For example, i have always been taught, that in theology if there is a standout text that is inconsistent with other biblical themes/statements, then we are reading the text in error. This is where quite often translational issues are to be blamed.
This example is the placement of the comma in bible translations regarding the statement from Christ saying to the thief on the cross “i tell you this day you will be with me in paradise.”
The two versions are:
I tell you this day, you will be with me in paradise
i tell you, this day you will be with me in paradise
One camp of theologians make the assumption that the above passage talks of the doctrine of immediate entry into heaven upon death. However, another camp emphatically claim that is incorrect given many other places in the bible where that is clearly not the case. So we find ourselves here in conflict.
When one takes a quick peek at the ancient text, there is no punctuation
43 et dixit illi Iesus amen dico tibi hodie mecum eris in paradiso (Latin Vulgate)
and so quite often (if not always) the placement of the comma in the text becomes a matter of opinion. In this case, we have two camps:
those who believe that when we die we go to heaven align the comma to suit their beliefs.
those who align with other biblical statements such as “the dead know nothing, all memory of them is forgotten, and for them there is no more reward”, these individuals place the comma according to that doctrine.
I align with the second camp…that the dead stay in the grave. A small sample of the main reasons for my position are:
the second coming of Christ - If the dead are raised in the second coming…why would they need to be raised in they are already in heaven?
Lazarus raised from the dead - Christ stated to the disciples “Lazaurus is dead” then, he spoke to the body from outside the tomb and called him out of it.
on the day of the crucifixion, a heap of individuals bodies came out of the grave and those individuals were then seen walking through the city (they obviously were not zombies)
Which theology and doctrine do you align with on this topic and why?
Possibly. Challenging to believe in “Soul Sleep” and in God’s ability to reconstruct what’s left after cremation. On the other hand, Genesis 3:19, which states, “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” may be in the Bible, but “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” is not, although it is common enough at funerals.
My own father-in-law preferred the idea of burial, ideally as high off the ground as possible, “so the worms couldn’t eat his body.”
Funeral homes like full-body burials in pretty caskets. The profit margin is higher.
++++++
re: Luke 23:43. IMO, what’s the likelihood of Jesus believing in “soul sleep”?
thats a really good observation and question aquaticus. To be honest, i havent actually thought about that angle before although i must admit the notion of some Christians not believing in cremation I am familiar with.
For me, that is where context and other biblical writings about the same fundamental come into it. Hence my belief in dead remaining in the grave until the second coming.
I believe that whilst the Bible talks about a number of resurrection events, there are only two directly cited examples of resurrected individuals alive today. These are:
Moses - satan argued with God over his body and, he was visible to the disciples at the transfiguration
Christ - appears to disciples in upper room, then 500 other individuals saw him during those last 6 weeks before His ascension.
I don’t see any doctrine or theology involved, really. As to the Greek, I can argue it either way (and have done so), though if it was meant to communicate “Today I tell you” I would expect σήμερον (SAY-meh-roan), “today”, to appear before σοι (soi), “to you”, but that’s not a terribly strong argument. I’d want to delve into TDNT and more to look at the positional use of σήμερον and see if there’s a pattern that’s informative.
I found via strongs that it occurs about 40 times in the New Testament. After reading through then though, it doesnt appear conclusive to me… https://biblehub.com/greek/se_meron_4594.htm
Logically a significant problem in reading it as meaning that day…
Generally crucifixion took days, so how could Christ claim that thief was going to be in paradise on a day when its unlikely he would have died unless Christ meant for the comma to mean “im telling you today, …”?
Yeah I read through the Englishman’s Concordance list yesterday and thought it was too bad that Luke didn’t throw in a ὅτι (HOH-tee) to indicate where the start of the dialogue began – he does that in other places but not in ch. 23. That’s why I wanted the TDNT (which I should have available now; I just bought an electronic bundle of NT references I used to have in my library, just need to download it [predicted download time 3hr 48min if I’m not doing anything else!]) – it goes back into all available pre-NT plus first century literature.
Christ knew from the Psalms how things were going to go, right down to the spear in His side.
That’s something we fail to keep in mind: Jesus knew the whole time that He was going to be crucified, and understood it in detail. It wasn’t a surprise, it was foretold starting in Deuteronomy right on through Zechariah. Jesus almost certainly witnessed crucifixions, or at least crucified people if He didn’t see the process itself.
And He also knew when and where – at a Passover, outside the walls of Jerusalem. That meant that anyone crucified with Him would be killed when He was, since the Romans knew better than to leave victims on crosses on the Sabbath of a great festival! So even as a human, He knew He wouldn’t live beyond the day of crucifixion, and by extension that neither would anyone else on a cross next to Him.
Which does nothing to solve the matter, unfortunately.
Here is a third camp: Our physical bodies which are a part of the space-time continuum are dead and food for worms – they are of no significance to us whatsoever. Our spiritual bodies are not a part of the space-time continuum and thus all talk of before or after in relation to events concerning our physical body is meaningless. The only continuation of our consciousness is in the spiritual body outside the space and time of this physical universe. In a surgical operation we wake up after it is done, there is no reason to expect anything different in the resurrection,
The dead bodies are recycled and part of all living things including later generations of human beings. The dead spiritual bodies are brought to life by the grace of God including the work of Jesus on the cross.
No medical doctors examined the body of Lazarus to pronounce him dead. He was dead by the meaning of that word to the people 2000 years ago and he was revived as many are revived these days (or even revive themselves) – a miracle to be sure, because God was at work there. But no I do not believe dead cells were brought back to life.
Matthew 27 The earth shook, rocks split apart, and tombs opened. The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead. They left the cemetery after Jesus’ resurrection, went into the holy city of Jerusalem, and appeared to many people. And yet there are no stories of things they did after this by anyone – or even stories by people who experienced this. This tells us it was not only a very transitory happening but a very subjective one as well – which is thus in the category of spiritual rather than physical events. (they obviously were not people returning to continue the life they had left)
I dont think one can make that conclusion based on nothing more being said about those who were resurrected…we have to either believe they were and walked bodily as the text clearly states or we dont. To say its not would be hugely problematic for ones faith.
History demonstrates it is no problem whatsoever because people do it all the time. Like the Millerites believing in Jesus’ return in 1844. No such thing was observed so they decided it was a spiritual event. And do those religions simply cease to exist and its people stop believing? No they do not. The religious denominations derived from the Millerites not only continue to this day but they have millions of members.
This Matthew 27 story is like a religion having scripture which says a UFO landed on the White House lawn in April of 1993. How can there be no record of the event by anyone outside their religion? Does that seem incredulous to you? But this story in Matthew 27 is no different.
Frankly the beliefs of many religions all over the world in things we do not see is much the same. No I don’t look down my nose at them and say it is all nonsense. What I say instead is that reality is not exclusively objective, i.e. not the same for everyone. Some people experience things which other people do not experience. Because of this, AND ONLY because of this can I take this scripture seriously because otherwise it would be like Sagan’s invisible dragon – something not detected by all the evidence of history and thus most likely a fantasy, literary device, or liberty of story telling.
And BTW a survey of comments on the internet shows that most Christian scholars take this as a literary device, largely because there is no corroboration from other gospels or writings in the Bible. And they observe the contradiction with other passages which tell us that Jesus resurrection was first. I observe however that many of the fathers of the church like Apollinaris, Jerome, Remigius, and Aquinas took this as an account of something which really happened, but these people (rising from their graves) must have gone elsewhere with Jesus. I have no problem with taking it as something which really happened also, but obviously it is not something which everyone experienced – darn few frankly (only Matthew out of all the writers of the New Testament said anything about it).
Obviously you take your beliefs from the Gnostic and eastern religions and not from the Bible. You should try reading the Bible itself rather than just the things all these scholars have written imposing far eastern beliefs on the Bible.
It is the rational soul inhabiting and operating the body like a puppet which is eastern mysticism, no matter how many Christians have adopted this Gnostic and Far Eastern belief.
Everything I said is right there in 1 Corinthians 15, excepting only the terminology of modern physics about space-time.
The belief that there is an existence outside the space-time universe which God created? No that is not eastern mysticism but Christianity all the way.
The spiritual body is all from 1 Corinthians 15. And it says right there in the text that this is not of this world but of heaven.
The new-age and far eastern belief in an astral body is not the same thing as the spiritual body spoken of by Paul at all. Again the difference is that this astral body is always portrayed as something residing in the physical body and capable of leaving it and moving around independently under certain conditions like death, exactly the way so many people talk about this “soul” thing they believe in. But this doesn’t agree with Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says it only comes to life when the physical body dies. For the eastern religions believing in reincarnation, the soul or astral body comes first to animate and inhabit the physical body. But Paul teaches that the physical body is first and only provides the seed from which the spiritual body grows.
I dont think your claims there give any evidence with which scripture can be taken seriously.
You claim literary technique to deny the historical accounts in tue bible that are incovenient with naturalism science and then try to claim the rest is more than fairytales?
No wonder atheists laugh at the stupidity of Christianity…they can see the holes in your story there…its a convouted, disjointed mess.
The only way the bible stands against the challenges/tests applied ro it is through its internal consistency. Atheism doesnt need the bible to explain morality (which is what the literary approach aims to do, because there is nothing else to be gleaned from that approach).
We can seek out the writings of other philosophers for our morality…Socratees for example.
I was raised by nonbelievers. I am a perfect example of what a nonbeliever can find sensible in Christianity. It is your nonsense which atheists will always laugh at.
Incorrect. That is not what I do. That is what most Christians do to make sense of the Bible and eliminate the contradictions from simplistic treatments of the text.
It is your literal physical historical interpretation of Matthew 27 which creates inconsistency. It says people were resurrected before Jesus, when the Bible says Jesus was resurrected first.
“This Matthew 27 story is like a religion having scripture which says a UFO landed on the White House lawn in April of 1993. How can there be no record of the event by anyone outside their religion? Does that seem incredulous to you? But this story in Matthew 27 is no different.”
I think it’s a fair question to ask and has nothing to do with naturalism.
Matthew 27:
" 51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and[e] went into the holy city and appeared to many people."
Why wasn’t this reported on by anyone outside of the gospel writers? The dead walking the streets would seemingly be something worth recording, as would the sudden ripping of the temple curtain. Events much less spectacular were recorded by historians of the time.
At the same time, there is a long list of possible reasons as to why it wasn’t recorded outside of the gospels, but perhaps not very satisfying ones.
Paul teaches that it dies before it becomes a new body…the seed grows from death, not a living plant.
Second, the claim we are raised as spirits has a couple of problems:
Paul in 1 Cor 15 preceeds his spill about earthly and heavenly bodies with the statement… 39Not all flesh is the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another. 40
Apostle Thomas, who, in John’s account, refused to believe the resurrected Jesus had appeared to the ten other apostles until he could see and feel Jesus’s crucifixion wounds. Wikipedia
Its all good and well to claim a heavenly body isnt physcial, however, clearly Christs resurrected body was physical…that means that He (God) is nlt bound to or by, and operates outside the laws of, physics…God is not restricted by the laws of science. Funny this should come up as i have been reading a book by a non Christian who makes exactly that consession about theism…
Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” by Thomas Nagel.
Another point about the seed…note that Paul tells us that the body that grows from the seed, Ggod designed…
37And what you sow is not the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else. 38But God gives it a body as He has designed, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body
and that right there is where you are very mistaken…i was raised outside of Christianity as well…in a family whos patriarch was staunch evolution through and through.
What it does tell me though, is that your grabble onto the threads of Christianity isnt founded on a historical fact in its writings but rather a needy longing for the hope something else exists despite the evidence to the contrary!
that right there is exactly why i am so focused on the historical evidence for the bible. Once we throw out the genealogies and other literal evidences shown in its timeline, Christianity becomes nothing more than the fairytale that you subscribe to.
