
And none of them recanted.
"Recanted"? To whom? Who would have given a shit? The San Hedrin? Why would any of them have told the San Hedrin what they did in order for them to figure it out and investigate and try to force any of them to "recant"? Was there
another Judas among them?
If you don’t address this charge in your next post I’ll take your silence as an act of dropping the charges.
Ok sport
I presented a case (possibly complex) to assert that the best explanation of the evidence was a miracle had occurred.
And you failed drastically in that attempt.
But atrib wanted to reason that lying was the better explanation. So I ask you this simple question………….how did you assert that our discussion is a fallacy on my part?
I didn't. I said you were employing the fallacy of the complex question. Do you know what that entails? Clearly not or you wouldn't be further revealing yourself in this manner.
We are each trying to make a case for our position. He was the one who brought up lying not me.
No, he was the one who brought up the notion that they were making it up. You were the one that tried to reframe that into "lying." As I pointed out, people can make stuff up--we generally call it "embellishing"--and yet still not be
lying. They can be mistaken, or still trying to make sense of what they thought they saw, or unwittingly mix into their own recollections bits and pieces from someone else's story, or even just over time come to convince themselves that something they did not actually see or experience nevertheless was what they saw and experienced. Or, even more simply, ONE among them could have lied about ONE aspect of the story--like Paul insisting that the resurrection MUST have happened and that all followers MUST believe that it happened (indicating they did not) or else there is nothing to the whole house of cards--and then others who believed that ONE person related that ONE element and it still not be they that are lying.
ALL of that is possible and falls under "making it up" without anyone necessarily
lying. Lying implies willingly/consciously/deliberately attempting to defraud others, while also fully knowing/understanding/realizing the truth that they are deliberately obfuscating with the lie. While that may be part of what atrib was alluding to, it need not be all that he was alluding to.
Hence, my pointing out that you were employing the fallacy of the complex question. Whether you were aware you were doing so or not is irrelevant.
ETA. Here's what atrib clarified:
Corpses don't reanimate after days of being dead (other than in bad zombie movies), nor are humans able to fly off into the sky under their own power. These claims are extraordinary, as you have stipulated to earlier when you agreed that it is appropriate to treat such claims with skepticism.
What is very commonplace, on the other hand, is the human ability to make up shit. My opinion that the Jesus stories are made up is far more reasonable for that reason, and I don't have to turn to magic to support my position, which is always a bonus. I also accept that there exists a family of candidate explanations, none of which involve actual flying zombies, that could be used to explain how the Jesus stories got started. I am not wedded to my opinion, and am willing to change my mind if evidence is presented.
