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Date Posted: 08:43:23 03/19/02 Tue
Author: Adilbrand
Subject: Point by Point - Ha!
In reply to: mt. healthy mountaineer 's message, "Re: Did jesus die? Or was he asleep?" on 14:11:53 03/18/02 Mon

But, of the 4 gospel writers, and their sources, only John was present. The others had fled and/or were in hiding.

That is unverified. Most Biblical scholars (all but the most hardcore conservative literalists) agree that at least four people wrote John (none of whom knew Christ personally, or else they wouldn't have ripped off so much of their text from other religions), and that the other Gospel writers also did not know Christ personally. The authors of the Gospels merely took an oral tradition and wrote it down, giving the Gospel the name to whom the oral tradition is said to have originated from.

Heck, Mark was identified in the 2nd Century as not being the work of a disciple of Jesus, and since Matthew and Luke were based off of Mark...

You are insisting that all 4 stories must be identical in detail, rather than non-contadictory. That is silly. I have 2 dozen histories of the U.S. Civil War. Most include a brief biography of Lincoln. Most fail to mention that Lincoln spent a great deal of his childhood in Indiana. Using your standards, we must now dispute the fact that Lincoln lived in Indiana. It must be deleted from all discussion. It is verbotten. Very few of the books mention U.S. Grant's childhood. I suppose he had no childhood, then. He was born an adult and soon thereafter entered West Point. In fact, using your standards, all 2 dozen of my history books must be identical or they are flawed.

My point exactly. Those texts are somewhat flawed. As is the Bible. Anything that claims to be literally true and to be the undisputed Word of God MUST be held to a higher standard than a book written by men, especially when those books disagree on major points (not minor ones like the examples you gave). Indeed, if a biographer claimed Lincoln did NOT live in Indiana, then we would have a situation similar to what occurs in the Bible (Where some Gospels say Christ lived for a time in Egypt, and other ones say he did not). The Bible is flawed.

Your arguement is that it must be false because someone can make up a story. So then - nothing is true, because everything can be a fictionalized story.

My argument is that unless you can give some sort of proof, then it is debatable. I did not say it wasn't true, just that it is debatable. Yet Biblical literalists say that the Bible is undebatable. I contest that view.

Was Julius Caesar a real man? More documents survive from the first century pertaining to Christ than Julius Caeser's own time about him. Maybe Caesar was a fiction.

Virtually no first hand papers survive about Alexander the Great. My Civil War books don't mention him either. He must be fiction.

His name exists on thousands of monuments, and many of the things claimed to have been done by him are, indeed, debatable. This is good. I maintain that the Bible should be considered debatable. This would also be good.

I have no papers or letters to prove the existance of Vincent Darlage - just a few old photos. Do you exist?

No, I don't. However, if you wrote my biography, and people could judge through your birth certificate and your death certificate that you were a contemporary of mine, your biography would have more weight than a biography written seventy years after my death by someone no one could prove even knew me. But you writing my biography is not the same as someone decades down the road who did not know me writing it.

If I were to write a biography of you that was not entirely complete would it be wrong and not worthy of consideration?

Completeness isn't the issue. If you wrote things that every other author declined to mention, then those things would become debatable. If you could be shown to have known me, then that would add weight to those things. However, if you could not be so shown, then the debate would continue.

Would it be fiction because anyone could make up a character named Vincent?

No, but it could be fiction. Entirely subject to debate.

But, once again we digress - the original question was could Jesus have fainted, swooned or even been knocked out to fulfill the prophecy of his resurrection?

What prophecy? Can you find a non-Biblical prophecy regarding Christ's resurrection? If I wrote a story about a man who prophesied his own death and resurrection, and then wrote that he fulfilled that death and resurrection, would that make it true? All the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in the Old Testament. All references to Old Testament prophecies in the New Testament are Old Testament lines taken out of context.

Criteria of a "real" prophecy:
In order for a prophecy to be considered a truly supernaturally inspired prediction, one might argue that it should meet a number of criteria.

In the text below:

"Prophecy" refers to a prediction of the future, and
"Event" is the happening that is said to fulfill the prophecy.

Six suggested criteria are:

The prophecy must be clear and unambiguous. It must not allow for a multitude of possible events. For example, Ezekiel 39 fails this test. It makes a prediction involving two military powers: Gog and Magog. "Gog has been interpreted as Gyges, king of Lydia, the Goths, and even a modern or future leader of Russia. Magaog has been interpreted as the Scythains, the Chaldeans, the Huns and modern-day Russia among others." Almost any military conflict in history could be cited as a fulfillment of this prophecy. Most (if not all) of Nostradamus' prophecies fail this requirement.

The event must be a fulfillment of the prediction. That is, the prophecy and the event must be related. An example is Isaiah 7:14, which some people eroneously believe predicts the virgin birth of Jesus. But that prophecy was fulfilled long before the birth of Jesus.

The event must have actually happened. Proof is required. All "prophecies" of the end of the world so far have not occurred.

The prophecy must have happened before the event. The book of Daniel fails this criteria. It was written, according to modern scholarship, after the events "predicted." They were actually historical recollections of the past written after the events really happened.

The event must not have been artificially created by a person who knew of the prophecy, with the intent of fulfilling it. For example, during a crucifixion by the Roman army, the legs of the victims were generally broken. This hastened their death by asphyxiation. But the Gospels record that Jesus' bones were not broken. When the Roman guards came to break his legs, they found that he had already died. There are a number of possible scenarios about this event. Some are: Jesus might have been physically exhausted as a result of his scouring and blood loss. He may have died on the stake or cross earlier than expected. Thus the Roman soldiers had no need to break his legs. Jesus intact legs were correctly reported by the Gospel writer(s); The guards might have followed standard procedure by breaking his legs. But the author(s) of the Gospel of John may have ignored this event, and written that it did not happen, in order that a prophecy from the Hebrew Scriptures would be fulfilled.

The prophecy must not have been a logical guess. For example, a person in mid-1939 who prophesized that a European war would break out before 1950 would simply have been describing the inevitable outcome of pre-existing Nazi expansion plans and activities. Hundreds of millions of people at that time expected a European war. A physic might predict a major volcanic eruption and a serious earthquake rated at over six on the Richter scale somewhere in the world during the current year. But these events are so likely to occur each year that the prophecy would be a sure thing. Similarly an ancient prophet might notice the Assyrian army approaching Israel from the East, conquering country after country in its path. He might quite logically guess that Israel was next.

You cannot show that any statement about Christ in the Bible was a bone fide prophecy using scientific criteria.

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