Talk:Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus

Sentence makes no sense.

Conversely, Helmut Koester writes that the stories of the resurrection were originally epiphanies in which the disciples are called to a ministry by the risen Jesus and were interpreted as physical proof of the event at a secondary stage. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.147.119.6 (talk) 19:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

It means they had visionary experiences wherein Jesus called them to ministry, which were later interpreted as bodily resurrection of Jesus. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:18, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Additions and question whether article of a fork

Just made some additions from articlePost-resurrection appearances of Jesus. That article and this cover much the same ground, and this one seems to represent a pov fork - the only new thing it covers is historicity.reliability of the sources. I suggest the two articles be merged and a new section added to the Post-resurection article (which doesn't cover reliability of sources)PiCo (talk) 10:29, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

I agree, but have changed this article in a redirect to Resurrection of Jesus

same topic, same coverage. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:24, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

N.T.Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God"

Lalvia added some material from N.T. Wright's book which I reverted, so I'll just explain here:
The section headed Cultural Background is about, well, the cultural background - what ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans believed about resurrection. In the first para is points out that few Jews at the time of Jesus conceived of resurrection in terms of a resurrection of the body - a resurrection of the soul, yes, but not the flesh. This was Jesus' own belief, as the last line of that para says. (Note that it's sourced, not something I made up).
The next para talks about the Greeks and Romans. They believed in a combined physical/spiritual ascension to heaven, at least for great men. The Roman Imperial ideology is especially important: emperors were the Son of God (not the Jewish God of course), and God (Venus or whoever) would signal approval of their life by taking them into heaven in a transformed physical form. From there they might visit Earth again to deliver messages to their followers, in person as Romulus was said to have done, but more often in dreams and visions.
The last para talks about the nature of the various resurrection experiences described in the NT. They come in two types, spiritual (the traditional Jewish type) and mixed physical/spiritual (the Roman Imperial type). The very earliest experiences are those of the Jewish Christian community described in Paul. They're completely spiritual, not physical. The Creed doesn't actually say what type the experience was, but Paul clearly believes his own experience was identical (he bases his apostleship on it) and it was totally spiritual. He saw Christ enthroned in Heaven, entering Heaven himself to do so. (The vision in Acts is also visionary, but bear in mind that it wasn't written by Paul and we don't know how authentic it is - but as I said, it's visionary, not physical).
Then you have Mark the first gospel. No appearances at all, although clearly he'd heard of a resurrection appearance in Galilee.
Then Mathew, Luke and John, with for the most part quite physical appearances, plus some that seem visionary (the Ascension described in Acts, for example). So you have a progression, from Jewish-style visions of the risen Christ in Heaven, to non-visionary experiences of a physical risen Jesus. Now to N.T. Wright. Lalvia added three quotes from his "The Resurrection of the Son of God". I'll paste each and make some comments.

• In one or two isolated cases, when a mortal was taken to be with the immortals, at least in mythology, his or her body was suppose to be taken with the soul. But the normal supposition seems to have been that apotheosis, or the taking of the soul to the land of the immortal gods, was completely consistent with the dissolution, often the burning, of the physical body... The graves of the heroes played an important part in their post-mortem cult; nobody supposed such graves were empty. Lalvia prefaces this with the comment that Wright is arguing against the idea that apotheosis meant physical resurrection, but he isn't, because it didn't. It meant that the dead emperor was given a new and transformed physical bod, while the old one stayed in the grave - this is in the second para of our section. Wright is talking about the "empty tomb" question, not about physical resurrection of the old body.
• The vexed question of whether these ideas influenced Jewish and Christian writers and thinkers must be addressed in its proper place. For now we may sum up by asking: in these special cases, who were the dead? They were humans who, through quite extraordinary lives, had shown themselves either worthy of translation to divine status or perhaps to have been all along a divine being in disguise. Where were they? In the heavenly home of the immortal gods; perhaps among the stars. They had not, however, been raised from the dead. Cicero is quite clear, and completely in the mainstream of greco-roman thought: the body is a prison-house... Resurrection was not an option. Those who followed Plato or Cicero did not want the body again; those who followed Homer knew they would not get one. I'm not sure how Lalvia sees this relating to our article. Again, Wright is talking about the resurrection of the old physical body, but as before, that wasn't what apotheosis meant.
• As we shall see, when Jews spoke of resurrection it was not something that they expected would happen with their god YHWH..." Here, as Lalvia says, Wright is arguing against the idea that the resurrection of Jesus is an instance of the ancient ANE myth of the dying and rising god. Our article doesn't touch on that, and quite rightly in my view - it's definitely a tiny minority view these days (tho it was quite respectable once), and found very much among fringe writers.

Anyway, there's why I reverted Lalvia's edits, which were certainly made in good faith and Wright is certainly a good source to quote. It's just that he's not touching on the subject of this section of our article. PiCo (talk) 01:53, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

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Lalvia I'll take this point by point.

You say "the earliest Christians believed Christ had a physical resurrection". It depends what you mean by the earliest Christians. Paul clearly didn't - his Christ is not physical. He clearly implies that the Jewish-Christians from whom he got his creed didn't either - he says that he saw Christ in the same way they had, and this justifies his claim to be an apostle. This is well sourced in the third para of the section. What Mark believed is unclear, but the other three gospel-writers clearly had a physical resurrection in mind. Please note though what's meant by "spiritual "and "physical" here. A Spiritual Christ is one who has been raised straight from his death and burial to the right hand of God, where he sits in glory as the Son of Man (not Son of God, which was a later development). The Gospels have a Jesus (not Christ, which is the figure seen by Paul in Heaven) resurrected in a physical body as an intermediate stage between death and enthronement. Wright isn't addressing this at all, he's talking about the empty tomb.

"It (resurrection) simply being spiritual doesn't make a whole lot of sense." On the contrary, it makes the most profound sense. The earliest Christians (the Jewish-Christians, not the Christians of the Gospel-writers' generation, who were overwhelmingly Greek-Christian) saw Jesus as the eschatological Son of Man, the figure from Daniel 7 who would save Israel and usher in the Kingdom of God. To do that he had to return to Heaven, then come back to Earth leading the heavenly army. It's all in the books referenced in the third paragraph. Note also what the paragraph about theology says: for those Christians, Christ (Jesus glorified in Heaven) was the fulfillment of the message contained in Daniel and Isaiah and the Psalms; but in Paul he actually becomes the message, the personal means of salvation.

"Even John D. Crossan ... admits that earliest Christians believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus." Again, you have to be careful about what you mean by "earliest." The generation of the Gospel-writers did, the generation of Paul and the Jewish-Christians did not (Paul speaks only of a spiritual resurrection, and implies that he carries the tradition of the generation who knew Jesus). Again, check out the books referenced in the relevant section of the article.

"Paul and the Gospels are pretty clear it was physical..." No, Paul is absolutely clear it was not physical. He was taken up to the 3rd heaven and saw Christ enthroned, and it wasn't physical.

"...but that the body would be transformed into something more spiritual as seen in Paul, Luke, John, and it's implied in Matthew." You seem a bit confused here. Paul's Christ is spiritual and visionary (in the ancient world, you saw spiritual things in visions), Luke, John and Matthew all have a tangible, visible Jesus. Again, check the books referenced in the relevant section.

As for dying and rising gods, I think we're agreed that this is fringe and not a respectable academic viewpoint. I'd prefer not to start that particular hare running.PiCo (talk) 03:36, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

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Paul states very clearly that he was taken up to Heaven and saw Christ there - that's a spiritual experience, not a physical one. Even the account in Acts, which is suspect because from the author of Acts rather than from Paul, is visionary, not physical. You say that "most leading scholars" hold that Paul's resurrected Christ was physical, but I see no signs of it - can you give a source? ("I mean one that says "most scholars ..." or similar).

Jews believed many different things about resurrection, but our article focuses on Daniel 7 and on the account Jesus himself gives, which is not of a physical resurrection.

All statements in our article are well sourced, and when you say that I've misunderstood things, please bear in mind that I'm only repeating what the sources say. Incidentally, you need to be careful when using sources. You quote Crossan as follows: "[Paul's] inaugural vision was of Jesus’ body simultaneously wounded and glorified..." Exactly: it was a vision. Here's the thing: the ancient world distinguished between visions, which were spiritual, and sensory experience, which were of this world, physical. If Paul saw something in a vision (Crossan is talking about the Acts incident, which is not entirely reliable), it's spiritual, because that's how the supernatural world communicated with the human world; the distinction between Paul's visions and the narratives in the gospels is that the Jesus in those is tangible, he can be touched ("noli me tangere" notwithstanding). You really must read the books referenced in the article, and go beyond Crossan and Wright.PiCo (talk) 04:45, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

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Still on Wright, we need to avoid using editorial commentary eg "heavily" and the use of quotes to prove a point (which in any case wasn't very clear). See Wikipedia:Quotations#Overuse]. I've recently reverted several instances of where this guideline was violated with huge chunks of an article devoted to quotes trying to prove a point. Doug Weller talk 16:53, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

[Comment by probable sockpuppet evading block removed]o probably more historically credible. Lalvia (talk) 22:06, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

I can see this headed for dispute resolution, but just to clarify why the edit keeps getting reverted:

• It's a huge wall of text, all from a single author. We don't do that on Wiki because it makes for undue weight, quite apart from being verbose. We try to represent the current state of scholarly debate, not the views of one author.
• In any case, Wright isn't saying anything that's not already in the section, at least where the edit is relevant - Wright is saying that non-Jewish apotheosis involved direct translation from the earthly realm to the heavenly, in a transformed or "spiritual" body (while the earthly one remained in the tomb). That's very much what all other scholars say, and it's what our article already says: "the earthly body of the recently deceased emperor vanished, he received a new and divine one in its place." (THe vanishing of the earthly body means it's replacement by the heavenly body, which was needed to enter heaven, which was a realm of fire - the original earthly body was burned, the act of burning serving to send the heavenly body on its way).

I suppose we could use Wright instead of Cotter if you really are so fixated on Wright, but Cotter says it better. PiCo (talk) 23:31, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

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But why bother? Wright is saying that Roman apotheosis involved the gift or aquisition of a new "spiritual" body". Our article already says this, in the second paragraph of that section. Also, that section isn't saying anything for or against Greek or Roman or Jewish influences, it's setting out the cultural background. PiCo (talk) 02:31, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

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So far as I know, apotheosis means elevation to divinity - the state of the body isn't so important, but around the 1st century it meant a new body, one made ofb the "divine" element of fire and light, since flesh belonged to the earthly realm (flesh was earth). I'm still working on it - not really happy with the theology section. PiCo (talk) 12:49, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Price and Kirby Paragraph, and Metaphor Section

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I think that Christ-mythicism is so marginal (and not held at all in serious academic circles) that we shouldn't mention it, on the grounds of due weight. The same holds for the idea of a metaphorical intention to the gospel accounts of the resurrection - Sheehan might have held this idea, but I haven't come across it anywhere else. PiCo (talk) 13:18, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Lalvia, could you help me by checking this sentence against the source? I remember it saying that Jesus was closest to the Essenes, which would be a useful piece of information if that's what's there, but I've lost access to page 58 of the source. Could you see if you can get it? This is the sentence, and it's from Tabor: Resurrection was available to the righteous alone and would make them equal to God and the angels, as the Gospels have Jesus tell: "Those who are accounted worthy ... to the resurrection from the dead ... are equal to the angels and are children of God..." (Mark 12:24-25, Luke 20:34-36) PiCo (talk) 07:40, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Irons etc.

Lalvia, you quoted a book by three scholars with three different viewpoints, so I find it suspect to attribute a claim to all of them. Also, as Bart Ehrman argued in How Jesus became God, Jewish monotheism wasn't that strict as you suggest. Both for Pagans and for Jews, being lifted to heavens meant being made divine, although for most Jews it did not mean being made God, they believed in varying degrees of being divine (e.g. angels were divine, but they were not God). Also, for beginning researchers (I don't know if this is the case here), peddling highly original, eccentric views is a shortcut to academic affirmation. Tgeorgescu (talk) 01:35, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

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Lalvia, it depends which early Christians you're talking about. Paul and those he met in Jerusalem actually saw the risen Christ - they didn't need any Romans to give them a lead. (I'm taking it that Paul is telling the truth and really did have the vision he describes of Christ in heaven, and that the circle of Christ-followers he met in Jerusalem had had the same experience). Cotter specifically talks about Matthew, and that's a different kettle of fish. It's hard to know just what Matthew is describing, a visionary Christ or a physical one, but it clearly happens on earth, not in heaven. Then in Luke you get both forms of resurrection combined, a physical one on earth and a visionary one as Christ ascends to heaven. John is largely physical but a bit mixed up. Anyway, the point is, it's not just one resurrection.PiCo (talk) 09:42, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

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That's pretty much right. Matthew has a single post-resurrection appearance, in which Christ appears to the apostles in Galilee and gives the Great Commission. Finney's point is that this is totally in line with the behaviour of apotheosised Roman imperial heroes, in which the hero appears after his death to give a message. Mark, interestingly, has no post-resurrection appearances, but he does promise an appearance in Galilee. Luke in contrast has the angel instruct the apostles to remain in Jerusalem, which is where the appearances happen. In John they're in both places, Jerusalem and Galilee. In all of them, Christ does what apotheosised heroes do, gives messages to the living. PiCo (talk) 09:37, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

It's Roman imperial apotheosis that's at issue, not the Greek version it arose from. It was, of course, a sham, and I doubt anyone believed it, not even the emperor ("I think I'm turning into a god," as Vespasian said). Anyway, read Finney and Cotter, I'd be glad to have your views on them. PiCo (talk) 09:41, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

single visit to Jerusalem ?

The article says "Evidence of this can be seen in the conflicts between them: to take a few examples, according to the synoptic gospels Jesus' mission took one year, was spent primarily in Galilee, and climaxed with a single visit to Jerusalem" Whoever wrote this has never read the synoptic gospels ! The temple is in Jerusalem !

Luke 19:47 "Every day he was teaching at the temple"

Luke 21:37 "Each day Jesus was teaching at the temple, and each evening he went out to spend the night on the hill called the Mount of Olives"

Matthew 26:55 "Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me"

Mark 14:49 "Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me"

--Brkic (talk) 11:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Capital in article title

Is a capital R required in Resurrection? Marcocapelle (talk) 06:34, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

No. Editor2020 (talk) 21:22, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

James Dunn

@Potatín5: you twide added the following sentence:

According to James Dunn, most biblical scholars believe the weight of historical evidence points in favor of the historicity of the resurrection.

References

I asked you for a pagenumber and a direcr quote, as it seems highly unlikely to me that Dunn wpuld have stated this in this way; in response, you reinserted this text with the comment He already indicates that in the front cover of his book. The title of Dunn's book is "Why believe in Jesus' Resurrection?: A Little Book Of Guidance"; the blurb says "James D. G. Dunn sets out clearly and fairly the arguments for and against Jesus' resurrection, and explains why most biblical scholars believe the weight of historical evidence points in its favor." That does not suffice; Glenn B. Siniscalchi in his review states a wide consensus of biblical scholars still stand in support of the honorable burial, the empty tomb, and the series of postmortem appearances of Jesus to friend and foe alike. Appearances, not resurrection. I want a pagenumber and an exact quote from Dunn himself from the book. Did you even read that book? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:33, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

@Joshua Jonathan: "Appearances, not resurrection" - Well, I take it pretty unlikely that Jesus could have appeared to the apostles after his crucifixion unless he had resurrected earlier, so Glenn is also indicating that most biblical scholars believe in the resurrection, as says the front cover of the book.

And yeah, I have not read the book (yet?), but I find it unlikely that Dunn would say something in its pages which would differ from what he already states in the front cover ("and explains why most biblical scholars believe the weight of historical evidence points in its favor."). Potatín5 (talk) 22:42, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

That's the whole crux: what happened to Peter and the others when they 'saw' Jesus after hjs death? Jesus didn't have to be raised from the dead to have his foĺlowers visions which they experienced as Jesus having rised from the dead. What Dunn seems to argue is that most Biblical scholars agree that Jesus' followers had such visions or experiences, not that he had objectively risen from the dead. That's in line with his other writings.

If you think this is unlikely, you'll have to read the book, not the blurb (You seem to be confusing the blurb with the front-cover); the blurb is not written by Dunn. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:28, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

@Joshua Jonathan: Evidently, Jesus could only have appeared to the apostles literally if he had resurrected earlier. Otherwise, if what happened were just merely hallucinations ("experiences", as you called them), then one cannot properly speak of Jesus as having appeared to the apostles but just that they thought that it happened without being so. So when Glenn states that most biblical scholar believe in the postmortem appearances of Jesus to the apostles and disciples, he is also indicating that most scholars believe in the resurrection, as says the blurb of Dunn's book. Potatín5 (talk) 10:49, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Pagenumber and quotes please, instead of speculations. See WP:RS and WP:VERIFIABILITY. Thanks, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:19, 7 December 2022 (UTC)