Another Biblical absurdity?
The Bible is a never ending stream of contradictions.
In Acts 3 , Peter makes a lame person walk.
This pales in comparison with Jesus raising the dead, yet apparently this miracle is an utter sensation.
In Acts 4, the opponents of Peter say 'Everybody living in Jerusalem knows they have done an outstanding miracle, and we cannot deny it. But to stop this thing from spreading any further among the people, we must warn these men to speak no longer to anyone in this name.'
So Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, many people are raised from their graves and appear to many in the city, Jesus himself is resurected, and yet the priests think that if they can keep the story of a lame person walking quiet, they can stop Christianity spreading any further?
Just how absurd is that?
Just why did not all Jerusalem convert to Christianity when Jesus was allegedly doing miracles 1000 times bigger than Peter's miracle?
In Acts 3 , Peter makes a lame person walk.
This pales in comparison with Jesus raising the dead, yet apparently this miracle is an utter sensation.
In Acts 4, the opponents of Peter say 'Everybody living in Jerusalem knows they have done an outstanding miracle, and we cannot deny it. But to stop this thing from spreading any further among the people, we must warn these men to speak no longer to anyone in this name.'
So Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, many people are raised from their graves and appear to many in the city, Jesus himself is resurected, and yet the priests think that if they can keep the story of a lame person walking quiet, they can stop Christianity spreading any further?
Just how absurd is that?
Just why did not all Jerusalem convert to Christianity when Jesus was allegedly doing miracles 1000 times bigger than Peter's miracle?
posted by Steven Carr at 1:44 AM
6 Comments:
Mr. Carr,
I dont believe that your argument holds much water here because of what the Bible tells us about the events leading up to this story about Peter. The Sanhedrin The Jewish council of the time, was made up of mostly Saducees and Pharisees, which were followers of Judaic Law and the High priest of Israel at the time presided over this councel. They absolutely hated Christ and His followers, thus they had christ crucified and were persecuting His followers at the time of this story; so it was pretty dangerous to be called a Christian during this time. Even so the Christian faith took of and exploded on the cultural scene. If we read a few chapters before this story we read about how Peter was preaching on the day of Pentecost and somwhere between 3000-5000 people converted to the Christian faith. Throughout all of the Gospel accounts we find how the saducees and Pharisees were constantly coming against Christ and His followers, they even had one of their own a man named Paul going arround throwing Christians in jail and killing them. Paul who was a Pharisee went on to have his own conversion experiance to christianity and eventually wrote a large amount of the New testament. So the Gospel accounts all tell us why this was going on. Passages from the Old Testament even tell how Christ would be rejected by His own people. In Isaiah 53:3 it says, "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and,acquianted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from; he was despised and we esteemed him not." Isaiah wrote this a few hundered years before the time of Christ. In the Gospel of John 1:11 it says, "He came unto His own, and His own recieved Him not." This was in reference to the Jews." So I would have to say that the Bible doen't contradict itself here, it only lines up with what it has already said. The Sanhedrin hated Jesus and His followers because the message that Jesus preached put a new interpretation on the Old Mosaic Law that gave them their Power. In essence they were just stuckup religous snobs, and Jesus wasn't He was contradicting them on everything and they hated this.
I don't see why your comment has anything at all to do with what I wrote.
The Bible claims that a tiny miracle of making a lame man walk spread over Jerusalem, and it was this 'outstanding' miracle that had the religious leaders worried.
And yet Jesus is alleged to have worked much more amazing miracles and still people did not believe.
Pure nonsense, and your comment entirely misses the point.
Mr. Carr,
Thank you for your reply. My point is that the Bible shows that Christ was a sensation in Jerusalem, alot of Jerusalem did convert to Christianity which was one of your questions, why didn't all of Jerusalem convert over. well it is becasue some were keeping a low profile due to the persecution of the sanhedrin, and the Bible tells us why not all of Jerusalem converted was because the prophets of the old testament had already prophesied that the jews would not totally accept Christ. The reason that the miracle was such a senastion is because Christ had been crucified and was reasurrected and was gone, now His followers were preforming miracles too, this was bad knews to the sanhedrin and they were doing what they had already tried to do which is stop this message of Christianity from spreading, which was foolish. So the Bible is not being contradictory here which is my point if they were alreaady trying to stop Christ and His followers what would keep them from continueing on doing so no matter what the miracle was
I see. So Jews did not convert en masse when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, fed 5000, fed 4000, or all those holy people rose from their graves and appeared to many in the city, simply because there was a prophecy that they wouldn't.
A self-fulfilling prophecy? How does that work? How does prophesying an event force people to do what prophesy says?
And Jesus was a 'sensation' was he? How many people converted to Christianity in the Gospels, while Jesus was alive?
But I do like your idea that Jesus had to be 'gone' before Christianity could spread.
And that the good citizens of Jerusalem were being converted by stories of a lame man walking, when there had allegedly been so many people rising from the dead just a few weeks earlier.
So , even on your account, the resurrection was so pathetically evidenced that it took a miracle for people to accept it.
Literally, you claim that it took miracles for people to accept the resurrection.
Wow, there must really have been shoddy evidence for this resurrection, if it took miracles for people to believe it.
So Jesus was 'gone', so the last stumbling block to people accepting Christianity was gone.
Mr. Carr.
Thank you for your reply once again, I have to say that I am enjoying the Conversation here.
My main point is that the text does not contradict ifself here, as you said in your original post. You made the text criticizm that the Bible contradicts itself in this story, which it does not. Now a self- fulfilling prophecy would have been one that Isaiah had prophecied and then made happen himself but he was dead at the time of Christ. If you will check the rest of the book of Isaiah you find that he prophecied what would happen in the history of Israel too. He said that they would be scattered among all nations of the earth,that the temple would be destroyed and that one day the Israelites would return and reestablish a nation in their home land. All this happened the Romans destroyed the temple and plowed the ground where it was in 70 AD and the children of Israel were scattered among all the nations of the earth, they reestablished their homeland in 1948 and to this day they are still returning from all the corners of the Globe. Now Isaiah prophecied all of this during a period of prosperity in Israel, hundreds of years before it happened. Also I made no arguement about the resurrection my only point was that Christ had returned to heaven at this point, and now His followers were the ones performing the miracles, which was bad news for the people who had tried to get rid of Christ. Also if you would check the scriptures those dead people only appeared to some people in Jerusalem after Christ was resurrected, not to everyone. Now there must have been some pretty good evidence that this resurrection had happened, because the leaaders of the government had Christ killed, and they were the ones that put the guards in front of His tomb, if it was just a bunch of crock dont you think it would have been pretty easy for the leaders of the day to dissprove it, and even document it. Then surely no one would have believed it Christianity probably would have even died out within a hundered years or so ,and we wouldn't even know what Christianity was taday other than something in a text book,Hmm thought
provoking.
What a strange objection you raise here.
It's nothing to do with the magnitude of a miracle. It's that Peter was doing it *in Jesus's name*. Everyone in Jerusalem understands it's part of the same movement. You can't separate the two.
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