The Perfect Visual Summary of Centuri0n's Debate with Brian Flemming

Found this article and you may or may not want to read all of it. I'm going to post the concluding paragraphs, along with a link to the picture, though you may have to click through to see it clearly.

The bottom line is this: the premise you start with about whether Jesus rose from the dead will lead to your interpretation of the evidence about Christianity's formation. If you read any of the debate, you will see clearly how this chart applies, and why Cent & Brian are miles apart--their disparate views of history.

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If Jesus of Nazareth rose again, then the God and Father of Jesus Christ was shown to be truly God. And not only did God validate Jesus’ person and work, but he also placed the disciples and eyewitnesses in a unique and authoritative place in history. The resurrection would inevitably affect our hermeneutic and historiography, because the resurrection of Jesus would be an event of such profound significance that all things must now be interpreted in light of this truth. Conversely, any interpretation of history that would ignore or reject the resurrection would be guilty of misinterpreting history and reality at its most fundamental level.

Since the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central event upon which the Christian faith stands or falls, there can be no such thing as “orthodoxy” without it. However, believing scholars should not fault unbelieving scholars for criticizing believers’ creedal presuppositions. Nor should believers be surprised at unbelievers’ reconstruction of Christian origins and rejection of the categories of orthodoxy and heresy. Given their own creedal presupposition that the bodily resurrection of Jesus did not (or could not) occur, their methods and conclusions are inescapable. If Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead, any attempts at reconstruction, deconstruction, refining, redefining, discovering, or recovering the early history of Christianity are acceptable antes placed on the table in the scholarly contest over Christian origins.

But if on the third day Jesus rose from the dead, then all bets are off.




Quoted selection from: Michael J. Svigel, Th.M. (no date), “You got to know when to hold ’em”:Trumping the Bauer Thesis, Copyright ©1996-2006 Biblical Studies Press, Retrieved May 14, 2006, from http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=3949)