CADRE Comments

PART 4: LOVE A TOMB At this point rather than providing a summary, it's probably better to just start back at Part 1 with the introduction of the question, or Part 2 with the first decisive reason why I answer, "Nope, I don't think it's possible that GosMark's author did invent the empty tomb," and why I would argue that even if I was an atheist. But in Part 3 , I ended by pointing out that even though the tomb story was clearly accepted by Christian groups broadly without any known early competition against it and without any evident problems in itself, tomb stories did still tend to come with associated problems. And those associated problems, I'll be arguing, add to the evaluation. One such problem, mentioned back in Part 1, is that, whenever GosMatt was written, at least some Jewish opponents were appealing to a very early accusation, with authoritative force, of disciples having stolen the body; an explanation that, despite its own associate...

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 7 is here. Part 8: So Why a Theft? On top of everything else so far, I can build some more inferences from the fact that the counter-Christian report (being addressed by the author of GosMatt in the Key) was "the •disciples• •stole• the body". I will present the most remote and tenuous inference first. If the disciples had to "steal" the body, then by implication the disciples had no legal right to its possession. This (if I am not inferring too far) would be an indication that whoever did have the body, was not one of the people commonly recognized to be Jesus' disciples. Yet neither (certainly) did any of the State Departments have total possession of the body. Yet (again) whoever controlled the body was someone who had enough clout to keep one of the State Departments (namely the Sanhedrin, who set the guards over the body) from simply taking the body themselves and putti...

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...

I had heard that a new Shroud book was on the way this autumn, but I hadn't heard any real details on it yet. The Associated Press has now released an article on at least one main new claim from historian Barbara Frale's book: the identification and translation of scribbled letters in Greek, Latin and Aramaic detected over (or near) the head of the Shroud. The letters (or anyway the appearance of letters) have been known about for some time; the last I had heard, the prevailing theory was that they were due to coins on the eyes: specifically a Roman coin with a shepherd's staff and the Greek inscription TIBERIOU CAISEROS (known to have been minted between 29 and 32 CE) on the right eye, and a Julia lepton on the left eye. (Both coins would be 'leptons' of different sorts.) The AP article, however, reports that high resolution photos of the Shroud taken in 2002 showed no evidence of coins; thus undermining what, until then, had been a long-running theory with a lot ...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) And On That Day He Rested (The storytellers continue in harmony...) Now when all the groups who had come together for this sight, observed what had happened, they began to return (to the city), beating their breasts (in grief). And many women were there; who had followed Jesus from Galilee, waiting on Him--among whom was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less and Joseph, and Salome the mother of the sons of Zebedee. They stood at a distance, with all His acquaintances, seeing these things. ....... Now, after these things, as evening was already coming... Look!--a rich man from Arimathea, a city of the Jews, named Joseph! A good and fair-minded man, a prominent member of the Sanhedrin, who himself had been a disciple of Jesus and who was waiting for the kingdom of God. He had not ...