I believe a man died and returned to life.
In more detail, there was a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, approximately two millenia ago, who claimed to be God, upsetting the religious leaders of the day. These leaders had him executed: flogged to near the point of death, asphyxiated by hanging, and then, to be completely sure he was dead, put a spear through his heart. Now, if that was the end of the story, there would be nothing much exceptional about it – there have been other similar historical incidents. However, I believe that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, was literally returned from the dead, to physical life in a physical body. There are eyewitness testimonies to this fact that have survived to the present day, with orders of magnitude more reliability of transmission than other documents of similar age. Other historical witnesses state that these eyewitnesses held to their statement, even being executed themselves rather than renounce it. It is, however, rather audacious to posit that a man literally came back to life. Science cannot explain it, and really the only explanation that fits is that Jesus was, in fact, God, as he claimed. Once the familiarity of this claim (at least in Western culture) is put aside, the implications really are enormous.
Read an interesting post the other day about the Codex Sinaiticus regarding Mark 16, the chapter where the two Mary's are witness to Jesus' resurrection. In short, the earlier Codex Sinaiticus ends after verse 8, where the man tells the two women to go fourth and tell Jesus' disciples that he is risen. There appears to be evidence that Scribes translating the Bible to English may have had some artistic lenience.
ReplyDeleteNot refuting your post - I just thought you might be interested.
That's just Mark - there's always the other 3 gospels.
ReplyDeleteAnd the fact that 11 of the 12 apostles were martyred for their beliefs, and the other was exiled.
ReplyDeleteWell, to be honest my problem wasn't really that one of the gospels was incomplete. The Bible is riddled with contradictions and omissions, and I don't really like to poke holes in it because it doesn't prove anything. Many Christians, I believe yourselves included, accept that the Bible contradicts itself at times and have your own reconciliations for it (translation from Hebrew, as Bruce pointed out when I said a verse ended in a preposition).
ReplyDeleteI'm more concerned that early scribes saw fit to amend the Bible with what they saw as a more correct tale. If part of the Bible, even a small one, is fictitious (even though it is supported elsewhere), doesn't that draw attention to the fact that other parts of the Bible (indeed, those that support the fictitious part) may also have been made up?
It's not my argument (I don't have one right now) - I'm just wondering how this affects your opinions/perceptions of the Bible. I've also realized that this probably would have made a good blog post, considering I haven't done one about religion in quite some time :)
Bits like the one you mentioned are typically marked off though. (Most modern translations will include a note saying "some of the oldest manuscripts do not have this passage"). For one, there is nothing of theological significance solely attributed to the disputed passages. Also, there are really very few of those passages (maybe half a dozen, only one or two more than a verse or so long), and we know which ones they are (again, by standard empirical measures, we are orders of magnitude more certain that the Biblical texts we have are what were written by the original writers than of any other text of similar age. In terms of our earliest manuscripts, those "early scribes" aren't terribly early. The only reason those passages are included at all is that the earlier translations did not have the benefits of modern archaeological finds, or scholarly sharing of sources, so they got included in the chapter and verse numbering, and are more or less there by tradition.
ReplyDeleteOne last thing that I've just remembered - I've heard the possibility advanced that the oldest Mark manuscripts were missing their ending, so the scribes you mentioned replaced it (from available sources, rather than fiction - these were academics), and that the ending we have, while not necessarily (or necessarily not) written by Mark, is still factually accurate.
I am not a historian, archaeologist, or textual critic, but I do have 20 years' instruction in Christian theology, Biblical and church history, and apologetics (rational arguments for the faith).
For me, I do get rather curious about the early bible and the reasons for different translations and the differences between the translations, but at the end of the day, I have the belief that, and Christian theology states that all scripture is God-breathed ... so the idea that the Bible has been tampered with is not a notion I entertain ... that comes with faith.
ReplyDeleteYour point is interesting though Ash, actually in May at church, we had a sermon exactly on that passage ... and the first point was "can we trust the validity of these passages" so quite interesting
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tmpchurch.ca/home/index.php?option=com_sermonspeaker&task=singlesermon&id=10055&Itemid=58
But what makes text scripture? When a reverend says so? I can't speak to the historical validity of any documents, but hypothetically, if you're confronted with unequivocal proof that a passage of the Bible was either changed or amended, wouldn't that render that passage no longer scripture, and thus no longer of the breath of God?
ReplyDeleteWell, I believe that a lot of debate and searching for accuracy has gone into deciding which books are authentic and which aren't ... there is the New Testament apocryphal that is not "Holy Scripture" like the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas. And like Aaron said, in instances like Mark 16:9-20, it does indicate in most bibles before the section "note: this section cannot be found in the earliest of manuscripts"
ReplyDeleteThis has also prompted me to read a bit more about Jewish Scribes and I read that they were meticulous to the extreme when copying texts and if a single mistake was made the scroll had to be destroyed and they would start over again from the very beginning, so errors weren't likely from them, and they were the only ones with copies of the bible.
Also, if the bible were changed, it will not necessarily change the validity of it. What makes the bible God breathed is that we believe that the people who have written the bible did so by the influence of special revelation from God the Father.
Mark was a Roman and so his book is so short and sweet because he gave the highlights, quick and to the point. Popular belief for the Mark passage is that in Greek, it just ended abruptly and the book seemed imcomplete, so the early church (first generation Christians) re-spliced the ending from 1 Corinthians 15:1-58, which was written by Paul, before Mark was ever written.
All of the resurrection appearance stories, including those later attached to the end of Mark, are nothing more than attempts to improve Mark's ending by contradicting it. Matthew and Luke, who otherwise closely follow the narrative of Mark, completely diverge after Mk. 16:8 (suggesting that any copy of Mark that they had lacked the endings). Matthew has Jesus appear in Galilee while Luke has him appear in Jerusalem. John is a loose concoction of both Matt. and Luke with several unique elements thrown in the mix. This situation hardly demands confidence in these texts.
ReplyDelete