Not the only one to come back from the dead?

Here's what I totally understand about the four gospels being slightly different on details. Each writer might have noticed things the other writers didn't. That's why the police interview as many witnesses as possible to the same incident - in real time nobody can catch it all, and no memory is perfect. The more data the better up to a point. Between the four gospel authors the true, accurate story is in there somewhere.

But I just can't fathom one author witnessing a veritable zombie army but nobody else even mentions it. If there were four differing accounts of the zombie army it would (as weird as this sounds) be more credible. But when only one writer mentions it almost as an aside....I think the editor dropped the ball.

But hey, in for a penny, in for a pound. If under the right circumstances god causes one person to rise from the dead, why not other people too? Who are we to set limitations on his power?

oldfella1962 said:

Here's what I totally understand about the four gospels being slightly different on details. Each writer might have noticed things the other writers didn't. That's why the police interview as many witnesses as possible to the same incident - in real time nobody can catch it all, and no memory is perfect. The more data the better up to a point. Between the four gospel authors the true, accurate story is in there somewhere.

But I just can't fathom one author witnessing a veritable zombie army but nobody else even mentions it. If there were four differing accounts of the zombie army it would (as weird as this sounds) be more credible. But when only one writer mentions it almost as an aside....I think the editor dropped the ball.

But hey, in for a penny, in for a pound. If under the right circumstances god causes one person to rise from the dead, why not other people too? Who are we to set limitations on his power?

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https://www.gotquestions.org/raised-from-the-dead.html

wow I guess bringing people back from the dead is more common than I thought!

oldfella1962 said:

Here's what I totally understand about the four gospels being slightly different on details.

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Lots of proof that Matthew and Luke copied Matthew, then embellished it highly. It's not that they gave differing accounts. It's a very interesting topic to dig into. For example, Lingo, we might say we were tossed about in the ocean by a wave, a big wave. Matthew was written long after by someone who knew nothing about Jewish lingo. As he copies Mark, instead of a donkey, the foal of a donkey, 1 donkey, he has 2 donkeys. Clearly not just another account of the same thing. And much more..... more certain stuff with no reasonable explanation. This was just the first that came to mind. I would have to get my bible out to find the others and get the exact wording.

In a letter LII To Nepotian, Jerome writes about his teacher, Gregory of Nazianzus when he asked him to explain a phrase in Luke, Nazianzus evaded his request by saying “I will tell you about it in church, and there, when all the people applaud me, you will be forced against your will to know what you do not know at all. For, if you alone remain silent, every one will put you down for a fool." Jerome responds with, "There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation."

In the 5th century, John Chrysostom in his "Treatise on the Priesthood, Book 1," wrote, "And often it is necessary to deceive, and to do the greatest benefits by means of this device, whereas he who has gone by a straight course has done great mischief to the person whom he has not deceived."

Ignatius Loyola of the 16th century wrote in his Spiritual Exercises: "To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it."

Martin Luther opined: "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."

1gr8bldr said:

Lots of proof that Matthew and Luke copied Matthew, then embellished it highly. It's not that they gave differing accounts. It's a very interesting topic to dig into. For example, Lingo, we might say we were tossed about in the ocean by a wave, a big wave. Matthew was written long after by someone who knew nothing about Jewish lingo. As he copies Mark, instead of a donkey, the foal of a donkey, 1 donkey, he has 2 donkeys. Clearly not just another account of the same thing. And much more..... more certain stuff with no reasonable explanation. This was just the first that came to mind. I would have to get my bible out to find the others and get the exact wording.

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Here is writer fatigue. Matthew dropping his guard as he copied, stated that "Herod wanted to kill John". Matt 14:5, But Mark tells us [mark 6:20] that Herodias wanted to kill John, Herod had protected him, thought him to be righteous and holy and liked to listen to him. Mistakes of context are not different accounts. It is writer fatigue EDIT, I just looked back over it. It's called editorial fatigue, and the main thing to see is the later verse, "and the king was greatly grieved". Now if Herod wanted to kill John, he would not be grieved. This is the real proof that Matthew was falling asleep while copying Matt 14;9 Mark 6:26

Too bad for Matthew coffee wasn't invented yet!

As for gradual embellishments that explains the many "great flood" stories in so many cultures. Humans were around during the last ice age (BTW we are currently between inevitable ice ages, sorry Al Gore) so no doubt there was massive flooding in countless locations! This was a few thousand years before writing was invented, so no doubt that leaves a lot of time for the stories to take on a life of their own.

So here we have a proven, natural event (end of widespread glaciation & subsequent flooding in much of the world) that people tried to explain or find the reason for. The Biblical flood is just one version out of many.
Each culture assumed they were the entire world because no one comprehended the size of the planet with the science of those times. 10,000 or so years ago we were just developing stone tools and atlatls (spear throwers) and the bow & arrow & the wheel - and this was in the more advanced cultures!

oldfella1962 said:

Too bad for Matthew coffee wasn't invented yet!

As for gradual embellishments that explains the many "great flood" stories in so many cultures. Humans were around during the last ice age (BTW we are currently between inevitable ice ages, sorry Al Gore) so no doubt there was massive flooding in countless locations! This was a few thousand years before writing was invented, so no doubt that leaves a lot of time for the stories to take on a life of their own.

So here we have a proven, natural event (end of widespread glaciation & subsequent flooding in much of the world) that people tried to explain or find the reason for. The Biblical flood is just one version out of many.
Each culture assumed they were the entire world because no one comprehended the size of the planet with the science of those times. 10,000 or so years ago we were just developing stone tools and atlatls (spear throwers) and the bow & arrow & the wheel - and this was in the more advanced cultures!

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Add in similar stories written a thousand years before the Jews started to write and you can easily see where they got their influences and borrowed some of the story lines.

jrickman said:

The best explanation I have read about the absence of this from the other Gospels is that the writers did not envision their work being collected into canon later on. They were merely recording their testimony as directed by the Spirit for their target audience. Matthew's target audience was the Jewish community, while the others were meant for the Romans (Mark), Greeks (Luke) and the Gentiles in general (John). The Romans and Greeks apparently found the idea of bodily resurrection of a non-deity to be abhorrent unless a deity was directly involved and some clear purpose was served. To claim this otherwise, immediately destroyed the credibility of the witness in their societies. So, being practical men, they tailored their testimony to their intended audience. I don't think we should view this as a green light to take liberties with scripture, because there is a clear difference between us and them.The recording of the 4 Gospels was entrusted to these 4 disciples, and we can probably all agree that they were given the spiritual authority to record their testimony as they saw fit.

As for what happened to them...I have no idea. Nor do I lose sleep over it. A wise man once told me that the Bible contains everything you ever NEED to know, but nowhere in it does it state that it contains everything there IS TO KNOW.

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Yeah that explanation doesn't work. First, on what evidence is the claim made that they found the resurrection of a non deity abhorrent? Second, the gospels all have the resurrection of Jesus and while it is now considered orthodoxy that he was a deity that was not the case in the first century when the gospels were written. People coming out of the graves should be pretty noteworthy not just for the gospel writers but for everyone else. The fact there are no independent corroborating stories of this leads one to believe it was a later fabrication.

We might also notice that the KJV makes it pretty clear in Matthew 27.52 – “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”

Saints? Canonized by which organized Christian Church? Absent a formalized Christian Church to make such declarations of sainthood, I’m afraid that, at the time, there really couldn’t have been any ‘saints.’ It is understandable that a number of folks who were already dead at the time of the ‘resurrection’ might have later been declared to be such once an actual Church arose. It is unclear just how they could have been Christian martyrs or miraculous instruments of Christ prior to his own death and elevation, and thus were already dead Christian Saints beforehand, waiting in the wings to rise from the grave as a group, but I’m sure some theologian somewhere has a hilariously strained answer to that. And I’d be first in line to endorse these folks for sainthood if they had actually jumped up out of the grave in a sudden show of solidarity, but at the moment being described the problem is that there just weren’t any saints. (And I believe that in addition to being declared a ‘saint’ by the Pope, one of the standards for ‘sainthood’ is at least two ‘miracles’ performed after death – and I guess popping up out of the grave would count as one. Having nobody at all notice, and then disappearing back into oblivion after only two verses, never to be mentioned again, is certainly another. )

In short-- no Pope + no formal Church = no Saints. So does this passage imply that the Pope and the Christian Church pre-dated Jesus, and had provided already anointed ‘saints’ to come back to life on cue? For there to be ‘saints’ present it would have had to, else this was written many hundreds of years later. (This is where the apologists are invited to go back to selective explanations of mistranslations, while holding fast to others. There was never anyone named Jesus Christ, for example. In the Greek, ‘Jesus,’ is Joshua, and ‘Christ’ means The Anointed One. At the time, his name would actually have been Yehoshua bar Yahosef bar Ya'akov, meaning Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob. But that is hard to pronounce, and has no Greek translation, so they sort of went with a description rather than a full name – Joshua, the Anointed One. )

Also, the Greeks at the time had no word for ‘Saint,’ perhaps because there were no such things at the time, what with Popes having not been invented yet. ‘Hagios’ comes the closest, mainly meaning ‘different,’ but in a holy context. In this case they used the word ‘hagion’ in the original text, which was transmuted into the word ‘saints’ a few hundred years and a few hundred translations down the line. This idea, of the ‘holy’ or righteous rising and being vindicated along with their chosen god fit in quite well with the Greek polytheistic pantheon, and one can only consider that it was a mere oversight on the part of Constantine that these two verses somehow survived. Even the most ruthless editors sometimes overlook minor details . . .

from a complete layman's view, maybe "saints" meant any well known religious figure or hero up to that point in time. Moses, King David, Ezekiel, etc.etc. that you hear so much about in the Old Testament. Somebody that the onlookers & witnesses would recognize as the figures that were important in the Jewish faith up to that point (since Christianity was literally being invented at the time). Granted as a layman I would be totally freaked out if I saw tombs open up and the dead walking around now or at any time in history. Just like I would freak out over the Dead Sea parting, the earth stop it's spinning to delay sunset so an epic battle could continue (don't you just hate extra innings?) riverbank physical fights with god himself that are so close they almost have to go to the judges scorecards except end in a "doctor's stoppage" when god's opponent dislocates his hip, etc. etc. that were apparently part of daily bible days life.