Posting nonsense again I see. Here is Brian Harrison's rebuttal of the heretical views of Cardinal Kasper, whom JPII saw fit to elevate to the princedom of the Catholic Church not too long ago. (Why hold a little bit of heresy against him?) This is taken from "Fr. Eamon Bredin and the Resurrection," Living Tradition, September 1988:
______________________________________________________
Our author goes on to quote with approval Walter Kasper, who maintains that although Mark's tomb story is older and less "legendary" than the others, "It is clear that in its present form at any rate, it is in no way a historical account." 29 If Mark's account, and therefore the more "legendary" ones as well, are "in no way" historical, that means they are substantially non-historical. Fr. Kasper's reasons for saying this appear ostensibly to be largely literary ones. As quoted by Fr. Bredin, he says that in Mark's empty tomb narrative,
"We are faced not with historical details but with stylistic devices intended to attract the attention and raise excitement in the minds of those listening. Everything is clearly constructed to lead very skilfully to the climax of the angel's words: 'He is risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him'" (16:6). 30
For the substantial non-historicity of the "tomb stories," then, we have been offered only two pieces of "evidence," namely, the (supposed) incompatibility of the details in the respective Gospel accounts, and the alleged literary skill of Mark in presenting his account. But this is completely unconvincing. If several witnesses write an account of some dramatic event - say, a fire in a large building - some years after it took place, we will almost certainly find some discrepancies of detail - differences, for instance, as to what time it broke out, how long it took to be extinguished, how many people were seen to jump from its windows, and so on. But what serious historian would take this as evidence that the reports were "in no way historical," and that perhaps the fire never took place at all?
Likewise, the argument from literary style proves nothing at all. Even if Mark had written his account even more "skilfully" - in the form of exquisite poetic verses, let us say - that would not be an argument against its historicity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, wrote a very moving poem, "The Wreck of the 'Deutschland,'" after reading in a newspaper an eyewitness account of this real-life shipwreck. He kept to the essential facts, even while expressing them in a creative and imaginative way. Any critic who argued from the mere fact of the poetic literary form adopted by Hopkins to the non-historicity of what he describes would of course be deceiving himself. Moreover, one suspects that in the case of Kasper's argument from the absence of conventional historical form to non-historical content in the Gospel "tomb stories" there is an additional fallacy - that of begging the question. What evidence does Fr. Kasper offer for his claim that the form of these stories is not in fact that of conventional historical writing or fact-reporting, but rather, that of "a narrative intended as the basis for a cultic ceremony"? 31 One would want to ask Fr. Kasper, "Supposing the women did in fact go to the tomb on the first day of the week, find it empty, and meet an angel who told them that Christ had risen from the dead; how in that case would a normal first-century historical form of reporting these extraordinary events differ significantly from the form which we in fact find in Mark's canonical account?" One suspects that no convincing answer at all would be forthcoming; certainly, Fr. Kasper himself offers none. This in turn strongly reinforces one's suspicion that Kasper's appeal to style and form is only a smokescreen: he seems to have judged the form of these stories to be non-historical simply because of their content; that is, because of what they say rather than how they say it. Thus, Fr. Kasper feels entitled to call Mark's mention of the angel a "stylistic device," not because of the way the evangelist talks about the angel, but simply because he talks about it at all. Angels as such are to be understood as a "stylistic device."
In short, we are told that the content is not historical because the form is not historical (which in itself would be a non-sequitur), only to find out that the reason for judging the form to be in fact non-historical is its (self-evidently) non-historical content - angels appearing and bodies being raised to life.
The exegetical arguments offered here for "non-historicity" are in themselves so transparently flimsy, as we have seen, that we doubt they could convince men as intelligent as Kasper and Bredin unless bolstered up by some powerful "hidden persuader," such as a philosophical world view which excludes direct or miraculous actions of God in the physical order as outside the realm of the possible or credible. But, as Pope John Paul II affirmed in a recent catechetical address, such a world view "clashes with the most elementary philosophical and theological idea of God." 32 Disbelief in miracles (in the true and proper sense of sense-perceptible events which cannot be explained by secondary, natural causes) is thus radically incompatible with Christian faith. 33 Yet this indeed seems to be very close to the world view of Fr. Kasper as recently, at least, as the mid-seventies. 34 He then wrote of the theological "task of coming to terms with the modern understanding of reality as represented primarily by the natural sciences" (as if there were only one such "modern understanding"). 35 Kasper continues:
"The premiss of the scientific approach is a wholly law-bound determination of all events. ... In scientific theory there is no room for a miracle in the sense of an event with no physical cause and therefore no definable origin." 36
That Fr. Kasper is confusing this particular philosophical position with real science - in the sense of certain and true knowledge which "modern" man just has to accept - becomes clear a little further on, when he tells us that any "miraculous" event
"always comes about through the action of created secondary causes. A divine intervention in the sense of a directly visible action of God is theological nonsense." 37
On the contrary: it is precisely this opinion of Fr. Kasper - which amongst other things would presumably rule out such "directly visible actions of God" as the raising of a dead body and a virginal conception - that seems like theological (and philosophical) nonsense. Why should the One who created the material universe from nothing find it impossible or unseemly to work further marvels?
That says nothing about denying the Resurrection - just that Kasper considers the tomb stories unhistorical.
It is Fr. Harrison who argues that Kasper's premises lead to the denial of the resurrection and virgin birth - he doesn't cite Kasper on that because Kasper affirms the resurrection and virgin birth in this book!