The account of Joseph of Arimathea is very familiar. It is often read in churches at Easter time. It records how Joseph requested the body of Jesus from Pilate and buried him in a tomb at a known location. However, on the following Sunday, the body was gone, many were claiming to have witnessed appearances of the risen Jesus; and Jesus’ opponents could not produce the corpse. Thus the historicity of the burial in Joseph’s tomb is paramount to the central truth claim of Christianity.
The entombment of Christ by Caravaggio 1603-1604
However, Joseph is only mentioned during one cameo appearance and is not mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament, the location of Arimathea is not absolutely certain, and there are no references to this town in contemporary non-Christian sources. Thus, the brevity of the evidence has prompted some to challenge whether the event occurred at all. After all, isn’t absence of evidence the evidence for absence? So, is Joseph of Arimathea historical?
There are records in each of the four gospels that have some common material but are viewed from different perspectives. From these we can judge whether they are based on factual eye-witness testimony.
Kevin Rogers is the director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide. He is also a researcher, research supervisor and lecturer at the University of South Australia.
In the very dark days of World War 1, Britain made agreements with both the Arabs and the Jews regarding the land, then known as Palestine, to seek short term assistance to win “The Great War”. As an inevitable consequence, both Arabs and Jews believed they had received a promise that they would possess that land, but the contradictory promises resulted in growing anger and conflict between Arabs and Jews in that land. By 1947 Britain, so weary after World War 2, had had enough of this conflict and, on 29th November 1947, the United Nations agreed to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The conflict has been going on ever since.
The story of Jonah is one of the better known tales in the Bible. The concept of a man being swallowed by a whale certainly piques the imagination, though there is more to it than that, but what are we to make of it?
Was it intended to be read as history, a fable, or something else? What was its purpose intended to be? And if it was supposed to be read as history, how much of it can we believe? How much of this story is actually historically plausible?
There are 27 books in the New Testament. When the canon was finalised and agreed in the late 4th century, the church attempted to include only those books that had genuine close contacts with the apostles. However, there had been many forgeries that had been circulating within churches. These were written to skew church beliefs or practices or for obscure authors to obtain wide acceptance or influence. The church attempted to reject these forgeries. However, the canon was finalised about 300 years after the documents were written and much of the personal information had been lost. Did the church make mistakes and are some of those books that were accepted not written by their alleged authors?
Kevin Rogers is the Director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide and is a researcher and research supervisor and the University of South Australia.
Various forms of human slavery have been practiced for thousands of years and professing Christians have practiced it as well. We know that devout Christian politician William Wilberforce led the British campaign to prohibit the export of slaves from Africa, so where did he find his mandate to take this stand – was it the Bible?
From ‘Gone with the wind’
Both the Old Testament (Jewish scriptures) and the New Testament (Christian scriptures) seem to accept slavery as part of the social order to provide labor for manual tasks. Is the Biblical perspective morally defensible?
Are Allah and the Christian God the same? That is a rather interesting question. Opinions are split and there are good arguments for both options.
Obviously Christianity and Islam are different, but they both claim that there is one God and only one God. So is this “one God” they each claim to worship someone totally different in each case? Or, if there IS only one, is it simply a matter of different perspectives, different interpretations, or different views of this one God?
We all know about the 10 plagues of Egypt, which are often the traditional perspective from our days at ‘Sunday School’. However, modern branches of science (especially hydrology, geology, Egyptology, and biology) put the Plagues of Egypt into a different perspective. There were certainly miracles, but the nature of these miracles may not be quite what you thought.
Theologically, the main theme was bringing God’s chosen people out of bondage and into freedom, with all the New Testament symbolism that this entails. In particular, the Passover has obvious parallels with salvation and the Church’s communion rites, but there is more to it than that. The ten plagues of Egypt were a slap in the face to Egypt’s pantheon of false Gods, and proclaim a strong Biblical theme of true versus false religion.
Gordon is a geologist, hydrologist, water resources specialist, and a climate-change impact analyst. He is semi-retired and is a keen advocate of ‘sensible Christianity’.
This is not about people hating God; it is whether a God of love can also hate. The love of God is very widely misunderstood and misrepresented. Many people glibly say that God loves everything He has made. He’s made everything and so He loves everything. And He loves everybody.
Many (if not most) people have a false view of what God’s love is all about.
Form Criticism is a branch of Biblical Criticism that was highly influential within mainly liberal theological colleges from the early to late 1900s. The primary assumption of Form Criticism, as applied to the gospels, is that stories about the events and sayings of Jesus were passed on through many stages of oral re-telling and were progressively modified to suit the needs of the church at that time. The gospels that we now have are captured snapshots of the evolving oral tradition and thus have limited historical value.
This belies the claims of the gospel authors themselves and the testimony of the early church fathers. Are the gospels the result of an unreliable chain of oral tradition, or are they based on eye-witness accounts?
Kevin Rogers is the director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide and is a member of Ingle Farm Baptist Church. He is also a PhD student, research fellow and lecturer at the University of South Australia.
How can you or I know that Christianity is true? One of the main aims of Reasonable Faith Adelaide is to demonstrate that Christianity is plausible and more reasonable than the alternatives. We believe that we can have confidence that God exists, and that Jesus Christ is as is ascribed to him in the Bible. In other words, our aim is to demonstrate that Christianity is true. But can we actually “know”? Is that even possible?
Brian Schroeder will address some of the evidence and will endeavour to demonstrate, as far as possible, that we can know that Christianity is true, and how we can know. Brian Schroeder is a Reasonable Faith committee member. He has BSc and BA degrees from Adelaide University (Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics), and an MA in Theology.
