to have contact with a corpse is ceremonially unclean
I don't think that is right. I had understood that after a year or so, the Jews visited the tomb and did somethings with the bones:
In talmudic times, burial took place in caves, hewn tombs, sarcophagi, and catacombs; and a secondary burial, i.e., a re-interment (likkut aẓamot) of the remains sometimes took place about one year after the original burial in ossuaries (Maim. Yad, Evel, 12:8).
From
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ancientburial.html
Also some sources say Jesus’ body’s preparation was interrupted by the passover, hence the delay in putting in the spices was not due to other motives.
I see that women did have some specific roles in ancient Jewish funerals (see link above), but I still don’t know about this particular task. How do you know that both sexes commonly participated? I’m not saying you are wrong, just want to know your source.
@loujost Lou, interesting point about the ossuaries, yes. I am not sure how that was squared-away with Numbers 19:11. A body must be very decomposed - essentially nothing but the bones left - in order to be packed into an ossuary; perhaps a body was considered “less unclean” after having reached such a state? I don’t know. There certainly is a visceral difference, at least in my opinion, between a skeleton and an actively-decomposing, fleshy corpse.
Yes, the women’s Saturday delay was due to the Sabbath - that is specifically explained in at least one of the gospels. But it is also said that the women knew the job was already done - they knew that the body had been ceremonially prepared already by one (or more - the gospels differ) sympathizers or followers (again the gospels differ) of Jesus, who had treated the body with respect and done all that was necessary within the 24-hour prescribed period. There was no custom left for them to dutifully fulfill, and such things were done before interment and not afterward in any case. I’d surely think that wanting to play a role in their master’s final laying to rest, in a culturally fitting manner for them, is part of what motivated them, of course. But that’s not the same as saying that what they did was entirely customary and stereotypical; the gospels imply they (like the men) were in great fear (skulking at a distance while Joseph transports the body, for example) but unlike the men they overcame that.
It does seem that both men and women could participate in ritual preparation - in the gospels it is said that Joseph (and Nicodemus, in John) took care of the preparations (I’d assume with a servant or two) - but in any case I was thinking of more than just that. I was thinking of visits to the grave for a showing of respect, devotion, or mourning; the men are not said to have done any of that, only the women.
If I may I would like to make a few comments on this topic.
First of all I would like to make it clear that the Resurrection is not resuscitation of the human body. The resurrected Jesus is not composed of flesh and blood, nor will our bodies in heaven be made of flesh and blood. As Paul clearly says the resurrection body is transformed formed from a flesh and blood body into a spiritual body.
Exactly what that means is unclear, but it does mean that our heavenly bodies will have mass, form, and shape, but be immortal. Thus while it may be unscientific to say that a dead flesh and blood body can be resuscitated, it is not necessarily unscientific to say that the spiritual aspect of a person could still survive after the death of her/his flesh and blood body which is transformed into a spiritual body.
If one believes that reality has only one physical dimension, of course this would be impossible, but this is not a scientific question, but a philosophical question. Philosophy discusses rational problems such as the nature of reality. If reality has a spiritual dimension, as well as physical and rational dimension, then it well maybe and I think it is to believe in the Resurrection.
Miracles like the Resurrection and the Creation are literally signs or messages from God revealing to humanity the nature of Reality as being physical, rational, and spiritual. They are metaphysical and cosmological information, not scientific info.
As far as the Resurrection stories go, it seems to me that the four gospels vary widely on the details of exactly what happened. I have always wondered why critics of the faith did not point this out. Maybe it is because if this event did not happen, then the disciples would have had to come together to get their stories to agree, which they did not.
As far as the role of the women goes, they do play a central role in all accounts. While the men appear to be fearful, they had more to be fearful of. They were associates of convicted anti-Roman rebel living under Roman rule which did not brook any resistance. Women were not seen as a threat to Roman rule.
The preparation of the body for burial was very limited by the beginning of the Sabbath, which was also Passover. The synoptic gospels say that Joseph only wrapped the body in the linen cloth. There is a difference between doing something barely passable, and doing something well.
It appears that the women were grieving the death of their Friend, while the men were dismayed by the death of their Leader. Neither of them were concerned about how humans like us would view that situation almost 2,000 years later.
In terms of the validity of the witness of the women, I can remember when before women became common in the workplace that women were believed to be more driven by emotions and less by reason than men. I remember when the “dumb blonde” was a comedic staple.
Men for a long time have thought of themselves as superior to women in the world of work and reason, thus there would be no rational reason to make hysterical women the initial witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus if it were not true.
I am neither a scientists nor a theologian but it seems to me that if one is a Christian there are certain basic tenants of Christianity…certain “truths” one must have faith in/believe in or they simply are not a “Christian” as I understand what being a “Christian” means. Believing in the resurrection of Christ after dying on the cross being one of those tenants. I would suggest that such a thing could NEVER be proved or disproved scientifically. However, an absence of “proof” does not require a person to throw out the tenant.
Accepting the historical Christian faith and upholding the authority and inspiration of the Bible as Bilolgos does (and as do I) does not render an organization or an individual as a non-ally of science but is, perhaps, simply a recognition that “science” can not provide all the answers of the universe or of life or faith.
@Ted Davis@Roger@Eddie
I would have to say that I have no problem with the resurrection of Jesus or the others that are to rise. I do not exactly know what the Apostle Paul meant when he called the resurrection body a spiritual body. There are many different interpretations to this subject. In the Synoptic Gospels, it seems that Jesus’ body was a physical one. In the Gospels of Luke and John, he even ate a broiled fish. Millard Erickson, a Baptist theologian, has said that when Jesus ascended into heaven, the nature of his resurrection body changed from a physical one into a spiritual one. Is this a type of evolutionary creation? I wonder. Or could we say that Paul has to be taken literally in 1 Corinthians 15:35-58? What did the Apostle Paul see when Jesus appeared to him? Another question I wish to propose about the Apostle Paul is the following. W.D. Davies says that Paul has further revelation about the resurrection body in II Corinthians 5:1-10. Dr. Frank Stagg, a moderate Baptist, comments on this also. If time and eternity are not the same, do the dead experience an instantaneous resurrection? A liberal Methodist, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, has said: “When our loved ones leave us, we lay away their physical bodies, no longer needed, like coats that are worn out. But at the time of death, the person is released into a heavenly body.” Jesus, when he rose from the dead, did have his physical body. He ate broiled fish in the Gospel of Luke; however, he could already pass through walls and doors and yet was physical. Therefore, are we looking wrong at 1 Corinthians 15:35-58. Does Paul simply say that Jesus’ resurrection body was not subject to the Laws set down by God the Father? I must say that this is a mystery of faith. Are human spirits inside of another spirit that is called a body. In other words, we get two for the price of one. Pardon me, I am being the Court Jester here. There are some things that are just wonderful mysteries of God’s creation, and we will not have an answer until we go to be with the Lord. I go along with the Apostles’ Creed that there is a resurrection of the body. The substance does not matter. I do know that it will be a higher form of life. If Don Piper’s death experience is correct, we get our resurrected bodies when time ends for us. We do not have to wait until the Second Advent that will one day enter time. Is it rational to believe in things like the Resurrection? If we believe in a God who is all powerful, I must say a big “YES.”
I just wanted to make a quick reply here, to Henry. I believe what Paul has stated in Corinithians is not fully understood. The words being translated (I forget the Greek) “spiritual body” is literally “soulish body”.
Now I know that may sound a bit bizarre, but I think it’s more accurate to what Paul is saying. When one says “spiritual” you think of the invisible / otherworldly realm. But soulish implies, almost an “in between” from physical and spiritual. Jesus’ body is physical as he can be seen eating broiled fish. Which sorta reminds me of the incident in Genesis 18, where God and his two angels visit Abraham, and eat Abraham’s food.
Think of it almost like a normal physical body, but following completely different laws. Your body is solid - you’re not an apparition. But at the same time you can appear in locked rooms. These are some of the mysteries of the Resurrection.
Also, I know none of you have (as far as I know) mentioned another peculiarity to the Resurrection story. Why did none of the disciples recognize Jesus at first? They seemed confused as to who he was, until he broke the bread.
It’s a bizarre motif to add to a fictional story. Why not have it so that everyone knew who he was right away? Instead of this obscurity?
Hello Tim!. You have made some interesting comments. God the Son did appear in his pre-incarnate self and ate with Abraham. I believe that the events of the New Testament did actually happen. I agree, these are the mysteries of the resurrection of our Lord. I wish to thank you for making your comments. God bless you. Your friend, Henry.
Egyptian theology had a fairly complex hierarchy of ‘personhood’. I wonder which
Egyptian concept best matches Paul’s?
Ib (heart)
metaphysical heart was believed to be formed from one drop of blood from the
child’s mother’s heart, taken at conception. . . . seat of emotion, thought, will and intention.
Sheut (shadow)
A person’s shadow or silhouette, Sheut (šwt in Egyptian), is always present.
Because of this, Egyptians surmised that a shadow contains something of the person it represents.
Through this association, statues of people and deities were sometimes referred to as shadows.
The shadow was also representative to Egyptians of a figure of death, or servant of Anubis,
and was depicted graphically as a small human figure painted completely black.
Ren (name)
As a part of the soul, a person’s ren (‘name’) was given to them at birth and the
Egyptians believed that it would live for as long as that name was spoken. . .
Ba (personality)
Ba takes the form of a bird with a human head.
The ‘Ba’ (bꜣ) was everything that makes an individual unique, similar to
the notion of ‘personality’. (In this sense, inanimate objects could also
have a ‘Ba’, a unique character, and indeed Old Kingdom pyramids often
were called the ‘Ba’ of their owner). The ‘Ba’ is an aspect of a person that the
Egyptians believed would live after the body died, and it is sometimes depicted
as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the ‘Ka’ in the afterlife.
In the Coffin Texts one form of the Ba that comes into existence after death
is corporeal, eating, drinking and copulating.
Ka (vital spark)
The Ka (kꜣ) was the Egyptian concept of vital essence, that which distinguishes
the difference between a living and a dead person, with death occurring when the
ka left the body. Depending on the region, Egyptians believed that Heket or Meskhenet
was the creator of each person’s Ka, breathing it into them at the instant of their birth
as the part of their soul that made them be alive. This resembles the concept of spirit
in other religions.
Akh
The Akh (Ꜣḫ meaning ‘(magically) effective one’),[5] was a concept of the dead that
varied over the long history of ancient Egyptian belief. It was associated with thought,
but not as an action of the mind; rather, it was intellect as a living entity.
Jesus of Nazareth and His resurrection from the dead is the easiest part of the Bible to believe IMO.
I will add that the Bible seems to suggest Mankind currently has no eternal spirit, but must die and be buried as a seed to gain spiritual life. Living Men are currently made up of, it seems, only flesh and God-breathed life-force which resides in the blood.
Well the frustrating part is that the Bible isn’t clear on either position. In some places it says death is not unlike being asleep. Unaware, gone from the waking World. See Ecclesiastes.
While in others it seems to suggest we go straight to some kind of paradisal or Hellish waiting room. Take the rich man and Lazarus for example. And the thief on the cross who was promised paradise that Day.
All I know for certain is that the dead are gone from here.
Diseases such as dementia seem to suggest we have no spirit or soul. That disease takes who we are away from us, and it’s all neurological.
This is another area where N T Wright has done some excellent work (“The Resurrection of the Son of God”), albeit at great length. Briefly, he agrees that nothing in the Bible teaches that man is intrinsically immortal (as even Genesis 3 makes clear: access to tree of life = life, exile from tree of life = death). The “immortal soul going to heaven” idea crept in from Platonic thought after a century or two.
Wright shows how belief in a final resurrection arose in Judaism, in a fairly diverse way but always linked to resurrection of the body at “the last day”. Then he shows how the resurrection of Jesus modified this (a) by being a surprising demonstration before the last day and (b) by showing that there was both continuity and discontinuity in the resuurection body - Jesus rose never to die agian, which had not been very clear in 2nd temple resurrection hope.
The final resurrection of everyone on the last day, then, was carried over into Christianity from Judaism. In both, the intermediate state was left somewhat unclear, but as Wright says, this becomes a bit clearer in Paul’s teaching: the dead in Christ are somehow “with the Lord”, perhaps in heaven, and to some degree conscious of his presence, but only as an intermediate state prior to the real goal, which is bodily resurrection in the redeemed creation.
But one clear theme is that for both Pharisaic-type Jews and Christians, the principle hope was never “life continuing after death”, but “life being restored at some interval after death, with an assumed intermediate waiting state.”
I don’t see a difficulty - God, as the source of life, grants eternal life, or denies it.
In the “intermediate state” he maintains life in a disembodied way, and at the resurrection grants its fulness in the resurrection body. Bear in mind that from Eden onwards there is a very close correlation between dwelling in God’s presence and life.
The second death is then separation from God, and from all that makes for life. To the annihilationist, that would mean the complete withdrawal of life, but in more traditional theology its attenuation (like the spiritual death that Adam experienced, only more complete and final).
In fact, I see “second death” as a concept more problematic for the concept of the instrinsically immortal soul - how can something immortal experience death?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record; and (adding insult to injury) still refusing to answer this …
I think it’s worth stepping back to recognize the whole paradigm in play that produces questions like this (and will produce more ad-infinitum). In short, is there something sacred about leaving this skepticism-spigot turned on through all seasons and questions of life just because empiricists have now erected a centuries-old sacred altar around it and take umbrage should any of their outward-directed skepticism get mirrored back toward their own holy orders?
In most centuries prior to Spinoza, one started with faith and belief (and if they argued over things like the resurrection, it was still usually within an overall context of recognized faith, and an acceptance --even if corrupted – of some religious tradition; think Sadducees). A recognized foundation of faith was seen as necessarily preceding any climb toward understanding. Since the enlightenment, this was inverted. Now understanding under-girded by the academy – preferably science, is seen as the foundation from which we must climb up to see if we can find any faith, (Christian faith, the modern evangelical hopes). And the enlightenment-spawned movements of historical criticism, Creationism, and ID were all born.
It’s a healthy thing that some of us are eyeing the knob on that sacred spigot. It isn’t that we don’t benefit from its output, but some regulation may be in order.
The one thing Josephus made clear is that the Essenes had a different view of the afterlife than the Pharisees. They believed shortly after death, the soul was transported to some divine waiting area … separated from the rest of the world by a river.
This realm was frequented by Angels. It is discussed at length in the ancient writing called “History of the Rechabites”. Ironically, the immediacy of this afterlife is much more like the modern Western view of the afterlife… rather than a long sleep until the End of Days.
Tom Wright deals in depth with the passages in Josephus, the contradictory passages in Hippolytus confiming Essene belief in resurrection, and the Qumran documents pertinent to the matter in The Resurrection of the Son of God pp.181-189.
I recommend you pick up on the arguments there - the book’s pretty essential reading anyway!
Well, I have read it, but I’m not sure what you think it actually proves: scholarly opinion is divided between its being a Christian monastic document (which would be from a late, ascetic form of desert Christianity) and a Christian interpolation of an earlier Jewish document with heavy Platonic influence, romancing about a particular “Brigadoon” landed granted to the biblical Rechabites back in Jeremiah’s time.
There’s no indication that it represents any particular brand of Judaism, nor that the Christian interpolators were in any way typical, nor even that it represents any serious theology of either.
There’s a bit about children coming from virginal relationships - but is that from the Jewish source or the Christian interpolator, given that references to the resurrection creep into that section? It may resemble the practice of the particular Essene sect we discussed - but if so it’s odd that an Essene writer would describe it as a wondrous novelty, together with living 600 years and so on.
And after a particularly blessed life of several centuries in their actually timeless Shangri-la, the Rechabites get prior warning of their disembodied souls being translated by angels to a Platonic heaven. This tells us nothing but that there were sometime in the early centuries AD Christians, or maybe Jews, or perhaps both, who told fables about a Platonic freeing of the soul - at least for a fabulous race of long lived OT saints. And such platonic influence is no secret, being well-documented by Wright using more historically tractable documents.
Most importantly, though, the disembodied life-after-death motif tells us nothing about its relationship to the belief shared by most Jews (apart from the most hellenised and the “when you’re dead you’re dead” Sadduccees), that such a state was only the interim before the Day of the Lord (often to be inaugurated by Messiah) at which time there would be a general physical physical resurrection of the just, at least, to life on the restored earth (and in some cases of the unjust to their deserved punishment).
ONE) You have described the THREE rival world views of most all JEWS - - just as Josephus intended:
A) When you are dead you are dead Sadducees [which may in fact represent Judaism prior to the Exile - - for it makes little sense for elite priests to DISCOURAGE a belief in the afterlife];
B) When you die, you are really sleeping, waiting for the End of Days [which appears to be the mainstream messianic position of the Pharisees]; and
C) When you die, after 3 days your soul travels to a Shangri-la or Brigadoon realm [< using your words here, Jon], as these saintly individuals wait for the End of Days.
You can use dismissive language all you want, but [C] clearly matches Western thought better than [A] or [B] … and the History of the Rechabites clearly has Jewish origins. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck …
TWO) Clarification 2 is a little known fact. In the Greek Encyclopedia Suidas, which is a compilation from 1000 CE, made from much earlier texts and traditions, the origins of the Essenes are connected to the Rechabites.
THREE) Clarification 3 regards your use of the term Platonic. Little appreciated is that the Greeks were heavily influenced by the Zoroastrian view of the afterlife. I have frequently proposed that Zoroastrian contact with the Jewish elite permanently transformed Jewish religion. This influence was also felt by Greek philosophers, but with more moderating affects of Egyptian alternatives.
There is no “relationship” between this view of the afterlife and the 2 other Jewish views (death is death, or death is sleep) - - because they are 3 distinct views of the afterlife. The relationship to look at is the one between the “Rechabite” and the “Greek” views - - where this Brigadoon realm seems to be the same scenario as the one some Greeks imagined with Elysium.
CONCLUSION?
As to the original question asked in the OP - - is it rational to believe in things like the Resurrection?
I would say it is more rational to believe in an afterlife than it is to believe in the End of Days. The End of Days scenario is almost certainly derived from the Zoroastrian mythology of GOOD triumphing over EVIL in the Cosmos. The Egyptians were not worried about EVIL triumphing over all the Universe.
Freemasons (I am one) are likely not to even make someone a Mason if the candidate does not believe in the immortality of the soul (your mileage may differ on exactly how the soul achieves this).
The Greeks exercised a lot of logic on the topic. Most of our most logical Greek predecessors believe that without the preparation of some kind of Mystery School, the difference in your future was as stark as spending eternity in semi-sleep with your face in the mud OR in Elysium.!!!
Jesus seems to describe events in a Jewish version of this Elysium, rather than during the End of Days. The story of the bosom of Abraham. The woman who married seven brothers. Josephus. The writer(s) of the History of Rechabites.
Whereas Paul describes people waiting in their graves for the return of Jesus.
The Bible seems to be an argument between the Pharisaic view of the End of Days Only vs. Paradise BEFORE the End of Days:
Luke 23:42-43, written about the final hours at Calvary:
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee,
Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.