Daily Manna 10-05-2016

Topic: The empty tomb 37

Reading: Matthew 27:57-66, 28:1-15

Scripture: He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee. (Luke 24:6)

Note: The swoon hypothesis is a litany of non evidential, man-crafted ideas aimed at explaining away the intimidating reality of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, proposing that Jesus did not die on the cross but merely fell unconscious or swooned as the hypothesis sought to portray, and was later revived in the tomb in the same mortal body. This 200 year old hypothesis is still the subject of intellectually heated debate to this day.

Early proponents of this theory such as German Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, who suggested in 1780, that Jesus deliberately feigned his death, using drugs provided by the physician, Dr. Luke to appear as a spiritual Messiah and get Israel to abandon the idea of a political Messiah. To give this wild assertion a semblance of historical proof, without the important details of the type of drugs Dr. Luke might have prescribed and whether similar stories abide of people ever surviving the brutal method of crucifixion at the hands of the mean Roman soldiers at that time. The proponents of this wild theory alleged that Jesus was resuscitated by Joseph of Arimathea.

Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy man. A member of the ruling Jewish religious council and a sympathiser of Jesus. It was in his newly prepared, unused tomb that Jesus was buried. There is no historical fact on his knowledge of medicine and whether he was a physician or ever practised medicine.

Why Dr. Luke, a loyal, committed disciple and physician, who had already provided Jesus with a ‘wonder’ drug that possessed a potent master-stroke able to make Jesus feign death through a painful process such as a crucifixion, which had the unenviable luxury of the diligent Roman soldiers ensuring that Christ was really dead when they pierced the spear through his side bringing out blood and water, to certify that the bleeding would certainly have completed the dying process, if Jesus ever had such a stunt in mind to recover later, would have abandoned such a critical task of resuscitating Jesus himself, leaving it in the hands of lay person such as Joseph of Arimathea, is certainly baffling and doesn’t add up to basic commonsense.

Food for thought: No doctor, surgeon or an anesthesiologist would ever commence a surgical procedure and abandon it half way for a layman to complete the procedure.

Declaration: But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came out blood and water. (John 19:34)

© Author: Rev Fred Aboe