According to all three of the New Testament’s Synoptic gospels, miracles attended Jesus’ death: a mysterious midday darkness over all the land and the veil of the Jewish temple torn in half. (The Gospel of John omits these miracles, differing with the Synoptics in this point as in others.) However, there’s one miracle that only one gospel records.
“And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.”
—
Matthew 27:52-53
It’s amazing that more attention isn’t paid to this, considering it arguably qualifies as the most incredible miracle in the Bible. Miracles like Jesus’ healings were small, local in scope, easily missed or overlooked by those who weren’t actually present. Old Testament miracles like Noah’s flood or the fall of the walls of Jericho, dramatic as they would have been, could theoretically have been attributed to some confluence of natural forces.
But this, if it had really happened, could not possibly be explained except as the result of a purposeful intelligence with the power to suspend natural law breaking into history. No natural event can raise the dead, much less explain why only Christian believers would be raised and not others. And the sheer scope of the miracle - a mass resurrection from the dead, witnessed by the entire population of Jerusalem! - would rule out trickery and ensure that no one could possibly have overlooked it.
Yet, as I said, nowhere else in the Bible is this event referenced. None of the other gospel authors know about it. None of the New Testament epistles mention it. Even the Gospel of Matthew itself seems curiously uninterested in this stupendous miracle - it writes it off with the few curt lines quoted above and then never refers to it again. And, of course, no historians of the time record it. I’m not even aware of any church fathers or early apologists claiming that this had actually happened. As with the twelve apostles, the resurrected saints get only this one brief, shadowy reference and then disappear from history.
Neither the gospels nor the Book of Acts have any follow-up information on the fate of the resurrected individuals. Did they die again naturally, did they ascend to heaven, did they disappear from the earth? Did they become evangelists? Did they found any churches? Did they write any books or letters? Did they have first-hand knowledge of the afterlife that they were willing to recount? How could they not have been followed everywhere they went by eager, desperate crowds wanting to know the answers to these and many other questions?
If this resurrection had really happened, it would be the most famous and best-known event in all of human history. As I wrote in “Choking on the Camel“:
Events such as these create historians. To assume that not a single person who witnessed these monumental events would have felt compelled to write them down, or that no one bothered to preserve those records if they had, violates all standards of credulity…. if they really happened, [they] would have left a vivid imprint on humanity’s collective memory and would have produced a flood of awed and astonished records. To suggest that the succeeding generation simply let all memory of them disappear crosses the line from unbelievable to absurd.
In light of the extreme implausibility of such an incredible event happening and then being immediately and completely forgotten, there’s only one reasonable conclusion: the resurrection of the saints never happened. It’s a complete fabrication, invented by the author of Matthew as a rhetorical flourish. But if the gospel authors were willing to make up details - especially details that could so easily have been checked, even in ancient times - then we must ask what else they might have made up. As much as believers may dispute this conclusion, the alternative is untenable. This biblical tall tale is too obviously a fiction, and so I ask: do you really believe that?
I just learned from Nerraux over at the Awful Show that TyT’s dad Tim Jackson passed away last night. Words can’t describe the sadness of losing a loved one, but there’s something comforting I read once, which I keep linked on the right hand column of this site, that express’ my feelings of life and death more eloquently than I ever could.
“Compared to the great vastness of the cosmos, the ocean of deep time, my individual existence is a blip, a bubble in the foam on the surface of a flowing river. I am a momentary arrangement of atoms and molecules - an arrangement that lives and moves, to be sure, an arrangement that thinks, laughs, appreciates beauty, dreams, and loves - but a mere arrangement nonetheless, a transient state, an ephemeral gathering. Soon the blip will go out, the bubble will pop, the arrangement will dissolve, molecular bonds released by entropy. My consciousness will cease. But the molecules that once were me will still exist. The atoms that made up my body - iron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all the heavy elements forged in the crucibles of dying stars - will remain. Liberated from their temporary home, they will rejoin the rest of the planet, taking new shapes, finding new arrangements, becoming part of other life. I will become merged with everything.
I will become part of the trees that grow wherever my ashes are scattered, joining the ecosystem of the forest. I will be in the slow green heartwood of the trunks as they patiently tick off the centuries, in the buds that burst forth in spring and in the leaves that explode with color in autumn. I will be the sparkle of sunlight on the surface of a flowing mountain stream. I will sink into the earth and mix with the groundwater, eventually flowing back and rejoining the ocean where all life on this planet ultimately began. I will be in the waves that crash on the shore, in the warm sheltered tidal pools, in the coral reefs that bloom with life, and in the depths that echo with whale songs. I will be subducted into the planet’s core and join the three-hundred-million-year cycle of the continental plates. I will rise into the sky and, in the fullness of time, become dispersed throughout the atmosphere, until every breath will contain part of me. And billions of years from now, when our sun swells and blasts the Earth’s atmosphere away, I will be there, streaming into space to rejoin the stars that gave my atoms birth. And perhaps some day, billions of years yet beyond that, on some distant planet beneath bright alien skies, an atom that once was part of me will take part in a series of chemical reactions that may ultimately lead to new life - life that will in time leave the sea that gave it birth, crawl up onto the beach, and look up into the cosmos and wonder where it came from. And the cycle will begin again.”
In remembrance of Carl Sagan, who died today in 1996, there is somewhat of a blog carnival afoot (thanks to Dr. Novella for pointing this out). Now I’ve not read as much Sagan as I should (I’m workin on it!), but even to one who hasn’t read all his works, his effect on those of us interested in Science and the wonders of the universe can’t help but be touched by his enthusiasm for Science.
Carl Sagan brought us a way of looking at things from a truly Cosmic perspective, putting us in our place - as well as letting us see just how incredible the universe really is. Through the magic of fair use, I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes from Carl Sagan:
“
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Last night I had the pleasure of remixing In My Room for TyT’s New Liver, New Life cd. It’s a solid track to start with, and YTCracker finally managed to get his vox in, so i recut the track, spliced him and it’s full of win. So if you were one of the first few individuals to purchase the cd and got the version minus YT, contact me and I’m sure we can work something out.
I also feel very cool having mixed together a track with TyT, Logic One, Maja and YTCracker.
Sometimes, I can be pleasantly surprised in this town. It doesn’t happen often, but it did today. I decided after dropping my laundry off to head on over to Borders, and see what books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens were there.
Now at Borders, the Atheism books at smack dab between Christian Fiction, and Judaism. So as you can imagine, it can be slightly uncomfortable, because you’re there looking for books that deny God in the middle of God central. I noticed one gal who was nearby also in the section, but didn’t happen to see what she was reading. I figured that in typical fashion it was a God person picking up Left Behind or some other such typical thing. I saw Christopher Hitchens book “The Portable Atheist” down at the bottom of the shelf, so I kneel down and am taking a look at it.
As I’m checking it out, this lady walks up from behind me, excuses herself and puts that exact same book back on the shelf, points out “God Is Not Great” (also by Hitchens), and says “that’s a great book” and heads out.
Always a pleasant surprise to find another critical thinker where you least expect it.
Please Do yourself and Tim a favor, and go buy this cd. It’s currently available at CafePress and via SnoCap at www.myspace.com/tyt It will soon be available at CDBaby.com and on iTunes. All proceeds go to pay for the medicine for Tim Jackson’s Liver transplant.And since I’ve heard it all cause I mastered, you should be aware that it’s FULL OF WIN.
Well, you’re not alone. Apparently the latest cumulative update from the 12th is causing ALOT of IE problems. Here at the office, we’ve had 2 sites affected so far, symptoms being IE 6 crashing on startup, or randomly crashing at various webpages.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942615
That’s the troublemaker right there. If you go to add/remove programs, and remove update KB942615, it appears that the problems go away. This update is installed as part of windows automatic updates.
Here’s hoping MS gets a fix out for this soon, as this is gonna be a real freakin’ headache.
EDIT: don’t forgot to head over to windows update, select “custom”, and make sure to select “do not show this update again” for KB942615, otherwise it’ll just get pushed to your machine again next time it queries for updates.
If you watch the four-minute movie below until the end, the Secular Student Alliancewill get a small donation from the producers! It’d be nice if those cents could add up. Only views that occur before December 23rd will count!
What is the movie? It’s called Heart of the Beholder:
Heart of the Beholder is based on a true story of religious censorship, intolerance, and political corruption. Heart of the Beholder was written, produced, directed, and funded by Freethinkers from around the world and has won more Best Feature Film awards than any other independent movie ever. The producers tell me that due to the controversial topic, distributors are afraid to pick the movie up.
More information on how this arrangement works is here and here.
If you like what you see, link to the video and help the promo video spread! The SSA’s percentage will go right back to supporting secular campus groups across the country. And if you’re feeling particularly generous, you can always donate straight to the SSA by going here
