CADRE Comments

PART 9: IS ANY STICK GOOD ENOUGH TO BEAT AN EMPTY TOMB? Part 1 introduces the question back here, "Did GosMark's author possibly invent the empty tomb?" While acknowledging that the idea isn't metaphysically impossible, I said I would be showing why I would answer no, the author did not possibly invent it, even if I was an atheist. Part 2 refers back to a previous series which (in a systematic argument, starting from extreme scepticism about the sources) decisively indicated that Jesus of Nazareth existed, had disciples, had made enemies of the Sanhedrin, was buried somewhere tomb-like after death and guarded by his enemies, shortly after which his body mysteriously disappeared, and the guards (for a brief period) publicly testified with Sanhedrin support that they all fell asleep allowing Jesus' disciples to steal the body. (Whether their claim about body theft was correct or not was outside the scope of the argument, so far.) Thus the idea equivalent to a...

PART 8: LIKE ONE UNTIMELY BORN Starting from back here , I've been arguing that Mark (the GosMark author) didn't invent the tomb of Jesus Christ or even the emptiness of the tomb: the hypothesis doesn't fit the actual facts of the textual characteristics, and the implications of those textual characteristics, and so I would regard that theory as historically impossible (even though not metaphysically impossible) even if I was an atheist. But as tomb sceptics are well aware, the only earliest texts that mention a tomb are the four canonical Gospels -- and Acts, which people are sometimes less aware of, since the tomb and its emptiness are only mentioned by heavy implication once (in Simon Peter's first sermon) and only mentioned once explicitly in the first main report of a sermon from Paul of Tarsus. Some sceptics, not only Jesus Myth proponents (though naturally them, too), like to appeal to an argument from silence in the epistles (and RevJohn) about the tomb, ...