This idea of a twin is quite a vast conspiracy by Jesus’ family to keep a twin hidden from public view. LOL And why did they do this? They planned on creating the whole Christian religion with a staged resurrection. WOW That is more planning and intentionality in the creation of Christianity than I even believe God had. Quite impressive. LOL
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This was already stated up front. I am not sure why you are quoting me and responding to me with a something I directly stated in post #2.
Some of them dying for their belief means they took it seriously. We can go no further. We can state unequivocally on historical grounds that some of Jesus’s earliest followers believed he came back to them after death on a Roman cross.
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I can’t find it in post #2…
It was quoted for you.
That doesn’t say anything about people being martyred or dying for their beliefs.
Same reason I gave up on “higher criticism” – make the right assumptions and you can argue for anything.
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I don’t think we can give up on higher criticism. Most of us want to understand the historical context of these works and questions like date, authorship, literary origin, genre, etc. They are somewhat important but take a backseat to other more important things of course. But I think as a Christian we have to realize the limitations of higher criticism and balance that with our belief in these texts being sacred. The simplest example I can give is the snake in the garden story. My understanding is that there isn’t the slightest hint in the story the serpent is the devil. Using higher criticism we would interpret this story in its ancient Babylonian context and would most likely see the serpent as one of God’s creation, maybe the craftiest one. But if we approach from a canonical dimension, including Revelation12:9, and put any stock in Church tradition, most Christians have seen the serpent as the devil and Genesis 3:15 as a clear reference to Jesus.
Higher criticism probably says Jesus was back-read into the OT and the gospels intentionally retell and fabricate details of his life to mirror ancient events in Jewish salvation history-- many events which higher criticism also probably thinks did not happen (e.g. Exodus). Imagine that, fictitious details of Jesus’s life were fabricated to mirror a Jewish history that never happened.
But I would suggest as Christians we are free to believe there is a Christo-centric thread running through the whole Bible and that Jesus’s life intentionally mirrored that of Israel, not through the creation of the evangelists, but via God’s sovereignty and foresight. This thread does not become apparent until the work is read as a whole.
People will inevitably disagree with all of this but I personally think we need to find a balance between understanding the text historically while also reading it from a canonical dimension. If we believe it is inspired then it is certainly more than the sum of the parts we analyze as we atomize every aspect of it.
I find the canons od higher criticism mostly sober but I think we have to recognize the limitations of historical probability and that history runs on principles of methodological naturalism. If our faith is true, if God came to earth and worked wonders, if God inspired a canon over a thousand years, methodological naturalism just can’t get that correct. It precludes it by default. That is why I say "history (I mean historical reconstruction) is not what happened in the past, it’s a best guess based on certain presuppositions. Miracles by definition seem to be improbable events and historians like figuring out what is most probable. History just can’t get that right. It’s like trying to find a bone in sand on a beach with a metal detector.
So when we approach the Bible from the perspective of higher criticism, most likely miracles are going to be flatly rejected, Jesus will be viewed as being back read into the OT, many details of his life will be viewed as creations from the Old Testaments, and predictions of his fate and knowledge of his death mostly post-Easter creations. This is a huge portion of scripture and scholars are coming in already thinking that much of it is unreliable and untrustworthy since it is miraculous and theological.
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Though contrary to what many people seem fond of doing, I like steel manning everything, including conservative apologetics for the resurrection. I think were have a tendency to confuse philosophical arguments with historical ones. I even left a part out in my responses that can be misunderstood. At any rate, we also approach issues differently depending on whether we are looking to support our beliefs or find a reason not to believe something. I came across this yesterday in Jason Waller’s COSMOLOGICAL FINE-TUNING ARGUMENTS (2020) which is a phenomenal work:
Psychologists have noted that people ask different questions based on whether they want to accept the conclusion of an argument. When people want to accept a conclusion they often ask, “can I believe it on the basis of this evidence?” When they do not want to believe it, they then ask, “must I believe it on the basis of this evidence?” These subtly different questions allow us to get the conclusion that we want because there is usually some evidence for the preferred view and only very rarely (if ever in philosophy) is there overwhelming evidence for the view.
On philosophical grounds, it does not follow that because someone genuinely believes something it must be true. The disciples fit here. Our best reconstruction doesn’t show them using their preaching to get rich, in fact, many of them faced persecution and some of them death for their preaching and beliefs. We can be confident their belief in the resurrection of Jesus was genuine on historical grounds. Now we cannot be sure what some of them thought “resurrection meant.”
Of course, in my mind, the conservative apologist is not making this philosophical argument: Jesus followers really believed he rose from the dead, therefore he rose from the dead. That is silly so a critique along that line is a worthless straw man. When we point out crazy things like conspiracy theories, aliens, etc., which is subconsciously disparaging by the way, we are not addressing the actual historical arguments made. William Lane Craig and similar apologists offer an argument from best explanation. He lays out his steps elsewhere and I will not repeat or criticize them. I will offer an analogy:
Let’s say there was a festival in 33CE and we knew for certain that a half dozen people all claimed to have seen the local leader of their synagogue pocket some money meant to help widows. Would we believe them? Do we trust this eyewitness testimony? I know eyewitnesses get things wrong but don’t we rely on this sort of testimony all the time, including in a court of law? We might think, maybe they were political opponents and lied. This happens in life. But what if they had nothing of monetary value to gain by coming forward and were persecuted for speaking out yet they never recanted? I think we would rightly consider their testimony even stronger. We know that many of Jesus’s originally followers claim to have seen him after he died. Sure, this doesn’t prove, philosophically that they did, but in terms of historical testimony it seems quite solid. If this was not a “supernatural event” this sort of testimony would probably be accepted by historians. And this brings us to what the conservative apologists would call a “supernatural bias” on the part of critics.
At the end of the day, I am skeptical and I understand and even run my life thinking extraordinary claims usually warrant extraordinary evidence. But that is a philosophical presupposition, or a matter of experience and I also determine what is extraordinary. It has nothing to do with the nature of the historical evidence. I do think conservative scholars overstate the evidence for things like the empty tomb but their arguments are still highly educated.
The real issue is people will find reasons to believe in things they want to just as people will find reasons to not believe in things they don’t want to. I am comfortably knowing that some of Jesus’s earliest followers strongly believed he rose from the dead and appeared to them. I can’t expect anything more on historical grounds. We are in good intellectual shape here.
Vinnie
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Not so much since it was learned that the Gospels actually fit into the ancient biography category, but yes.
Wracking my brain here . . . there are two German words for history that are used to make a distinction; your “history” here would be historische (or something like that) but I’m not recalling its counterpart – geschictshce?
[Okay, here’s a place where AI is useful: ChatGPT says, “The two German terms for history are “Geschichte” and “Historie”.”] Geschicte is the story told from history that gives meaning.
Then there’s the way it was asked in the science university courses I took: “What does this evidence suggest?”
It still fascinates me that this was essentially the same question that professors pounded into us to ask of ancient texts: what does the evidence – the text as it is – suggest?
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