I'm sorry Captain, I didn't know I was such an idiot as to take the claims of the Christian faith seriously enough to research them. But, of course, there's no sense discussing whether something that didn't happen happened, is there?
Were you this smart during that time when you were knocking on doors, telling people about 1914? Or did your prodigious smarts come to you after you left?
Bohm, I'm sorry I didn't get back to our earlier conversation. I'll make an effort.
The whole "congitive dissonance" thing actually is addressed at considerable length in Wright's book, which is right here on my desk as we speak. In fact, that objection to the claim about the resurrection are part of the background of the entire work. So, for Komarnitsky to say that Wright doesn't adequately rebut the cognitive dissonance idea simply means he missed the entire point. Well, a major point, anyway.
Look, for Jews of the period, having potential Messiahs getting whacked by Romans or whoever was pretty much standard operating procedure. They might think the dead wanna-be Messiah was still a prophet, an idea that was within the Jewish mainstream since prophets were often murdered. They might, if they were Helenized, suppose that the potential Messiah experienced apotheosis. But, given what the Messiah was supposed to do, and given the eschatological timing of resurrection, the idea that Jesus was physically raised doesn't solve any problems. Nobody was expecting anything like a resurrection and the resurrection caused more problems than it would have solved, cognitively speaking. Simply put: the resurection made them more wrong than they were before. The whole point of cognative dissonance is to make you right, against the evidence.
So, no, the idea of cognative dissonance does not seem to provide much of an explanation.