[ornxka]

>I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal

[lisper]

Hard to tell if you or Charles Colson is/was being serious, but for the benefit of the many, many people who actually do believe this: there is not a single account of an apostle dying for their beliefs that was written by someone who 1) was contemporaneous with the apostles and 2) put their name to the account. All of the supposed first-hand accounts are anonymous.

[upwardbound]

There's a fringe hypothesis that historical Jesus (the human person behind the legends) survived crucifixion, perhaps aided by secretly-sympathetic guards, and was in a near-coma for 3 days in the tomb but then returned to alertness and was helped out of the tomb (perhaps by sympathetic guards).

The Roman official who ordered Jesus' execution didn't really want him dead, so perhaps he gave off-the-books instructions to the guards that "if this person were to miraculously survive being crucified, and escaped his tomb in a few days, well there's nothing you could have done to stop a miracle. His tomb that of course is temperate and happens to have water supplies inside. There's nothing you could have done. Wink wink."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate%27s_court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_hypothesis#Supporting_ar...

"It was uncommon for a crucified healthy adult to die in the time described by the Gospels; the Gospel of Mark reports that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning and died at three in the afternoon, or six hours after the crucifixion. ... The average time of suffering before death by crucifixion is claimed by some to have been observed to be 2–4 days. ... Modern scholarship has also cast some doubt on the generally agreed depiction of Jesus being nailed to a cross, as opposed to the more common method of having a victim's hands and feet being tied to a cross."

If dying normally took 2-4 days, it's possible that a sympathetic guard could have declared him dead after only 6 hours on the cross (maybe after he first fell unconscious) and then transferred him to the tomb in the hopes that he might recover in the remaining 1.5-3.5 days, perhaps moistening his lips in the process.

If Jesus were tied to the cross rather than nailed to it, there's really not any plausible thing that could have killed him in just 6 hours of mild to moderate blood loss + heat exhaustion. It's much more plausible that he would have fallen unconscious while maintaining a heartbeat and weak breathing.

I used to be Christian and am now more of an agnostic who wants to believe in a benevolent God, and it would be really cool if something like this did happen. Maybe Jesus was just a person but a good one who tried to do good and got lucky through some series of events like this.

I recently unfortunately had a loved one who went through the dying process in hospice care, and it was horrifying to watch, but it took multiple days, about 5 days, and 6 hours just isn't plausible. 6 hours on the cross + a recovery from near-death three days later in a cool tomb makes a lot of sense if someone gave him water on the way to the tomb. Or maybe the tomb had a hidden supply of water in it, like a puddle big enough to drink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

[bjourne]

But it is important to point out that while there is no conclusive evidence to say whether Jesus was nailed or tied to the cross, nails were used for crucifixions by the Romans in Jesus time. It's possible that the Roman official who ordered Jesus crucifixion wanted to be merciful so he ordered the guards to hammer bigger holes into the hands or wrists of Jesus to increase the rate of blood loss so that he would die quicker. I guess my point is that the evidence is inconclusive so there are many ways you can fill in the gaps. There's even some who claim that Jesus and Paul were the same person. Sounds sketchy to me, but there is probably no way to disprove them.

[Enginerrrd]

I don't know my Christian scripture, but didn't Jesus also get stabbed with a spear by a Roman soldier at some point around the crucifixion? That could certainly explain an early death. I might be horribly wrong though.

[BrandoElFollito]

> who wants to believe in a benevolent God

What would be a benevolent God, in the context of our history and present? (wars, torture, floods, famine, ...)

(I am myself an atheist, curious of what drives people to believe in a deity)

[solarmist]

I'm agnostic but have come to believe in Buddhist beliefs here.

Life is suffering. You can literally only live by causing suffering in other living plants/animals. Therefore to live a happy life, you must come to terms with this and attempt to cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible.

Therefore if there is a God, they are either an impersonal one (think mother nature instead of the Christian god), or their understanding/views are so removed from our own that we have completely misunderstood and guidance they have tried to give us.

I lean toward the first view. Anything capable of creating the universe might be interested in us, but I highly doubt we’re their only (or even primary) interest.

[upwardbound]

Some possibilities include:

Maybe God is not omniscient or thinks in such non-human terms that human suffering didn't catch God's attention. E.g. maybe God operates primarily at the scale of quarks, and God wanted to create a universe full of quarks doing interesting things, and humans are an emergent behavior that God isn't aware of.

Maybe God is near-omniscient but is not omnipotent. E.g. maybe God had the power to create the universe from nothing, but can't affect what goes on in the universe. So maybe God has a hand on the universal/multiversal "off switch" and could choose to end all of everything if suffering outweighs joy, but maybe God is powerless to affect reality beyond this binary effect of enabling or disabling existence.

A third possibility similar to the second one is that maybe God sees all possible timelines, and cannot change events within a timeline, but can adjust the "volume knob" for the intensity of qualia in each timeline. In applied moral philosophy this volume knob is sometimes called "moral weight".

A fourth possibility, and a different way that God might be constrained in powers, is that perhaps God sacrificed their life in order to give life to the multiverse. You could imagine this as God wrestling against the nothingness of non-existence that came before God, and that the only way to win was to die in some way, so that God no longer exists but once did.

We currently know so little about physics that we don't know if we live in a singleton universe, an infinite multiverse (like in the many-worlds hypothesis), or a finite multiverse (like the Marvel movies, where you can assign a finite number to each universe because there are finitely many). And we don't know if we live in a block universe (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time... ) or if there is something else (e.g. a combination of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_presentism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return ).

Perhaps in the future we can use reasoning to determine the most likely answers to metaphysical questions, and if God does exist, is benevolent, and is still alive, maybe we can even find a way to communicate with God, perhaps through particle accelerators or whatever other equipment could affect the phenomena which are easiest for God to notice. I figure it doesn't hurt for us to think about what our civilization would ask God if given one chance to do so. If God really does control the "volume knob", we have a lot to be grateful for, such as the spontaneous arising of RNA life through excellent luck in prehistory. More recently, we barely survived the Cold War. I study Cold War history a lot, and many of those of us who do so estimate our odds of having survived up until now as being 1 chance in 3.

[rougka]

My fringe hypothesis is even wilder:

Jesus told his believers to eat his flesh and blood to get eternal life (John 6:53–57)

Someone took it literally and opened the grave, and ate the body

This is how the body disappeared suddenly and the grave was open. Others seeing this thought this was a miracle. Meaning Jesus came back to life, opened the grave and left

Whoever was involved had a good reason to keep that secret

[MisterBastahrd]

And that's why Jim Jones was truly God. Man got 900 people to literally drink the kool-aid.

[InitialLastName]

> kool-aid.

You say literally, but the Kraft Heinz company would like you to know that it definitely also might have been Flavor Aid.

[MisterBastahrd]

Makes sense. Socialists ain't got enough money for koolaid.