King is sailing, they say

Regarding the Resurrection, and continuing the comments from the last article:  

But to me, it is not what is possible, but what seems most plausible. The Synoptic Gospels line up the events of Jesus life fairly well. The Synoptics line up the events of the cross pretty well also, despite the differing sayings of Jesus in all 3. They line up sort of well until…. guess where? The assumed original ending of Mark at verse 8 of the Resurrection story. That is when things get hopelessly confused in Matthew Luke and John. I think this is sufficient reason to think that Mark is the oldest Gospel and was used as the main source of information for Matthew and Luke. Mark and Matthew use really implausible story-telling devices. I think it is in Mark where the women are witnesses to the burial of Jesus at the tomb. Why did they go to the tomb alone on Sunday morning, knowing a rock they could never move was there?

In Mark, just as they muse, “who will roll away the rock for us?” right on cue, they look up and what do you know, the rock is rolled back.

Matthew elaborates on this greatly. The women come to view the grave, the stone does not simply roll back, no there is a massive earthquake, an angle comes out of the sky, either the angel or the earthquake has rolled back the stone, but the angel sits on it! Whoa, very impressive - but it reads to me like a story embellishment.

I hear that all 4 Gospels vary greatly because this represents 4 different vantage points. This is not plausible to me. How many witnesses were there to the resurrection scene? A few women at the most that I can see. Why would they tell 4 different eyewitness reports to 4 different Gospel writers?

And speaking of witnesses, who were they? In John, Jesus materialized in front of his disciples where? In Jerusalem behind locked doors!! That’s it? No outsiders allowed in to see the risen savior? In Matthew he appears at an isolated Mountain top in Galilee. Why the secrecy? We don’t believe modern-day conspiracy buffs when they are the exclusive witnesses to an event (no offence, I don’t know how else to phrase that!) “You didn’t see it? It was here, I swear!” Paul speaks of 500 witnesses - this does nothing for crediblility here, not in my eyes. It seems like an afterthoght - “First to Cephas. Then the 12. Then 500 other people!” But, who are they? It could have been 5000 people and this does not help the testimony any.

There is real confusion in the narratives as to whether Jesus was spirit or flesh. Yes, there is a difference - a huge difference. In John, Jesus was not to be touched - presumably because he was spirit. Later he can be touched, in other Gospels he is sometimes ghostly, sometimes flesh. Through in the narrative in 1 Cor 15 for even more competing doctrines and real confusion. I just see many competing doctrines in these stories about the nature of Jesus’ bodily nature. Read books like Tobit, 2 Enoch or Ehman’s ‘Lost Christianities’ for more info on this, it is a huge subject.

I could go on about where I think the most troublesome difficulties in this story are, but I don’t have the time right now. It seems the most probable to me that these are fictive devices, that we see story development and elaboration and embellishing when we read the Gospel Resurrection stories in the order that they were written. Hey, I could be wrong, but to me that makes the most sense. If God wanted to be convincing to me and a whole lot of other people, he picked a funny way of inspiring the 4 Resurrection narratives to be believable.

So the bottom line is, did Jesus rise from the dead? Is he resurrected? Anything is possible, and I do not discount the miraculous. But from everything I have read and from what makes most sense to me, I don’t think a man named Jesus physically rose from the grave. The narrative elements don’t seem likely to me. This is not easy to say, and I would like to be convinced otherwise - after all, I believed it my whole life.