CADRE Comments

Doherty tries to construct a fictional history for his fantasy group, the "Q community," and then invents a crisis in which they needed a leader. Out of that crisis the Jesus myth emerges to offer them the hope of a leader. One wonders how this would work in real Life. Real groups need real leaders. It seems more likely that a fictional or mythological figure would be the object of worship rather than become a group leader who never existed. But all this talk of a group makes us wonder, was Jesus a total loaner before he began his ministry? John seems to indicate in his Gospel that Jesus had friends, he had a social circle. That consisted at least of the little family of Bethany, Lazarus and his two sisters. But did Jesus not belong to a group? He had a human nature (speaking from an Orthodox standpoint), why would he not belong to a group. Jesus may have emerged out of Hellenistic groups and thus had a penchant for Hellenistic sounding ideas, and he may ha...

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...

This is an apologetics site, not a specifically evangelical one; and relatedly, I tend (and prefer) to write apologetics--defenses and establishments of little pieces here and there, so that real evangelists somewhere else will have a little better soil to work with when spreading the seed for harvest. My recent series (which I'm about half through with) is one such case: despite the meticulous detail, I really have only a dozen or so relatively small points to make with it, compared to the hundreds (or thousands?) which a fully conversant Christian might believe (and which a sceptic might, or must, be prepared to believe in order to profess her loyalty--certainly not to me, but to Someone infinitely greater than I, Whose sandals I am not even fit to untie.) But, do all those things matter? In one sense, no, I don't believe they all matter for some purposes. I think what matters, and so what matters to God--whether now or in any life to come--is this: that a person is willing i...

In their book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus , Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona argue for the historical reality of Jesus' bodily resurrection using the "minimum facts" approach. Rather than get bogged down in inerrancy and other debates, they focus on the key facts demonstrating Jesus' resurrection. For them, the key facts are: *Jesus' death by crucifixion. *Disciples' Beliefs that Jesus Appeared. *Conversion of Paul. *Conversion of James. *Empty Tomb. William L. Craig, another significant apologist for the historical bodily resurrection of Jesus likewise focuses, in his accessible The Son Rises , on the empty tomb and Jesus' resurrection appearance. Craig gives special emphasis to Jesus' honorable burial by Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus' appearances to James and Paul and their subsequent commitment to the Christian cause. Craig, Licona, and Habermas argue that these basic facts are generally supported by most of the relevant sc...

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...