One Christian Thought

Twelve Disciples after the Crucifixion? (And "three days") Lapide presents a reason to distrust the New Testament as the word of God, from 1 Corinthians 15:5: "'The twelve' as a closed group of the first witnesses include also Judas -- this both agrees with the consciousness of Jesus to be sent to all of Israel and contradicts the supposed suicide of Judas (Matt. 27:5)." (page 98-99) I had never thought of that until I read it just then. It makes sense: the tale of Judas is a legend, and so Paul didn't know about it. However, Lapide's own book helped me come up with a reasonable response. "'On the third day' has nothing to do with the date or with the counting of time but contains for ears which are educated biblically a clear reference to God's mercy and grace which is revealed after two days of affliction and death by way of redemption." (page 92) (Some people charge the Bible is wrong to say Jesus was in the tomb ...

Is Christianity Based on Pagan Myth?  Maybe you've heard something like that before. Nothing in Christianity is original. This idea has many names, the ones I prefer being the Christ-myth theory or the copycat theory. Lapide topped on this argument to his others: "If we add to all these disturbing factors the statement that in the ancient world there were not less than a round dozen of nature deities, heroes, philosophers, and rulers who, all long before Jesus, suffered, died, and rose again on the third day, then the skepticism of most non-Christians can easily be understood." He cites the supposed suffering and martyrdom, sometimes on a cross, of Osiris, Dionysos, Adonis, and Attis, and the "resurrections" of them all along with Isis, Heracles, Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Great, and Emperor Augustus. (pages 40-41) When I read that, my eyebrows raised. I was surprised and dismayed that he actually believed what he was writing. Famous a...

Hello again! The first 16 days of April, right after my last post of March (which is now an out-dated announcement so don't let the title get you), was spent reading. Just two books, unfortunately, but one was much longer than the other one and I found it challenging to read. But still, I have enough material for at least three projects, one of which I am working on now, and another which can be determined by finding a hint here  and then going to where it points (so cheers to you if you figure out what it's about!). However, a monkey wrench has been thrown into my schedule: class, starting tomorrow on Monday. If you can recall my last announcement, the reason I stopped writing when I had planned to every week was because I didn't get the time to really sit down and focus on an academic-minded project outside of my actual academy. But fortunately, I have already written an outline for my current Blog Project, and so should be able to complete the last three parts in a...

Legendary Development  Lapide summarizes the objection: "The inclination to 'secondary elaboration,' ... can even be demonstrated quantitatively: While Paul, who was closest to the events, needs only four sentences (1 Cor. 15:3-7) to express his faith in the resurrection, Mark, decades later, needs eight. After him, Matthew expands the report to 20 verses, followed by Luke who is able to report later more than twice this amount - 53 verses. The Fourth Gospel, edited two generations after Easter, long after the last eyewitnesses were deceased, devotes two full chapters of altogether 56 verses to the theme, in order to describe what its author could know only by hearsay." (page 39) The first point I think should be made is the absurdity to place an early creed, of course short so someone can easily pass it on, alongside someone whose purpose for writing is to describe Jesus's life in a biography. Then, we can look at each individual Gospel, and see whether or not...

Hooray, I'm back to Blog Projects! These are simply just multiple blog posts to address one big specific subject. I haven't done one since last school year, when I did only two. So now I am excited to have enough material to create another. I heard about this book from the debate between J.P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen titled Does God Exist? Moreland wrote, "So strong is [the sudden preaching of the resurrection out of Judaism] that recently an orthodox Jewish rabbi, a Jewish scholar of New Testament in Frankfurt, Germany, was converted to belief in the resurrection on strictly historical evidence. And he has written a book defending its historicity. Lapide writes, 'How is it possible that His disciples, who by no means excelled in intelligence, eloquence, or strength of faith, were able to begin their victorious march of conversion only after the shattering fiasco of Golgotha?'" Carl E. Braaten, the introduction's author, wrote, "Pinchas Lapide is ...