THE LAST DAYS OF JESUS CHRIST (part three)

If the disciples wanted to remove Jesus’ body from the tomb, all they would have to do was roll the large heavy circular stone from the entrance of the tomb which apparently really happened that night by whom—there is no records of who removed Jesus body from the tomb. 

Later the guards were questioned about the empty tomb but they said that didn’t know what had happened since they had fallen asleep during part of that night. Oh oh, I wonder what their fate turned out to be for that failure in their duties.

The Gospel writer, John wrote that in Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. I doubt that. It would have taken many men to undertaken that task and the guard would have been woken up and stopped them.

Before I go any further, I will tell you why Mary Magdalene’s   last name was Magdalene. Her name was a lengthen of Magala which is the name of  an ancient town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that is 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the town called Tiberias which is on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. My wife and I spent a night in Tiberias in 1995.   Now back to the opened tomb.

The stone was no longer at the entrance of the tomb It was on the ground and broken into several pieces. That could have happened if there was an aftershock from the earthquake that took place on Friday just after Jesus died.

There is no mention anywhere as to what really happened in the exact location of the tomb Jesus was buried in on the day after he was crucified. 

Mary Magdalene was a Jewish woman and who, according to the four canonical gospels, traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion, burial.

According to Matthew 28:1-9 he stated; After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (James’ mother whose son was not one of Jesus’ twelve apostles.) went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶He is not here. He has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. ⁷Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you." So the women hurried away from the tomb. 

Quite frankly, I don’t believe any of this at all. I will tell you why. There is no doubt however in my mind that there was an aftershock on either Saturday or early Sunday morning of the original earthquake that took place on Friday afternoon.

I don’t believe that an angel of the so-called lord came down from heaven and, went to the tomb and rolled back the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb. Also I said earlier that the aftershock caused the stone to fall away from the entrance of the entrance of the tomb and when it fell, it broke into several pieces.

Further, I don’t believe that there are angels. The Catholic Church says that angels really do exist but they don't fly about with feathered wings because they don't have wings feathered or not.  The Vatican's resident angelologist, Father Renzo Lavatori says God's helpers are more like shards of light than the depiction that straddles the tops of Christmas trees.

I can’t help but wonder when that myth of the existence of angels is going to be rebutted by the Catholic Church like it finally rebutted the existence of purgatory after centuries of the Catholic church’s teachings that it existed.

The two guards previously told the soldiers to say that 'the disciples stole the body while they slept.' The only problem with this is that everyone in those days knew that the penalty for such neglect of duty was death. Further, no-one has been able to explain to this day why there isn’t any record of them being executed for their failure in their duty to guard the tomb.  

The huge stone certainly wasn’t removed by his disciples because on Friday, they fled from Judea to go to the province of Galilee out of fear that they might be the next ones to be crucified.         

In Mark 16:1 – 11, it says in part;   When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.  Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed,  trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid .unquote

It is my view there was no angel or any human being in the tomb, not even the body of Jesus. His body had been removed. It could have been removed on the orders of Pilate or of Caiaphas since neither of these two men really wanted Jesus’ body left in the tomb where thousands  of Jews would think of the tomb as a shrine of the man both  Pilate  and the high [priest feared

According to the scriptures, after Mary Magdalene saw that the empty tomb, she saw a man approaching her, She thought it was the Gardener and was afraid because it was against the law to be in the cemetery on Sunday.

Now think of this.  When she approached the man, she feared the man because she knew it was prohibited by law to be in the cemetery  at that particular  time of the day.

Woman,” the man asked,  “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

The man whom she now believed was Jesus said to her, “ “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

When the man spoke to her and told her to go to Jesus’ disciples and tell them that Jesus would meet them, she thought that the man was really was Jesus who was talking to her while in the body of another man.

 A disciple named Cleopas was walking towards Emmaus who was  another disciple when they met a man on the road. They did not recognize him however the discussed their sadness at recent events with him. They persuaded him to come and eat with them and while they were eating their meal, it was then that they suspected that the man might really be Jesus in the form of another body. 

As they approached the village to which they were going, the man acted as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly by saying to him,  "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over." So the man went with them to stay with them. The two disciples showed their openness and caring to the unknown stranger, by inviting him to stay with them, to join in a meal and share their companionship. At first, the man appeared to Cleopas as another disciple, but "their minds were confused so that they could not recognize him as Jesus.

 A man who was walking on the shore at the north end of the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers; Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. They appeared to have no luck getting any fish into their net.  

The man called out and told them to cast their net on the other side of the boat. This they did and when they pulled their net into their boat, it was filed with fish.

Peter was so amazed; he cried out, “It’s Jesus.” He jumped into the water and swam to the shore.  When the two other disciples pulled their boat onto the shore, they saw Peter and the man  sitting at a small fire and they believed that the man was really Jesus in the body of another man.

When Jesus died on the cross, there was no way at all that he could have survived. I will explain why. When the soldier jabbed the spear into Jesus’ chest, no blood squirted out of his wound. Further, no blood kept slowly oozing out of the wounds. hat is because Jesus’ hart had stopped beating. When that happens, if it isn’t beating within minutes, soon the brain slowly begins to turn into mush. When that happens, there is no way that the brain can return to its normal functioning state.  If his heart was faintly beating when he was removed from the cross and taken to the tomb, someone would have noticed that drops of blood were falling on them or on the ground.

Now I realize that there have been many cases in which people   have appeared to have died and their hearts appeared to have stopped. However, even if the beating of the heart is extremely faint and a very minimal amount of blood is flowing, it will get into the brain. When Jesus was placed in the tomb, he was without question, literally brain dead. For this reason, he would not be speaking to his disciples or anyone else again.  

So why did the Sixteenth century scholars include that fairy tale in the King James version of the New Testament? My answer is this. Consider what the spokespersons speaking for President Trump says on his behalf. Do you believe them also?

If the scholars believed that Jesus was really dead when he was taken into the tomb, then everything they wrote after that event, would have not been placed into the New Testament with respect to the role that Jesus played after he was taken from the tomb.  

 It is concvieble that when the women saw that the tomb was empty, they would have had two thoughts in their minds to consider. Ether the Romans or the priests had removed him or some of his disciples had removed him for whatever reasons they had at that time.

In my opinion, it wasn’t Jesus’ disciples that spirited Jesus’ body from the tomb because they were fleeing from the province of Judea and the city of Jerusalem lest they be captured by Pilate’s soldiers or the guards of the temple and end up on the cross themselves after being lashed the way Jesus was lashed before he ended up on the cross. Besides there is ample evidence that they, with the exception of Judas, were in Galilee.

Incidentally,  will tell you what happed to Judas after Jesus was crucified.  According to the scriptures, Judas threw the silver coins on the floor of the temple and then hanged himself from a tree and that his body fell down, causing his bowels to burst out. I believe that he hanged himself but I don’t believe that his bowels fell out after the tree branch broke and he fell to the ground.  I believe that the scripture writers in the Sixteenth Century simply wanted to make his death appear as a gory one.

And now I will return you to what Mary and the five disciples saw that made them believe that what they saw on the road and again on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, was really Jesus in the body of an unknown man who was alive. In (Luke 24:31), ne said;  “"Their eyes were opened" and they recognized him.” Enquote

In my opinion, they only imagined that it was Jesus in the flesh.

I will explain why that is my belief.  I read an article on Aril 20^th 019 about when consciousness ends. I will quote from sections of the article.

 He siad that could see a nurse and doctor, a bald, “chunky fella” dressed in blue hospital scrubs. He watched as they frantically worked on his body, which was remarkable, considering he was, essentially, dead.

The man had suffered a cardiac arrest. Normally there is no measurable, meaningful brain activity after the heart stops beating. Within two to 20 seconds the brain “flatlines

But the man would later tell researchers that he could see an unfamiliar woman beckoning from a corner up in the ceiling. “I can’t get up there,” he remembered thinking to himself, and then the next second, “I was up there, looking down at me.”

There have been other cases when persons woke up after an operation and remembered seeing the operation being conducted on them. I had a lengthy heart operation and when I woke up hours later, I remembered nothing about what happened to me when they took my heart out of my chest. This is because their brains were still functioning when those other persons were experienced these images even though the machine flat lined. There had to be some very minute part of the brain still functioning. People are coming back and describing real events that have occurred and that doctors and nurses have verified what the patients said. So, by definition, they can’t be hallucinations, because they’re describing real events tht took place.

Dr. Sam Parnia estimated the man experienced conscious awareness for three to five minutes in the absence of detectable brain activity, a time, he has said, “when no human experience should be happening whatsoever.”

Throughout millennia people have tried bizarre ways to revive the dead. In the early ages, around 500 AD, people realized lifeless bodies are also cold bodies, as Parnia has described in his talks, so they covered the newly dead in warm ashes or burning animal feces, believing heat would restore life. Later came the flagellation method, the idea that the deceased could somehow be whipped into breathing again. In 16^thcentury Europe, rescuers used fireplace bellows to try to push air into the lungs of corpses.

Today, advances in resuscitation medicine mean we can reverse death in people who have been without a pulse for hours. London Free Press journalist Jane Simms last year chronicled the story of Ashlyn Krell who died but was brought back to life after her car flipped on Canada’s busiest highway, trapping her in a construction hole filled with ice-cold water for 27 minutes.

More people are being successfully revived after “crashing” in a hospital, and Parnia believes even more lives could be saved, more people hauled back across that threshold of death, if more hospitals implemented more advanced techniques — chilling bodies to protect the brain, or using automated mechanical devices to deliver chest compressions beyond what any human could do.

A book titled Life After Life,” detailed the experiences of more than 100 persons who experienced “clinical” death but were revived

If you look down a microscope at a brain cell, and I said to you, this brain cell is now thinking, you’d say that’s crazy, it’s a brain cell.” Brain cells produce proteins that generate changes in sodium, which generates electricity. “That’s not a thought,”

And if I said, well, somehow, if I connect a hundred or a thousand or a million of these cells together, it just leads to this magical phenomenon of thought. There’s no mechanism to account for why that should occur. Why would my brain cells, millions of them connected together, suddenly feel guilty, or have a sentiment of guilt, like if I were to throw a brick in my neighbour’s window, or be rude to somebody or do something immoral?”

The moment the heart stops, the brain shuts down from a functional perspective, “Yet, paradoxically, what we started to see is that millions of people have now been resuscitated, and many of them have reported these very lucid, well-structured thought processes.” They’re able to form memories, describe conversations and what people were wearing. “Except that their brain has shut down and they’ve gone through death. Which is completely a paradox, it should not happen. If your mind is simply a by-product of your brain, if your brain has shut down, there should be no consciousness.”

Renowned Western University neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who has devoted much of his career searching for signs of consciousness in “vegetative” patients, says the brain is the organ that produces consciousness, full stop. “If you take that organ away or kill that organ or that organ dies, you cannot be conscious.”

Owen doesn’t believe patients who report near-death experiences get to a state where there’s no detectable brain response whatsoever. If that were true they would be classified as brain dead, “and I know of no case in the literature of a brain dead patient coming back.” Owen’s not saying they’re not almost dead. But the brain has an amazing vasculature. Unless a person dies of massive trauma that knocks out all of the brain function immediately, like going through the windshield of a car, parts of the brain will continue to get oxygen for some time after the heart stops.

More astonishing, researchers at Western University reported two years ago the case of a patient who was taken off life support who continued to show bursts of brain wave activity for up to 10 minutes after the final heartbeat.

The original AWARE trial involved 2,060 cardiac arrests across 15 hospitals in the U.S., the U.K. and Austria. Of those, 330 people survived. Nine who were able to undergo detailed interviews had experiences compatible with a near-death experience. Even fleeting bursts of electrical activity deep in the brain’s temporal lobe, even a few seconds worth, can evoke experiences of the paranormal and mystical.

The precise point beyond which the brain is no longer ‘living,’ a threshold which remains unidentified, is perhaps less definite than has been historically assumed,” Laurentian University researchers wrote in PLOS One in 2016. Death is a process, Parnia says, not an absolute, black-and-white moment. “It’s actually only after a person has died that the cells start to undergo their own process of death, and that can take hours.

Even when the brain flat lines — no sign of brain waves on a standard EEG — brain cells don’t die immediately, Parnia says. It may take hours before they become permanently damaged. When the brain is dead and the tissue has lost its structural integrity, the individual is assumed to no longer be represented within what remains of the organ. Without any life support, the brain eventually degrades. At  that point, ,death after cardiac arrest is reversible.

In my opinion, Jesus may have had some minor brain activity and was semi–conscious when he was placed in his burial tomb but as such, he couldn’t speak or move on his own volition,  And during the night, his brain was no longer alive and functioning. And since it wasn’t functioning, he didn’t get up and leave his burial place nor was  he the person that the disciples communicated with and with others and who saw him supposedly leaving earth ad going upwards to heaven.

Praying to Jesus or even to God is a fruitless exercise because in  my respectful opinion, Jesus stopped being a human being when he died in 33 AD and God never existed  so millions of people prayed to those two entities and the believers got nothing in return but hope.   

Notwithstanding my disbelief that any god really exists and heaven,  angels and Satan and Hell also don’t exist, and that Jesus lived  after he  was crucified, I believe in the teachings of Jesus and in my opinion, they are worth following by everyone on Earth regardless of his or her faith.

Aftermath

All of  Jesus’ disciples  with the exception of Mark died horrible deaths.

After Jesus' death, Mary Magdalene moved to southern France where she continued to preach. She also had many children.  I don’t know when or where she died.

With respect to Mary, Jesus’ mother, tradition has it that she lived with the disciples for at least three years and that she died shortly thereafter and was buried in a tomb. I don’t know where the tomb was located. 

Pontius Pilate had real problems after Jesus was crucified. According to Flavius Josephus, Pilate’s supporter, Sejanus, was murdered later. Without his protector in power, Pilate made a major error and suppressed a small uprising in Samaria. The leader of the Samaritan group had promised that “He would show them those sacred vessels which were laid under that place, because Moses put them there.” But Pilate sent his troops and defeated them before they arrived at Mt. Gerizim. However, trouble followed as indicated in Josephus’ following statement;

When this tumult was appeased, the Samaritan senate sent an embassy to Vitellius, a man that had been consul, and who was now president of Syria, and accused Pilate of the murder of those that were killed Vitellius sent Marcellus, a friend of his, to take care of the affairs of Judea, and ordered Pilate to go to Rome, to answer before the emperor to the accusation of the Jews. So Pilate, when he had spent ten years in Judea, made haste to Rome, in obedience to the orders of Vitellius, which he dare not contradict; but before he could get to Rome, Tiberius was dead. It was later reported that Pontius Pilate committed suicide in Spain during the reign of Caius or Emperor Caligula. 

Caiaphas was dethroned as chief priest by the proconsul Vitellius in 36AD (the same year Pilate was recalled to Rome) and replaced by Annas’ son Jonathan, Caiaphas retired to his farm. However, there are several traditional stories on Caiaphas’ ultimate fate. They are;  1. He committed suicide, 2. Caiaphas, Pilate, and other Jewish rulers were arrested on Tiberius’s orders and taken to Rome, but Caiaphas died on transit in Cyprus. Which one of the stories  is valid? I have no idea.

The cross that Jesus was crucified on was re-used at other times on other victims until it was no longer usable. In most probability. it was  used for cooking foods and/or heating homes. I don’t believe that any church as slivers of the cross.

I sincerely hope that you have found these three articles informative. I have not written them to embarrass Christians. I just want to bring to everyone who reads what I have written about Jesus and his death and so-called resurrection from death as to what I and no doubt millions of others believe as to what really happened to Jesus during his last days of his life.