reply to post by pthena
Then there are the FISHERMAN LIKE TALL-TALES...
In the ‘resurrection’ account in the 2nd Gospel [‘Mark’] we have 'ONE Young Man' appearing to the women but no corpse or body, and in
‘Matthew’ we have 1 Angel appearing to the women followed by an ‘appearance’ on a hill in the Galilee...
And in the 3rd & 4th Greek canonical gospels we have TWO Angels appearing – (!!!!!) -- the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger like a
fisherman’s fable – certainly a long way from a simple ‘young man dressed in a white tunic’.
We also have other Resurrection Weirdos in the NT, e.g. ‘The Book of Revelation’ chapter 11, where there are TWO witnesses who were martyred and
‘raised back to life to stand upon their feet…’, then… ‘lifted up to heaven’…
We also have the very weird story of Eleazar (‘Lazarus’) who was said to have been dead 3 days and raised back to life by R. Yehoshua screaming
‘Lazarus come out !’ in ‘John’ chapter 11:1-48
(which is pre-shadowed by an earlier more primitive fragment version of the same story found in Secret Mark’s gospel found in 1958 in Greek
shorthand tacked on to the back of an 18th century book, Secret Mark, 10:34a-35, where ‘the disciple whom Iesous loved’ was shouting to from
inside for someone to GET HIM OUT of the tomb…’
We have the ravings of ‘Saul of Tarsus’ who never met R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean in the flesh (only in dreams and visions), but who boldly
claimed that he ‘manifested himself’ to him in some way…see the Greek Mystery Religion language found in I Corinthians 15:3-55 etc.
Curious ‘Saulos-Paulos’ never states outright ‘I saw Iesous in the flesh’ --
Instead, this Saul-Paul personage runs around saying that ‘Iesous Christos manifested himself unto’ him and also to various OTHER people (all of
whom. curiously, are ‘believers’)
e.g. ‘was made manifest unto Kephah’ [=Peter], or ‘was manifested unto the 12’ and later ‘was manifested also to’ e.g. the c. 490
persons (70 x 7 i.e. ‘nearly 500 persons at the same time..’).
He uses the phrase ‘he was manifested unto’ and not ‘they saw him’ which specific language tells you something about what is meant to be
conveyed here – not a resuscitated corpse, but an epiphany (‘revelation’) of what was normally a pagan ‘divine god’ such as Isis, Osiris or
Mithras.
If I myself bumped into someone that I knew say for example, at my local supermarket, I might tell my roomate in plainer words e.g., ‘Hey, you’ll
never guess, I saw Josh at the Market this morning – he was in the frozen foods section…looked kind of tired…’
I would NOT say to him ‘Hey, Fausto, listen, I was in the Supermarket this morning standing near the frozen foods section and Joshua Was Manifested
Unto Me….’ – people just do NOT talk like that in regular conversation.
So clearly by the use of the very weird ‘grammatical passive’ voice in the 4 canonical Greek Gospels we are not dealing with normal every day
language, but the language of the Mystery Religions
(‘and the candidate, blindfolded, shall be led to the place of baptism..and when he has recited all the prayers and the rutual incantations, the
god (e.g. Hapi-Osiris aka ‘Serapis’) will suddenly manifest himself to him bathed in in light…’ etc.
We see foreshadowings of these ‘appearances’ in the earlier pieces of the gospel material e.g. ‘go to the Galilee, and there I shall manifest
myself to you…’ cf: the 4th gospel John 14:21-22
‘Whoever hears and obeys the commandments [of Moses] that I have been teaching you is the one who truly loves the Bar-Enasha (‘Son of Man’) –
and he who honours the Bar Enasha will himself be honoured in the Last Days by my Father in Heaven, and the Bar Enasha will also honour and MANIFEST
MYSELF to THEM…”
Then Judah ha Levi (‘Theudas’) said to him,
‘But Master, why will you ONLY MANIFEST YOURSELF TO US, and not MANIFEST YOURSELF to the rest of the World also? …’
So ‘the manifestations’ only seem to occur to ‘believers’ and not to other persons outside of the circle.
One could go on forever about what ‘really happened’ but ‘believers’ rely on ‘faith’ not on ‘hard facts’ so I suppose it would not
make any difference one way or the other to them - they just have to 'have Faith' that their fearless tax free leaders are not lying to them every
Sunday as they clink all those tax free coins and bills into the offering plates !!