CADRE Comments

PART 1: A SEPULCHRAL NO GosMark's author sheerly invented the empty tomb of Jesus of Nazareth! {/clickbait} This has long been an article of faith for fringe sceptical theories; the most recent wave of which was kicked off back in the 90s by Burton Mack popularizing the theory during the heydey of the Jesus Seminar. Ideas that Mark invented the empty tomb tend to be associated with developmental theories of John Dominic Crossan as well, although he actually argues (somewhat notoriously in how he goes about it and what he tries to make of it) that someone else invented the empty tomb tradition much earlier than Mark did! (For sake of expediency I'm using "Mark" as a shorthand for "the author", without intending an assumption of author identity. More on this qualification soon.) JDC essentially argues that Mark borrowed written material, much later also found in GosPeter. The actual argument for pre-Markan written tomb material (even from Cross...

In his excellent inaugural post our newest contributor, Elliot Swattridge, tells us that Mark did mention the resurrection .I thought it might complement if I told us how he didn't make it up. At lest the empty tomb was already part of the Christian tradition when Mark wrote. The crux of the Easter faith is the empty tomb. Atheists and sketics believe they have proved that Mark made up the empty tomb.Peter Kirby once defended the idea, claiming a huge number of scholars agreed with that. I'm not sure if he still holds to that or not. The paper is still up and the argument was made so I will  refute it. Peter Kirby once wrote: Several schoalrs doubt the historicity of the empty tomb. I intend to set out the reasons for disbelieving the empty tomb story. I will argue that the empty tomb narrative is the invention of the author Mark. This conclusion will be supported by showing that all the reports of the empty tomb are dependent upon Mark, that there are si...

This is in response to the last post by BK. BK defended the idea of the James ' ossuary as legitimate, but skeptics contended that no artifact has gone unexposed as a hoax. While this may be true of small personal items, such as Jesus' comb or face cloth or whatever, it's not true of major locations in archaeology such as the tomb of Christ. Long consider a forgery of pilgrims the archeological evidence supports the notion that we have the tomb and it was the actual tomb. Professor Biddle (The Tomb of Christ) proves the site of the current Church of the Holy Sepulcher (CHS) is the very sight selected by Constantine for his chapel because he believed it to be site of the tomb of Jesus, the one that turned up empty, and the near the cross of Golgotha. It's only a few yards from the site of the crucifixion (so some believe). In the past atheists have become very angry over this point and gone to great lengths of deception and hostility to avoid the obvious conclusi...

Christopher Bryan is a biblical scholar noted for his work on the genre of Mark (as Chris Price has blogged about previously). In this volume , the culmination of decades of research, he presents his discussion of the resurrection of Jesus. Coming on the heels of Michael Licona's monumental tome on the resurrection, which itself was preceded by N.T. Wright's magnum opus , what sets this volume apart? One distinction is that, while it covers much of the same ground as Wright's book, it is much shorter and easier to digest. Much of the technical discussion is found in the endnotes, which take up nearly half the book (reminiscent of Craig Keener's book on the historical Jesus). The main text itself is concise and elegant, and it is obviously the mature distillation of a lifetime of research and thinking about related topics (indeed, one reason why the endnotes are so voluminous is that Bryan often digresses into discussions of literature, art and ethics, which all how...

New to the series? I recommend tracing back through previous entries to catch up. Part 8 is here. Part 9: Some Body, Give Us A Summary! I have covered plenty of ground since I began discussing the Key (GosMatt 28:11b-15); so a reminder and summary of developed positions may be handy. I have arranged the positions in a rough combination of evident chronology and topicality. 1.) A man named Jesus existed--the same man whom GosMatt's writer (and his sources, if any) wrote about (and more importantly, for this study, were talking about to some Jews): i.e., Yeshua bar-Yosef, Jesus son of Joseph, Jesus the Nazarene, who came to be called by some: Kristos, Hamaschia, Messiah, the Anointed One. (The Jewish opposition to GosMatt's writer and his audience, or the ones our author had in mind anyway, were not saying "This guy never existed" or "You've got the wrong guy, you should be talking about..." They were saying "Yeah, and his disciples stole his body!...

New to the series? I recommend tracing back through previous entries to catch up. Part 6 is here. Part 7: Hints of a Particular Person and Place So, where are we now? We have the chief priests, setting guards over a body. Which pretty much obliterates the notion that the body was thrown into a common grave. Jesus' disciples wouldn't have thrown their own Master into a common grave; the only people who would have done that, would be the Romans or the Sanhedrin itself. If the Romans had done this, then Romans would have accepted any necessary responsibility for guarding it (assuming any guarding was thought to be desirable in the first place). Yet as I have shown, it is not the best historical conclusion that the Romans were the ones who sent the guard (even before we get out of the Key and into other parts of the GosMatt story, much less into other accounts of the incident!) So either the Romans never had anything at all to do with the body--as far as the Key by itself goes, and...

Hat tip to Victor Reppert for this one. Every year, as Lent season starts up and Easter approaches, it isn't unexpected to find counter-Easter apologetics gearing up as well in Western culture. Which is entirely fair: we're still a free society, and it's still quite acceptable and legal for apologetics either way to be publicly promoted in North America and Europe, on broadcast and in print media. Um... right? Actually, in a way I would be more worried if mainstream broadcast and print media (I mean those not specifically dedicated to evangelism) started throwing up pro-apologetic articles and neglecting counter-apologetic ones. Not because that would mean they've been co-opted by a faction promoting a particular religious view (instead of being... well, what they currently are. {g}) But because it would mean that the pro-apologetic side has become such a true minority that the news media thinks pro-apologetics count as "news"!--i.e. as something interesting ...

In Parts 2 and 3 of this Round, I demonstrated that the actual data of the texts does not indicate the authors were using the name "Jud-", including with Judas Iscariot, to heap derision on orthodox Judaism; that there is no clear progression across the texts of exonerating Pilate while blaming the Jewish religious authorities; and (most problematic of all, perhaps), that Bishop Spong himself has less than no problem admitting that there was a fatal rejection of Jesus and his teaching (even on Bishop Spong's theologically truncated notion of Jesus' teaching) by the mainstream Jewish authorities of his day: a rejection leading to Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans via the Sanhedrin. Which admission of historical accuracy, radically undermines Bishop Spong's theory for the reason why the authors would invent a fictional character of 'Judas Iscariot', in order to promote rejection of orthodox Judaism among Jewish Christians. There is, of course, th...