Unasked questions: Who was buried 3 days and 3 nights?

Apr11

Before Jesus went up to Jerusalem to have himself proclaimed King of Israel, he prophesied that he would show off his powers by having “a son of man” brought back to life after “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”.

The magic trick might have been more credible if it hadn’t been performed by Jesus on his best friend.

Luckily his best friend Lazarus was reported to have died as Jesus and the disciples were headed towards Jerusalem. Lazarus lived four miles south of the city at Bethany, with his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus delayed his journey for a couple of days, while the disciples urged him to hurry. When Jesus got to Bethany, Mary and Martha met him near Lazarus’ tomb and made a theatrical production of grief. Jesus dramatically called for the stone to be rolled away and called Lazarus to come out, even though he was four days dead. Lazarus came out.

“Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him.” (John 11:45) The wording suggests that many others were unimpressed with the show, and didn’t believe it.

So the “three days and three nights” prophecy was fulfilled even before Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the crowd calling him King and God’s Anointed. He had no reason to think he himself was going to be the object of the prophecy.

Lazarus fulfills Jesus’ prophecy. Which is more than can be said for Jesus, who was only buried for some 36 hours before his corpse disappeared.

And no, “son of man” had no meaning of “Godlike” attached to it by Jews at that time. The most detailed exposition of its use in the Old Testament is in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_man. It has the connotation of “mere human”. Redacted excerpt:

“Within the Hebrew Bible, the first place one comes across the phrase son of man is in Book of Numbers 23:19:

God is not a human being (איש : [‘iysh]), that he should lie,

or a son of man (בן–אדם : [ben-‘adam]), that he should change his mind.”

Got that? God is not a Son of Man. (That Mithraist God-incarnate idea is Paul’s great innovation, and the beginning of Christianity.)

Cannibals and resurrection

Jan6

People have been playing games for thousands of years with some of the absurdity in the idea of a physical resurrection of a long-dead body. If a cannibal eats another person, so that the cannibal’s body is now made up of the other person, and the other person only exists in the body of the cannibal… then which of them owns the body that gets resurrected on the Day of Judgement?

Image result for cannibal's resurrection

A traditional way of handling “Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

St. Augustine dealt with it, and so did John Donne, Voltaire, and Cyrano de Bergerac, and it continues to amuse writers of fantasy and science fiction. A man is eaten by a wild boar, which is then caught and eaten by other men… where is the first man now? Alternatively, what of the worms that eat a buried body, and of the things that then eat the worms? Or what of the cannibal’s sweat and piss and shit, as he disposes of parts of the person he ate?

Theologians dismiss these mind games as just that, and say that the individual will be resurrected regardless of the scattering of the original body. Why then do they pay so much attention to the care and burial of the body in the superstitious hope of physical resurrection? (Well, but of course there is a lot of money to be made from funerals…)

If you would like to read Cyrano de Bergerac’s take on things, I recommend you to the weekly online SF magazine Bewildering Stories, specifically this issue.

Wishing for eternal life, then and now

Mar8

Humans have always (as far as we can tell) resisted the idea of their mortality. Many people simply refuse to think about it, and others refuse to believe it. In the face of all the evidence of creatures that die and rot or get eaten, and don’t come back to life, humans will confidently state that we are different.

True, some groups have accepted that even if we have a “soul”, our body rots in the grave and our “soul” gradually fades away underground. This was one of differences between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the time of Jesus. The former believed in a resurrection of the body and a divine rebalancing to reward the virtuous and punish the evildoer. The latter felt that life ended at death, and there was no reckoning in an afterlife. Therefore the Pharisees tended to be morally upright and religious puritans, while the Sadducees were generally more venal and collaborated with the Roman Occupation. Fair enough.

Jesus surrounded himself with Jews of all types in his attempt to bring all of Israel to repentance and purity. Of the four philosophies of his time, he was close to the Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes, less close to the Sadducees.

The promise of a physical resurrection of the body, together with the promise of an eternity in paradise if you are a believer or an eternity in hell if you are an unbeliever, is basic to Christian and Muslim belief. It has been a very powerful meme for persuading people to donate their time and cash to the promulgators of the religion. The Mormons have upped the ante by promising their adherents that they can become gods of their own planets… at least, if they are men; the status of women in all these religions is less than equal.

The religious afterlife may be an increasingly laughable idea, but the desire to avoid death is as strong as ever. Last year Google launched a new company, Calico, to focus on health and aging in particular. It is run by Arthur Levinson, former CEO of Genentech and currently Chairman of the Board of Directors at both Genentech and Apple. This is a serious attempt at life extension, backed by Google and its $54 billion in cash.

In Google, Larry Page and his cohorts Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Astro Teller have created a company that is known for two things: crunching data phenomenally well, and going after data-heavy speculative ideas (officially identified as “Moonshots”) that – even if they work out – will take many years of development to pay off. The original Google search engine was the product of vision and a data-heavy opportunity. Currently under development are a raft of others, including Google Glass and self-driving cars. Looked at in this way, medicine is just another information science with vast amounts of data – seven billion case histories walking around on the planet… data to be assembled and crunched for a path to understanding everything about our life processes. Google’s Calico should then be able to cure disease – eliminate all cancer (which would add some three years to average life expectancy) – and presumably tinker with our cellular and genetic structures any way we can imagine. To me, that suggests an indefinite lifespan in a body that would gradually move away from current human norms.

Timeframe for this? The only hint is from Larry Page: “In some industries it takes 10 to 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Health care is certainly one of those areas. We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done.”

Larry Page is only 40, but I’m 63. Let’s get a move on, guys!

And what will it cost? Google is “not a philanthropic organization. But,” says Astro Teller, “if you make the world a radically better place, the money is going to come find you, in a fair and elegant way.”

Or in other words, just like with the priests of old, the promise of eternal life will get you to give them a ton of money. The big difference is that this time around, it is grounded in scientific developments, not wishful thinking.

Unasked questions: Who was buried 3 days and 3 nights?

May10

The magic trick might have been more credible if it hadn’t been performed by Jesus on his best friend.

Lazarus fulfills Jesus’ prophecy. Which is more than can be said for Jesus, who was only buried for some 36 hours before his corpse disappeared.

“Within the Hebrew Bible, the first place one comes across the phrase son of man is in Book of Numbers 23:19:

God is not a human being (איש : [‘iysh]), that he should lie,

or a son of man (בן–אדם : [ben-‘adam]), that he should change his mind.”

Got that? God is not a Son of Man. (That Mithraist God-incarnate idea is Paul’s great innovation, and the beginning of Christianity.)

Jesus’ failed prophecy

May8

Christians say Jesus was dead and buried for three days. But Friday night to Sunday morning is only a day and two nights. A tour operator trying to sell that package as ‘three days’ would be prosecuted. So what’s up with the Christians?

Jonah, three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish

A case can be made for the Roman practice of inclusive numbering. They would have said our week was eight days, running from Sunday to Sunday. They based their own week on the public market day which was held every eighth day throughout the Roman Empire, and they therefore said the week was nine days. They were brilliant engineers, but not strong in pure mathematics.

However Roman numbering doesn’t deal with the issue of Biblical prophecy. Christians are at pains to say that Jesus was correct in all his prophecies. Here is the prophecy by Jesus that causes them to say he was buried for three days:

“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40)

Christians will wriggle and wriggle to claim that late Friday plus Saturday plus early Sunday equals three days, but there is no way they can find the necessary three nights.

Clearly, if Jesus was prophesying about himself, a Sunday morning resurrection fails to meet the criteria. He failed to stay under long enough.

Sorry, but the claim of accurate prophecy must be disallowed.

No one (well, almost no one) wants to die

May4

The human desire to avoid death is instinctive, genetically programmed, and can only be overcome with great difficulty. People don’t think of actual “immortality”, of living “forever”, but they don’t want to die quite yet. Not this year. And if they are offered the option of somehow continuing to live on after death, in a nice place, and made young and healthy again, they will choose to believe it’s possible, unlikely though it might seem.

Rumors were always out there, inspired by hopes and dreams and visions, that there was a place on Earth where you could live forever. Maybe Dilmun (now Bahrain) where Gilgamesh sought out Utnapishtim the Faraway, survivor of the Flood… Maybe in the West, where the sun goes, beyond the Gates of Hercules, the Isle of Avalon, you can get there from the Grey Havens…

And others (more primitive in their thinking, or more advanced) say No, when you die you get put in a hole in the ground or your body is burned and that’s the end. In the time of Jesus, that was the Sadducees’ position. As wealthy and influential collaborators with the Romans, they didn’t like the idea of any Egyptian-style afterlife and assessment of their morals. But the Pharisees expected a resurrection of the body, so that God could manifest his essential justice and reward the good and punish the evil, and balance out their otherwise unfair lives.

Religious Jews of Jesus’ time certainly thought resurrection of the dead was possible. There are three stories in 1 and 2 Kings of people being restored to life: one an intervention by God after Elijah prayed; one a raising from the dead by Elisha; and the third being a dead man who was thrown into a tomb and came back to life when his body touched Elisha’s bones.

Raising the dead was therefore a good indicator of a prophet. Jesus not only claimed to have brought back the daughter of Jairus, and a young man in his own funeral procession, and his friend Lazarus, but he commanded his disciples to raise the dead (as well as heal the sick). Peter and Paul were each said to have raised a dead person on different occasions, as recorded in Acts.

And at the moment that Jesus died, Matthew records that the earth shook and tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people were restored to life. (They were a little slower than Lazarus, because Matthew also says that they didn’t come out of their tombs until Jesus’ own resurrection, a day and a half later, when they went into Jerusalem and appeared to many people.)

So not all these stories are coherent, let alone credible, but that’s not the point. The point is that humans want to believe that they aren’t going to die. In fact when you offer a belief in the afterlife to someone for the first time, they rarely assess it on grounds of logic, but they choose what to believe regardless.

Modern thinking about an ancient problem

A classic example is the story of Radbod, ruler of Frisia from about 680 to 719. He was nearly baptized a Christian, but then refused when he was told that he wouldn’t find any of his ancestors in Heaven after his death, because they hadn’t been baptized. He said he would rather spend eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors, than in Heaven with his enemies – especially the Franks. He chose not to be a Christian because he preferred the idea of the Germanic afterlife to the Christian one. Or because his family loyalties were more important than the wishes of God. Or because he couldn’t really tell the afterlife ideas apart, and feasting with Woden is more fun than sitting around on a cloud singing hymns of praise.

The pagan afterlife party (until it all ends in Ragnarok) is one version; the Muslim paradise for believers is another; Hindus and Buddhists see you coming back to life in a different way; Taoists and others let you keep on living as long as your descendants keep on looking after you – buying and burning the things the priests sell, paper money, paper houses.

And as science slowly puts an end to all this wishful thinking, is it any wonder that we start looking to science for genetic intervention and rejuvenation, with the fallback of cryonics as a sort of ambulance to the future if we die before the medical miracles are fully developed?

Easter is finished

Apr26

Easter ended a couple of years ago in our household when the children left home. Hunting for chocolate rabbits and Easter eggs in the garden, including digging through the sandpit, remained a fun event for the kids and their friends right through to college. Church, Jesus, Bible stories – they were never a part of it. This was about nature, not religion. Spring, not sin. Eostre, not Easter.

Eostre (to the Northumbrians) or Eastre (to the West Saxons) was the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. Eggs and bunnies. Flowers, nests, the rebirth of the world. March/April (in northern climes only), surrounded by birds, bunnies and mad March hares.

Paul built the legend of Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb to be a Mithraic story of the Blood of the Passover Lamb (instead of the blood of the Mithraic bull) taking away the sins of the world (a Mithraic, not Jewish, concept). This echoed so fortuitously with the springtime rebirth of the world that, as Christianity spread north, it simply adopted the preexisting springtime celebrations, and kept the name Eastre and the eggs and rabbits in order to help transition the pagans into Christianity.

For our adult sanity, we drop the idea of the Resurrection. For our kids’ enjoyment, we keep only the eggs and rabbits… and the old name Easter.

The Miracles, 4: Lazarus

Jan28

When Jesus was heading to Jerusalem for Passover (because he was a Jew, remember?) he got word that his close friend Lazarus is very sick. Instead of making the one-day walk to Lazarus, he waits where he is for a couple of days, telling the disciples that Lazarus will die so that he can be resurrected to demonstrate God’s glory. Jesus has already been prophesying that people will see a “son of man” raised from the dead after three days. Now’s clearly the time for it.

Classic Mummy

Jesus shows up, finally. Yes, Lazarus has been dead for three or four days. Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary meet Jesus at the graveyard, there are a lot of other people there too, and Jesus has the tomb opened and calls Lazarus, who stumbles out stinking and wrapped in grave-clothes. “Many believed,” says John’s Gospel. Therefore clearly many, perhaps most, did not believe.

Why not?

Too easy to fake.

Why didn’t Jesus come earlier, except to show off what he could do?

If he could raise people from the dead, why didn’t he do it more often… and not for a close friend where there would be doubts about the veracity of it?

And Lazarus walked out of the tomb. Seriously, no one wraps a body for real like they do for horror movies. In real life you wrap the legs together, just as you wrap the arms to the body. Unless you want the body to be able to walk!

It was a bogus ‘miracle’, and not even good enough to fool all the onlookers.