Introduction
here‘s no shame in it. Everybody dies. Even great historical figures.
Even Jesus. No one will deny that — at least if one believes there was
an historical Jesus in the first place — but that‘s another can of
worms! The issue is, did he stay dead? Everybody else does. Why should
Jesus be an exception? But the Christian claim is that Jehovah did make an
exception in his case — handing him over to the Grim Reaper, yes, but then
snatching him back before his corpse was scarcely cool. How does one
evaluate such a claim? Insofar as its proponents urge it upon us as a datum of
history, we must evaluate the resurrection creed in historical terms. And the
verdict I must then return is the title of this book. It is not quite so simple, but
I do not want to obfuscate the issue with a haze of religious sentimentality as
many do.
In the present collection I have assembled some of my best writing and
thinking on the resurrection (and in a couple of cases, closely related issues).
―Easter Fictions‖ was the opening statement in a debate I had at Colorado
State University with Dr. Craig Blomberg. The next two, ―What Can We
Know of the Historical Jesus?‖ and ―Must Jesus Have Risen?‖ are condensed
versions of two chapters from my book Beyond Born Again (out of print at
the moment). I have found these versions useful in debates with my pal and
sparring partner Greg Boyd at UCLA and other venues. I wrote ―Night of the
Living Savior‖ for the 2005 Atheist Alliance conference in Los Angeles.
―Was Jesus John the Baptist Risen from the Dead?‖ was a Jesus Seminar
paper that nearly convinced even the late, great Robert Funk. ―How Secure Is
the New Testament Witness?‖ began as a long answer to a question by my
friend Fred Lykes.
―Templars and the Tomb of Jesus‖ grew out of research I did for
another book, The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth is Stranger than
Fiction (Prometheus Books). There turned out to be too many related
books to survey in that context, but they invited comment anyway, and
this seems the place for those comments. I analyzed another bit of
pseudo-evidence about Jesus, The Talmud of Jmmanuel, for a course I teach
Chapter 3 THE CHRIST CULTS y choosing the terminology "Christ cults," Burton Mack means to differentiate those early movements that revered Jesus as the Christ from those that did not. For the Synagogue Reformers, the Q people, and the Community of Israel, Jesus need not have been the Messiah in any Jewish sense at all. If the Pillars and Heirs communities saw Jesus as the Messiah or the Messiah-elect, they saw the role in strictly nationalistic Jewish terms. But starting with his sixth category, Mack considers the communities for whom Jesus as a teacher (and even as a miracle worker) was of no importance at all, and who may not even have been aware of such a Jesus tradition. For them his role as a savior of one kind or another was pivotal. And the title "Christ" came to denote this. Outside of Palestine, this Greek equivalent of "messiah," i.e., Anointed One, rapidly became the proper name of a divine savior. After all, outside the Holy Land, and...
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