Monday, May 9, 2011

Accidentally or Conveniently Forgotten?

Apologists often give historical defenses of Jesus’ resurrection, piecing together scant information from the Bible and concluding that there is no alternative explanation for the claim of the empty tomb and the early explosion of Christianity. But my question is: what explanation do apologists have for some of the missing historical information? If Jesus was really God, then there are certain pieces of information that would have been extremely advantageous for the early church to remember, information that would have served as evidence to confirm their beliefs. The earliest Christian church seems to have either quickly forgotten certain critical information, or never knew it. To me, this suggests that the information was not advantageous, or was even disadvantageous. The biggest one is the location of Jesus’ tomb. The empty tomb is one of the most important confirmations of Christian beliefs, so I can’t conceive of how early believers could let anyone forget this if Jesus really rose. I can think of two explanations for forgetting the location of the tomb. 1) It was not important to the earliest church because their belief was based more on feelings than cold-hard facts. 2) The tomb location would not serve to confirm, but rather disconfirm their beliefs. Other forgotten information that makes no sense is the authors and date of authorship of the gospels. How could the Christian church ever have forgotten this? There must have been no advantage to remembering who wrote the gospels. The earliest records we have of the Christian church shows them trying to piece together what happened in Jesus’ time from scant information, just like we are still trying to do today. They’ve been mystery texts ever since day 1 (whenever that was).

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