Quote:

Let's say you have dinner with your rabbi. Is that a belief or an experience?

The next day you tell your friends about having dinner with your rabbi. Now they may choose to believe your or not. To me their's would be a belief. But what you had was an experience.

The disciples had an experience with the resurrected Jesus, ate with him, and finally saw him ascend to heaven.


A difference does exist, Doug. My Rabbi is around for people to ask. Since my Rabbi has a wife and family who I also would request to have dinner with, there would be witnesses to ask. Also, my friends would get a first hand report of my experience from me--not from something written years after the experience of having dinner with my Rabbi and his family.

We really don't know if the disciples had such experience or not. The Gospels were not written down and recorded in a time frame that would allow for more reliablity. Eight recorded instances are recorded in the four seperate Gospels of disciples seeing Jesus after his death. How do the records compare?

We can't be sure that the disciples experienced anything. We can't ask them? And we do not have a reliable resources.

Now, if you as a Christian want to take the recorded information and use it as myth, fine. I am not talking about myth as in something that isn't true. I am talking about myth as in a story that teaches a lesson for living life--a symbolic story.
See "mythology" here:
web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/cl...ulture.htm

Mythology is how I view the Gospel stories. It is the stories that Christians use to explain the purpose for life, reason for death, and the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Judaism has its own sacred stories, Doug.

Shalom,
Gretta