show_no_mercy

Mark Goodacre has just made a blog post arguing that at the end of the gospel of Peter, it's not the cross that's talking but the crucified (i.e. Jesus) that is talking.

http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2010/10...27s+NT+Blog%29

stephan huller

Seems to make more sense than a talking cross. Very clever.

Sheshbazzar

Appears to me that a rewrite revision of a fantastic and fictional story...still results in what can only be a fantastic and fictional story.
Baloney remains baloney no matter how you slice it.

spamandham

Three dudes walking around with their heads stretching all the way to heaven is so much less cartoonish than a talking cross.



Gee, what if the story wasn't actually intended to be taken as literally true? Naw, couldn't be.

stephan huller

I guess but if life lacks poetry even the best things in life - sex for example - amounts to being little more than just a stinking, mess of bodily fluids too. One could argue that being absurdly rational about everything is a sign of degenerative soul too. Animals have strong impulses. When my dog sees a squirrel or a cat, it can't help but pounce. This is healthy. You wouldn't want a dog that just pathetically mopes around the house. I want my children to have passion about life. I don't want Nietzschean offspring. I don't think that Nietzsche wanted little Nietzsche's running around the world.

The poetry of the original Christian message was a development of the sexual nature of the original Jewish religion. Just watch an eastern Chrsitian baptism ritual. There are clear sexual imagery. Read early ascetic literature in Syriac and you almost have a homoerotic longing for union with God the Father (what makes it heterosexual I guess is the fact that the Church is a feminine assembly or 'brides of Christ').

The point is we should try to deconstruct the original logic of Christianity without attacking its alleged 'senselessness.' It's senseless to go to work. It's senseless to long to ejaculate bodily fluids into a vagina. It's all pointless unless - and here I think is the way that Christianity doesn't seem so stupid - sexuality was established as a metaphor for something redemptive, something perfected through the coming of Christ.

That's why I don't dismiss the Letter to Theodore. I think something like what is described here is the core of the Christian experience. I don't think that Jesus had sex with his beloved disciple but the point is that Christianity is a sublimation of the need for union. In its origins, the messiah said here is what your imperfect longings and desires REALLY wanted ... the Cross.

That doesn't mean that I buy into the system. It just means that if we want to do justice to the original poetry of the tradition, if we want to understand why SMART people like Origen would have castrated themselves and joined this strange religion, we can't try to ridicule it everytime it presents us with something unusual.

Mark Goodacre's suggestions are useful because I do believe that Christianity was developed from the very moment Jesus's beloved disciple looked up at that cross and the crucified one seem to 'speak' directly to his conscience.

That's how artists work. That's how artists create great works of art. We shouldn't ridicule the artistic impulse in Christianity. It's the dogma that is deadly and dangerous.

show_no_mercy

You wrote that on purpose, didn't you?!

mountainman

Cartoonish baloney via outrageous fiction in my book is satire. In all of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" (particularly the 20 odd "Acts") there is Cartoonish baloney. We have only to read Eusebius himself in his “Life of the Thrice Blessed Constantine”, at Ch. LXI, entitled "How Controversies originated at Alexandria through Matters relating to Arius. to read that ....

“… the sacred matters of inspired teaching were exposed to the most shameful ridicule in the very theaters of the unbelievers.”

A walking and talking Cross ambling behind three really tall people, so tall that their heads were adjacent to the Bridge of the Enterprise, in geostationary earth orbit, with one of the heads - the one in the middle - stretching to the Hydra Cluster. What were the Greek Gnostic unbelievers doing with stretching Jesus and the Angels in this story, and Jesus and the Apostles in other stories? Heaven forbid. What were they thinking of to be so blasphemous? What gnosis did they have for Jesus? Jesus was not a well known figure to them at all. He appears as a stretched character and the subject of Greek satire.

The Gospel of Peter IMO is best described as a Greek anti-Christian satire, a popularisation of key characters in other lights, and one which could indeed have been performed in the Greek theatres of Alexandria. It was very popular with the everyday people but unfortunately Constantine did not appreciate the humor. The Alexandria Greek speaking pagans were sending up Constantine's PREFERRED "new and strange Greek Testament" (ie: the NT Canon)

Sheshbazzar

One would guess that writing anything that was obviously critical of the ridiculous claims of the Christian religion would have brought on a swift and certain death penalty. Whereas with these being so gullible and enamored of such fantastic tales, parodies of their religions characters would have quite flown right over their heads, and have been accepted and embraced. It does explain why the Church, after expunging, eradicating, and burning all pagan documents and critics that were openly critical of Christian claims, ended up having to denounce a multitude of false 'gospels', 'epistles' and 'Acts', likely underground writings produced by Christianities enemies with the deliberate goal of infiltrating, overblowing, and so by undermining and sabotaging the credibility of Christianities claims.
I think they actually did a pretty good job of introducing confusion, doubts, and dissensions, turning Christian against Christian in bloody confrontations, confounding the goals of the murderous religion, given the constraints and subtlety with which they would have had to conduct such a covert campaign.

mountainman

Now this also I ordain,
that if any one shall be found secreting
any writing composed by Arius,
and shall not forthwith deliver up
and burn it with fire,
his punishment shall be death;
for as soon as he is caught in this
he shall suffer capital punishment
by beheading without delay.

Yes. Most did not read and were thus read to, or went to the theatre. Entertainment after all was entertainment.


Yes it does. It was a popular resistance, but ultimately doomed to fail against the absolute power of the emperor.

It think the covert campaign was brutal and short and may have been all over and done with between the years of 325 and 337 CE. Subsequent generations were left to embrace the merits or heresies which ensued over the literature output this brief epoch. The books of the NT canon ascended to the purple, while the books of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" descended into the mother earth for preservation by burial.

The "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" were hot property. It was for sure not safe to be around any readily identifiable Greek copies. That's why they went underground into Coptic and Syriac. They represent a brief literary resistance of popularised literature for the masses in the face of Christian oppression during that epoch 325 to 337 CE.

But generations and centuries past. Nowdays, perhaps because Christians are often serious about the gospel figures, and are not used to laughing at these figures (ie: of Jesus and the Angels and the Apostles), that many readers (of Christian backgrounds) cannot immediately apperceive the openly manifest antichristian satire evident in most of these "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc". The author of the Gospel of Peter sure made sure that his audience undertood how far he could stretch the head of Jesus.

Ironically, it may have been the Gospel of Peter's "walking and talking Cross" that got the cross off the ground in the archaeological record. We might imagine a child walking down the street passed a church with one of the first christian crosses, sometime later in the 4th century, asking his parents (who had a copy of gPeter) the time honored question ....

"Does that one walk and talk too?"

JoeWallack

JW:
I find Mark's argument from Incredulity incredible. For starters, he has no External or Internal evidence to support the change. Regarding Incredulity we have:

1) S&H observation above.

2) Tied to the "resurrection" (which is more incredible?).

3) Don't forget the voice from Heaven (although it could have been an amazingly young George Burns practicing for his future role Oh God, Part Jew).

4) Co-Ordination with the context:

1 - If Jesus is being carried than he can not walk

2 - If Jesus can not walk than he can not talk

3 - The point of the resurrection is that it gave motion and speech to
the inanimate.

4 - Jesus' spirit left at the cross leaving the cross as the closest (only?)
witness.

5) At the time GP is created there is no Canon to conform to. An analysis of how subsequent Gospels deconstruct, to use the Palestinians' word, Catastrophe, of "Mark" 16:1-8 (not the crucifixion but the lack of belief that Jesus was resurrected)

http://www.freeratio.org/showpost.ph...&postcount=183

indicates that GP was written after "Matthew" and before "Luke" and therefore uses "Matthew" as a base but like all Gospels, edits it. Note that for the offending paragraph:

it is dominated by the guard issue introduced by "Matthew" and the offending sentence regarding the sleeping is likewise from "Matthew". There is no tradition to worry about crossing at this time. There's just the original narrative "Mark" and the first draft "Matthew" which GP makes a second draft.

At least I know what my costume is going to be now for Halloween. It'll scare the B-Jesus out of the Jewish trick or treaters.


Joseph

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