The risen Christ appeared to . . . whom, exactly?

[dafydd]

We do this with evidences that are allowed today.
Or proof that we are getting that correlates to the evidence at hand and what is written that is not negative but positive in correlations to prophesies by our own loved ones before death.
And in many other ways..

What? Is English your first language? Sounds like your third or fourth.

 

[dafydd]

lolz, don't worry your pretty little head..... you..... wouldn't be able to recognize him if he was standing in front of you.

And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.

Got any more fairy stories?

 

[Jake Dale]

Got any more fairy stories?

you mean this forum?

 

[dafydd]

you mean this forum?

No,we deal with reality here. Fairy stories like the ones in the holey babble.

 

[Foster Zygote]

If you have a good answer, please share it. I'm interested.

I think the best he can do was just sent to AAH.

 

[TimCallahan]

lolz, don't worry your pretty little head..... you..... wouldn't be able to recognize him if he was standing in front of you.

And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.

Regardless of whether or not I'd recognize the risen Christ, the fact remains that the gospels, along with the material in 1 Corinthians, give mutually contradictory accounts of how many people the risen Christ appeared to and in what order. Matthew and Luke disagree on whether Jesus told the disciples to leave Jerusalem and meet him in Galilee (Matthew) or to stay n Jerusalem (Luke)

As other posters have already noted, these aren't just discrepancies in testimony between different witnesses. Rather, they are out and out contradictions. So, once more I ask the question: How do you reconcile these contradictory narratives? Or, do you think one variant is truthful, while the others are wrong?

 

[TimCallahan]

We do this with evidences that are allowed today.
Or proof that we are getting that correlates to the evidence at hand and what is written that is not negative but positive in correlations to prophesies by our own loved ones before death.
And in many other ways..

Along with others on this thread, I find this post to be largely incomprehensible. However, I think what you're trying to say is that we tend to blend and harmonize disparate testimonies of witnesses. So, if one witness says the man who fled the scene wore a red shirt and another says, "No, it was hot pink," and a third says it was magenta. we can harmonize them as some variant of red. If one witness says the shirt was red and another says it was green, however, we cannot harmonize these color wheel opposites to get a brown shirt.

Likewise, the discrepancies in the various Resurrection accounts - such as Luke's Jesus meeting the disciples in Jerusalem and telling them to stay there, and Matthew's Jesus telling the disciples he'll meet them in Galilee - are contradictions that I see as being unreconcilable.

 

[dafydd]

I think the best he can do was just sent to AAH.

I saw it before it vanished. Another example of the true christian spirit at full blast.

 

[NoScotsman]

I think the bigger question is, "Why is there no mention of dead people coming back to life in any of Jewish or Roman histories written at the time?"

You would think this would deserve a mention... or, for that matter, why did no historian ever chronicle any of Jesus' miracles?

 

[zooterkin]

I think the best he can do was just sent to AAH.

The best he can do for the next two weeks, anyway.

 

[TimCallahan]

One reason I think Paul's account of the appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Cor. 15:4 - 8 might have been altered has to do with its order:

Jesus appears to Peter
then to the 12
then to the 500 + brethren
then to James
then to all the apostles
then to Paul.

Since Peter was one of the 12 and since we know from Paul's letter to the Galatians that James was in charge of the Jerusalem church, over Peter, it appears that James was demoted in these verses by being placed after the 500+ brethren. Also, until we get to James we have a successively widening circle of people to whom the risen Christ appeared. Also, since none of the gospel writers include the 500 + brethren, a proof they wouldn't leave out had they known of it, I'm assuming it as well was an interpolation. Here's what I see as the original order:

Jesus appears to James
then to the 12
then to all the apostles
then to Paul.

A number of things are notable about this catalogue, regardless if you take it as written or my version. First, the appearances have a somewhat hierarchical order to them. Jesus appears to people in their order of importance. Second, Paul places himself last partly because of his history as a late-comer and partly as a way of showing humility. Finally, his appearing to "the twelve" would seem to indicate that when Paul originally wrote 1 Corinthians, ca. CE 50 - 60, the story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas hadn't yet been formulated.

 

[HansMustermann]

It most certainly is a possibility. But as I keep saying, we don't actually know what the phrase "The Twelve" actually meant for Paul. It certainly could mean "the 12 guys who hung out with Jesus and were his best buddies" or really any group of 12 people of any significance to the church, or more generally any group of 12 people that his audience would already know from him about.

Or for that matter there is no evidence that for him only the 12 were "apostoloi", i.e., envoys or messengers of Jesus. While for us the term "apostle" means some guy who hung around with the great man Jesus himself, the word had no such meaning at the time. Any "envoy" was an "apostolos", to the extent that the king's men sent to collect taxes were also "apostoloi". Paul himself talks about someone as "apostolos" of a certain church to him, or some guys being "apostoloi" of their respective churches. In fact when he does want to mean that some guy is an "apostolos" specifically of Jesus or his message, he often explicitly says "apostle of Jesus Christ", which would kinda be redundant in the way we understand apostle today.

Taking "apostolos" as "envoy" (closest I can think of an exact translation of its meaning) doesn't require any mental gymnastics as to who needs to be demoted and whether there's a Judas counted or not. Jesus could jolly well have hundreds or thousands of envoys or messengers, if he wanted to, basically.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Back when I was a young evangelical Christian I can't recall ever being made aware of the differences in the various gospel accounts. Details from the various accounts are all just mashed together into one super-narrative.

 

[ria_rokz]

Back when I was a young evangelical Christian I can't recall ever being made aware of the differences in the various gospel accounts. Details from the various accounts are all just mashed together into one super-narrative.

I wasn't an evangelical, but rather a meager Presbyterian. I was aware of the differences but not concerned by them. I don't remember how it was dismissed away, but I know it had something to do with one of the gospels being written by a crackpot. Or something. I could be making that up. it didn't bother me at the time because, let's face it, I believed in a giant sky fairy.

 

[HansMustermann]

Along with others on this thread, I find this post to be largely incomprehensible. However, I think what you're trying to say is that we tend to blend and harmonize disparate testimonies of witnesses. So, if one witness says the man who fled the scene wore a red shirt and another says, "No, it was hot pink," and a third says it was magenta. we can harmonize them as some variant of red. If one witness says the shirt was red and another says it was green, however, we cannot harmonize these color wheel opposites to get a brown shirt.

Likewise, the discrepancies in the various Resurrection accounts - such as Luke's Jesus meeting the disciples in Jerusalem and telling them to stay there, and Matthew's Jesus telling the disciples he'll meet them in Galilee - are contradictions that I see as being unreconcilable.

Also, I think that this last part is by itself a better illustration than the colours metaphor. One can explain colour discrepancies via, say, red-green daltonism, but one can't really reconcile it when one witness says an incident happened in New York and another one says it happened in Washington DC.

Between Luke and Acts (both NT canon) we have a big interval when Peter and the gang stay in Jerusalem and are publicly active and visible in Jerusalem. They meet Jesus there after the resurrection at the cemetery, stay with him there until he buggers off to heavens, and then clearly stay around Jerusalem, do miracles, have daily communions, meet in temples, and get in trouble with the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Peter is still there when he gets dragged to court for it.

That's by itself harder to reconcile with John's having them all fishing again in the Sea of Galilee than any colour analogy IMHO.

 

[Elizabeth I]

His logic on other topics is even more bizarre. About the Law alone he has an incoherent position that goes in circles between it's good, but we don't have to do what it says, but it's still good because it keeps crooks and criminals straight, but we still don't need to hold it because Christ is enough, but it's good, but it's a curse from which Christ saves us, but it's still good, but we uphold it by believing in Christ instead of doing what it says. No, literally. That's a condensed version from more than one epistle, but that's actual arguments done by Paul.

Give the boy a break - he was a Gentile and didn't want to have bits of himself snipped off so he had to try to justify ignoring the Law somehow.

Back when I was a young evangelical Christian I can't recall ever being made aware of the differences in the various gospel accounts. Details from the various accounts are all just mashed together into one super-narrative.

Yep, the Sunday-school version. Everyone gets fed a version of Bible Stories for Children.

 

[Garrette]

Along with others on this thread, I find this post to be largely incomprehensible. However, I think what you're trying to say is that we tend to blend and harmonize disparate testimonies of witnesses. So, if one witness says the man who fled the scene wore a red shirt and another says, "No, it was hot pink," and a third says it was magenta. we can harmonize them as some variant of red. If one witness says the shirt was red and another says it was green, however, we cannot harmonize these color wheel opposites to get a brown shirt.

Likewise, the discrepancies in the various Resurrection accounts - such as Luke's Jesus meeting the disciples in Jerusalem and telling them to stay there, and Matthew's Jesus telling the disciples he'll meet them in Galilee - are contradictions that I see as being unreconcilable.

I agree with you on the gist of what you're saying, but it is important not to understate the wide discrepancies in eyewitness testimony; they can go far beyond one person describing a shirt as red and another describing it as green. Witnesses to the same crime scene, real or staged, have described the same person as white, black, short, and tall.

Of course, I don't know of anyone claiming divine inspiration for those eyewitnesses.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Yep, the Sunday-school version. Everyone gets fed a version of Bible Stories for Children.

Then there's the Cecil B. DeMille version of the Old Testament that so many people think is the whole story. I wonder why they didn't show Chuck Heston rallying the Levites to slaughter 3000 of their fellow Hebrews, then telling them how they had brought a blessing on themselves by murdering their sons, brothers friends and neighbors?