Thursday of Easter Week - Believing Things Held To Be Unbelievable

The disciples of Jesus recounted what had taken place along the way,
and how they had come to recognize him in the breaking of bread.

While they were still speaking about this,
he stood in their midst and said to them,
“Peace be with you.”
But they were startled and terrified
and thought that they were seeing a ghost.
Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled?
And why do questions arise in your hearts?
Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.
Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have.”
And as he said this,
he showed them his hands and his feet.
While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed,
he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?”
They gave him a piece of baked fish;
he took it and ate it in front of them.

He said to them,
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses
and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.
And he said to them,
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name
to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.”

Luke 24:35-48

This is another of the descriptions of the friends and followers of Jesus encountering him after he died, it reports that he wasn't a ghost, that he had a body but it also says he just appeared in the midst of them, so his body was not like their bodies, which makes sense, his body now was in the world after he died.

It's become fashionable among a lot of scholars these days to try to fit a conception of what it says in the Gospels into a modern, materialistic, "enlightenment" limit set on the behavior of what science studies.  I've tried to point out that since those rules are set to limit things anything possible outside of those limits would be invisible to science.   Science is a means of determining the typical behavior of things and to use that knowledge to do things we want,  it's probably safest to consider it in terms of that utility and not deserving any higher repute or respect than the worthiness of those goals, but that's not going to happen.  
 

As I've read more and more of those who hanker after the kind of repute that you get from holding strictly to the limits of materialism or, as they'd probably prefer these days, "naturalism" the more I find them both annoying and hypocritical.   It's one thing to question the descriptions in the scriptures which should be done - not to mention the outlandish claims that are allowed to be called religion for legal purposes - but it's another thing to start out rejecting the possibility that these people were actually telling what they or those they knew and held to be reliable experienced.   I've never seen anything like that but I've never seen a Higgs boson, either nor most of the elements in their elemental form,  I've certainly never seen natural selection happen - something which, by the way, no one else has ever seen, either, it doesn't happen within the possibility of human witness.   And in the case of natural selection, I find its clear class-based, ideological motivation to be discrediting. 

I am often challenged as to whether I believe in the Virgin Birth or the various miracles or the Resurrection and depending on how the challenge is made, I generally give different answers but always include that I don't really know what those things are.   I do believe in the Resurrection because of what came after it and for the multiple attestations of those who said they witnessed Jesus risen, also because what is claimed was not something that would have been expected by religiously inclined Jews - almost if not everyone recorded as witnessing the risen Jesus were Jews.  Also the character of what is claimed is another of those things which would be a lot easier to take if they'd said it a different way.   People who want to gull people say things that make it easier to convince people, not harder.   I have said that I found the descriptions of Jesus, after a period of him not being recognized, being known through the breaking of the bread oddly convincing because it is of a piece with my understanding of his teaching based on sharing the stuff of life.  I find that more convincing than just about any of the rest of it, though I do have to say him unexpectedly appearing first to Women, another hurdle for belief in a culture where the testimony of Women was discounted or dismissed, isn't something I'd expect if they wanted to make things easier for 1st century people in the Roman Empire to have accepted.