Is He Risen? Indeed?

[MineralMan]

Today, in Christian churches around the world, those who claim Christianity as their religion celebrate the Resurrection of their Messiah. It is the high point of the year.

Why, then, I wonder, is there a cross with a depiction of a dead Christ at the front of every Roman Catholic Church? Why is that their symbol of Jesus? 364 days a year, the message is that Jesus died for humanity's inherent collective sinfulness. Then, on Easter Sunday, with the dead Christ still hanging from the cross at the front of the church, Catholics hear the story of Resurrection, while still staring at the dead man on a cross.

So, is the Resurrection the real core of Roman Catholicism, or is it the death of Christ? I maintain that it is the dead Christ that is at the core of RCC dogma, not the resurrected one.

It's very interesting.

[secondwind]

1. It all boils down to faith....If they've got you all the way up to the Crucifixion, then

you just have to prove to them one more time that you are blinded by your faith....so they tell you he rose into heaven on the third day, just like that....Floated up to the sky, and Christians all around the world are salivating -- looking forward to their turn (the "Rapture")...

On Edit: I should point out that I am a lapsed Catholic, a product of boarding schools for years, and learning by rote, etc.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

25. In the Catholic manual on torture boiling is mentioned.

In fact, it was a two volume text, showing how you could torture and keep the subject alive long enough until they confess, after which they would be put to death. Boiling, stripping the skin off people who were alleged to be possessed, small cuts, smothered in salt, stretching on a rack, - and that was just the men. Women's breasts were a particular source of fascination and torture, as well as their vaginas.

The best of all was the wheel. The broke each of your limbs, and threaded them through the spokes of a wheel, keeping you in placed. Then, for more fun and amusement, they would spin you around. All in the name of a catholic god.

So if you think about it, today's church, filled with sexual predators, liars, and cheats, really is no different from the church of Ye Olde Tymes.

[saltpoint]

2. It would be real tough deciding if the account in the New Testament is

factually sound. Dead Christ, Risen Christ -- the best investigative reporters would find that their investigation dead-ends somewhere deep into History.

"File unretrievable."

"That file does not exist or you have no access to it."

I like the renewal and cyclical refreshing of life notion, and but believe that it's aligned with this time of year because in many parts of the world winter is over with and a daffodil or two begin spushing through the dirt. Grafted onto human beings, there are cathartic and renewing things that can happen and which can refresh a person's life.

The real difficulty with Messianic constructs is that belief alone sustains them as divine interventions and that's problematic for Resurrection-believing Christians because Messianic psychology significantly predates the origins of their faith.

[Igel]

28. Here's a lesson from a historical linguistics class I was in.

A person pointed out that the first attestation of a word in language X was in something like 1450. How, then could it be borrowed from language Y?

The professor said that the first attestion of a word is the latest that language X could have borrowed or innovated the word. That it wasn't mentioned in older texts might well have been because they had little to do with the kinds of subjects that would entail use of the term. Or it might have been because the language innovation had occurred hundreds of miles to the west and it took time for the term to make its way from the language border to a town that had any sort of text production. Or it may simply have failed to be mentioned because it was a low-class term, or a novel, trendy term, or because writers simply preferred a synonym.

In Russian there are words attested only in the 1700s that are Proto-Indo-European and have distinctive Common Slavic sound changes. The words were there when Russian was a dialect of Slavic, when Slavic was a dialect of Balto-Slavic (if you think that was an actual language), when Balto-Slavic was a dialect of Indo-European and before, back to 4000 BC or earlier. Then there are borrowings from Germanic that show up in the earliest texts, from c. 1100. Most Bible scholars' logic would argue that the borrowings from Germanic, an Indo-European dialect, must predate Proto-Indo-European itself because they tend to think of date of first attestation as meaning "approximate date of innovation." Then there's surprised when a new datum causes them to revise their ideas, mostly because they didn't consider all the uncertainty in their ideas to begin with. Faith, my son, is not just for belief systems masquerading as religions.

The only thing you know from seeing a word first attested in 1450 is that it existed in 1450, and usually before that. Same with the "origins of our faith." Many themes in the OT or NT are similar to texts that are far older. The problem is whether precedence in attestation is precedence in innovation: The only thing you know from having something in the OT is that it was written down in something close to final form in 650 BC, and probably existed in textual form for a few centuries before that. How long before *that* it existed in oral form is anybody's guess.

In other words, since the OT narrative ostensibly starts in Assyria, that narrative may be as old as any other from that narrative. It may be older. It may be younger. The point is, you can't tell from first attestation in a given tradition, esp. one that crucially relies on writing.

Then there's parallel innovation. It's a common trick to give beginning historical linguistics students a couple of words, say their meaning and let the students say, "Aha--cognates!" When they work out the sound correspondences they're all horribly wrong and they're in a muddle. You whisper "onomatopeia" at them and they blanch: Both languages copied an animal sound independently with similar results, the words are not sprung from a common source, at least not a common *human* source. You see animals come out of caves after hibernation. "Resurrection" isn't a stretch of an idea.

And finally consider the Slavic word for "carrot." Russian morkov', Polish marchiew, with various forms in other languages: all the evidence points to something like *murky or *murkhy; the problem being that you can't resolve the k/kh discrepancy within Slavic. People have tried to say that as it was borrowed from Slavic language to Slavic language it changed, but that solution fails. All the solutions saying they were borrowed from different source languages fail, as well, being utterly implausible and counter to what we know about how carrots spread into Europe. The best solution is uncomfortable--the Slavic languages differed slightly, in ways that were trivial to their development, and their speakers heard the word differently when borrowed from a single source language--one source, two different takes on the same word. So also there's no reason to say that, say, a given Babylonian and West Semitic narrative doesn't ultimately go back to a source that is neither Babylonian nor West Semitic. After all, we know a bit more than we did in the 1800s about the deep history of the area, and that Babylonia wasn't the first civilization to rise there, not by millennia.

None of this is novel to a linguist. I'm willing to bet that it's not novel to cultural anthropologists. But most discussions I've read concerning Xianity, esp. lay discussions, overlook these points. Perhaps because the certainty of the conclusion can't abide the doubt and uncertainty that these entail. Perhaps they've just never read outside their field.

[saltpoint]

29. I do not argue exclusivity for faith's role in belief systems, nor do I blame

it on those terms. It's just that it cannot be excused, especially in the use of available filters by which a religious tradition is examined and discussed.

There is a political component that Christians of more than one stripe set aside in favor of the religious construct. That is a dangerously wobbly construct without the political backdrop. Because it is against that political backdrop that the Roman soldiers surround the garden at Gethsemane and arrest the Galilean, to select but one example. And the apostles, drunk though they apparently were, were also armed. Somebody was lookin' for a tussle and expected to get one.

The ministry of Jesus -- at least as it is relayed to us by those texts -- occurs in part as narrative against the socio-political backdrop of the Roman Empire. Republic was long since gone and Empire had certainly kicked in, and a Messianic figure, no matter who it was or where he came from, or how old the idea may be, was a gesture of defiance against the local authorities of the Roman Empire. Political subversion in the form of Messianic revolt, threatened their control. Jesus evidently was getting through to the rabble. The authorities didn't care for that sort of thing and tended to nail people to boards in response.

So there we have the redemptive blood but we don't get it until those Roman nails are driven into an innocent man's flesh. Linguists should and do examine in part the psychosocial origins of speech. In the approximate life span of Jesus, we are working, though, with a part of the world where languages were in relatively constant flux for the sustained period of a human life. Trade routes and harbors with significant trade activity were part of the constant landscape. The texts we are left with by which we examine the coming of the Messiah proceed as academic endeavor largely through modern interpretation. Belief aside, that's all we have available. Which is a bit of a shame, because the Gospels are a bit flat-spirited linguistically. There must have been few poets available. We get some lyric language here and there but a lot of it is brief and distilled, which gives it power in the absence of lyric poetic tone, but the narrative as it's described probably deserves more poetry and less of the clipped, brief, likely abbreviated words that have survived.

Agree with you that we cannot 'monitor' the derivation of language through the Tigris Euphrates Valley, for example, but with what we have we are able to make interpretative decisions. We know some things about Alexander, who made Babylon his capital, but we do not know enough, or rather, there is so much more we would like to find out. His letters to his teacher Aristotle have not survived. The role of the relationship -- strategic and personal -- between Alexander, land conqueror of Persia and the Far East -- and his naval commander, Nearchus, is sketchy at best. His tomb is still undiscovered. It does seem also that it is reasonable to suspect that the local monasteries, who inhabited the process of salvaging so many books from the distant past, were prone to the meddling and interpolation of their senior scholars who may have preferred Jesus a certain way and "adjusted" the words of Mark accordingly. The Book of John, for example, is many Christians' favorite but as one of the Gospels, it is a bit of a mess. It reads to me like a book written by a committee, very possibly a centuries-long "committee" of interpolators, across many years and in various locales, to "adjust" Jesus to their perception and their purpose. Which would put the Biblical literalists' belief system under considerable strain.

Archetypal and ancient narrative set against a decidedly perilous political landscape and two millennia or so of awed comment on same.

[Gman2]

3. The same reason why we worship BABY Jesus.

The establishment doesnt want Jesus words to hit home. They are revolutionary. The powers that be, want the part that stops the slaves from stealing the silver, not the part that stood up to hate, power, and selfishness. Dead God, and baby Jesus are far less disruptive of capitalism than angry temple table upsetter. Witness the rebranding of corporate Jesus. Soon, rambo Jesus will have his own bible version. And we scold Muslims, for Making Jihad mainstream. FUCK CORPORATE JESUS.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. he is leavened?

Why the depiction of a make believe man, nailed to a couple of planks? Easy. Just look to the surrounding imagery. It is foreboding, large, mysterious, impressive, especially to the great unwashed. It boils down to a couple of simple ideas. Fear, awe.

Fear provides the incentive to seek solace somewhere. And, when an entity creates the fear, AND pretends to provide the answers, it has you coming and going.

Awe? Why else include all those make believe fairy tales, stories about miracles, and images of hell (and heaven)

The image of a corpse hanging in a church, right behind the altar, is there to grab the attention of the masses, to confuse, scare, and to make them feel small when compared to the alleged power of some god.

[rug]

5. There's no Resurrection without the Crucifixion.

[MineralMan]

7. Yes, and there is no salvation without the Resurrection.

Isn't that true, as well?

[rug]

8. It is if you accept it.

[MineralMan]

10. Well, Rug, I'm not talking about reality here.. I'm talking about

the symbolism of Christianity. In the RCC, the symbolism is death. The cross is empty in most Protestant churches. Seems a significant enough question as a point of comparison, I think.

You know that I'm an atheist. So, I obviously don't believe any of it is real. However, the symbolism affects people I deal with on a daily basis, so it is of interest to me. I guess I'm looking for a discussion, not bumper stickers.

[rug]

18. The main difference between the Crucifix and the Cross is obviously the Corpus.

Protestant churches emphasize the Word and salvation by the risen Christ, whereas Catholic churches emphasize the Eucharist, considered a bloodless participation in the Crucifixion at Calvary.

Hence, the different emphases in the symbols. At the core, it's a difference in emphasis, not in message.

Neither Church is fixated on death but rather on the conquest of death by an incarnate God.

There are other explanations but that is the main one that was told to me.

[MineralMan]

19. Yes, that's how I've understood it, too.

It's the symbolism that interests me, though. In religious matters, symbolism is a very important element of worship, and colors the emotional aspects of any liturgy. It is what is carried away much more internally than the words.

And I'm troubled by the symbolism of the Corpus. I wonder if the message that is internalized is equivalent to the message that is spoken.

[rug]

23. There are certainly gruesome enough depictions.

But the raw suffering on the Cross is the counterpoint to the Incarnation of Christmas. Assuming there is a God, and assuming that God became incarnate, to go through this voluntarily is, to say the least, stunning.

If you're interested in the Catholic view of the Passion, look for various meditations on the Stations of the Cross.

Here's one from the Houston Catholic Worker.

http://www.cjd.org/stories/cross.html

[MineralMan]

24. There was an old Spanish Mission in San Luis Obispo,

near where I used to live. I was there from time to time, playing in an orchestra, and always found the Stations in that church very interesting. It preserved or replicated some very old images from the time the Missions were built.

I'm actually pretty familiar with the RCC interpretation of the Passion. I've been studying religions all my life. I have a small collection of various meditations published over the years.

[MorningGlow]

6. My Catholicism is rusty, but...

Wasn't his death (sacrifice) what "saved" humanity? So the resurrection was the icing on the cake, so to speak. The reward for his sacrifice. :shrug:

[MineralMan]

9. Were there not a Resurrection in the story, there would

be no salvation, since it would just be another crucified Jew. There were many "Messiahs" around Jerusalem. I have no doubt that others were crucified, too. It is the Resurrection that makes Jesus different, I'd think. Bones in a crypt just don't cut it.

[MorningGlow]

17. Oh absolutely

The Resurrection was the confirmation that Jesus was the "only" son of God and all that. But the Catholic Church does put a great emphasis on Jesus' suffering and sacrifice for humanity.

[iris27]

12. Well, I was always taught growing up Lutheran that it was the full package of his death, his descent

into hell to claim victory over Satan, and then his subsequent resurrection that brought salvation for humanity (or at least those who heard the tale and believed it; fuck everyone else). Heavy emphasis was placed on the resurrection being the real saving act.

But then, the Bible says his last words on the cross were "It is finished", so I suppose it's open to interpretation and is another point of doctrine for different denominations to argue about.

[MineralMan]

14. Yes. That is the standard post-reformation dogma, and is common

to most Protestant churches. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the Resurrection. There's no doubt about that. Yet, the essential symbolism that towers over the Mass is the crucified Jesus, not the risen one. The empty cross in most Protestant churches symbolizes the empty cross, with a resurrected Christ.

It seems an essential difference to me, and one that informs both churches' doctrinal message.

I'm sort of picking nits with this, but that's always what I'm doing with religious study as I try to make sense of why people are able to believe that sort of thing.

[jody]

11. OP will attract diverse opinion so IMO the Resurrection is the core Christian belief because it's

the most visible link between our natural world and the preternatural.

According to Genesis, God removed the Tree of Life from Eden but in the Synoptic Gospels metaphorically returned it with the Cross upon which Jesus was hung, the First Fruit of The Resurrection and manifestation of eternal life.

[MineralMan]

13. That's a good explanation of the Protestant view. Thanks.

My original question about the RCC's use of the occupied cross still troubles me, though. My own religious training was Protestant, and I recognize your explanation.

[jody]

15. My opinion is a synthesis of a paper published several centuries ago by a RC priest. If you want

the RCC view then only Vatican explanations will suffice.

[MineralMan]

16. The symbolism doesn't match the thesis, I think.

That's my dilemma in understanding this, you see.

[zipplewrath]

20. You're avoiding the point

The reason that the crucifiction is the focus is because that is the "gift" that God gave. Christ died for your sins. If you want much more than that, you'll have to study some art and architectural history.

[MineralMan]

21. Actually, it has nothing to do with architecture or art. You're

missing the point, actually. It has to do with a distinct difference between the symbolism used by the RCC as compared to Protestant denominations. It's a doctrinal issue, not one of architecture and artistic expression.

If you can't understand the question I'm asking, it is you who is avoiding the point. It's my OP, and my question. You don't get to change the question in the middle of the discussion.

[zipplewrath]

26. Art History has alot to do with it

For about the first 200 years, it was the fish that was the predominate christian symbol. Somewhere around the time that the romans put it on their shields and embraced Christianity, the symbology started to change. The predominate location of graphic representations of in RCC churches came along much later. Actually, with the advent of Vatican II there was a move away from these kinds of architecture. There has been some effort to refocus on the baptismal fountain.

[jody]

22. It's been several decades since I read the paper. I tried to google it but it's probably not on the

Internet.

[struggle4progress]

27. We have flipped through many calendars, but the same people are still recognizable

today. The cruel overseers of the Egyptian captivity narrative may have changed their names and addresses, but you can still find them: you need only prick up your ears to hear the cries of those who labor under them. They have machine guns now. Perhaps nailing people to crosses has passed out of style too, but it is really a mere quibble to say so: terrorizing people by threatening them with death has never lost its popularity in certain circles; again, the names and addresses have changed but the cruelty reproduces itself, generation after generation

And so there is the seductive voice that murmurs: Why not just go along with us? You would have to be a fool to do otherwise. It will be so much easier for you to go along, since you cannot win: we would simply kill you and be done

It is an ancient murmur; and there is an ancient response -- Yes, I suppose I would be a fool not to go along with you, seeing that you can destroy me utterly and reduce my body to bones rotting in the dust. But I think I would be an even greater fool to go along with you and to give you power by bowing to your threats, because I see the world where you want me live sliding down into hell. And I think that even if you can destroy my body, you really cannot destroy the great truth of love and mercy. So I think I will walk under a different light in a different direction

[DeSwiss]

30. What has risen is the SUN......

...not the son.


This Is What All
The Fuss Is About
http://www.archive.org/details/biblemythsandthe00doanuoft">

[darkstar3]

31. The answer to your question lies in the earlier days of European Catholicism.

The symbol of the early Church was not the Crucifix. In fact, the "early Church" didn't really have just one symbol, though the symbol we refer to today as "the fish" was very prominent.

The Crucifix made its appearance in Europe around the same time as another Catholic oddity known as the Passion Play, and they are both born from the same purpose. Bonus points to anyone who knows the nefarious purpose behind the creation of the Passion Play.