THE SECRET OF THE SUCCESS OF THE "JESUS ROSE" LEGEND
Why would it matter if Jesus rose from the dead or not? Believers say he died so that our sins might be forgiven and rose to look after us and reap the fruits of his mercy. That is plainly an excuse for surely he didn't need to rise bodily from the dead to do that. The Jehovah's Witness theory that Jesus rose not as a man or bodily but came alive as some kind of hyper-angel makes more sense. Surely a body would only be in the way? By definition a body limits.
So Jesus died to show that God is offering forgiveness to us and invites us to share it with one another to create a world of peace and reconciliation.
Forgiveness means letting the past go for the sake of the future and for the sake of people being good to each other. So it is the principle. You recognise the principle and go with it. It is about the principle, the need for mercy. It is not about what you need or feel. A moral principle is not about you any more than a mathematical one is.
Some say that morality comes from God - eg it is because God is peace that we should strive for peace. [Tellingly, they do not explain how we are supposed to understand this. It is just words.] Others say that morality is right no matter what a God or anybody thinks or says or is like. Principle does not forgive sin. You have to know that it tells you to. Yet if morality and the right thing are separate standards from a God or a person they cannot know. They can only believe they are very sure they are right but that is not the same as being certain that you are.
So forgiveness in any particular case is invalid and illicit unless principle decrees it.
If God is not principle then he cannot know, he can only argue for it being probably correct to forgive.
And God is in the same boat as us so we can disagree with him. And he with us.
God does not own forgiveness. He serves it.
He asks for thanks but ultimately he is entitled to none. Nearly all the good he supposedly does is for sinners who he forgives. So ultimately all thanking is thanking him for his mercy. It is mercy that puts the medicine in your hands when you pray for healing.
Jesus and the cross say he does own it. They are wrong. They lie. Yet he supposedly rose from the dead to give his mercy and forgiveness.
The link between Jesus and mercy is forced and serves well as emotional and moral blackmail. That is one reason for the popularity of Jesus and his supposed vindication when he was raised to eternal life.
Another is the manipulative way the faith is framed.
Christians believe Jesus rose, or think they believe, not because of the gospel narrative but because of the way the narrative is presented. For example Muhammad was declared to have died in battle and showed up again and nobody reads a resurrection or possible resurrection into that. Joseph Smith supposedly appeared in Brigham Young’s place in the pulpit. There are loads of potential resurrections to match and surpass that of Jesus. Perhaps a ghost encounter was read by you that way because of your cultural conditioning, when in fact the person was resurrected and alive? We all know people tend to see what they are expected to see especially when it is something you don't understand. It gets more complicated when you realise the body is always being rebuilt and waste is everywhere so there is no rule that says that the body laid in the grave is the one that has to be raised. All that matters is that they have a living body.
If the apostles assumed, and in that age they must have, that Jesus always
had the same body that raises questions. While they knew that a part of that
body can be used to build a new one like the rib from Adam, did they think the
body in the grave had to rise for it never occurred to them that you are
literally replaced every few years? If so it wrecks their credibility.
Also Christianity says it is clear enough that Jesus was alive after being dead
for a few days. It says it assumes that God did it. It admits then that it might
not be God. How can science function if some bizarre power can tamper with
nature or the results of experiments? Science is politely called rubbish. And
does a God of truth want to be assumed about? The road to chaos is paved with
assumptions.
Christians manipulate you to think that Jesus simply came alive in the tomb.
Alone. The gospels don’t comment. Did the men in white they talk about use
spells to revive him? Didn’t Elisha’s relics supposedly raise a man in the Old
Testament to life? Did God send angels with scientific equipment that we may
reinvent some day to revive him? If something odd was being done to the
body and it rose we would be a lot more doubting.
Why the silence? By the way had there really been men in white there would have been a warrant out for their arrest and the apostles would have been in jail blamed for being accessories through silence.
The fact is that if there were more outlandish elements in the story that crafty faith makers left out, the story would not have taken off the way it did.
Acts 1:3 is important too in the debate. This text however shows signs of poor editing. It is clunky. It is clumsy. It is poor as evidence that Jesus rose. It says that Jesus before he went up to Heaven through the Holy Spirit passed on instructions for his chosen apostles. After he suffered on the cross he appeared alive MANY TIMES to them over a forty day period “proving to them with many convincing signs that he had been truly resurrected”. Acts adds that then he taught them the truths of the kingdom of God. Now it is important that it says it was not enough for Jesus to just appear. He had to verify his claims a lot to them. There is elitism in a system that says a few men had to get all the evidence and we are supposed to take their word for it. That is not respect for evidence. It is getting us to listen to hearsay. Why can't we have the evidence as well? The claim of special knowledge being given to the apostles led to chaos and grave trouble. This was secret knowledge for a time at least. Such claims opens the door for others to claim revelations, secret knowledge. And that is what happened with the mystics such as Valentinus and creatures like Basilides. The forty days of visions is not declared anywhere else. Is the author of Acts saying he had a dream or revelation that that was the number? We do not know so we can discard his evidence as dross.
From The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered Evan D.
Murray, M.D., Miles G. Cunningham, M.D., Ph.D., and Bruce H. Price, M.D.
https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.11090214
we quote regarding Jesus,
"In advance, he explained to his followers the necessity of his death as prelude for his return (Matthew 16:21–28; Mark 8:31; John 16:16–28). If this occurred in the manner described, then Jesus appears to have deliberately placed himself in circumstances wherein he anticipated his execution. Although schizophrenia is associated with an increased risk of suicide, this would not be a typical case. The more common mood-disorder accompaniments of suicide, such as depression, hopelessness, and social isolation, were not present, but other risk factors, such as age and male gender, were present. Suicide-by-proxy is described as “any incident in which a suicidal individual causes his or her death to be carried out by another person.” There is a potential parallel of Jesus’ beliefs and behavior leading up to his death to that of one who premeditates a form of suicide-by-proxy."
The mistake here is that as Jesus thought his death would bring him back in glory, it could be a rationalisation that hid his depression and hopelessness. Somebody who thinks a terrible public death is needed for them to come back in glory is clearly extremely mentally ill. A person who has absurd goals is suffering. And Jesus reportedly did try to avoid people but it seemed to go all wrong and he was forced to engage. Christianity despite glowingly endorsing a clearly sociopathic and insane Messiah while opposing anybody behaving exactly as he did is exploiting him. Human nature takes advantage.
We can argue that the manipulations around the subject of Jesus being alive indicate that deep down the preachers of the faith know the real truth.
