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To: GonzoII; Sherman Logan
The resurrection is basically a true story, with one gigantic caveat...

Simple logic tells us that Jesus could not have been walking around in a Roman province in a dead human body for forty days and nights without Romans seeing him; they'd have crucified him a second time and done whatever it took to ensure that he stayed crucified.

Nonetheless he did come back and to the people who witnessed it, what they witnessed was utterly indistinguishable from him having come back in his own body.

The mistake people make here is thinking that Jesus was the first and/or the only person ever to have been heard from after he died; he was the last. The OT contains a ghost story (1 Samuel 28:7 - 28:20 or thereabouts) in the familiar tale of Saul, Samuel, and the "witch of Endor" and in times more remote than that, such stories were less rare.

The resurrection was the sort of thing which Julian Jaynes described as "bicameral"; it was the last such thing ever seen by more than one or two people on our planet, and it was not any sort of an "auditory" or visual mass hallucination, but was sufficiently real.

9 posted on 11/11/2009 12:28:25 PM PST by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946

There are LOTS of stories about dead people communicating since then.

What you mean is that this is the last one you choose to believe in.

My point is that the devotion of Christ’s followers after his death no more proves the truth of his being raised than the similar devotion of others proves the truth of their cause.

I happen to believe Christ was raised, I just object to such easily disposed of arguments being presented as “proof.”

The apostle Paul said believing in Christ requires faith, not proof.

“Proof” of this type will not convince anyone who does not already believe, in which case it’s redundant.


10 posted on 11/11/2009 12:33:31 PM PST by Sherman Logan ("The price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections." Thomas Sowell)
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