Yup, my response to "no true scotsman" has changed from "do they believe Jesus rose from the dead?" to "Do they use the word 'Christian' to define themselves culturally?" It is impossible to deny that a person has the right to label themselves a Christian; the word can mean any of a huge rage of things, many of which are mutually contradictory. It's why it's important to assess believers on an individual basis before approaching their arguments. Even the beliefs which have been historically central to the christian tradition (up to and including the existence and nature of God) are variable between groups (Although there are definite peaks and minority views that make it easier to respond online).

I thought Jesus' resurrection was THE central part of Christianity.
Basically if you want to call yourself Christian you should *at least* believe that Jesus was resurrected.
Now, I realize that none has the monopoly over the word "Christian"...

I have been meaning to respond and I appreciate the responses - I read them and did not forget I'm the one who asked. Very thorough. I've been having a hard time concentrating which makes my posts take a hard turn down the rabbit hole of confusing tangents. It is like an episode of Hoarders in my head and everything suggests a potential to be relevant. Editing my thoughts, getting to the point, having room to move around and admire the place, just really hard for me.

That's an interesting snippet I've never picked up on before! It's suggestive of a few things which could trouble the average fundie, regarding time, place, and authority of the author.

Blotonthelandscape already covered most of this.

A lot of the traditional imagery that has soaked into our collective visualization of these events is absent in the gospels, and originates with the set decorating choices of filmmakers and renaissance painters. Artists who have depicted Jesus have often drawn details from previous depictions. Over time most of us have absorbed these standardized images. At this point we all kind of picture the passion narrative the same way. Probably because we have all seen it pictured the same way.

1)
The tomb isn't really described as appearing any particular way. In a nearby garden, outside the city, carved in rock, with a stone in front of the door is about as far as visual description goes. If you'd like a picture, there's a tomb in Jerusalem that some christians in the 1800's arbitrarily declared the burial site of Jesus. Since then millions of christians have found this to be a visually plausible match (I say that derisively because it's pure fabricated tourist bullsh*t with no historical basis, but that probably is about what the tomb would have looked like).

2, 3, 4, 2b, 4b)
The custom for executed prisoners would be to toss him in a pit with the other executed prisoners. The tomb, the stone and the guards are depicted as unique to Jesus. The tomb is said to have belonged to Joseph of Arimathaea, a follower of Jesus, sometimes identified as a member of the sanhedrin. This is an area where the gospels diverge quite a bit, but the basic gist is that after Jesus is crucified, Joseph goes to Pilate to request Jesus' body. Pilate gives the body to Joseph, and Joseph places it in the tomb. A couple days later a group of women (a different group according to each gospel, but they all say Mary Magdalene was among them) come to the tomb and find that Jesus isn't there.

In Matthew's account (the one with the guards) the other priests then go to Pilate and say that since Jesus predicted he would die and come back three days later (according to Matthew he did say this), his followers might steal the body and say Jesus rose from the dead. They request guards to be placed at the tomb for three days so that this doesn't happen. Pilate agrees and the guards are placed at the tomb. As the Marys are approaching the tomb, an angel comes down, smites the guards, moves the boulder and tells them Jesus isn't here, and to go tell his disciples he is alive.

"I can think of a lot of ways a body could disappear from it, but there were no forensics experts on the scene at the time, so everyone just matched their stories, took everyone at their word, and left only one possible explanation for Jesus not being in the tomb."

And possibly no scene to investigate. It's impossible to pinpoint where in the development of christianity, christians first started talking about Jesus resurrecting, predicting his resurrection, and not being in a tomb. Somewhere between three days and thirty to sixty years. I find it more likely that the empty tomb was added into the story later to support resurrection, rather than the resurrection belief resulting from any actual empty tomb. But there are a few possible scenarios. Maybe Jesus disappeared from the tomb. Maybe he was moved. Maybe he was never in the tomb. Maybe he was ten layers down in the pit decomposing anonymously with the other crucifictees before anyone mentioned his body not being in the tomb.

It is possible the disciples did steal his body with the intent to stage his resurrection. It is also possible to have a disappearing body without anyone trying to stage anything. It could just be a simple misunderstanding.

One can easily imagine a few completely realistic scenarios whereby such a misunderstanding could occur. If for example Jesus was crucified shortly before the beginning of the sabbath, and the jewish religious leaders insisted that his body be down before sundown on the day he was crucified (John 19:31), and Joseph as both a christian (Matthew 27:57) and an orthodox jew (Mark 15:43) would want Jesus to have a proper burial, but wouldn't be able to bury someone on the sabbath, and he happened to own a tomb nearby (Matthew 27:60), it might have occured to him to just put Jesus in the tomb before shabbat, and put him somewhere more permanent later.

To take the speculation one step further, if the people who discovered the empty tomb followed Jesus, saw which tomb Joseph put his body in, then left the site of the tomb to go rest on the sabbath (Luke 23:55-56) (which is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) then came back to the tomb at dawn the next morning (Matthew 28:1). That would leave Joseph about twelve hours to move the body. Joseph goes back as soon as the sabbath is over, grabs the body, and takes it to be buried somewhere else. Mary shows up the next morning and Jesus is gone. And the rest you know.

Of course that's all speculative. But what isn't when you're talking about this character. And I sometimes wonder if something like this may be what happened.

Not that you'd even need a disappearing body for a resurrection belief to get started. If a few thousand people spent a few years following a beloved charismatic leader who promised to build a new kingdom where they would be rewarded for their loyalty to him, and then he gets executed before he could make good on the messianic stuff, that would be a better prelude to earnest hallucination than the death of Elvis.

So yeah, there's lots of ways to get rid of a body. And as has been noted, we might be talking about a body that never existed in the first place.

"It seems like it was written just for major opportunities to physically remove it by someone who was never found out."

It wouldn't be unheard of for a cult to spring up around the burial site of a religious leader. It is conceivable the romans would want to prevent this and would place guards. But considering that the gospels were written by people who would have considered the death and resurrection to be the entire point of the Jesus story, the guards seem much more like the kind of thing that would be added in to make the escape more dramatic, or more like it couldn't be faked ("you guys just moved his body" "no, we couldn't have, there were guards, and a big rock").

Interesting postscript to that guards thing.

Matthew 28:11-15 (ASV)
11 Now while they were going, behold, some of the guard came into the city, and told unto the chief priests all the things that were come to pass.
12 And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave much money unto the soldiers,
13 saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.
14 And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and rid you of care.
15 So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continueth until this day.

That "until this day" is troubling. But that has nothing to do with our topic here. These verses are an attempt to discredit the claim that the disciples moved his body. The author(s) of Matthew were trying to reduce the credibility of the claim that christians moved Jesus and faked his resurrection, so they said the jewish priests made up this rumor to discredit christians. And in attempting to refute it, it is also a documented admission that enough people were claiming this by the time Matthew was written that they felt the need to address it.

Haha, yeah, no worries ;-)

In the tradition I was raised in (and in most others as far as I'm aware), Jesus' resurrection was an important part of the atonement process. In "defeating death" he cleared the path for us sinners to get to heaven. So his death was the sacrifice, and his resurrection ended the need for further sacrifices, or something. So the resurrection served a purpose; after all, Jesus isn't meant to be just another sacrifice, but the final one.

Honestly, in my case, it was more a flashy display of power to show that Jesus was really, really God. I never really thought through the theological implications of the belief, I just accepted it as true.

Just to clarify - I don't believe it happened. I just have imagery going on where I conceive what the story is and it probably doesn't match the story most people are working off of, both believers and atheists familiar with the bible, when they do that particular go-round of could it/not happen... just going by what I know, it sounds like a fairy tale account, fairly romanticized for the drama. I used to do drama club and repertory theatre, you go to a play and maybe it draws you into it well enough that you don't notice it's not a real house, say, and everything is made of plywood. The lights come up and you clap, and the actors step out of character and bow. Meanwhile, I'm in the back of it all and it's framed like a... it doesn't need to be perfect or level like a house because we have to tear it down in two weeks. It just can't fall down in the middle of a play and the front has to be as resplendent and illustrious as the budget will allow to recreate the designer's vision. The back looks like total shit.

That's what, you know, when you're reading Noah and you know most people accept that it never happened, but for some reason feel positive after reading it because families, animals, rainbows, and endurance. But what makes it unbelievable to me is not the science, it's the dopey story. So what makes the resurrection the one thing all Christians cling to? Maybe Jesus was a wise man sometimes, like a wise character in a book - I like Charlotte the Spider in Charlotte's Web for example. Some people really like Tony Robbins or some shit, he's not even technically fictional. But it's all rendered pointless if Jesus only pretend-resurrected. The sequences of the story read like you know you're in a theater, maybe it's a good play, I won't be the critic here, but it is so convenient when all the characters say what they're supposed to say instead of something else. For example: where did he really go? If people have souls* too and they've seen a dead body, assuming the soul left the body and went somewhere else and the body's still here, what. the. fuck. Lots of people go missing, I used to watch a lot of In Search Of... and they'd have the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, Michael Rockefeller, etc. Well maybe they fuckin' resurrected too. Why are we so curious all of a sudden.

Anyway, thanks for pointing me in the direction and answering my questions. I hope I don't sound too pissy, it's not you or even this topic.
*I am not stating they do what they think they do.

1) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019:38-42&version=NIV
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2027:57-61&version=NIV
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023:50-56&version=NIV

Resurrection narratives are composites of these three narratives. Note that Matthew and Luke probably shared a source document, and John is a gnostic gospel which was authored much later than the other two.

2)See above. According to tradition/canon, Jesus was buried in an empty, unused tomb in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea. Because the execution was technically a roman deal, I'm not sure what the tradition would've been (probably a mass grave for executed criminals).

3) Again, see (1). It was special treatment on request of a Jewish Elder (who usually plays "devils advocate" in the trial of Jesus in Passion plays).

4)Read on in Matthew from the verses linked above. Luke and John do not mention guards.

4b) According to tradition/verses above, it was the Sabbath, so no-one visited his tomb in-between burial and resurrection.

2b) We can only speculate, obviously, but once it was established that there was no jiggery-pokery going on, and no risk of rebels trying to steal the body of their god, the guards probably wouldv'e left (assuming they were there in the first place.

Note that there's little reason to believe any of this happened at all. And a lot of ways in which we could hypothesize a con (note above, Sabbath->nobody went outside/visited the tomb, so plenty of time to stage a resurrection). In all the odds are strongly against a miraculous resurrection on purely historical (not to mention scientific) grounds.

I'm a little confused and other than reading the bible I thought maybe someone could clear up some questions about the bible for me. Not because I don't want to read, but because I don't want to read long bible passages. I have a vague understanding of the story of Jesus' tomb based mostly on some movie I probably saw and the set decorating choices of that particular movie, going back at least to the 1980s. I realize any time it's brought up, I half work off these sparse dramatic images and half gloss over unanswered questions. I'm expecting the answers to be stuff you already know and didn't have to yourself go look up for me, and some people really know a lot about the bible already.

1. How is the tomb described to appear?
2. Why a tomb, what's the custom? Was this his family tomb, some random tomb, a prisoner disposal? Why not burial?
3. Some others were crucified, what happened to them after? Did they receive the deluxe treatment? This seems above average or at worst, a fear of dead prisoners escaping, or possibly standard.
4. Why guards?
4b. Visitors - did Jesus have other visitors to his corpse when he was still there or just when he wasn't there? I'm still not getting from he was executed to his corpse mattered to someone enough to guard it, as if someone were planning to steal it, which always seems to imply to me they schemed it out so (air quotes)no one (/air quotes) could steal it.
2b. If he hadn't disappeared was he going to stay in there guarded forever and visited from time to time? Was he going to be moved eventually or buried or something?

In my version of the story, it was a small cave with a heavy boulder for a door perhaps a rock so large and heavy even god couldn't lift it... not really, somewhere between the size of a bean bag chair and a whole round rock the size of a smaller-than-normal door, and it was a holding cell. It serves a function like a modern funeral parlor where the body is laid out before it's buried, and there was a stone table in the cave where the body was supposed to be, but the cloth was still there. Alternately, they crumple him up in a ball and lean him against the far wall (for some weird reason*). I for some reason assume this is special treatment because they knew he's the lord, a private cell/tomb with guards and an elite admission filtering protocol. That's based on the spare detail I can recall of the movie that always stuck in my head combined with details I kind of filled out from my own mind - another awesome example of how someone can conjure up a detailed biblical story that sort of happened (on tv) approximately a mere 30 years ago that I saw with my own eyes. I thought I should seek clarification since I realize I've always just assumed this basic framework without irony.

I can think of a lot of ways a body could disappear from it, but there were no forensics experts on the scene at the time, so everyone just matched their stories, took everyone at their word, and left only one possible explanation for Jesus not being in the tomb. Seems weird, but I don't know of the customary procedure for corpse disposal of the era, it seems like it was written just for major opportunities to physically remove it by someone who was never found out. But then I don't really know. All the times it has come up, my version of the story still makes sense (to me) in the context of discussion happening around it by people who are more extremely familiar with the bible, but the details I'm asking aren't usually in question.

*This tends to go with a strange visual association I made of Hitler and Eva Braun's suicide bunker, and not really related to the movie. Probably. It's kind of like how kids don't know who Richard Stands is but they still pledge allegiance to him. Instead, I would conjure up twisted understandings about how people who died strangely died even more strangely.