CADRE Comments

Back in 2006, I was working on an analysis of the Guard Story at the end of the Gospel According to Matthew during Easter season (naturally), when I became involved in an exchange on Victor Reppert's "Dangerous Idea" web journal with his friend the atheistic apologist Dr. Keith Parsons on hallucination theories and visions of Jesus by the first disciples. Along the way, the topic of a missing body logically came up, and aside from the usual points of discussion I provided some hints at what I was analyzing (but was not yet ready to publish anywhere); and also (somewhat more vaguely still!) hinted that this would also help provide an answer to a peculiar question often overlooked in apologetics for or against the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth: why didn't the Sanhedrin fake providing a body?! It was this exchange which led directly to me being invited here to the Cadre as a guest author, and I eventually posted a series of articles on the Adventure of the Gu...

Appendix 1: Wouldn't It Be Equally Plausible For Both Sides To Have Been Ignorantly Inventing Details Against Each Other, Leading Over A Sufficiently Long Period Of Such Invention, Never Corrected On Either Side By Any Actual Facts, To The Shape Of The Data In GosMatt's Guard Story? {inhale} I realize that this question almost answers itself, when put that way. But bear with me--this is an example of the practical importance of checking the details of a theory, which isn't always easy to do. Besides, it gives me a welcome opportunity to cover an angle I didn't discuss directly in my original composition! Recently, “Brap Gronk” ( possibly not his or her real name {g}) contributed the following comment to Part 2 of the series (because that is where I was listing a number of possibilities for consideration of plausibility): I have read all nine parts of this series, although perhaps not all in great detail. So there may be an easy argument against the possibility I propo...

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...

New to the series? I recommend tracing back through previous entries to catch up. Part 5 is here. Part 6: The Backhanded Strength of a Weak Story Jews had been replying, to GosMatt's Christian audience, that guards had been 'witnessing' (so to speak) that they had fallen asleep, or otherwise rested (to the point of inattention), during the night and the body had been stolen then by Jesus' disciples. This story, however, is very weak. I already have considered one of these weaknesses--the chief weakness, in fact. Here is a detail of guards, charged by someone in authority to guard a dead body at night. Even if they were Temple guards coming off a hard duty (and thus somewhat likely to fall asleep during a boring watch in the middle of the night, especially if it's in a nice quiet graveyard garden outside the city walls as indicated by the story prior to the Key), what must we believe to accept their story? We (or anyone) must be prepared to believe that a set of sold...

Note: at this point it's easier for me to just point back through previous entries in the series ( Part 4 is here with links going back to Part 1), than to try to summarize it. Part 5: No Body Knows The Trouble They Seen Guards don't spring into existence out of nothing to guard bodies. Guards work for someone. The Jews near GosMatt's writer had evidently been saying something about these guards: namely that the guards had testified to their own failure to keep the body from vanishing, which they explained by claiming they had fallen asleep on the job (or had been so lazy they might as well have fallen asleep. The Greek of GosMatt’s counter-counter-polemic report could be read either way, or so I understand.) It would be ridiculous for the Jews to care enough about the GosMatt Christians' resurrection story, to provide such a refutal, if the Christians’ story did not concern something that touched them as Jews . GosMatt's author evidently thought it did this; which...

Part 4: They Ain't Got No Body The most recent inference I have drawn from the Key (in Part 3 ), is that Jesus' body must have been missing (not only that some opponents to Christianity were admitting it was missing, which was how I ended Part 2 instead). But was it always missing? Was it perhaps found? I can only recall one claim more-or-less contemporary with GosMatt (within a hundred years anyway), to the effect that the body of Jesus was found in a well near the tomb; and was carried to Pilate for identification. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where this story was reported; and although I have done some research I haven't been able to find it again. But it will serve well enough, even in its secondary hearsay position, for some purposes of illustration. One thing we may be certain of: this body-in-the-well story, or any similar story, fact or fiction, must either not have been known or not have been accepted by the official opposition in contact with GosMatt’s aud...

Part 3: A Shape of Results, and Other Shapes I have been engaged in considering how far even a minimal acceptance of various historical facts, and the most historically plausible consequences of those facts, might be reasonably carried in building a set of beliefs about the person (or literary character?) known as Jesus of Nazareth. This consideration has been mainly focused on the historically certain existence (as a piece of textual data) of the small narrative included in The Gospel According to Matthew (or GosMatt) 28:11b-15, and its most historically plausible relationship to the author (or final redactor or whatever) and the target audience of GosMatt. This small narrative, which I have been calling Guard Adventure-B (i.e. what happens when a set of guards reports to authorities about the missing body of Jesus), has been the key to unlocking an increasing number of details which (as a most-plausible historical inference) may reasonably be believed to have been agreed to by tota...