The Truth about Mark 15 and the Body of Jesus

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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So, I was in Newark, New Jersey this morning, flew back today, I've been up since 2 o 'clock in the morning, it's almost 10 o 'clock at night, so I can't guarantee the coherence of much of what

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I have to say this evening, but anyway, as I got back, some more resources from my library came in.

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This is the facsimile of Chronic Manuscript E20. This is a

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Russian -English text, you can see the facsimile pages right here, the book has all sorts of other information about the background, the text, and the kinds of decorations, variant readings of some interesting stuff about Ibn Masud, things like that in here, that's from Russia.

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I also have the Complete 40 Hadith, revised edition of the Arabic text, another Quran. This one has a little bit of a different text in it, it uses color to indicate things.

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This is the kind of stuff that I've been adding to my library, you can see some books I haven't even unwrapped there yet, the

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Sunan Abu Dawud, for example, back there in the corner. This kind of material I'm adding to my library while Shadid Lewis is quoting from historical fiction writers, and still trying to take apart the

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New Testament. What I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to address

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Mark Chapter 15 in context, and look at what it actually says, demonstrate that anyone reading it in context would have known what it's saying, and then address the

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Soma Ptoma issue, and demonstrate that Shadid Lewis' argument did indeed require us to believe that Soma can only mean a living body.

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Now, did he use the word only? No. Does his argument require us to believe that there is a contrast between Soma and Ptoma?

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Yes. And if you take that out, does it turn his argument into mush? Yes. So, if Shadid would like to be honest and say, all right,

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I shouldn't have quoted a historical fiction writer, I didn't check my sources, I withdraw the argument, that would be the honorable thing.

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If he doesn't, well, then he's clearly convicted of using really bad arguments that have been fully refuted, but just sticking to them because he won't admit that he was wrong in the argumentation he was using.

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So let's look at Mark 15, let's see what it actually said, and then look at what Shadid Lewis said, and once again demonstrate he was simply factually wrong in the debate in Norfolk, Virginia.

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Let's look. So as we look at the text, we ask ourselves the question, did

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Joseph of Arimathea believe Jesus was still alive as suggested by Shadid Lewis and Michael Bajan?

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Well, let's look at the text. Mark 15, beginning at verse 37. And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last, and the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

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When the centurion, who was standing right in front of him, saw the way he breathed his last, he said, truly, this man was the

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Son of God. Now please notice just in passing, the phrase breathed his last defined by Bower, Donker, Arndt, and Gingrich, which is the current scholarly lexicon of the

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New Testament. Breathe out one's life or soul, expire a euphemism for to die.

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This is what it means, and notice this is observed by a centurion. Centurions are

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Roman officers, and when it comes to execution, there was no one in the ancient world more able to determine the success or failure of an execution than a centurion.

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He was the one who had been given the responsibility of making sure the prisoners were dead.

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This man is an expert at what he does. Please keep that in mind. We continue. When evening had already come, because it was the preparation day, that is, the day before the

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Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea came, a prominent member of the council who himself was waiting for the kingdom of God.

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And he gathered up courage and went in before Pilate and asked for the soma, the body of Jesus.

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So here is Joseph of Arimathea. He has to gather up courage to go in before Pilate, and he does so because it is the day before the

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Sabbath. It is the preparation day, and as John tells us in John 19, to leave the bodies hanging upon the crosses during the

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Sabbath day itself, which this was a high Sabbath, it was the Passover, would be something that would be extremely reprehensible to the

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Jews. And so he goes to Pilate, and he asks for the soma, the body of Jesus.

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He does not ask for Jesus. He asks for the body of Jesus. We continue on.

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Pilate wondered if he was dead by this time, and summoning the centurion, who we met earlier, he questioned him as to whether he was already dead, and ascertaining this from the centurion, he granted the body, that is toma in manuscripts such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, but Alexandrinus in the majority of texts actually reads soma at this point.

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He granted the body to Joseph. Now please notice something. The centurion ascertained, demonstrated, confirmed that Jesus was dead.

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The centurion could lose his life if that was not the case. It's the centurion testified to the death of Jesus.

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Then we have in the manuscripts a textual variant. You have toma, and you have soma.

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The earliest manuscripts read toma, and then you have soma in, for example, Codex Alexandrinus.

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Here I have reproduced that particular section from Codex Alexandrinus, which is from around 375

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A .D., the very section that we're reading here. Here in this slide, I'll give you a box surrounding the word soma.

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You can see toma, you, to, and then Jesus is what's called a nominus saceris, so it's an abbreviation, has the line over top there.

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There you can see one of the textual variants at that point where soma is actually found. Why would scribes so easily switch between soma and potoma?

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Because of course, they are synonyms and can be used synonymously. We continue on.

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Joseph bought a linen cloth, took him down. Please notice Joseph is actually involved in removing the body from the cross, and folks, that was a gruesome thing to do.

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No living body can be removed from a cross very easily. I won't go into the details.

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Let's just put it this way. Those nails don't come out of the wood, at least not very easily, and so normally it's the body that is torn apart, not the nails, obviously.

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So he took him down, wrapped him in the linen cloth, and laid him in a tomb, which had been hewn out in the rock, and he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.

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By the way, Mr. Lewis even grabbed some of the amazing theories, the spices and things, a hundred pounds of which were supposed to be healing ointments.

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You don't wrap somebody in a cloth and stick them in a tomb without air and roll the rock in front of it, without air, light, and water, as if you're going to be healing a body.

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This is how you bury someone. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joseph, were looking on to see where he was laid.

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Now please notice the definition provided by Bauer, Donker, Arendt, and Gingrich. Soma, first definition, body of a human being or animal, body, and then two subcategories provided.

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The very first one is dead body or corpse, secondly, the living body.

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You see, the term soma, its semantic domain overlaps that of ptoma.

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That's why they can, in fact, be synonymous with one another and are being used that way in this particular text.

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In Greek, this denotes a living body. When Pius reads that Joseph can take the body down from the cross, the word that is used is ptoma.

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It's a different spelling. So we see that this means, this other word, ptoma, or soma, means a fallen body, a corpse or a corpse.

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In other words, the Greek text of Mark's Gospel is making it clear that while Joseph is asking for the living body of Jesus, Pius grants him what he believes to be the corpse.

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So it appears that whoever would write that part, whoever would want, they don't want to make it clear exactly what it is. But whoever wrote it, it appears that the

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Jesus survival is revealed right there in the actual Gospel itself. Based on the word, those words are clear.

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If Joseph was asking for a dead body, there's a clear Greek word that denotes a dead body, as I show here.

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But the writer, he put that word on purpose, so it appears that whoever the writer was James White's latest video, entitled

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Shadid Lewis on Sinai Jonas and Use of Bajan. Now, for those of you who've seen the video footage that he played of the debate that I was in with David Wood, if you heard, although the sound quality was not good, you heard very clearly that I did not,

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I repeat, that I did not say that Soma means only living body.

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This is what you asserted, Mr. White. You said that I said that Soma only means living body, and the video footage shows that I did not say that.

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The quote that I used from Michael Bajan did not say that. So therefore,

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I stand by what I said. Stop lying, because I did not say that Soma only means living body.

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Very briefly, as time is short, if Bajan is admitting that Soma can mean a dead body, then there is no argument here.

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If Shadid is admitting that, then why did he present this argument? Because there is no argument. The only way that those words can be understood is that he was saying that Soma means only a living body, and that is untrue.

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The argument has been refuted. What Shadid should do is, instead of accusing me of being a liar, admit his argument was bogus, he shouldn't have used it, do the honest thing, let's let the viewers decide.