Was Jesus Crucified? Ahmed Deedat vs Dr. Floyd E. Clark Posted - TopicsExpress

Was Jesus Crucified? Ahmed Deedat vs Dr. Floyd E. Clark Posted by Zia Shah Whereas, Dr. Floyd E. Clark stays mostly off the subject and indulges in emotional rhetoric to preach to the converted, Ahmed Deedat despite being a Sunni Muslim realizes that Sunni position about Jesus’ crucifixion is not defensible, so he nicely orchestrates all the arguments, which the Founder of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, had written from the Bible to establish that Jesus did not die on the cross. The Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him, had given the title to the Promised Messiah, ‘the one who will break the cross!’ So, Deedat’s use of his arguments is a compliment in disguise. … Ehrman and Licona debate: The so called ‘facts’ about resurrection are merely contradictory hearsay: Christian apologists try to use the label of ‘facts,’ to create credibility for the hearsay evidence that they present for resurrection. But, the ‘facts’ of one apologist differ in some ways from the ‘facts’ of another apologist and in this comparison we can see that all the evidence mounts to no more than hearsay. The first apologist that I want to bring here as a witness is Michael Licona. He debated Prof. Bart Ehrman and was trying to prove the historic validity of resurrection, he had the first opening statement. He suggested three (so called) facts to make the sum total of his thesis: 1. Jesus’ death by crucifixion. 2. Sighting of Jesus by the Apostles after Crucifixion. 3. Sighting by Paul. It turned out that the first fact was a red herring and had no relevance to the debate, as Ehrman simply refuted it by saying that Jesus did not have to be crucified but could have been drowned or died of cholera and could have been raised from the dead. So the first fact goes away fairly quickly and the other two ‘facts’ are in fact only one fact as these imply witnessing by certain people including Paul. The only surviving ‘fact’ of our Christian apologist in this debate is also full of contradictions, which I have examined in a Google knol titled: Did Jesus rise in a physical body or a spiritual one? The first debate in this post also touches on this issue of spiritual versus physical body. What disciples witnessed was a physical body but what St. Paul proposed as he came on the scene twenty years later was a resurrection in a spiritual body! So much for the three ‘facts’ of Licona. Let us now move to the so called ‘facts’ of William Lane Craig on the same topic in a different debate. Did Jesus Rise From The Dead: Prof. Bart Ehrman Vs Prof. William Lane Craig: William Lane Craig makes a big deal out of the so called ‘fact’ of the empty tomb and its relevance to resurrection. His fact is easily negated by a little quote from the chief apologist, Pope Benedict XVI: Jesus traveled the path of death right to the bitter and seemingly hopeless end in the tomb. Jesus’ tomb was evidently known. And here the question naturally arises: Did he remain in the tomb? Or was it empty after he had risen? In modern theology this question has been extensively debated. Most commentators come to the conclusion that an empty tomb would not be enough to prove the Resurrection. If the tomb were indeed empty, there could be some other explanation for it. On this basis, the com-mentators conclude that the question of the empty tomb is immaterial and can therefore be ignored, which tends also to mean that it probably was not empty anyway, so at least a dispute with modern science over the possibility of bodily resurrection can be avoided. But at the basis of all this lies a distorted way of posing the question. Naturally, the empty tomb as such does not prove the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, in John’s account, found it empty and assumed that someone must have taken Jesus’ body away. The empty tomb is no proof of the Resurrec¬tion, that much is undeniable. Conversely, though, one might ask: Is the Resurrection compatible with the body remaining in the tomb? Can Jesus be risen if he is still lying in the tomb? What kind of resurrection would that be? Today, notions of resurrection have been developed for which the fate of the corpse is inconsequential. Yet the content of the Resurrection becomes so vague in the process that one must ask with what kind of reality we are dealing in this form of Christianity. Be that as it may: Thomas Soding, Ulrich Wilckens, and others rightly point out that in Jerusalem at the time, the proclamation of the Resurrection would have been completely impossible if anyone had been able to point to a body lying in the tomb. To this extent, for the sake of posing the question correctly, we have to say that the empty tomb as such, while it cannot prove the Resurrection, is nevertheless a necessary condition for Resurrection faith, which was specifically concerned with the body and, consequently, with the whole of the person. So, the punch-line is that the empty tomb does not prove resurrection hypothesis but may be necessary for considering such a hypothesis. By comparing arguments of different Christian apologists, as they build case for resurrection by historical testimony, describing what happened on the fateful day of crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem, 2000 years ago, one can expose their contradictions and the futility of their arguments. In this information age it is just not tenable to formulate a religion on oral traditions of 2000 years old stories, transmitted to us through different means, collected in what came to be known as the New Testament! QED Ref: Pope Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection. Ignatius Press, 2011. Pages 253-254