Jason Pratt responds to Keith Parsons Part II

Keith's thought-experiment concerning finding a body today, consequently, is completely not to the point. Keith is looking at things as a sceptic on
the other side of religious claims altogether; he isn't thinking in
terms of the historical situation of the Sanhedrin (a different kind of
unbelieving group altogether), and what _they_ would chiefly expect to
accomplish by providing any (even a fake) body, _in that historical
situation_.


Jesus's execution was an official act of the Roman authority. Joseph
of Arimathea had to ask for Pilate's permission to take down and bury the
body (Matthew 27:58). Wouldn't the Jewish authorities have had to ask permission
to dig it up again and display it? What would the Romans have thought of
such a bizarre request?

Assuming the Romans thought anything at all about the Sanhedrin
exuming a body that had been given back to a member of the Sanhedrin by petition
to the governor from that member (as Keith is willing to allow being an historical story detail), I think we can reliably suppose they would havethought either:

'So what? Not our concern anymore; we gave it back to the Sanhedrin--why
are you even bothering asking us about this?' (an answer similar to
what Pilate may arguably be saying in GosMatt about providing guards on the
tomb)

or else

'Great! Part of our job here is to nip dangerously unstable religious movements in the bud; and we know from experience that Messianic movements can lead to military rebellion; and whatever our personal opinion may have been about that Joshua guy, his followers are clearly deranged and practically begging to be strung up next themselves as rebels against the Empire!'

That's the historical situation, as given. The body is no longer a Roman
concern, except insofar as it may be helpful quelling potential rebellions.
Either way, not a problem _from_ them concerning it.

The argument assumes that the authorities could have gotten hold of the body, but, even if we assume that they knew the site of Jesus's tomb, the body could have been missing for non-supernatural reasons.
Aside from those non-supernatural reasons (whatever they are) needing
to fit into a whole coherent theory; this rebuttal assumes that a fake
body wouldn't do just as well. Which, to me, seems historically implausible.


To the Jewish authorities, if they even noticed the Apostles' preaching, yet another ragtag band of loudmouthed preachers (and Jerusalem had
plenty of those) would hardly create an intellectual problem, one that would
have needed confutation with argument and empirical evidence.

This would look better as a rebuttal, if the Romans (not to say the
Sanhedrin itself) hadn't previously thought enough of the leader of
this ragtag bunch to execute him as a potentially dangerous rebel. A problem
that would have been compounded by any fear that the Romans were always
looking for a political excuse to pay the material (and somewhat political)
costs of stamping Israel flat instead of bothering with them any more.
Plus compounded (and complicated) still further, if (as GosJohn relates,
though a tad obscurely) significant numbers of the Pharisee party even within
the Sanhedrin had previously been backing Jesus. The man was _not_ executed to solve an intellectual problem; the sufferance, or otherwise, of his followers subsequently, wasn't going to be any merely intellectual problem, either.
(Again, Keith is coming to the issue from a non-historical perspective.

To _him_, and to most people today, it's primarily an intellectual question.
It was _NEVER_, and _could never have been_, any mere intellectual question
to the people, including to the authorities, _in_ question.)


To put it in perspective, since Keith brings up the Branch Davidian:
no, the US government didn't bother trying to refute them. But they _did_
bother to wipe them off the face of the earth; and I'd be willing to bet a
Coke that any sufference they may allow people connected to the Branch
Davidian today, isn't some merely intellectual question. Nor do I expect
they still let those people get very far without keeping a suspicious
(where not outright hostile) eye on them.

(And this is _without_ "King David" regularly visiting the Capitol
Building where he had some tacit heated internal support, to snipe at various
corruptions of people in charge there to great public acclaim--all while
under the heel of the godless pagan Soviet Union overlords who would like
some political excuse to muster an army and relieve themselves of the
hassle of dealing with the Senate and House at all.)


Who knows how many crucified bodies, roughly similar to Jesus's,
would have been available at that time?

An excellent point. {g}

Further, exhuming and displaying the decayed body of a victim of
crucifixion would have been an intensely shameful and repellent task
for a first century Jew, an act far beneath the dignity of the distinguished
members of the Sanhedrin.

They don't have to do it; they only have to officialy _sanction it_. (Hire
some sabbath goyim to do it, if the Romans won't agree to do it themselves.)

Or, better yet, turn the shame and repellance into a positive thing. 'Yes,
we don't want to do this--we delayed in fact partly in the hope we
wouldn't have to. But: _this_ is how bad we think these cretins and their claims
are--we'd rather do _this_, and suffer the shame of it, than see our
beloved people of Israel led astray from God by the followers of this
deceiver. Blah blah, rend our garments, insert similar rhetorical
counterpunch here, anyone wanting to stone these people now will have
our blessing. Stones are free of charge in case anyone was worrying, having
gone to the Temple in recent years...'

Such an act would have so scandalized the Jewish community (most of
whom
no doubt pitied Jews executed by the Romans)...

But most of whom, no doubt, _didn't_ generally have much pity for
freaking blaspheming pretender Messiahs executed at the behest of their own
God-sanctioned religious authorities (even if the pagans were the ones
to pull the trigger). The popular notion (as, again, the Gospels quite
realistically report) was always that Jesus was going to save them from
the oppressors. The reported reactions of the crowds when it looked like he
had no intention of doing that, are again quite realistic. And he did worse
than merely fail. The end. (Except, it wasn't: here are his damned
followers again--_why_ are they here? Shouldn't they be crawling into a
hole in shame??)


I will, however, add and emphasize: I would _not_ use the (apparent)
non-report of the Sanhedrin producing a body, as evidence for a
conclusion that the body was gone. On the contrary, in a way I go in the _other_
direction: if they weren't producing "a body", it was for some reason other
than that couldn't "produce one". Probably a far more complex reason.

Nor would the Pauline epistles be my first choice of where to start. But,
since Keith brings them up...

But there is no evidence that the empty tomb story was even a part
of the earliest Christian preaching. Paul never mentions it.

'Etaphe_' implies burial _in_ something, covered over. (Kind of like rice
buried in crawfish etouffe... {g}) _Was_ buried, _was_ raised; handed
down by Paul _before_ his letter to the Corinthians, as being an
authoritative kerygma of first importance. Where _else_ was a body of a beloved rabbi
going to be buried?? In a compost heap??--and if _that_ had happened,
why wouldn't it have been part of the story? (Especially for Paul, and his
strong 'reckoned with the transgressors' theology.)

This insistence on 'no tomb before Gospels' is becoming increasingly
tedious, the more I hear it repeated. At _most_ what it comes down to
is, we have no (surviving) record before the Gospels of the story _of
Joseph of Arimathea_ (not to say the adventures of the women). Without _that_ (or
those), there's hardly any point mentioning a tomb at all, since a tomb would be considered a matter of normal course for a rabbi cared for by
his followers (crucified or not). And there's no reason for Paul to mention
those, even if he did know about the details; he wasn't writing
historical
apologetics.

Now, if Keith wants (and indeed sooner or later will need) to set up a
theory about how the 'Joseph of Arimathea story' came about, he's
welcome to go for it; but even the proposal of fictional development of that
kind _presumes the normativity of a tomb_ in the understanding of the
"burial" Paul mentions as kerygmatic information.

Further, Richard Carrier argues at length in his contribution to The
Empty Tomb that the earliest Christians, including Paul, held a view of
resurrection that was compatible with the earthly body having been left
behind in the tomb.

I _might_ pretty easily accept textual (and similar archaeological)
evidences about this (assuming Richard can provide any), for purposes
of establishing an option of general belief during that time and place.

But once Paul is on the table--well, I'm _very_ familiar with _those_
arguments. They're selective again about what they allow to count as
evidence; and the one Pauline statement which counts heaviest as
positive evidence for this notion (1 Cor 6:13a), doesn't fit into its own
context
very well with _that_ interpretation.

(Whereas, it fits in extremely well, and helps pull together all first
six chapters into a unified topical progression, if v.13a is considered to
be a quote familiarly used by the unnamed church leader being judged against
back in chp 5, _which Paul is opposing_. We know from chp 15, the main
Res chapter of 1 Cor itself, that Paul could easily throw out
non-scriptural quotes pro and con without making any reference to them _as_ quotes.)

I'd have to be pretty desperate, in short, to think Paul _wasn't_
talking about a resurrection of the body (in general _and_ of Christ). Though,
I _would_ be ready to believe pretty easily (since Paul _is_ opposing it)
that the Corinthian church thought the resurrection of the body (generally
and of Christ) to be either wrong, or at least disposable as doctrine.


In any case, it's frankly a moot point. The place to begin isn't with Paul, and whether his analogy of a seed coming up from the ground (in 1 Cor 15) somehow presents a notion of a bodily resurrection without a body (though the new plant is hardly leaving the seed behind at all, much less exactly as it was when it was buried. Paul's subsequent analogies are about the differences in _glory_ each has--and he goes right from that to descriptions of the _same_ body being sown and raised.)

The place to begin, is with the counter-polemic at the end of
GosMatt--and maybe with that young man at the tomb in GosMark. One of them cannot be
plausibly explained without an agreement between opponents about the vanishing of a body; and the other points toward the author tactfully trying to correct what he thinks is a mistaken detail--_as_ an eyewitnessat the tomb on that Sunday morning.

Even simply given the existence of the GosMatt polemic, though, a vanished body is on the table (so to speak {g}), as an historical fact agreed to by the traditions of two completely antithetical _opponents_ (at the time GosMatt was finally compiled) differing on what the fact _means_. That's a key kind of evidence analysts of ancient texts look for, in putting together reliable historical conclusions. After that, it's pure moonshine to be trying to tease out variant beliefs from Saul of Tarsus
(ex-prosecutor _for_ the Sanhedrin) about whether he needed to have a body
out of the ground or not to believe in a resurrected body.


Jason Pratt