![\"In](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2023\/06\/1920px-Brimpsfield_Church_St._Michael_29856658892-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s 1890\u00a0 novel The Sign of the Four<\/em>, Sherlock Holmes explains his method as a private detective to Dr. Watson:\u00a0 \u201cWhen you have eliminated the impossible,\u201d he says, \u201cwhatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n If a person is determined to disbelieve in the proposition that Jesus rose physically from the dead, if that person dismisses the notion as flatly impossible and unworthy of serious consideration, just about any alternative hypothesis might serve to explain the claim.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a really good one, from L. Eisenberg, \u201cA New Natural Interpretation of the Empty Tomb,\u201d International Journal for Philosophy of Religion<\/em> (2016): 133-143, as summarized by Andrew Loke, in his book Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach<\/em> (Routledge, 2020), 144:<\/span><\/p>\n Eisenberg (2016) has combined a variation of the swoon hypothesis and the remain buried hypothesis together with the intramental hypothesis and the mistaken identity hypothesis.\u00a0 The key question asked by Eisenberg is this:\u00a0 What would have happened if those who retrieved Jesus\u2019 body found that he was still alive?\u00a0 Eisenberg suggests the following scenario: Jesus survived the crucifixion and was discovered to be barely alive by the few followers (e.g., Joseph [of Arimathea]) who retrieved him.\u00a0 Hoping that Jesus would survive, and fearful that the Romans would discover he had illegally rescued a condemned man, Joseph faked the burial of Jesus (by having his slaves go to an available tomb, carrying a corpse-shaped bundle of burial cloth, placed it inside, and then sealed the tomb) while trying to revive Jesus.\u00a0 However, Jesus expired soon after, and was buried quietly in an anonymous grave.\u00a0 Nevertheless, rumour of his survival reached his followers and the Romans, who opened the tomb and discovered the body missing.\u00a0 To sooth their grief the disciples seized on the rumour of Jesus\u2019 survival and encouraged each other to hear the voice and see the image of Jesus in other people, which later became interpreted as a physical resurrection. . . .<\/p>\n [R]eports of feeling the presence of a post-crucifixion Jesus in another person would have been readily accepted by disciples given the fact that people of the first century commonly believed in possession by demons or spirits, visitations by gods, and the transmigration of souls, and given that Jesus predicted his own resurrection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Right.\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 I\u2019m convinced.<\/p>\n If you just toss all of the primary-source accounts out the window and invent a new narrative out of whole cloth, you\u2019ll come up with quite a different story!<\/p>\n There is, of course, precisely no evidence that Jesus was found still barely alive after his crucifixion.\u00a0 There is no evidence that Joseph of Arimathea faked the burial of Jesus.\u00a0 There is no evidence that Jesus died after attempts to revive him or that he was buried quietly in an anonymous grave.\u00a0 There is no evidence the disciples encouraged each other to hear the voice and see the image of Jesus in other people.\u00a0 (Would they really have given their lives for such a silly cause?)<\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of the atheistic Utah historian Dale Morgan (1914-1971), who was once something of a fashionable darling of cultural Mormons<\/a>.\u00a0 In 1945, he wrote a letter to the believing Latter-day Saint historian Juanita Brooks (1898-1989, the heroic pioneer on serious scholarship about the Mountain Meadows Massacre) in which he stated the fundamental issue between them with unusual frankness and candor:\u00a0 \u201cWith my point of view on God,\u201d he said, \u201cI am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith\u2019s story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church.\u201d\u00a0 (Dale Morgan to Juanita Brooks, 15 December 1945, at Arlington, Virginia. Transcribed in John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History<\/em> [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986], 84\u201391. The quoted passage occurs on page 87.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We spent last night in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, about half way between London and Oxford.\u00a0 My father spent several months there during World War II working on photo reconnaissance matters before he crossed the English Channel onto the European continent with General Patton\u2019s Third Army.<\/p>\n High Wycombe is far enough out in the countryside that it wasn\u2019t subjected to the V-1 and V-2 attacks that were terrifying London during that period, and my father was safe there.<\/p>\n But he wasn\u2019t allowed to remain<\/em> safe.\u00a0 He was a staff sergeant at the time, and one of the American captains assigned to High Wycombe regularly requisitioned him as a driver into London, where the V-1s and V-2s were raining down.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the captain, who had a wife back in the United States, was carrying on an affair with a female English military volunteer in the city.\u00a0 So my father was obliged to sit in London during the Captain\u2019s adulterous trysts, under German assault.\u00a0 At one point, the captain was standing by a window in his love nest, looking out and smoking a cigarette, when a bomb or a rocket exploded nearby.\u00a0 The window shattered, and a shard of glass scratched his face.\u00a0 He received a Purple Heart for having been wounded by enemy action.<\/p>\n My father always lamented, though, that he had never seen London at night with its lights on.\u00a0 It was always under blackout during his time there.\u00a0 We got him back to Europe more than once, but one of my dreams was to take him to England so that he could see London illuminated in the dark.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I never did.\u00a0 I deeply regret that.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Today was devoted to exploring some of the territory where my wife\u2019s paternal ancestors lived (before they accepted the Restoration and gathered to Zion).\u00a0 Particularly, we visited a very pretty and very old village called Miserden<\/a> (pronounced MIZZ-er-den) in the Cotswolds, with its Saxon Church of St. Andrew, as well as the equally old nearby village of Brimpsfield<\/a>, where we had a pleasant conversation with a plainly well-traveled and well-educated local woman who, as a volunteer, was cleaning the interior of the Church of St. Michael.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Posted from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s 1890\u00a0 novel The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes explains his method as a private detective to Dr. Watson:\u00a0 \u201cWhen you have eliminated the impossible,\u201d he says, \u201cwhatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.\u201d If a person is determined to disbelieve in the proposition that Jesus rose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":100568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34350,36293,29244,31396,36290,1366],"class_list":["post-100562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andrew-loke","tag-brimpsfield","tag-dale-morgan","tag-high-wycombe","tag-miserden","tag-resurrection"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/a>
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Jaggery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n