Third difficulty. There is no direct evidence of a resurrection. There is no one in the whole New Testament who claims to have been a witness of the resurrection. The resurrection is nowhere described. The only exception to this is the unauthentic (apocryphal) Gospel of Peter which appeared about A.D. 150 and at the end gives an account of the resurrection in a naive, dramatic fashion with the aid of legendary details: these -like so many apocryphal elements - entered into the Church's Easter texts, Easter celebrations, Easter hymns, Easter sermons, Easter pictures and were thus mingled in a variety of ways with popular belief about Easter. Even such unique masterpieces of art as Gruenwald's unsurpassed depiction of the resurrection in the Isenheim altar can be misleading in this respect.
The reverse side. The very reserve of the New Testament Gospels and letters in regard to the resurrection creates trust. The resurrection is neither depicted nor described. The interest in exaggeration and the craving for demonstration, which are characteristic of the Apocrypha, make the latter incredible. The New Testament Easter documents are not meant to be testimonies for the resurrection but testimonies to the raised and risen Jesus.
One of the things that was most surprising to me since coming online is that so many of those whose minds are formed by what they see on crime shows on TV and movies don't seem to realize that humans' testimony of their own observation and experience constitute evidence, especially when that evidence can be tested as is supposed to happen in a law court. That idiotic demotion of testimony contributed in the successful campaign to cover up the crimes of the Trump regime as the direct observational testimony of credible witnesses, in most cases corroborated by other witnesses and even physical confirmation and confirmation in the chronology of events was claimed to be inadequate by those who lied about the guilt that was proved.
Given how addled most people are by their addiction to entertainment, I can imagine a lot of reasons for the belief that evidence is something physical, testable in a laboratory, which some sexy plain-clothes cop happens to have fall into their laps in such abundance and is of such confirmatory strength as only happens in ridiculous Hollywood scripts, as written or as padded out by directors, actors and others. Though I could certainly go at length into the uses of evidence in popular atheist debunkery as opposed to its use in science, honest and dishonest, there isn't time to get into that enormous chasm between integrity and sham.*
But, in reality, often the only evidence that is available is testimonial, if we chose to withhold judgement, for or against, in those cases when only witness evidence could inform a decision, an enormous amount of what we consider to be true or even probable would be forever frozen in a state of indecision. I would note that for anyone holding out for more than is available who opts for disbelief is, as well, making a choice to believe because disbelief is also a belief and if they support their disbelief on the lack of any but testimonial evidence, they are doing exactly what they would claim is not allowed when the decision is to believe the testimony given.
Kung's proposal to test the claims by the modesty of what is contained in them seems to me to be a reasonable one to consider. But one thing that all of the sources, all of the Gospels and letters in the New Testament would seem to agree on, there were no direct human witnesses to the actual raising of Jesus from the dead. Kung gives a very long and detailed discussion of various points that are relevant to that later in this section. One of them is that in dying into God, what Kung says is the resurrection, the event would have happened outside of time in eternity. One thing that is clear about human testimony, it is only definable within the confines of temporality. I don't think we could possibly even have the language to construct evidence with that wasn't related to time.
This point seems to me to be somewhat like the point made yesterday about how Paul and the even earlier followers of Jesus who taught him made some of the hardest to believe aspects of Christianity, the crucifixion and Resurrection, the very centers of the faith when they could have made their job of converting people to their movement easier by making easier to believe claims. And that seems to me to be related to the fact that so much that is used against the Jewish and Christian religions is based on the confessions of wrongdoing and faithlessness that are found nowhere in history except within the Scriptures.
The point about the padding of the stories about Jesus in the later Apocryphal books is evidence that there was a hankering for more story than what would be chosen as the canonical books provided. Subsequent centuries have continued that creation of extra-Scriptural invention and filling in details. And that didn't end with the 18th century enlightenment but, especially in the Marioloatry of post-Baroque, romantic Catholicism it expanded absurdly. I may give Kung's short history of that which comes soon after this discussion in his book.
In looking for seasonal music around Easter, one of the most interesting things I've found is that most, by a large percentage, of the music of the season deals with the crucifixion and almost none deals directly with the Resurrection. Almost all of the Easter music deals with the encounters of the risen Jesus with his friends and followers, none with the event of his Resurrection. That could be due to the complete lack of reporting on the actual event and what it was like - how could it, one of the few things that can be said about it as given it is unlike anything in human experience - or how it looked, what actually happened, etc. But some of it is certainly a realization that any attempt to describe it will inevitably be as false as any fable or tall tale humans could construct.
As presented, as claimed, it is like the virgin birth claims, unlike anything else, something not knowable by analogy with other human experiences. Those who want to debunk it might not like that but it is clearly one of the claims that would be debunkers would have to get past in order to make a tidy case against it.
The first time I read this in the list of difficulties I didn't think it was a particularly strong one but that was before I considered this matter of testimony and how it is considered and dealt with.
Note: As someone raised as a Catholic and who remembers the pre-Vatican II church rather well, I found Kung's short but full history of Marian devotion and its devolution into Mariolatry quite interesting. Most of what I would bet most Catholics believe about that aspect of the Catholic tradition is based on very late and often openly political use of the very lightly documented life of the mother of Jesus. While there are aspects of that I am very sympathetic to, the visions of Juan Diego and Juan Bernardino, Mary as the "Brown Lady" and their importance to the poor people of Latin America and elsewhere, I don't happen to have ever found the stories of apparitions important or interesting. Many of the reported messages - an astonishing number of them in the form of "secrets" are so banal and so absurd and so self-aggrandizing that it is outrageous to believe they could come from someone in the state of beatitude that Mary is supposed to be in, especially after the dreadful and very likely mentally ill Pius IX embroidered the documented accounts of her out of all possible proportions.
I hope to go through what Kung said in that regard later. Maybe in May. In the meantime, get his book On Being Christian and read it for yourself.
* Also: I could also go, at length, into how people often speak out of both sides of their mouths in matters such as the rules surrounding evidence and what evidence they like and that which they don't like and how seldom that is based in the actual difference in quality between the two. The stupid slogan that Carl Sagan stole and distorted into a far worse form from the true skeptic Marcello Truzzi, that "extraordinary claims" require "extraordinary evidence" has been elevated, not only in popular stupidity but also in academic, even scientific ideology into a "rule of logic" or so the internet tells me.
That can't possibly be true. If you hold that standards of evidence are inadequate to support things you don't like, that you declare are invalid, they can't become valid merely because they are, also, applied to things you do like. That slogan is merely an insistence on the part of the "skeptic" (you may more accurately say "atheist" in most cases) that their ideological preferences and prejudices be introduced as a "rule of logic". Such is the degeneration of culture under materialist-atheistic-scientism and its PR methods that they have suckered a couple of generations of allegedly educated people into allowing them to do that and to call it "logic."
Marcello Truzzi is reported by some of those who knew him. to have been on the verge of writing a disavowal of the idea when he died. I don't know if that's true or not but the idea is obviously an ideological tool, not a rule of logical analysis that will lead to the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment