Islam and Buddhism as well? All have been hijacked throughout history. Constantine being the first to hijack, paganize, and politicize the Christian faith. Enter early Roman Catholicism...and the Crusades - neither resemble early Christianity; the true faithful of Christ.Mulu wrote:remember that as soon as Christians gained a foothold, they started their own bloody persecutions that have lasted to this day. Just look at the Decree of Theophilus in 391, or the lynching of Hypatia in 415. And I doubt I really need to recount all the blood spilled in Christ's name after that. Given the actions of Christians over the millenia, in the name of Christ, I think it's safe to say that Christianity has no moral value.
Mulu wrote:Some historians say Jesus never existed at all, he is a total fabrication.
Only a small minority accept a nonhistoricity thesis. It's important to remain intellectually honest, not viewing history through a prism of atheism. The New Testament is hardly the only source. Consider the writings of Tacitus, Josephus, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, the Talmud, Lucian, Valentius, Saturninus, and Phlegon.Grand Fromage wrote:If we presume Jesus existed and was crucified (which is NOT at all universally accepted by historians, despite any claims to the contrary)...
Nekulor wrote:he was buried by the agents of the empire, according to everything I've seen. I don't think his followers ever got a chance to lay their hands on his body before he was arrested.
With Pilate's permission, Joseph of Arimathea (a disciple) buried Jesus in a rock tomb already owned. Other disciples, (Nicodemus and several women), including Mary Magdalene and Jesus's mother Mary, witnessed this. The tomb itself was placed under Roman guard by Pilate's orders - for fear of a body theft and a resurrection conspiracy.Grand Fromage wrote: he would've been put up in a high-traffic area of Jerusalem, and would have never been buried at all.
Again, much like in the Middle East, evil political structures have often operated behind a guise of religion with assumed moral imperative and superiority.Mulu wrote:in three days don't you think some faithful follower who wanted the prophecy to come true couldn't just carry the body out and hide it in the desert?
The only Christian counterargument to the body not simply being taken runs like this:
Did the disciples steal the body? If so, then the men who delivered to the world the highest moral standards it has ever known were frauds, liars, and hypocrites. Is this credible to believe? Paul Little asks, "Are these men, who helped transform the moral structure of society, consummate liars or deluded madmen? These alternatives are harder to believe than the fact of the resurrection, and there is not a shred of evidence to support them.
Really, is it *harder* to believe that a bunch of zealot cultists stole the body of their dead leader than that it rose from the grave? I think the explanation is obvious. This explanation also has some rather huge straw men, as Christianity does not contain the world's highest moral standards. Christianity also didn't help transform the moral structure of society. In fact, the time when Christianity ruled Europe is known as the Dark Ages. It is responsible for the witchcraft trials, the crusades, etc.
Mulu wrote:The evidence that the disciples stole the body of christ is its absence from the tomb.... No more evidence is needed to conclude that they were, "frauds, liars, and hypocrites," just like many christian leaders today. Seriously, if we were talking about *anybody else's* body, would you think it had risen to heaven or been stolen?
Blaise Pascal wrote, "The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus' death and conspiring to say that he has risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out."NickD wrote:as an alternative answer to how his body disappeared... perhaps it didn't? Perhaps 5 years later people just started saying it did. Considering nobody knows where his tomb is supposed to be anymore, and it was a lot harder to get around back then, so people would be a lot less likely to check out the claims anyway, it's not a hard rumour to get going.
The kicker is that no one ever confessed (freely, or under pressure from bribe or torture) that the resurrection was a lie, a deliberate deception. Even when citizens broke under torture, denied Christ and worshiped Caesar, they never let that cat out of the bag, never revealed that the resurrection was their conspiracy. For that cat was never in the bag. No Christians believed the resurrection was a conspiracy; if they had, they wouldn't have become Christians. Thousands of people do not die for what they know to be a lie.
Furthermore, there was no motive for such a lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What advantage did the "conspirators" derive from their "lie" ? They were scorned, imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled alive, burned alive, beheaded, disemboweled, and/or fed to lions in the Colosseum.....hardly a list of perks.
If the resurrection was a lie, the Jewish authorities would have produced the corpse and put a swift end to the movement (which was the desired effect of the crucifixion in the first place). All they had to do was go to the tomb and get it. The Roman soldiers and their leaders were on their side, not the disciples'. And if the Jews couldn't get the body because the disciples stole it, how was that possible? Unarmed peasants could not have overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone "while they slept on duty". The story the Jewish authorities spread, that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body, is unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on such a duty; if they did, they'd be killed by their superiors having failed so simple a task. And even if they did fall asleep, the crowd and the effort and the noise it would have taken to move a boulder covering the tomb's entrance would have woken them up.
If there had been a conspiracy, it would have been revealed by the faith's many enemies who had both the interest and the power to expose any fraud.
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