Hello Foogworg, thanks for responding.
You said:
“How would anyone know about +500 sightings? Either they made it up or someone kept a database which would be an odd and implausible thing to do.”
It wasn’t 500 sightings.
It was 500+ people who saw Jesus alive at the same time.
It was one sighting with 500+ witnesses.
That’s why it was so persuasive in the early church.
You said:
“This is just another Jesus story born of a hallucination that spread and morphed in the decades before it was written down in a document lost to time but copied and recopied many times over and eventually included in a canon chosen by a group of mere men.”
Despite the popularity of such ideas, there’s no evidence backing it.
Our earliest manuscripts agree with the Bible we read, today.
We keep digging up more manuscripts all the time, to the extent that we have over 11,000 New Testament documents. No matter how early they go, they don’t show any sign of being morphed and changing as they were copied.
Even Bart Ehrman, one of the staunchest critics, agrees with Bruce Metzger that if we had to reconstruct the original New Testament text, we could do it with over 99% accuracy, based on the manuscripts we have.
Quite simply: the Bible hasn’t changed over time.
The few times scribes tried to insert a verse here or there, we can spot it and remove it with ease, based on all the thousands of manuscripts we have that don’t have that addition.
You said:
“The ascension story is amusing in illustrating a belief common at the time that heaven was in the sky. Those ancient people apparently believed in multiple levels of heaven since Paul claims he was caught up in “third heaven” (2 Cor. 12).”
They didn’t believe Heaven was in the sky, at least not in the way you’re implying.
They spoke of three “Heavens,” each of which had a clear referent.
The first Heaven was the sky — the clouds, the blue sky, etc.
The second Heaven was the cosmos — the moon, the stars, etc.
The third Heaven was what we call Heaven — where God dwells.
That’s why Paul specifies that he was caught up in the “third heaven” — He was where God was. He wasn’t talking about being in the sky or in the cosmos.
You said:
“That and his Damascus Road event suggests Paul suffered from seizures.”
If so, you’d expect that these seizures appear sometime in his well-documented travels in Acts, or mentioned in his letters.
But the Damascus Road event was witnessed by those with him. They saw the light and heard the sound, as well.
This was not a halluncination in his head.
You said:
“And the bible mentions “firmament” as if there were a shield in the sky holding back rainwater. They also believed the earth stood still while bodies in the sky moved as evidenced by Joshua 10:13 where the sun and moon reportedly stopped in the sky.”
Joshua 10:13 refers to their perception of time stopping, not the physical sun and moon stopping.
You said:
“In discussing the over 500 witnesses Paul oddly omits the women who reportedly saw Jesus such as in Mark 16:9 while claiming Cephas was the first then an appearance was made to “the twelve.” It seems Paul didn’t know Judas was dead by then.”
Matthias replaced Judas in Acts 1, filling the Eleven back up to Twelve. This happened roughly 20 years before Paul wrote, so he was entirely correct to speak of the Twelve.
The woman are, by all reasonable expectations, included in the 500.
You said:
“We should not be surprised at the discrepancy. It is just one among hundreds in the bible. We don’t know if the women at the tomb told no one or everyone:
- Mark 16:8 “The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, and they said nothing to anyone because they were too frightened.” and most ancient manuscripts end it there.
- Luke 24:9 “and returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest.”
It is interesting that the most ancient and best copies of Mark end at 16:8.”
Study your history, my friend.
Multiple church fathers discuss the longer ending of Mark in the centuries PRIOR to these “most ancient and best” copies of Mark.
The longer ending was considered Scripture in the second century. The Text of the Gospels: Mark 16:9–20 and Early Patristic Evidence
As for the women, it’s quite easy to see what happened.
If you leave somewhere and you’re afraid, what do you do?
Sure, maybe at first you hide and tell no one.
But then, do you… just keep hiding?
Or do you get over your fear after a few hours, then go and tell people who would want to know?
Do you really believe that the women just kept hiding and saying nothing indefinitely? Or can you see that they would stop hiding at some point, and probably would want to tell people what they had seen?
