Gospel Disproof #41: The Case of the Lying Guards

I’ve been enjoying a stimulating conversation with Jayman on the topic of resurrection, and one of the things I’ve realized as a result is that the story of the guards in Matt. 28 is unmistakably a fraudulent addition invented long after the time of the alleged Resurrection. See if you can spot the clues that give it away:

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it… The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men…

[S]ome of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, and said, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day.

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At last the GOP makes sense

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them.

via People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say – Yahoo! News.

Don’t laugh, this explains a lot about the Democrats, Libertarians, and Tea Party too.

Deceived by appearances

For those of you who may be interested, we’re still going through William Lane Craig’s book On Guard over at my other blog. Here’s an excerpt from today’s installment, discussing the so-called appearance of Jesus to the soon-to-be Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus.

Notice, this is an appearance of Jesus, just like all the others. There’s just one problem. By Acts 9, Jesus had been gone from the earth for 8 whole chapters, having ascended bodily into heaven at the beginning of chapter 1. And there, we’re told, Jesus is going to stay until Judgment Day. The appearance of Jesus to Paul happened at a time when, according to the Bible, Jesus was not even here.

You can read the whole thing at Evangelical Realism.

 

Gospel Disproof #40: The law of sin and death

This may surprise some of you, but according to the Bible, Christians are actually supposed to be free from sin. Sure, temptation may still be around, and our mortal bodies may still be subject to the lusts of the flesh. But thanks to Jesus’ death on the cross, those things no longer have any power over believers. Or at least that’s what the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8.

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law [of Moses] could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us…For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you… If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

Did you catch that? Without God you have death and sin; with God you have life and peace, right here, right now, in your mortal body. And God can give you that life—which is the opposite of sin and death—through the Spirit of God who dwells in you, because the flesh has been put to death.

It’s a fantastic promise except for the fact that it’s complete bollocks.

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Oh boy

As grieving parents, family and friends try to deal with the tragedy of the Chardon High School killings, at least one commentator is cackling with glee. For Todd Starnes of (where else?) Fox News, the killings give him the perfect opportunity to ask, “Why is school prayer only allowed during tragedies?”

As police try to make sense of the senseless, the school superintendent called on people to pray.

It was a wise decision.

But perhaps lost in the chaos is the irony that in American public schools – people are not allowed to pray.

Liberals have successfully banished God from the classroom, replacing Him with the manmade god of secularism.

Yes, those darned liberals and their support for liberal handgun access. Oh wait, no, sorry, handguns are real, and aren’t really a liberal thing. Let’s blame an imaginary response by an imaginary God to an imaginary ban on people praying. Because everybody knows that if you don’t let God into the classroom, He gives handguns to emotionally unstable kids and tells them to go kill people—even when He’s not really banned from school.

Gospel Disproof #39: The Sign of Jonah

In Matthew 12, Jesus makes a prophecy concerning his own burial.

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for asign; and yet nosign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as JONAH WAS THREE DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS IN THE BELLY OF THE SEA MONSTER, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

This same story also appears in Luke 11 in more general terms, and there’s a further reference to the Sign of Jonah in Matthew 16, but Matthew 12 is unique in specifying exactly three days and three nights. And it’s a problem, because according to the Gospels, this prophecy got the duration wrong.

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God loves cheaters

You know that old saying, “Cheaters never prosper”? According to a report from Science, that may be just clever propaganda designed to conceal the wealth-producing secrets of the rich.

The team’s findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score.

via Shame on the Rich – ScienceNOW.

If you think about it, it does make sense: if you have an environment where some people value fairness and fair play, and other people are willing to do whatever it takes to maximize their rewards, then over time the fair play folks will see more of their rewards shared with others (meaning less reward for themselves), while the whatever-it-takes folks will end up with more rewards for themselves, provided they’re reasonably wily about getting away with it.

And once they get enough to start buying their own news media, lobbyists, and political candidates… Hmmm, I wonder how long it would take this process to divide society into 99% fair-players and 1% wealthy cheaters? Part of me says this is over-simplified and too plausible to be true. On the other hand, it would explain a lot.

Gospel Disproof #38: The guards at the tomb

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, there’s an interesting story that appears nowhere else in the Bible. According to Matthew, the chief priests were worried that the disciples might steal Jesus’ body to fake a resurrection, so they went to Pilate and got permission to post a guard on the tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead, the guards reported it to the priests, and the priests bribed them to claim that disciples stole the body while they were asleep. And thus, says Matthew, the Jews were reporting “to this day” that the body was stolen by the disciples.

Cool story, bro, but if you look at it a bit more closely, there’s something kinda fishy about it…

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Follow-up on Lazarus

This is way overdue, but I hate to leave a loose end dangling. I wanted to go back and spend a little more time with Jayman’s comment on the Gospel Disproof about Jesus and Lazarus. There were a couple of points where I think he misunderstood me, plus a few difficulties he doesn’t really resolve, so if you’ll forgive me for digging this up again (groan), I’ll go into detail below the fold.

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