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Edited on Fri Mar-04-05 05:50 PM by Stunster
I don't really care whether people reserve the term 'Christian' for those who believe in the true divinity of Jesus or not. It's simply a linguistic choice. What I do care about is whether Jesus was truly divine or not. Here's an email I sent recently to an inquiring skeptic: Another thing is the claim that Jesus was resurrected.
In general, people didn't claim that the other messiahs were resurrected. It's important to understand something about this claim. It's not just that Jesus was alive in some spirit world, or that his soul was immortal. Several hundred years before Jesus, Plato had taught that everybody's soul was immortal, and a belief in some form of afterlife long predates Jesus! In the case of other religious figures, the claim was that they had moved into the afterlife.
If the early Christians had simply proclaimed that the soul of Jesus was immortal, or that he survived in some form of afterlife, people would have said, yes, so what? What possessed them to make the far more extraordinary claim---extraordinary even in the context of the ancient Near East---that Jesus had risen from the dead?
What makes the resurrection of Jesus claim so extraordinary is that it was clearly meant to include the claim that the *crucified body* of Jesus, not just his soul or spirit, was resurrected. From a historical point of view, it is practically certain that the tomb of Jesus was indeed found to be empty, because if the body had still been there, Christianity would not have got off the ground, if you'll pardon the pun. The authorities would simply have produced the corpse.
The Anglican Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, makes this point very effectively in his massive scholarly study, THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD, which I've cited before. The point is this: ancient people knew that dead people stayed dead just as much as we know it, meaning they knew that even if there is an afterlife, the corpses of the dead are not resurrected. Hence, for the first Christians to have proclaimed this to be different in the case of Jesus is utterly astonishing.
Why did they do it? They were inviting ridicule just as much as anyone today would invite ridicule if they said their friend was raised bodily from the dead. Yet they went about proclaiming this with astonishing energy and remarkable success.
Wright concludes (I think with impeccable reasoning after an incredibly well researched and massive historical study) that by far the best way to account for this is that a) the tomb was empty, and b) the first Christians had visual experiences of Jesus being alive in a resurrected, glorious body. Without both a and b, nothing would have caused them to preach such an apparent absurdity.
Of course, it's a further question as to what caused them to have those visual experiences, (and what caused the tomb to be empty). Were they caused by Jesus actually being alive in a resurrected, glorious body and appearing to them, or were they caused by something other than that? The first Christians themselves seem to have been pretty certain that it was the former. But the truth of the matter can't be decided by historians. What a historian can do, looking at the historical evidence we have, is conclude something about what the first Christians genuinely believed to be the case.
And the evidence, looked at with immense scholarship and thoroughness by Wright (and many others of course) is that what they believed was that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead, and was now living in a glorified body. This is actually a rather unique claim, even in the ancient world.
The next astonishing thing that the first Christians claimed is that this resurrected Jesus was not only the true Messiah of Judaism, but the incarnate Son of God, come into the world for the salvation of all. For Jews to claim this is indeed utterly astonishing.
First, the concept of 'Son of God' in any literally divine sense would have been unknown to them. Second, the concept that this literally divine Son of God would become incarnate was simply unthinkable to Jews (in much the same way and for much the same reasons as it still is for Muslims, and of course modern Jews). Third, most Jews were not interested in saving Gentiles.
But all these claims are multiply attested to in the New Testament, which is largely authored by Jews!
So now the question becomes, when was the NT written? Well, the scholarly consensus is that most or all of it was written between between 50AD and 110AD, give or take a few years. In the 19th century, some scholars made the dating much later, but this is now untenable, because we have actual fragments of the NT which place its composition in the latter half of the 1st century.
Note that this is several centuries before Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine in the 4th century. The earliest of the NT writing is either Galatians or 1 Thessalonians (both circa 50-52AD). This means that there were Christian communities as far away as Turkey and Greece within 20 years of the crucifixion of Jesus (which is dated either 30AD or 33AD).
I won't go into the arguments for the dating here, but there are many solid reasons for thinking that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) were all substantially completed prior to 70AD. We have a letter from Clement of Rome dated in 95AD in which he quotes from 10 of the 27 books of the NT.
Now it would be tedious to point out all the many bits of the NT that affirm the divinity of Christ. But a good place to start would be the Pauline letters, since he is acknowledged to have died in the mid-60sAD and hence all his letters must have been written before then. Well, in Galatians 4:4, Paul writes that "when the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us ot adopted as sons. The proof that you are sons is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts...". So here we have a text written about 51-52AD, indeed it's probably the very earliest or second earliest Christian text we have, authored long before Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, in which a Jew (Paul), who had initially persecuted the first Christians (see Galatians 1: 13-24), writes of Jesus as being the Son of God. As I say, that's just for starters. A summary on NT dating can be found here: http://www.carm.org/questions/written_after.htm
Recently, there has been a bunch of stuff written about Gnostic Christianity, such as BEYOND BELIEF by Elaine Pagels (professor at Princeton), and which focus a great deal on the Gnostic gospels and other literature found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. Now, I'll leave to one side all the very good evidence is that this literature was written much, much later than the NT. But ok, what does Pagels say?
Controversially dating the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas earlier than the canonical Gospel of John, she claims that John was written to disprove Thomas, and that early Christianity had both the orthodox view (represented by John), but also the unorthodox Gnostic view written by Thomas, and that the unorthodox view was kind of unfairly excluded from the Canon of Scripture by the likes of Irenaeus of Lyon in the late 2nd century (still long before Christianity became the religion of the empire, mind you). I can't do much better than quote one reviewer of Pagels' book to show why this is simply an untenable view:
"The idea that John was written to disprove Thomas is untenable for at least three reasons. First, (as Pagels herself admits here), John shows many marks of familiarity with the time, events, and persons of First Century Palestine, while Thomas (as I think she admits of the Gnostics in general, in the Gnostic Gospels) shows none. It was therefore entirely reasonable for early Christians to accept the obviously historical John and reject the even more obviousy unhistorical Thomas: where is the mystery?
"Secondly, many Biblical scholars believe, for what seem excellent reasons, that Thomas was written in the Second Century. Oxford scholar Tom Wright suggests that Thomas is not only unhistorical, it is even anti-historical: "Thomas did for the parables in the second century what Julicher, Dodd and Jeremias did in the twentieth, and perhaps for similar reasons, namely, the attempt to get away from their historical and very Jewish specificity." Pagels never mentions discouraging words like this from competing scholars, still less refutes any of the evidence on which they are based. We are supposed to accept her early dating for Thomas on blind faith, it seems. I wish she had been inspired by the Thomas who was full of doubts, rather than the Thomas who is simply doubtful.
"Thirdly, John resembles the Synoptic Gospels much, while Thomas resembles them little. I recently went over what the Jesus Seminar calls the "Five Gospels" with a fine-toothed comb, and narrowed it down to four again. First, I listed 45 characteristics of the Synoptic Gospels, 43 of which John strongly shares. I then compared Thomas and other ancient literature, and found that of six documents I compared with the canonical Gospels, Thomas resembled them the LEAST. (And two of the other documents were from China!) I found Thomas flagrantly a-historical, formulaic, lacking in developed, convincing characters, unconnected to space or time, un-Jewish, and platitudinous on occasion. Pagels claims that John, unlike the Synoptics, has no moral teaching. Actually John contains rich moral teaching of the highest caliber: it is Thomas (surprisingly, for a sayings "Gospel") that has none!
"In short, I find NO reason to take the "Gospel of Thomas" seriously as a source for the life of Jesus, or to call it a Gospel. John, on the other hand, is intimately related to the Synoptic Gospels in dozens of vital ways, and shows many signs of being a trustworthy account of something that happened. The early Christians chose these Gospels because they knew their work -- better than some modern scholars, it seems to me, who are making absolute fools of themselves by pushing such wares, when they ought to know better."
Anglican Bishop of Durham, N. T. "Tom" Wright, whom I regard as probably the best scholar of Jesus and early Christianity, has a webpage devoted to his work:
http://www.ntwrightpage.com/
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