THE DEVIL PROVES THE JESUS MIRACLE CAN’T BE PROVED

The gospels say that a miracle healing man called Jesus Christ lived. They say he died by crucifixion and three days later he rose again. The tomb he was placed in was found wide open with the stone that had been across the entrance moved back and the tomb was mysteriously empty. His body was gone. Certain witnesses claimed that Jesus appeared to them as a resurrected being.

 

Bon and Tibetan religion to mention a few believe that the mind has the power to make artificial personalities that go about like spirits and ghosts.  One example is how if enough people start to think a house is haunted it will become really haunted.  If they think the ghost is Old Marley soon people will hear chains being dragged around the house.  The ghost is real but created by forces in their minds.  They project spiritual and psychic energy to make this artificial being, this metaphysical artificial intelligence..  The being may eventually end up evolving into an invisible person equal to you and me.  When thoughts and fears and feelings create a form, we call the result a thought-form.  Another world is tulpa. 

Many hold that God and Jesus and Satan are tulpas.  So the believers are the ones standing by letting evil happen instead of using paranormal power against it.  It is not God.  So the believers are to blame when Satan possesses an innocent person.  If there was a Jesus, it does not follow that the risen Jesus was really him and not a tulpa.  Occultists or psychics might say that the stronger your desire that Jesus be real, the stronger your belief that he is real, the more people share that faith with you, the more you would die for it, the tulpa increases in power and its immortality is assured.  Hypothetically, I would add too that this Jesus would have to be a projection of what is inside of you.  We all know people whose Gods bear a startling tendency to agree with them.  So that would also establish and empower a tulpa.  It would ensure it will attack people or ideas you detest.  The hate will feed it too.

The resurrection of Jesus is one of Christianity's core doctrines. It is essential. It is at the root of what Christianity is all about.

 

Some feel that when Jesus told a thief on the day they were dying that they would be in Paradise that day and how he said he would not drink wine again in this world and even refused bad wine on the cross to make the point that he was clearly thinking he was going out of this world for good.  The resurrection appearances could actually have been holograms or images rather than real appearances of Jesus.
  
The Church denies that the apostles and the other witnesses hallucinated or imagined the appearances of Jesus Christ following his death that led them to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Yet the same Church recognises that a deep psychological need can cause such visions and claims that the visionaries had a strong need for Jesus to be alive. There is no evidence against the hallucination explanation and it is simpler to accept it than to accept that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

If there is a Devil who has the power to make people hallucinate then how can we be sure that Jesus really was seen after he rose from the dead? What if Satan sent a hallucination? If he did, then if psychology thinks it was unlikely for it to be a hallucination as understood by medicine that does not rule out it being a hallucination of a different order. Maybe it was supernatural or paranormal?

If there is a Devil then the resurrection cannot be proved for he might have raised a good man called Jesus from the dead for an evil purpose. The Christian claim that only God can raise the dead is just an assumption and when the Bible says God lets the Devil kill and that the Devil is a murderer why can’t he let the Devil raise the dead? They know they are skating on thin ice.

No matter how strong the evidence for resurrection is, there is stronger evidence that it could not have happened. Jesus supported the Jewish Law though it said that God commanded the murder of adulterers, apostates and heretics by stoning. No good God would raise a man like that from the dead to promote such fanatical preaching. The Bible attributes miracles to the Devil and says he likes to pretend to be a messenger of God. If the Devil raised Jesus then he might just as easily have made the body of Jesus invisible in the tomb and caused the witnesses to miraculously hallucinate that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had appeared and got them to take the body away and then wiped their memories so we would have no evidence for saying a resurrection took place. Or perhaps the Devil simply looked at what evidence there was for what in that great time of turbulence and considered what he could get away with and worked out from it what to say about Jesus and tricked people to believe that the evidence said Jesus rose from the dead and appeared, by manipulating the evidence. He would not have raised Jesus when it was easier to do a few magic tricks to make it seem that he had returned from the dead. And the fruits of Christianity have been a vulgar hypocrisy and crass error and an endless stream of deaths and wars which would back up the diabolical agency explanation. Any good Christianity has done could and would have been done without it so the good fruits are irrelevant. Jesus himself said that you know false prophets by their fruits. But one would need to be God to see if Christianity really had more good fruits than bad so that was not very honest of him. And what about religions that have just as many or more good fruits? What if the Devil plans to bring about much good that is so well planned that the greater badness is unknown? What if he makes the resurrection do good for the world so that the ripples of the event will throw world events in such an order that some big future disaster will take place?

Logic says that if Satan has magical powers the resurrection could have been a fiction and a hoax that he was responsible for. Spirituality says that Jesus was not all he was made out to be but a dubious character and so Satan's interest in him would be comprehensible.

 

The Christian argument that a hallucination is an individual experience contradicts the fact that group hallucination is quite common in religious circles. Gary Collins an expert on these matters writes, “By their very nature only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren’t something which can be seen by a group of people.”

Another objection is that if believers hallucinate Jesus then how come Paul hallucianted him when he ws still Jesus enemy.

REFERENCES

Arnold, Clifton E. Ephesians: Power and Magic, The Concept of Power in Ephesians in Light of its Historical Setting, 1989, Cambridge University Press.
—. The Colossian Syncretism: The Interface between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae, 1996, Mohr Siebeck.
Aune, David F. “Magic in Early Christianity,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, H. Temporini & W. Haase, (eds), 2.23.2 (1980), 1507-1557.
Baur, Walter, William F. Arndt & F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 1957, University of Chicago Press.
Bertram, George. “energew,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, G. Kittel (ed), 1964, William B. Eerdmans.
Bolt, Peter G. Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers, 2003, Cambridge University Press.
Conybeare, Frederick C. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, II, 1921, Harvard University Press.
Eitrem, Samson. Some Notes on the Demonology in the New Testament, 2nd edition revised and enlarged, 1966, Symbolae Osloenses, Supplement XX.
Frayer-Griggs, Daniel. ‘More Than a Prophet’: Echoes of Exorcism in Mar-kan and Matthean Baptist Traditions,’ Matthew and Mark Across Perspectives: Essays in Honour of Stephen C. Barton and William R. Telford, K.A. Bendorais & N.K. Gupta (eds), 2016, T&T Clark.
Garrett, Susan R. The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke’s Writings, 1989, Fortress Press.
Gordon, Richard. “Imagining Greek and Roman Magic,” Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, B. Ankarloo & S. Clark (eds), 1999, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hanse, Hermann. “ecw,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, G. Kittel (ed), 1964, William B. Eerdmans.
Harmon, Austin M. (tr). Lucian, III, Harvard University Press.
—. Lucian, V, Harvard University Press.
Hoehner, Harold W. Herod Antipas: A Contemporary of Jesus Christ, 1972, Cambridge University Press.
Hull, John M. Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition, 1974, SCM Press Ltd.
Jennings, Theodore W., Jr & Tat-Siong Benny Liew. “Mistaken Identities But Model Faith: Rereading the Centurion, the Chap, and the Christ in Matthew 8:5-13,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 467-494.
Jones, Christopher P. Culture and Society in Lucian, 1986, Harvard Univer-sity Press.
Kannaday, Wayne C. Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: Evidence of the Influence of Apologetic Interests on the Text of the Canonical Gospels, 2004, Society of Biblical Literature.
Kotansky, Roy. Greek Magical Amulets: The Inscribed Gold, Silver, Copper, and Bronze Lamellae, Part I, Published Texts of Known Provenance, 1994, Westdeutscher Verlag.
Kraeling, Carl H. “Was Jesus Accused of Necromancy?” Journal of Biblical Literature 59 (1940): 147-157.
Kraemer, Ross S. “Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer: A (Christian) Theological Strategy?” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 321-349.
Marcovich, Miroslav. Origenes: Contra Celsum Libri VIII, 2001, Brill Aca-demic Publishers.
Margalioth, Mordecai. Sepher Ha-Razim, 1966, Yediot Achronot.
Morgan, Michael A. Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of Mysteries, H.W. Attridge (ed), 1983, Scholars Press.
Myllykoski, Matti. “Being There: The Function of the Supernatural in Acts 1-12,” Wonders Never Cease: The Purpose of Narrative Miracle Stories in the New Testament and its Religious Environment, M. Labahn & B.J.L. Peerbolte (eds), 2006, T&T Clark.
Ogden, Daniel. Greek and Roman Necromancy, 2001, Princeton University Press.
—. In Search of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The traditional tales of Lucian’s Lover of Lies, 2007, The Classical Press of Wales.
Philostratus, Flavius. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, I & II, F.C. Conybeare (tr), 1912, Harvard University Press.
Preisendanz, Karl. Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die Grieschischen Zauberpapyri, I & II, 2001 (reprint), K.G. Saur.
Rabinowitz, Jacob. The Rotting Goddess: The Origin of the Witch in Classical Antiquity’s Demonization of Fertility Religion, 1998, Automedia.
Reimer, Andy M. Miracle and Magic: A Study in the Acts of the Apostles and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 2002, JSNT Supplement Series 235.
Ricks, Steven D. “The Magician as Outsider in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament,” Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, M. Meyer & P. Mirecki (eds), 2001, Brill Academic Publishers.
Samain, P. “L’accusation de magie contre le Christ dans les évangiles,” Ephe-merides Theologicae Lovanienses 15 (1932): 449-490.
Schäfer, Peter. Jesus in the Talmud, 2007, Princeton University Press.
Smith, Morton. Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? 1978, Harper & Row.
Sorensen, Eric. Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Chris-tianity, 2002, Mohr Siebeck.
Twelftree, Graham H. Jesus the Exorcist: A Contribution to the Study of the Historical Jesus, 1993, Mohr Siebeck.
Vermeule, Emily. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, 1979, Uni-versity of California Press.