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 

 

The stated goal of Rachel Crandall-Crocker's Transgender Day of Visibility is power

Rachel Crandall-Crocker says several times in a 2020 interview, if you can manage to get through the whole thing, that the goal of organizing their day in the first place was to obtain power.

Just turn the sound off and turn on the closed captions and you'll see for yourself.

Comments to the YouTube video, by the way, have been turned off overnight, which is exactly what you would expect from people who want power, which to them means they have a say and you don't.

The success of this gay man's effort, originally organized on Facebook in 2009, elicited the Oy vey! he exclaimed about four minutes in. This attention-seeking larper must be even more thrilled now.

This was April 21, 2020, not quite a year before Joe Biden became the first American president to recognize the day officially, which in retrospect seems indicative not so much of Joe Biden's thinking on the matter but of the unseen activists in his administration who drive his policies behind the scenes because Joe is too feeble of body and mind to exercise executive function.

Americans didn't notice at the time in March 2021 for good reasons.

Their attention was consumed by the COVID-19 hysteria, by the Trump defeat, by the roll-out of the new vaccines, uptake of which peaked in April because of sudden deaths for some Johnson and Johnson vaccine recipients which in turn launched the seemingly interminable vaccine controversy, and in the summer by the Afghanistan debacle.

But now that the day happened to coincide with Easter three years later, Americans have noticed, which has had the unintended effect of making their day more visible and powerful than it might have been. We have taken the bait and given them the attention which they wanted, which is the basis of their power. Their success may be measured by how the conversation of the country was dominated by their day, not by ours.

Note that when confronted with what he had done, Joe Biden denied that he had declared Easter Sunday the Transgender Day of Visibility. But of course he did. He brought the Trojan Horse of Transgenderism into the government and now we awaken from a long sleep and find that Troy has already fallen.

Since their goal is power, we may imagine that it won't be long now before America has its own attention-seeking Emperor Nero, who played the bride to a man he had married, consummating it on a couch in full public view. Or before we have a transgender woman Elagabalus, the Roman Emperor who said "I am a lady". 

The freaks will be thrilled.

What will you be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evangelical Timothy George Calls Lincoln The Most Spiritually Minded American President

Well, the devil was spiritually minded, too.

Here: 

Though Abraham Lincoln was neither baptized nor joined a church of any kind, he was the most spiritually minded president in American history. His faith was wrought on the anvil of anguish, both personal and national, and because of this he has much to teach us in our own age of anxiety.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Why is it that religious people today are so quick to venerate the American model of authoritarianism, the man who arguably ended the Republic, invaded the South, presided over the mass murder of fellow citizens, set the precedent for the meaninglessness of citizenship in the age of Obama and Anwar al-Awlaki (just as imperial Nero slew Roman citizen Paul of Tarsus), and refounded the nation on the basis of a few ideological principles and executive power which did nothing but alienate the Constitution from the Declaration? 

The "spiritual" views of the founding generation of enthusiasts found opposition to such tyranny completely synonymous with obedience to God, but we are largely found on the other side of the argument today.

They wouldn't know us, and if they did they'd take up arms against us.