Tamaki, Cultwatch and the Herald

Once again Brian Tamaki, New Zealand's highest profile and possible richest church leader is in the news.  This time it is a Herald editorial, blasting Cultwatch for categorising Brian Tamaki as a cultist because he has denied the bodily resurrection of Christ.  The writer of the editorial appears to be under the impression that this then places Tamaki in the same camp as Lloyd Geering and other liberalising theologians in their rejection of orthodox Christian doctrine in the name of embracing the fruits of secular modernity.  Said editor displays a complete failure to grasp that this is not "Bishop" Tamaki bowing to the reason of the modern age but his out of control ego propelling him to reinvent Christianity in a way that serves his own ends more efficiently.  I would, however, agree with the nameless Herald editor that Cultwatch has been a bit slow on this one, it is not doctinal unorthodoxy that makes a cult but the systematic manipulation of the vulnerable.  True followers of Jesus are good news for the poor, they don't use the poor to bankroll their next pruchase of a Lexus.  If a pastor has a personalised number plate it should read "here to serve," Tamaki's betrays his true heart:

Two posts on Mark's Gospel

Steve Douglas discusses equal opportunity salvation,

Neither the rich nor the poor are demonized, because the author understood a focus on class or status to be missing Jesus’ point.

And James McGrath has a hunch (AKA an essay) as to how the gospel story ended in Mark's mind if not on paper.

Wright on Colbert

I don't know how I missed this the first time round, but on a clue from John Byron (thanks John!), I sought and I found.  To be honest, it is not as much fun as I thought it would be, but still worth watching Tom in a less typical situation.  The time Bart Ehrman appeared on the Colbert report was much funnier though.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bishop N.T. Wright
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Josephus on the Ressurection: Why Should We Want It?

A preacher I heard the other day alluded to the fact that non-Christian historians also recorded the resurrection of Jesus.  As far as I am aware the only non-Christian historian of that era to make any possible reference to the resurrection is Josephus in Antiquities, 3:63-64.  Whiston translates the passage,

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ.  And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross , those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named for him, are not extinct at this day.

Now, generally those Christians who want to defend the authenticity of this paragraph, over and against the assertion that this is a Christian insertion or at least shows signs of Christian editing, do so because such independent testimony would be important corroboration of the Christian accounts (leaving aside for the time being the manifold serious issues with Josephus as a historian).  But if this really were Josephus' unedited words then the fact that a 1st c. Jew could calmly relate the fact of the resurrection and Jesus' status as messiah and yet not be himself a follower of the way actually does more to undermine Christian apologetics than help, because it would show that 1st c. Jews, even educated ones, really were credulous about such things.

It is surely more important to argue, from an apologetics perspective, that 1st c. Jews were not easily impressed by such claims and so the fact that so many of them were convinced, even to the point of martyrdom, suggests that something really did happen.  If Josephus believed the account but felt it to be less than earth shattering ( it certainly had little or no impact on his understanding of the divine will in contemporary world events) then it actually weakens rather than enforces the testimony of the Christians.

As I've warned before, apologetics is a messy business with often unintended and unfortunate consequences, most of those practising it would be better off spending their time doing what Jesus commanded instead of arguing the point.

brick-a-brack 11/10/10

OK, inspired by Marc's, "flotsam and jetsam" I have decided to go with my own coothy phrase to save me thinking of new titles for my internet round up's that don't make me sound like a web based cowhand.

• ‘a homemaker and home schooling mum who does analytic philosophy in some of her spare time’ argues for the resurrection, HT 
• A Guardian article on the Book of Common Prayer and the joy of being a sinner
• Doug considers Luke 17 and how some healings are only surface level
• And here are some blogs worth between 20 and 240 million dollars each, but Xenos is priceless, free for you.

Easter Blogging

Well I took a blogging holiday over Easter, not because I was being especially pious, far from it in fact.  I had a few ideas for posts but didn't want to take time away from family to do them.  However, no harm done to the world at large as there was plenty of quality Easter fare this year:

Good Friday sermons from Kim Fabricus, M&M while Doug Chaplin ponders "the cup" as does Glenn Peoples, but Richard Beck ponders the Passion from a Christus Victor angle.

James McGrath points out the importance of Saturday, which is something I wrote about (albeit from a totally different angle) in an old essay.

Easter Sunday Sermons from Kim Fabricus and Bruce Hamil meditates on materialism and the resurrection as does Jason Goroncy and Doug while others just wonder if we can prove it or not?  For Richard Beck Easter demands a decision from us but don't tell the bunnies.

Three Views on the Resurrection of the Body

[pic from here]

I'm currently wrestling with 1 Cor 15:35-58.  In this famous passage Paul juxtaposes the bodies we have now with the bodies that we will have at the resurrection.  Because much popular Christianity tends to focus on the "pie in the sky when you die" many of us don't think much about the resurrection and the life that it will entail.  But Christian hope is not actually centred on "getting to heaven" but on the new heavens and new earth which we anticipate at Christ's coming.  However interpretation of the scriptures' most detailed passage on the subject is notoriously difficult and has over the centuries resulted in three schools of thought (citations from Dahl).

1. The "traditional" view is that "the resurrection body is this body restored and improved in a miraculous manner." (p7)  But given the knowledge we now have about the way we are composed of the atoms that have been part of millions of other human beings and the way the body itself contains very little if any "original" material, such a view seem problematic.  However we might find continuity in our bodies it is not through the material that they consist of as this is always changing.

2. The view that has in modern times displaced the traditional view can be called "hetero-somatism" (p8) or if jargon is not your thing different-body-ism.  This simply argues that we are given totally new bodies, but we continue.  We then exist somehow apart from our bodies, we have bodies but we are not bodies and so our essential personality can be transposed into a new vehicle/vessel without any change in who we essentially are.  However if this is Paul's view, then it is hard to see why he places so much emphasis on the body per se in 1 Corinthians.

3.  A third view is that the resurrection body, while not "materially identical" to the original will be "somatically identical." (p10)  For Dahl this is the difference between saying a gold ring is the same object three years later and saying that a human is the same person three years later. (p94)  For a ring to be the same it must contain the same atoms or it will be a new ring, but for a human even though the atoms have changed we still recognise continuity.  "This identity is not simply a matter of having the same 'personality' . . . nor simply a matter of his having the same thoughts, memories, associations, character, etc., but also of having the same 'body' (in the modern sense)." (p94)  [Update, after a rereading of Dahl I realised I had misunderstood him, so I have altered this bit accordingly.  Although he is too dependent on the now very dated JAT Robinson's The Body, I think he is largely on the right track.]

Contradictions in the Resurrection Narratives?

Well after ETB's insane gibbering 5 comment flame of my earlier post I thought maybe it was not so obvious to some people why the differing Resurrection accounts in the Gospels do nothing to suggest that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth couldn't have happened, and so I should do a post on the subject. It is important to point out that this is not an argument why any one must believe it did happen, only that the differing accounts are evidence in favour rather than against it. Another blogger, Michael Bird, writes in How Did Christianity Begin?,

According to Paul, again in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, the risen Jesus was seen by individuals and groups . . . This early tradition interlocks with the multiple accounts in the Gospels that narrate persons seeing, hearing and touching the resurrected Jesus. There are clear divergences in the details provided by the Evangelists that do not appear to add up; indeed, we can speak of an excited bewilderment as to exactly where, when and who saw the risen Jesus and in what order, but this only adds to the realism. In the words of E.P Sanders: 'Calculated deception should have produced greater unanimity. Instead there seems to have been competitors: "I saw him first!" "No! I did."' [The Historical Figure of Jesus, 1993, p280] As we investigate the various stories of the appearances at the tomb, in a locked room, on a road out of Jerusalem, in Galilee and by the Lake of Tiberius we are led to the conclusion that several individuals and groups believed that they had genuinely seen Jesus alive in a physical mode of existence after his death.

There is often the idea in people's heads, it seems to me, of a monolithic early Christian group agreeing on a fiction or delusion on which will rest the substance of their faith and then producing or selecting only those documents that seemed to substantiate those claims. But what is evidenced by the narrative in Acts and the composition of the NT itself is that from an early stage the church as a whole was scattered to different localities and although there would have been contact between the different groups (especially through relationships to significant figures) to some extent they evolved independently of each other. This is seen most clearly in the Gospel of John which relates a very different tradition to the other three gospels.

Instead the NT is something of an "ecumenical" document representing a number of different strands of early Christianity (e.g. Matthean, Johanine, Pauline, Petrine, etc). This is why each gospel shows evidence of having access to different sources than the others, although Mathew and Luke both seem to have had access to both Mark and a sayings tradition, "Q". The scattering that took place near the start of Church history meant that no harmonized authoritative version of events could be established. Instead, different communities independently recorded their best version of events. And this is exactly what the "contradictions" in the Resurrection narratives display, competing versions of an event that these different communities are nonetheless absolutely convinced took place. A convincing that was probably the result of hearing eye witness testimony and having it verified in their own personal religious experience. The fact that the gospel Resurrection accounts contradict each other in the details does not stop them all confirming the same event in its essentials.

To conclude: I couldn't give a tinker's fart how many angels were present or who saw him first, but if Jesus of Nazareth really was raised from the dead then that is something worth knowing about!