Author Archives: Jaxsonhoughton

There are thousands accounts of christians being martryed, but today we are addressing the disciples.

On the early preaching 50 days later, all we have for that exact time is the comment in Acts. But nothing turns on that exact time. Critical scholars acknowledge that the preaching began in Jerusalem pretty quickly. For example, James D. G. Dunn recently wrote in his book Remembering Jesus (p. 855) that the 1 Corinthians 15 creed was formalized and taught within months of Jesus’ death

We have strong data on at least the martyrdoms of Peter, Paul, and James, the brother of Jesus, recorded by Josephus and Clement of Rome, both before the close of the First Century. Josephus, of course, was not a Christian, so we cannot argue that he wanted to make the Christians look good. Further, Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius, along with Roman governor Pliny the Younger also tell us that early Christians were persecuted and even killed. These were also non-Christian authors who were trying to disparage Christianity, not brag about believers. Then, just a few years later, others died for their faith, like Ignatius and Polycarp. Willing deaths show that the martyrs sincerely believed their own reports. So, just to preach Jesus in the early church context would expose the preacher to at least the possibility of death. Virtually no scholars would deny that this occurred. But please note that I generally base these points on the disciples’ willingness to die, because this keeps me from having to prove the actual point and their being willing is all you need to show they were sincere.

Let’s take a look at one specific disciple; James. James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, he was a very skeptical person of Jesus and his claims to being the Son of God. He wasn’t a christian until he witnessed Jesus after his resurrection (which we will be addressing evidence for later) After Jesus’ resurrection, he eventually became the head of the church. He spent the remainder of his life preaching the gospel.

Now that you have a little background on James lets look at his death:

Clement of Alexandria relates that “James was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple, and was beaten to death with a club”. Hegesippus cites that “the Scribes and Pharisees placed James upon the pinnacle of the temple, and threw down the just man, and they began to stone him, for he was not killed by the fall.

Second-century historian, Hegesippus, states the event this way:

“…They went up and threw down the just man [from the temple height] and said to each other, ‘Let us stone James the Just.’ And they began to stone him, for he was not killed by the fall, but he knelt down and said, ‘I entreat thee, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ One of them, who was a fuller [launderer], took the club with which he beat the clothes and struck the just man on the head. And thus he suffered martrydom.”

Thank you for reading, I hope you found this helpful

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The purpose  of a creed is to be memorable and easy to pass on to future generations. This means being brief and including what was absolutely necessary. Only the most important details were included within it to preserve the essential outline of what happened. Ehrman wishes Paul mentioned much more in his recounting of what the Corinthian Christians already knew. Fair enough. But this is no argument that Paul was unaware of the Jesus burial tradition.

Why does Paul mention the burial of Jesus at all in verse 4? Why not skip it entirely? The fact that the burial was included in this extremely primitive creed should strike us as not only important to Paul, but also historically plausible considering how old this tradition is. James D. G. Dunn posits that this tradition was likely composed within months of the death (and resurrection?) of Jesus. (J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1, pg. 855). If so, this is extremely early tradition that should not be discarded too quickly

It is very likely that this was the meeting where Paul received the creedal tradition(s)37 he cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, among other traditions and hymns concerning the historical Jesus. “Creedal tradition” is a phrase that means this section is, first, pre-Pauline tradition, and second, was composed in the form of a creed (whether oral or written). Scholars are unanimous that this creedal tradition originated at the latest within a decade of Jesus’ death and at the earliest “months” after Jesus’ death.

If Paul received this creedal tradition sometime in the mid-30s AD, then it must have been composed sometime before he received it, and of course after Jesus was crucified in AD 30 or 33.42 This is what leads to the agreement among scholars that this creedal tradition should be dated no later than a decade after Jesus’ crucifixion. Some scholars even date its composition to within months of Jesus’ death, going back to the very “pillars” themselves: Peter, James (Jesus’ brother), John, and possibly others of the Twelve. Dale Allison writes, “Indeed, Paul knew Peter and James and presumably others who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. First Corinthians 15:3–8 is not folklore.”43 The creedal tradition found in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 is the bedrock source for all the bedrock facts we will be discussing in this book concerning Jesus’ death, resurrection, and appearances.

Now let us behold the bedrock, most ancient source of Christianity, which is unanimously dated on average within five years of Jesus’ death: That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time … then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.44 Even though we don’t know everything about this meeting between Peter and Paul that we would like, the fruit of this meeting, represented in Paul’s receiving some or all of the traditions behind 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, forms the unalterable bedrock source of Christianity.

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As we will see in these paragraphs from the Bedrock Christianity book. Historical sources aren’t based on how close a source is to an event, but how accurate the source is within a reasonable amount of time.

In one sense, “history” is everything that happened in the past, every second of every day since the beginning of the universe. However, I mean something more specific when I talk about studying history or the historical method. In this second and more useful sense, history is the “knowable past,” the people and events of history for which reliable sources have survived.

In some cases, such as with Alexander the Great or many of the Roman Caesars and Egyptian Pharaohs, we have physical evidence of their existence such as coins, art, busts, statues, and even their mummies! However, most figures from history we only know through surviving written sources. Sometimes these are written by eyewitnesses to the events or person(s) they are describing, but in most cases, they are written by individuals many generations later. Like a paleontologist trying to piece together his newly discovered group of bones, historians work with what the sands of time have delivered them to piece together a particular historical event or understand the life, aims, beliefs, and death of a historical figure. How well they can do that really depends on the nature of the surviving sources. We engaged in this art of time travel in the prologue when we sought to learn as much as we could from the epic meeting between Peter and Paul in Jerusalem. The one written source from Galatians 1:18 could only take us so far. Yet, since Galatians was written by a reliable eyewitness, Paul, we were able to explore in detail this event that occurred in Jerusalem sometime between AD 33 and 38.

In Bart Ehrman’s many books on early Christianity, he discusses what makes for a reliable source: “What historians want, in short, are lots of witnesses, close to the time of the events, who are not biased toward their subject matter and who corroborate one another’s points without showing signs of collaboration.”47 This can be laid out as four distinct items that constitute a historian’s wish list: (1)Early dating: sources that are very close to the time of the person or event (2)Eyewitnesses: multiple people who saw and/or recorded the event (3)Corroboration: eyewitnesses and sources that corroborate with one another without collusion (4)Unbiased: sources that are not biased toward their subject matter.

As Ehrman concludes, “Would that we had such sources for all significant historical events!” Now, if we followed this criterion woodenly, we would have to throw out most of ancient history we now take for granted. In almost all cases, we don’t have a person writing about an event who is unbiased or disinterested, and most of our sources date many generations, even hundreds of years, after the person or event that is being described.

For example, Oxford historian A. N. Sherwin-White says that historians of ancient history are usually dealing with derivative sources of marked bias and prejudice composed at least one or two generations after the events they describe, but much more often, as with the Lives of Plutarch or the central decades of Livy, from two to five centuries later. Though connecting links are provided backwards in time by series of lost intermediate sources, we are seldom in the happy position of dealing at only one remove with a contemporary source.

Sherwin-White goes on to say that even with many generations separating an event from the person writing about it, this does not prevent the historian from being able to say quite a lot concerning “what really happened.”49 To have the kind of sources and eyewitnesses Ehrman is describing is almost unprecedented, at least from the ancient world. To be fair to Ehrman, that is why he calls it a wish list! I will argue in chapter 3 that, incredibly, the creedal tradition found in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 does pass this high threshold for sources. But for now, I want to emphasize that most of the history we take for granted does not come even close to meeting the wish-list criteria for reliable sources. Yet that does not present a problem to ancient historians (or for us) who desire to time travel to experience this event or meet that historical figure. As Sherwin-White pointed out above, even with multiple generations separating an event from the author describing it, we are still able to learn a lot concerning what really happened.

Using the tools of the historical method, historians do their best to distinguish clear exaggeration and the mix of legend and history from the places where Josephus is telling us “what really happened.” All in all, Josephus gives us many bedrock facts about the Jewish war with Rome despite being on Emperor Vespasian’s payroll, greatly exaggerating numbers,51 and occasionally adding legendary events to the story. But through the historical method we can time travel and witness the massacre at Masada (J.W. 4.398–404; 7.252–406), observe that Titus’ soldiers in jest played with different postures for crucified victims until they ran out of crosses (J.W. 5.449–551), and learn of many of the other horrors of the Jewish war with Rome.

For a third example, if we want to walk the streets of Athens with Socrates, listening to his philosophical wisdom, how do we do it? Like Jesus, Socrates didn’t write anything. The only way we can meet the “historical Socrates” is through the undeniably biased writings about him from Plato’s Dialogues, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Symposium, and Aristophanes’ Clouds. These were all contemporary disciples of Socrates and wrote within decades after his death. We learn from all of them that the “historical Socrates” occupied himself primarily with ethics, seeking to help everyone around him toward excellence of character. He was the first to raise the problem of definitions and used a unique method of argument and debate known as the dialectic method. According to Plato, Socrates was told by the oracle at Delphi that he was the wisest man on earth. Socrates was perplexed by this pronouncement. He thought of himself as someone who really knew nothing. Then he finally figured it out. He was the wisest because he was the only one who knew he was not wise, the only one who knew he did not know: “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either” (Plato, Apology 21D–E). Eventually, the leaders of Athens accused him of leading the youth astray, teaching “strange gods” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1), and even “wizardry” (Plato, Meno 80B). The Athenian Senate condemned him to death by drinking hemlock. His last words, according to Plato (“Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Pay it and do not neglect it”) are recorded in his famous dialogue Apology, which means “defense.” He was seventy years old when he died in 399 BC (Plato, Apology 70D). Scholars debate to this day whether Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes give us the historical Socrates or an idealized version of Socrates whom they used to teach their own philosophical theories and concepts. The majority view is that the historical Socrates is best represented in Plato’s earliest dialogues (Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, etc.), and only in the later ones did Plato begin to put his ideas on Socrates’ lips.52 Classicists John Burnett and A. E. Taylor argue that Plato almost always gives us a faithful portrayal of the historical Socrates because he would not have done such an injustice to his master, especially while others were still alive to correct this view.53 Even though these disciples of Socrates were clearly biased and interested in preserving their master’s philosophical wisdom and legacy, we can learn a lot concerning the historical Socrates through their different, no doubt artistic, portrayals.

So, as we can see, if we use the criteria many skeptics put on the sources of the resurrection, we can see that it dimishes the accuracy of fact taken. The criteria should be set on every historical event, not just the resurrection. The skeptic must then denounce much of ancient history, leaving them in a tough spot.

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       Christian apologetics is the defense of Christianity using (most of the time) secular facts or refuting secular facts. It is considered a branch of theology, but is abundantly different the the theology taught on sunday mornings. The central focus of apologists is to 1) Prove God’s existence and 2) Prove the resurrection. If these two things can be proven, then other issue’s or objections the the Bible are secondary (Of course apologists should address them.)

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Note: This may not be as extensive and as well written as other blogs, I am just introducing you to the subject. And getting my self familiar with this program