So James Cameron is attempting to "debunk" the resurrection of Christ. He even now claims to have possession of the body, an audacious claim that neither the Jewish authorities nor their Roman counterparts made. I have a few problems with this latest attack on Christianity:
- The Jewish authorities had every interest in crushing the early "heresy" of Christianity; they had the resources to secure the body and the motivations to not only secure it, but prove after three days that this man who so many of them wanted dead, was in fact dead. Guess what? They couldn't produce the body.
- This site does a good job of rebutting several of the major theories of what happened to the body, some of which are tied into Cameron's claim. The record in the gospel, which was an account of events, not a series of religious metaphors, hails from the same era and most of it was written by eye witnesses to the events described.
- None of the apostles fits the profile of a cult leader. In fact, the majority of them paid in blood to spread a message, to build a church, that they would never see any financial, sexual or authority benefit from. If you think that because people are willing to suicide bomb for religion or political causes, and that that explains away the willingness of Peter to die by crucifiction, then you clearly don't grasp the full extent of the horror they were suffering, and unlike modern Islamists, they had a chance to know if it were right or wrong. If they never saw Jesus again after three days, they would have gone back to being "good Jews," not followers of Yeshua.
- There are too many "little things" whose validity is demonstrated daily. For example, Christianity itself, the message, not even the followers, is hated by a lot of people. It was like that even in the beginning. No other religion has been so violently persecuted for a message that compared to other religions, is as genuinely peaceful, tolerant and that teaches people that it's ok to enjoy the material world, just not certain ways. Jesus said that the world would hate the gospel message, and He is proven right daily in the sort of persecution that third world Christians face. You can blather on and on about evil that was done by men in the name of the church, but there is no message as hated as that of the gospel and no religion that has produced as many people willing to suffer or die at the hands of evil men and women out of faith as ours.
The disciples' reaction to Christ's death was like that of a follower watching a cult leader unceremoniously die. It broke their spirits and made them walk away. It takes a cynical bastard to believe that these men turned around and decided to pay such horrible sacrifices for something that broke their spirits and never came true; especially after they apparently knew it wasn't true.
***UPDATE***: El Borak points out that it's absurd to think that Jesus' family would also have been buried there. Unfortunately for Cameron, the archaeologist in charge of the project for the Israel Antiquities Authority, agrees that it is just not realistic to think that this tomb is what it's being made out to be:
"It is just not possible that a family who came from Galilee, as the New Testament tells us of Joseph and Mary, would be buried over several generations in Jerusalem."
I especially like your last point. I'd like naysayers to provide other examples of men who died for something they knew wasn't true.
Especially when there was nothing to be gained from it, and everything to lose. They didn't even stand to get power and prestige in their day, and very, very few people are so desperate for that that they are willing to die for a flat out lie.
Dude - I posted on this too. I was so mad when I read that, I just wanted to rip him to pieces, hurt him real bad. But, I then went into pity mode, wondering why someone would choose to be alone.
I also finally fixed the link to you from my site. I kept trying to get here, but the link was broken. Fixed now though!
I was upset at first, but then I read the word "casket" and something immediately went "ding, ding, ding!" in my head that something was awry with it. Then I found some stuff, such as even a leading archaeologist with the IAA saying that in his mind, Cameron is full of it. Besides, the whole DNA testing is a liiittttle hard to do without a living person to say, "hell yeah, I'm Yeshua of Nazareth!" That, and there's the whole positive identification issue. It's not like they had forensics databases for executed prisoners in ancient Rome...
Absolutely correct. The story in the Gospels is one where positively prooving either truth or falsity is nearly impossible. As a comparison, can anyone find the body of either Herod or Pontius Pilate? Both of them were men of formal position who were likely to be interred in a formal manner, and yet, no physical evidence of them can be shown.
How much more so would one expect that the body of a person who was executed as a criminal would be unidentifiable?
No, Cameron is off his rocker in this. Folks like him seem to think that nitpicking around the edge of a story (it wasn't cave X, it was cave Y! So THERE!) actually should impact the religious belief of the believers. I know very few people of sincere religious faith who would be shaken by the equivalent of errors in transcription (like, what if Jesus were called "Yehoshua" during his life instead of "Yeshua"? I don't think that would change the story...)
I bet you that these same men could not find the bodies of most major leaders ranging from Mohamed, to Ghengis Kahn, to Marcus Aurelius, to Charlemagne, to most of the emperors of the Aztecs (assuming they weren't served at the banquet of the next emperor...)
It just goes to show much so many people **don't want to believe** rather than believe that they would be taken in by such flimsy evidence.
Exactly my point. There is enough contemporaneous evidence to support Christian belief that there was a person named Jesus who was influential about 2000 years ago. There is also enough comtemporaneous evidence to support those people who do not accept Christian doctrine.
It all comes down to belief...
Thanks, Mike. Thanks to you I have to come up with another unique idea. This is hard on me, man! ;)
Glad I could be of assistance in some small way.