Gospel claims forty years removed and more from Jesus' resurrection are not the same thing as claims which are "only a short time later"

Jesus After the Critics

Michael C. Legaspi  

 ... Like most New Testament scholars, she holds Mark to be the earliest Gospel (composed sometime around the year 70), with Matthew and Luke—both of whom use Mark as a source ­document—coming along a generation later. John, independent of the other three, came later still. ... 

Pagels’s own position is that the question of Jesus’s resurrection goes beyond what a historian can say: “Historical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the reality”; it can only verify that “after Jesus died many people claimed to have seen him alive.”

Pagels is not entirely wrong. The evidence that Jesus was put to death—actually killed, in public, on a cross, by the governing ­authority—and that many people claimed, only a short time later, that they saw the same Jesus alive cannot seriously be doubted. ...              

 

Nice try, but no. 

We do not know that many people claimed that they saw Jesus alive "only a short time later". 

Pagels' claim to fame has been all about making this very kind of chronological error, placing later Gnostic sources on the same level as the New Testament as evidence to argue for multiple Christianities and their legitimacy. That Legaspi shrinks from calling her out on that tells you everything you need to know about Legaspi.

The only sense in which it is true that the modern phenomenon of scholarship is "now in retreat" is in the extent to which scholars like Pagels and her reviewer Legaspi themselves retreat from the critical project.  

Meanwhile in A.D. 69, around the time of the composition of Mark, many dreamers thought Nero had come back from the dead, too, but just because they existed doesn't mean we take them seriously or believe them, any more than Tacitus did, whose case proves yet again that human nature is unchanging, a mixture of credulity and incredulity from time immemorial:

... About this time Achaia and Asia Minor were terrified by a false report that Nero was at hand. Various rumours were current about his death; and so there were many who pretended and believed that he was still alive. The adventures and enterprises of the other pretenders I shall relate in the regular course of my work. The pretender in this case was a slave from Pontus, or, according to some accounts, a freedman from Italy, a skilful harp-player and singer, accomplishments, which, added to a resemblance in the face, gave a very deceptive plausibility to his pretensions. After attaching to himself some deserters, needy vagrants whom he bribed with great offers, he put to sea. Driven by stress of weather to the island of Cythnus, he induced certain soldiers, who were on their way from the East, to join him, and ordered others, who refused, to be executed. He also robbed the traders and armed all the most able-bodied of the slaves. ... Thence the alarm spread far and wide, and many roused themselves at the well-known name, eager for change, and detesting the present state of things. The report was daily gaining credit when an accident put an end to it. ...

-- Tacitus, Histories 2.8 

 

Occasionally a Christian reminds the world that the religion is pagan, its human sacrifice an abomination to the God of Moses

 

What Protestants Get Wrong About the Epistle to the Hebrews

Peter J. Leithart, First Things

 ... The blood of bulls and goats was always impotent; what was needed was the human sacrifice of total obedience, fulfilled in the cross. It’s not a conservative gospel, but a revolutionary one in which first things change place with last things. ...

To wit:

When you come into the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations.  There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD; and because of these abominable practices the LORD your God is driving them out before you.

-- Deuteronomy 18:9ff.

They built the high places of Ba'al in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

-- Jeremiah 32:35

Not only that, Leithart's interpretation of the Eucharist is an abomination to the Christian God, even whose catechumens were excluded from the Lord's Supper as strangers from the third and fourth centuries:

The Eucharist is the Lord’s, and our, hospitality to strangers.

To wit:

The Church urges the entire assembly of the faithful to pray for the catechumens, even though they are still strangers. Indeed, they do not yet belong to the Body of Christ, they have not partaken of the Holy Mysteries; they are still apart from the spiritual flock … They stand outside the royal court, far from the sacred forecourts. That is why they are sent away before those fearful prayers [of the Anaphora] are said. So she asks you to pray for them, that they may become fellow members with you and no longer be strangers and cut off.

— Apostolic Constitutions, 8.32 PG 1.1132B; Apostolic Tradition, 17, SC 11bis, p. 75

Sohrab Ahmari learns something valuable from Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops: Rome lent Christianity inspiration to be a world religion

 The ­universalist—in the sense of world-spanning—religion of this new church was from the ­beginning suited to and even prefigured by the political universalism of the Roman Empire. Roman-ness, this history teaches, is of the essence of ­Christianity. ... Roman reality structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse. ...

Christian life in the centuries prior to the Constan­tinian conversion was already developing authoritative structures, and at a relentless pace. Such structures are always necessary for governance, spiritual and temporal. The general tendency of these structures was expansion, away from the margins and into the center of human affairs. 

More.

 

 

Certain partisans will object strenuously to the idea that pagan Rome lent the universalist impulse to Christianity, but they will be wrong.

They are already unwilling to accept that the aims of the historical Jesus were more modest, who insisted he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10), whose twelve disciples were to judge the twelve tribes of Israel in the imminently coming eschatological kingdom of God (Matthew 19) in Jerusalem. To it many in Israel were called, but only few were chosen.

The germ of the universal religion idea certainly came from elsewhere, from the likes of St. Paul the Roman citizen and his intellectual and spiritual kin who, inspired by Isaiah the prophet among others, thought God's aim was to have mercy on all the nations (Romans 11).

For his part, Paul combined in himself two streams with a single and much more ambitious agenda. The Hellenistic Jew of the proselytizing Pharisee variety not coincidentally was still the enthusiastic missionary despite a crisis of conversion, but with a now much wider field of opportunity. And the Roman citizen by birth who was at liberty to travel and study in Jerusalem became himself an itinerant teacher, exploiting his favored position both at the margins and finally at the center of the empire.

My ambition has always been to preach the Good News where the name of Christ has never been heard, rather than where a church has already been started by someone else. ... In fact, my visit to you has been delayed so long because I have been preaching in these places. But now I have finished my work in these regions, and after all these long years of waiting, I am eager to visit you. I am planning to go to Spain, and when I do, I will stop off in Rome. And after I have enjoyed your fellowship for a little while, you can provide for my journey. But before I come, I must go to Jerusalem to take a gift to the believers there.

-- Romans 15:20ff. 

Ahmari chalks it all up to the divine will. The evidence chalks it up to the civis romanus and Pharisee.

Except Jesus the apocalyptic prophet never would have said it, let alone imagined it

 “This is my body; this is my blood” is one of the most philosophically challenging of all human utterances, forcing us to consider the meaning of substance, the modes of presence, the concept of embodiment, the relation of God and creation or heaven and earth, the metaphysics of change, and on and on.

More.

Why all this poetry?

 Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but ­unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry. ...

No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. ... These ancient Hebrew and Aramaic poems remain vividly present in English—and not only for Christians—because the King James Bible had the good fortune to be translated in the age of Shakespeare. ...

What are the Beatitudes but a poem carefully shaped in the tradition of prophetic verse?... The Incarnation requires an ode, not an email. ... Sacred poetry is a human universal. Every culture has felt the need to invoke and describe the divine in the most potent language possible. Poetry itself seems to have originated in sacred ritual. Only gradually did the art expand into secular uses. Since the development of poetry as an art predates the invention of writing, the genealogy of sacred verse is lost in prehistory. It is always hard to assign an exact date or occasion to surviving ancient texts. Even the dating of the Old Testament is difficult to establish; the books were composed and compiled across a millennium.

Much more, here.

George Weigel thinks the resurrection of Jesus made possible "the individual" in the West when it was really the example of Jesus

Rebels like Paul and Luther would be unthinkable without that example.

Catholics used to understand this. It is amusing that Weigel argues like a Protestant fixated on the resurrection instead of on the life and teaching of Jesus.

Who Invented the Individual? 

George Weigel, First Things

Before Christianity, immortality was a family concept: One lived on in one’s family. The Resurrection of Jesus and the promise of a “resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5) changed all that, as the individual human being became the locus of immortality—and thus the bearer of a unique, personal, “individual” dignity. 

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None of that would have been even thinkable were it not for the example of the supreme individuality of the forerunner as the "true man", whose vertical faith relation to God superceded [sic!] the social dimension and made it irrelevant:

 

And [the Pharisees] sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.

 

-- Matthew 22:16

This aloofness of Jesus, if we may call it that, is one of the things which marks out the unique individual qua individual so characteristic of the figures we name "religious founders". For good or for ill, it is that attitude which triumphed in the West and has been democratized to an extreme degree, in large measure due to Protestantism. Positively it has evolved into what we call "leadership". Negatively it is what is known as "a Messiah complex".

The example of Jesus is not unalloyed.

Peter Leithart observes that William Lane Craig is a moderate on Genesis, and Craig responds that a figurative reading was the Pentateuchal author's intent!

In which Leithart amusingly puts back on his discarded Protestant hat to defend the faith from a mind-reader trapped in a cul-de-sac.

[H]e sneaks into the head of the author of Genesis to discover that the biblical account of Eden and the fall was “fantastic, even to the Pentateuchal author himself.” ... Some Evangelical theologians deny the existence of a historical Adam entirely, which means that Craig’s position is a moderate one.

-- Leithart, here in "Doubts About William Lane Craig’s Creation Account"

If an aspect of a story contradicts what the Pentateuchal author believed, it is unlikely to be literally intended.

... the Pentateuchal author would have known that ... sunset and sunrise could not have occurred prior to the creation of the sun ...

... If the stories are inconsistent with one another when read literally, that suggests that a literal interpretation is not intended.

-- Craig, here in "Mytho-History in Genesis"

 

Catholic systematic theologian Thomas Weinandy featured at First Things appears to be a process theologian in disguise, not an orthodox one

He appears to be driven to his conclusions by his reading of the Fourth Gospel, which has the risen Jesus still in process in heaven "preparing a place for you" (John 14:2f.).

As a consequence the historical Jesus wasn't really fully Jesus, nor are Christians ever fully Christians, until the end of the world when they all are reunited in that place.

... the Incarnation of God’s eternal Word, his “pitching his tent among us” (Jn. 1:14) in our mortal condition is not an instantaneous happening, confined to Annunciation or Nativity, but an ever-deeper process of immersion and transformation. ...

In his coming down out of heaven at the end of time, and in his taking up with him the faithful into his ascended glory, Jesus will then become fully Jesus, for he will have fully enacted his name—YHWH-Saves. ...

As Jesus becomes fully in act at the end of time, so Christians, who fully abide in Christ, become Christians fully in act at the end of time ...

More.

This all sounds suspiciously like it is tailored for the "Life is about the journey, not the destination" crowd, a theology for the consumers of pop-cultural Marxism not of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Of course one has to ignore, among many other things, the imminent end of the world preached by the Jesus of the Synoptics and its failure to come, to even begin to go down this path, which makes the reviewer's assertion that there is eschatological energy in all of this completely laughable.

That is precisely what one would expect of enthusiasm for systematic theology, which, pace the Pope, always ends up making a mockery of the inconvenient evidence.

"The dualism between exegesis and theology" which Francis laments is irreconcilable.

"Huge majorities" of the Presbyterian Church in America twice "voted to uphold the Christian sexual morality of the last two millennia"

But its elites "are out of touch with the denomination's grass roots."

More. 

Not to be confused with the pro-gay PCUSA, which had 3.1 million members in 1984 (now down 60% in the 35 years to 2020).

 

1.24 million members

0.38 million members

Creepy connubial Christ talk at First Things and the Book of Revelation

Loving with Mary :

Mary, the Shulammite, turns around to Jesus. In his voice and face, she recognizes her husband, her Lord. Jesus is the groom; we ourselves are Mary, the Shulammite. Her grief is our grief, her tears our tears, and her despair our despair. ...

We, his bride, hold on to him, united to him in faith. Every Eighth Day, he comes to us in the preaching of the gospel; every Sunday morning in the breaking of the bread.

When we walk into church and the doors close behind us, we enter into heaven. Eastertide begins; time and space are reconfigured. It is the Eighth Day; we are in Paradise. Eve, the Shulammite, Mary Magdalene—we all join Jesus at the altar. Bread and wine show up. It’s a marriage supper. Our groom, our Lord, unites himself to us, his bride.

Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready;

it was granted her to be clothed

with fine linen, bright and pure—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints (Rev. 19:6–8)

And you thought gender confusion was so . . . fringe.

M.C. Legaspi for FIRST THINGS totally misses Jesus' conception of prayer as secret communion with God as Father

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 

-- Matthew 6:6

What is more comical, Michel Houellebecq's misplaced faith in the competence of theologians or his ignorance of Catholicism's responsibility for schism?

Restoration: An Exchange of Views on Religion Between Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune

"Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, perhaps, I don’t know. It would be good if she moved away definitively from Protestantism and drew closer to Orthodoxy. Unity would be the best solution, but it would not be easy. The question of the Filioque could easily be resolved by competent theologians. ... Basically, it amounts to this: The Catholic Church, in the course of its history, has granted much too much importance to reason (aggravated over the centuries, probably, under the influence of Protestantism). Man is a being of reason: That’s true, from time to time. But he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion. It would be good not to forget that."

National Catholic Reporter attacks its conservative luminaries and First Things, denies Catholic abuse scandal is primarily homosexual in origin

This snooty editorial demanding deep self-examination is itself blind to the sin of homosexuality which has metastisized in the Catholic priesthood. The church's view that God has created people homosexual is the little leaven that has leavened the whole lump.

Here:

Those who worked so ardently in the past to enable you — the faithful, so betrayed, who just couldn't believe you would engage in such a deliberate cover up; the likes of George Weigel and his blind, uncritical hagiography of Pope John Paul II; Dr. Mary Ann Glendon and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and their naive celebration and defense of Maciel; the rest of the chorus at First Things and like publications; the telling silence of so many other Catholic outlets; the absurdity of charlatan William Donohue and his silly "Catholic" League — they helped sustain your weak narrative as many of them denigrated those who raised the tough questions and pursued the truth.

It's over.

None of them any longer has a persuasive case to make. Some of them now try to blame the crisis on gay priests. You might be tempted to latch onto that diversion, but it will only prolong the already intolerably long agony.

Gay priests and bishops are certainly among us — probably a greater percentage of gays in the Catholic clergy, if anecdotal evidence and the private chatter of seminary rectors and heads of orders is to be believed, than one would find in the general population. ...

Unless the preponderance of credible experts has suddenly flipped its understanding of things, however, sexual orientation is not one of the topics that match with sexual abuse.

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

The harebrained Peter Leithart writes that "we fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering" at First Things

Here.

It's a textbook example of ignorant exegesis, in this case of Colossians 1:24.

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the church

Νῦν χαίρω ἐν τοῖς παθήμασιν μου ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν καὶ ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου ὑπὲρ τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία

Paul isn't saying there's anything insufficient or lacking in Christ's afflictions. He's saying he himself is lacking in them, which is why he says to begin with that he rejoices in his sufferings.

Those sufferings fill up what he asserts to be a deficit of them in his experience, "in my flesh" (ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου), which might seem surprising given his statements elsewhere about their ubiquity in his missionary activity. So Paul is clearly speaking a little hyperbolically about himself here. Or perhaps ironically. In comparison with most every one of his contemporaries, he has already suffered much. The point Paul wishes to make is that his service to the church as Apostle to the Gentiles is validated when he experiences suffering and affliction, and so he welcomes those things. The more he suffers for the sake of the gospel, the more the church should know the validity of his calling. "When I am weak, then am I strong", etc.   

This is an entirely autobiographical statement by Paul as an apostle, an example of the defense of himself he is wont to make against his opponents, rather than a recommendation for or illustration of the normal Christian life (compare his counsel elsewhere to ordinary folk to live peaceably with all men, live quietly, work with your hands, etc.).

To suggest otherwise is ignorant and needlessly feverish.

Critic of the alt-right Matthew Rose is mistaken: Race was a category to the historical Jesus

Matthew Rose, here in First Things:

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].” The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible. ... Young men . . . need an account of nationhood that teaches them about their past, without making them fear the future; an account of civic life that opens them to transcendence, rather than closing them to their neighbors.

It was the Pauline synthesis which made the risen Christ the proponent of a universal religion, one which goes into all the world making disciples. The historical Jesus, however, viewed those outside the house of Israel as dogs, and himself as sent only to the lost among his own kind. To imply that that made Jesus somehow closed to transcendence certainly ought to give his worshippers pause, but it shows just how thoroughgoing has been the victory of Paul over Jesus that the horizontal is so matter-of-factly valued as if it were the vertical. This is, in fact, a kind of idolatry.

The alt-right's opposition to Christianity is really opposition to this Paulinist revolution, without which Christianity would no doubt have ceased to exist. But the alt-right understands it as little as Christians understand that they are children of this lesser god.

Meanwhile, the failure of Jesus' coming Kingdom of God is a cautionary tale of humanity's inate capacity for self-deception which could instruct his followers and opponents alike but, because it hasn't so far, probably never will.

North America will be glaciated again, or worse, before that ever happens.

    

An alt-right Jesus, but for Jews only: The rest of us are dogs, whites included

Contra Connor Grubaugh, assistant editor of First Things, here:

Christianity in its original and most animating form is fundamentally incompatible with the Faustian ethic and race-based mythos of the alt-right, just as it is incompatible with the equivocations of liberalism. Orthodoxy is its own mythos—a true one.

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

-- Matthew 10:5f.

I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

-- Matthew 15:24, 26

The vignette in Acts 10 and 11 proves that the earliest church had assumed on the basis of this original message of Jesus that repentance unto life had not been granted "also to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).

Moreover Jesus himself had criticized the missionary zeal of the Pharisees in the outside world:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

-- Matthew 23:15

Rather than speak of the impossibility of "alt-right Christianity", it seems more like an absolute necessity, however much that makes the faith an anachronism which has precious little to say to our time. The original message of Jesus is thoroughly "race-based", for Jews only.

Or is all this "scripture" to be relegated to the junk heap of history as nothing more than the evil work of Paul's opponents, the Circumcision, tampering with the Word of God?

Offending our self-obsessed chaos of individualists in twenty words or less

"I do not get to decide who I am and how I may behave".

-- Carl R. Trueman, here

One Kyle Harper grasps Paul's vision of "virginity as the highest mode of life and marriage as second best"

In a worthwhile essay in First Things which shows how early Christian sexual morality is fundamentally different from Stoic. 

Here:

Paul charted the future course of Christian sexual discipline: Virginity as the highest mode of life and marriage as second best, yet also infused with a divine significance that jealously reserves sexual union for itself.

No Gates of Vienna for these guys: The Christians wear the cuck label with pride at First Things

And no tea in Boston Harbor nor American victory at Yorktown, either. Catholicism means the death of America from within as surely as Islam means it from without.

Matthew Schmitz, here in "Christianity is for Cucks":

As it happens, I think those alt-right accusations had some truth to them. Christianity really is for cucks . . .. Christianity is not a matter of blood, or of race, or of victory in this world. It requires us to accept defeat in this life so we might enjoy triumph in the next. A Catholic cannot be certain that his line will continue or his country thrive. He only knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ’s Church.