What’s likely got to do with it? Jesus knew he was a putrefying corpse.
One could raise a number of questions about the death of Lazarus. The point is that Jesus as God has control over death. This point was made in the other gospels by the raising of the daughter of Jairus. The Resurrection proves that Jesus is the second Person of the Trinity and thus could raise the dead. Whether these two narratives are 100% accurate is not cfear, but thieir meaning is.
On the contrary, Jesus knew Lazarus was only asleep.
11 Thus he spoke, and then he said to them, “Our friend Laz′arus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep.”
And yet Jesus also knew that by the standards of people at the time, Lazarus was dead, and that more people would believe if they saw Lazarus rise from the dead.
14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Laz′arus is dead; 15 and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.
No that was not the point. Jesus makes the point quite clear.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.
And yet the FACT remains that every Christian who has ever lived has died a physical death just Adam and Eve died but not on the day they ate the fruit and just as people died long before Adam and Eve, because the death brought by sin is not a physical death but a spiritual death. And it is the resurrection of the spiritual body (1 Cor 15) to eternal life which God promises to all of us.
No Mitchell. As was very if not most often the case Jesus spoke metaphorically. You are being woodenly literal. Jesus didn’t know anything about ‘the standards of people at the time’ in some timeless, meaninglessly omniscient way. He did know that Lazarus was ‘asleep’ - in rotting death. He knew by the Spirit. He was minimizing death prior to demonstrating His mastery of it, just days before His own. It raises questions about the pragmatism of God in the perfect timing. Lazarus didn’t die by chance.
You are of course free to believe that the Bible is a comic book and fantasy story, perhaps even wishing the world to be irrational magical make-believe contrary to all of our experiences of life. I, on the other hand, believe in a sensible rational world in agreement with our experiences, believe that the Bible is not just a fantasy comic book, and believe in a God who has the integrity to stick to the laws of nature which He created.
So, no I don’t believe that Lazarus was a reanimated corpse like from some zombie movie any more than I believe Jesus was any such thing. According to Paul resurrection is to a spiritual body made of the stuff of heaven rather than a physical body of dust, matter, and other such stuff of the Earth.
You are free to patronize defensively, distractingly, with that false dichotomy.
Jesus had no anachronistic knowledge.
The knowledge I was speaking of doesn’t have to be anachronistic in the sense of knowledge of the future language for things such as the word “coma.” Nevertheless, Jesus often displayed knowledge beyond that of other people. He did speak with the Father quite often, and I have no reason to think that God did not tell Him things. Nevertheless, I don’t believe Jesus had powers and knowledge beyond what other human being could have (John 14:12-14), but many human beings know things that 99.999% of other people alive at the same time do not know – way ahead of their time. Take for example Jesus prediction that the temple would be destroyed. I don’t think that is evidence that this was written after 70AD because a lot of intelligent people observing what was happening in Israel could have predicted the destruction of the temple. Or take the prediction that Peter would deny him 3 times before dawn. I think that was knowledge of Peter’s weaknesses rather than foreknowledge of the future.
Thus, I think your objection is irrelevant.
Your defence is incoherent and full of category errors.
I don’t accept your arbitrary made up categories. Why should I?
Which? Where?
I cannot tell for certain, but it appears that you are most likely over-spiritualizing the resurrection as most Christians do. Christianity reconciles Greek and Jewish thought. Then Greeks insisted on the Spiritual and the Jews the Physical.
The resurrection of the spiritual body is a compromise so to speak, but the emphasis is both on the spiritual AND the Body, not just the spiritual. The Apostolic Creed that we all follow ends with the statement, “I believe ….in the Resurrection of the body.” Everyone believes in the eternal life of the Spirit, so why insist on the eternal life of the body.
The resurrected Jesus has a resurrected body, so why not us? Humans are created in the Image of God and resurrected in the resurrected image of Christ. This is further evidence of the triune nature of Reality.
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I do not recognize any authority of creeds which were never agreed to by any ecumenical council. I believe in the resurrection of the spiritual body just as the apostle Paul taught. It is only physical in the sense of bodily and not physical in the sense of natural law. In 1 Cor 15, Paul teaches that it is not the same body which dies but a different body, made not of dust or of the stuff and nature of the Earth, which is weak and decays, but of the nature of heaven which is strong and imperishable. The natural body is eaten by worms which are eaten by birds which are sometime eaten by people, for the stuff of the Earth is part of cyclical process and does not go off into another world as Jesus so obviously did. Why is that? Why didn’t Jesus stick around for another few years teaching and leading his disciples? Clearly He was no longer of this world.
We certainly cannot read God’s mind, but I would say that what Jesus did says more about us, than about Jesus. Jesus ascended into heaven so the Holy Spirit would come down at Pentecost.
Jesus left us in the body, because His disciples has to learn 1) to witness and minister for themselves rather than depend on His to do it for them, and 2) to know that the Holy Spirit and faith are to only tools they needed to bring in God’s Kingdom. We need s Church grounded on Jesus Christ, not built by Jesus Christ.
Do not confuse the body with the flesh. The flesh is weak because it is the physical alone. The body is God’s gift of empowerment to humanity. We cannot use the Spirit without the body.
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Hmmm…that’s interesting, haven’t thought about it that way before. “Adjectively” God. And perfect in what a human could ever be.
I don’t believe science can solve all our problems. If what you mean by science is ‘science-ism’ (a kind of unspoken religious, in the socially phenomenological way narrative), then certainly not. As a methodology it brings clarity to a lot things though. A good metaphor I heard once is that science is like a streetlamp on a dark street–just because you can see clearly under it doesn’t mean that’s all there is to see.
And the reason I brought up the concept of ‘nephesh’ is that maybe we can look at the spiritual in a more grounded sense, and gain some insight into it instead of just as a far-off concept–that ‘thing’ over there. I.e., like you can say hot flows to cold because it just does, or you gain some framework to understand it via something like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Spirituality maybe doesn’t need to be mystical? Perhaps the spiritual is connected in some way to matter, which would be truer to our experience. After all, what does it even mean to have values without a brain to think of them, or to act in accordance to them?
This doesn’t make values ‘just’ a product of chemicals and the mind, however. I think that is unwarranted reductionism.
Then why does Paul obsess over defending Jesus’s physical resurrection in 1 Corinthians: 15?
Whoops…this point was already made.
I’m back-slarden now John. I now have to bow to the son of man being a slice of God the Son. Nounal.