I didnt say historical proof of what the religious text claims. Historical truth about the even that happened. Unless i didnt understand correctly. As time passes my English are getting bad lol
Mine too! âŚ
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Reason why Iâm showing these images is to help clarify the questions about why is there not a lot of historical accounts on the people in the New Testament.
The first image is a image of one angle of the earth. There are many others. The second one has a tiny red circle, thatâs where 90% of the new test took place around. The final one shows even now just how much âwastelandâ there is.
Itâs unbelievable that the small red circle even managed to find its way in America 2000 years later. There are hundreds of thousands of other little red circles about amazing people, empires overthrown, and power warlords and warriors and little off shoot faiths that never made it 100 years or 100 miles away.
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Also consider that the letters were just a few letters. Those letter had to be carried by foot or horse to different places and copied by hand. It would take a few days just to copy the text and have it sent from one side of the red circle to the other.
By the time the letters was wrote just a few thousands were believers. The majority were not. Most people would have brushed off another tiny villages claim of something supernatural. Then during this time, the most powerful nation on the planet then In that area begin to kill Christians and Jews and they fled into hiding in the mountains. They would not hardly be able to write letters and carry it. To be caught was to be murdered along with your family.
I understand this but thats not the case. If we are to have that debate arround the ressurection of the saints we are talking about things that happened inside the city and been several people. So it wasnt in the wasteland or in the outskirts of the city
Good point. Just keep in mind that if is claimed that âthe locusts covered the whole earthâ ⌠or âthe whole world is going over to himâŚâ that such claims donât literally mean what, on the surface, they appear to say. So they wouldnât pass muster in a court of law as such or by todayâs journalistic standards. But the fact that it didnât actually happen as claimed does not mean (as you correctly observe) that they donât refer to very real events and real impressions left on the observers at the time.
Yeah but what is the hyperbole here? Ok there wasnt a ressurection of people going to the city.What wad the actual event then?
The resurrected âbodiesâ roaming around the city just after Jesus died is a bit of a mysterious passage (if it isnât extravagent hyperbole about the significance of Jesusâ death). [Not that it is possible to overstate the significance of Jesusâ crucifixion, but if one needs to convey that âheaven and earth were moved by thisâ, typical words may fail a person - and who knows how their narrative traditions of story telling would handle it. Even now, we understand what somebody is claiming about an event if they tell us âthe earth stood stillâ, or âthe sun stopped shiningâ even while fully understanding those things donât literally do that.] Had that been a literal event, one would think it might have warranted at least some mention in the other gospels and not just in Matthew. But there are other significant things too, such as the raising of Lazarus, which only get attention from one of the four gospels. Of course that one is relayed with plenty of personal detail - a complete account in its own right by John, and not just a vague âasideâ as the Matthew resurrections were that didnât pursue it to the point of even just providing a single name.
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So what do we get from that expect that its a mysterious passage? We have no historical accounts and cant use hyperbol here because we dont actually know if it happened
What Iâm saying is âso what if it didnât really happen?â I hear what youâre saying ⌠you want to go from there to say (as many skeptics easily do) âwell, if we canât take these âsmallâ details as literally true, then why should we believe Jesusâ resurrection itself has any truth to it?â What I would recommend doing is discerning what the gospel of Matthew is about. Is it about the risen life of âmanyâ un-named bodies of some saints? Or is it about Christ? Given where nearly all Matthewâs time is spent (not to mention the other three gospels) we are safe in concluding it is the latter. We are given a lot of testimonial evidence for the life of Christ. We are given none for this one brief mention of these others. You should be able to draw some conclusion from that.
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Not really. I just dont find an answer as to why would he put that verse in if it didnt happen. I would have understood why if it was a allegory or something poetic but its clearly not
I think many of us are raised in the belief the Bible is Godâs faultless word without any errors, that the Holy Spirit dictated every word. The realization the Bible is written by people, composed by people and stamped by people as Godâs faultless word in the 4th century and that nothing indicated God approved the establishment of the canon can be hard to swallow, at least it was for me. Does that cause fear? Absolutely. I had to reinvent my faith.
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Maybe Bible scholars can provide more insight into why writers did things like this. Just on the human level (speaking for myself, and at the risk of sounding irreverent to some regarding scriptures); since Matthew obviously followed Mark so closely, it is illuminating to see what Mark wrote at the same point. Mark tells of the ripping of the temple curtain at that moment and no more. No darkened sunshine (only in Luke and Matthew). No splitting rocks or earthquakes (only in Matthew). It makes me think that the later writers were thinking their prior compatriots fell short in describing just how significant this event was ⌠surely they could do better! And then curiously, John - the one and latest gospel that we might then expect to give the most grandiose descriptions of all only has Jesus declaring âIt is finishedâ and bowing his head ⌠then giving the rest of the account to the soldiers carrying out their crucifixion routines to make sure everybodyâs dead. I think this was brilliant on the Johanian authorâs part. No focus on darkened suns, rock splitting earth quakes, raised dead ⌠no no ⌠the entire focus is on one and only one figure. The simple, naked man, mocked, scorned, and hanging there and his one phrase that lays waste to all our other grandiose obsessions and distractions: âit is finished.â Itâs almost as if John is mocking the worldâs clamor after signs and earthquakes ⌠peoples both present and ever still obsessed in later ages (even now) ⌠John essentially telling us: âyeah; youâre still not getting it.â
It is finished.
Thatâs the only truly great work you need focus on. Tie yourself up in knots about fundamentalisms or textual certainties of this or that if you must. But when youâre done chasing around after all that, come back to the (now empty) cross and then set your gaze on the Risen one. Follow him. And that will be all you need worry about.
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Mervin emphasizing on Christ is a must and all christians are doing it. But thats not a thing to rule out curiosity about the other verses in the bible
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There is no reason to believe an account like that would have shaken the world and survived 2000 years. Even in the city. Itâs also not in-depth. How many? Did four, or maybe just two people
Resurrect from the dead and come to their family and a few disciples?
Jesus own disciples did not recognize him on the street.
Also, there are 6,000,000,000+ people on this planet that could come back from the dead and sit down with me and have a meal and I would have no idea.
Theres no reason not to.
If im not mistaken the text says they were seen by people. So it clearly was a bodily ressurection.
So?
Our pastor referenced Ezekiel 37 in a recent sermon focused on returning to church fellowship using this text from Exekielâs prophesy of Isreal returning to Zion from captivity, and I made the connection that perhaps this very difficult scripture of the dead coming out of their tombs is linking back to that, and showing that Jesus is restoring us back into the Kingdom of God, back to Zion, through his death and resurrection. In that sense, the meaning here is not just bodily resurrection, but the spiritual resurrection that we also share in. More to still unpack, but food for thought.
Ezekiel 37
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.
He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.
He asked me, âSon of man, can these bones live?â I said, âO Sovereign LORD, you alone know.â
Then he said to me, âProphesy to these bones and say to them, `Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!
This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.
I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.ââ
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone.
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If so mister Phill then its a hidden connection. The Ezekiel one i think its really clear speaking about the returning of the poeple. But thats not the case here with Matthew
I donât think Matthew adds these details to make his story more convincing. If anything, they make it more apocalyptic, more hyper-real in the sense of transcending the real. And this is a pattern with Matthew. Just as he ends with many saints being raised after Jesusâ death, he begins with many innocents being killed after Jesusâ birth. Both scenes are completely unique to his gospel.
Similarly, Matthew freely changes details or adds precision not present in his sources. When he tells the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, he makes her a Canaanite (never mind that Canaanites didnât exist in this time period). This helps his readers grasp Jesusâ different perspective on what to do with Canaanites and their children.
Other gospels saw a connection to a prophecy when Jesus rides into Jerusalem, but Matthew takes the prophecy hyper-literally. It speaks of a king âriding on a donkey; on a colt, the foal of a donkeyâ (Zechariah 9:9), which read normally is a single animal described with poetic parallelism. But Matthew alone shows us Jesus riding both animals, somehow straddling both a donkey and its colt as he rides into town. Itâs not a detail added to make the account more believable! Instead, it double-underlines with a thick Sharpie how this is the king Zechariah spoke of.
We still do stuff like this today. Movies based on real peopleâs lives will still take some license in order to arrange events in a way that makes the historical personâs character shine through more clearly. Itâs not lying. Itâs a way to convey truth that might get obscured in a more prosaic historical treatment.
When it comes to Matthew 5 and the âI have not come to abolish but fulfillâ speech, I think Matthew is portraying Jesus as far more in line with Paul than some other gospels. That speech is radical, but itâs easy to miss that if we read it apart from its Jewish context. I got into that more in an old thread here. Or you can see my fuller treatment in an old paper:
Iâd say two. John has the raising of Lazarus as an event that leads the Pharisees to further oppose Jesus. Luke includes it in one of Jesusâ parables as something that wouldnât convince the rich manâs brothers (i.e., âthe Pharisees, who were lovers of money,â Luke 16:14). But thatâs probably a whole ânother rabbit trail.
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Yea the problem here is that hyper-literaly. Like what do we mean about that? That an event happened literally and Matthew hyperbolic it ? Its the same thing i stated to mervin in a previous post