Morning pages, 3rd January 2022. Free written with some edits and extra sentences as I typed.
Last night I read that there's a real possibility that the body of Jesus was eaten by dogs.
The suggestion is clear that there was no clean tomb into which his corpse was lovingly placed only to be discovered missing a couple of days later. I loved that old story of course and history can't ever prove it didn't happy. It can merely suggest it didn't, that there are other possibilities, and give reasons for making that suggestion, far from any of the contradictory gospel narratives.
Years ago I read Frank Morison's book, "Who Moved the Stone?" and believed in its brilliance as proof that Jesus must have risen, airtight enough evidence to be accepted in any court of law. Except, as I now realise, all of the impossible alternatives in the book are in fact just not probable and improbable things happen every day. Also, while our medical definitions of death are not exactly what they were 2000 years ago it's generally accepted that coming back to life days after being executed is impossible rather than improbable. Unless we have faith in the story at all in which case the impossible is made possible in our minds.
So as historical or legal argument "Who Moved the Stone?" failed. There are reasonable alternatives, other stone movers are possible and we do not have to resort to a belief that God let Jesus out, alive and well but scarred and not quite physical in the normal way by which we can't walk through walls - it's clear belief in his physical resurrection hadn't fully developed even by the time that story was written or compiled. Not even the greatest conjuror can walk through walls just as they can't really walk on water no matter how impressive the illusion is.
Last night's reading showed me that Who Moved the Stone? and all similar apologetic attempts fail in an even more important respect than merely arguing that events that are not probable are impossible or saying that, for example, the followers of Jesus wouldn't have stolen the body and lied because Christians are too nice to lie. The slightest look at church history shows that to be nonsense when we see Christians can perpetrate all kinds of evil. Sometimes they later repent and call it sin. Sometimes they call it God's holy will. Faith in Jesus doesn't make anyone immune from fraud or dishonesty though of course most Christians resolve to seek to live a better life.
Perhaps the biggest failure for the honest and critical historian then, something Frank Morison claimed he was seeking to be, was the failure of assumption. Who Moved the Stone? There's a giant assumption in the question isn't there? It assumes there was a stone to be moved and with that comes the assumptions that there was a tomb behind the stone and that the gospel narratives are accurate. C S Lewis makes the same mistake in his famous Lord, liar, or lunatic trilemma from Mere Christianity. If the texts aren't reliable as words and actions of Jesus then the trilemma fails. It fails even if the texts were perfectly reliable as history because there are still other options than the three Lewis can imagine. I was part of the Christian Union at university for a while and I shudder remembering how every single session for a term the invited speaker, different each time, would quote those words of Lewis as if they could never be answered or critiqued.
But what if there was no stone, no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea? What if they were stories and traditions that developed in the decades after the death of Jesus, like so many myth narratives of his life such as the Christmas stories many of us will have heard recently or the story of the magi celebrated by western churches in a few day's time?
Then the question "Who Moved the Stone?" becomes at best a mind game, a hypothetical, a "What if?" What if the tomb stories were true? What could possibly explain them? I now do not believe in the slightest in the physical resurrection of Jesus but I used to completely agree that there was only one answer to the questions, a supernatural answer, miraculous, a unique event, Hallelujah, Praise Jesus, the risen Lord, himself God the Son and conqueror of death.
History cannot prove the story false. We don't have good enough sources. There is nothing from unbiased eyewitnesses. There was nothing recorded at the time. No mention in any other sources of a giant earthquake, an eclipse, the curtain in the temple ripping in two, or of lots of dead people coming back to life and wandering around. I would expect something of that to be mentioned somewhere. The dead rising from graves isn't exactly an everyday event but nobody thought to mention it. There's no mention anywhere else of the five hundred other people who are said to have seen the resurrected Jesus, most of whom didn't then follow him or believe in him if we're to believe the numbers in the Pentecost narratives. What we do have are contradictory sources from later religious believers writing with definite motives out of developed, largely augmented oral traditions and probably a written source or possibly several written sources that are now lost.
If there was no stone there can be no question of who moved it. At this moment a song is in my head. I sincerely and absolutely wish it wasn't. It's a song from "The Donut Man," a Christian children's television show made by a man named Rob Evans (the Donut Man and head of the Donut Repair Club) helped by children and a simple donut glove puppet named Duncan who always looked suspiciously like a bagel! The song I'm suffering now is called "Run Peter Run" and the chorus begins "He's alive, he's alive ... the stone is rolled away."
There's that assumption again: It's not just a set of contradictory religious stories based on faith. It all really happened and afterwards the apostles or disciples were explicitly ordered to stay in Jerusalem until Pentecost. Or they were explicitly ordered to go to Galilee. It depends which account you want to believe. Conservative so-called "Biblical" Christians believe both even though that makes no sense. Some contradictions you can remedy with clever, though unlikely solutions. That one cannot. To the liberal Christian the contradictions don't matter because they see the text differently but if you believe it's the infallible word of God, "God breathed," then it becomes very important to harmonise the text because faith becomes based at least in part on there being no possibility of error or myth in what's seen as a fully reliable historical text.
So let's question the assumption of a stone, a tomb, a resurrection proven thanks to Frank Morison and his well written book that any judge in any land would say convicts all who deny the physical resurrection of Jesus as being wrong.
There are good reasons to question. Bart Ehrman, who I was reading last night and will read again today, gives some of them. I'm looking forward to covering similar ground when I return to and finish "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography" by the scholar John Dominic Crossan. He and Ehrman share much common ground in their historical analyses.
What if there was no tomb? What if Jesus was eaten by dogs as I suggested in the first paragraph? Crossan has a chapter in his biography, "The Dogs Beneath the Cross." Neither Ehrman nor Crossan claim to prove it of course but both suggest it as a strong possibility as they study crucifixion practices across the Roman empire and as far as possible in first century Palestine. They further study what happened to the bodies of those convicted as criminals after they died and study what we know about Pontius Pilate and the way he ran things.
They also cover the way in which Pilate was gradually redeemed in Christian though from being portrayed as thoroughly evil, to trying his very best to go against the cries of the Jews and not crucify Jesus at all, and in later gospels that didn't make the final New Testament cut even to converting to Christianity. Why did this happen? Simply to place the blame for everything more squarely on the Jews. Unfortunately it didn't take long from the preaching of the Jewish prophet and his Jewish disciples to become infected with worsening anti-semitism, mostly from gentile influences.
Three pages a day is my writing challenge. Today I was planning to continue on from the fiction I wrote yesterday set in one of many worlds I could build. I believed that would happen as I wrote the first letter, an L. In honesty I can say that I'd have preferred to write more of that. Instead, aspects of last night's reading tumbled out as I continue deconstructing and understanding my old faith.
As for the dogs? Perhaps I'll write of them another day. Or perhaps you can just read Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan. Both are far more knowledgeable than me!
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