Vorkosigan

Fortunately, that already existed. Go here and read Theme 21. Especially usful is the second article listed there, by Segal.

THEME 21: Divine Mediators Figures: Jewish and Christian Traditions
* Celestial Choirmaster: The Liturgical Role of Enoch-Metatron in 2 Enoch and the Merkabah Tradition (Andrei Orlov). pdf
* Some Observations about Paul and Intermediaries (Alan F. Segal).
* What Do We Mean by "First-Century Jewish Monotheism"? (Larry W. Hurtado).
* Moses as Heavenly Messenger in As. Mos and Qumran Documents (Jan Willem Van-Henten)
* Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah Literature (Daphna Arbel).
* The High Priest as Divine Mediator in the Hebrew Bible: Dan 7:13 as a Test Case. Part I (Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis). pdf
* The High Priest as Divine Mediator in the Hebrew Bible: Dan 7:13 as a Test Case. Part II (Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis). pdf
* Early Christian Binitarianism: The Father and the Holy Spirit (Michel René Barnes).pdf
* Paul's Christology of Divine Identity (Richard Bauckham). pdf
* Was There a "Messiah-Joshua" Tradition at the Turn of the Era? (Robert Kraft).
* A Messiah in Heaven? A Re-evaluation of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Traditions (Cana Werman).
* A Methodology for Studying Divine Mediators (James R.Davila).
* The Son of Man (Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis).
* In Praise of Michael the Archangel (Robert Kraft).
* God's Right-Hand Man: A Comparative Study of Jesus Christ and Metatron (Jennifer E. Terry). pdf
* How do the Mediators Figures Illuminate Origins of Worship of Jesus? (James R. Davila).

Vorkosigan

He doesn't need to be for Doherty to be right.

mikem

That came later. What I think happened is that following jesus execution, his disciples experienced visions of him as the "Risen One". Since ordinary people just did not do this sort of thing, that led them to conclude that Jesus was more than an ordinary man. They cast around for a way to explain Jesus, borrowing from the Old Testament. For example, in Philipians 2: 5 -11 Paul quotes what scholars believe to be an early Xtian hymn, "..bestowed on him the name that is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father". This is a direct borrowing from Isaiah 45:23, where the one to whom every knee bows is Yahweh.

I have recently come across a book by a woman called Margaret Barker called the "The Great Angel", which sets out to show that Yahweh was originally a secondary divine being in the Court of EL, the High God. In later Judaism, El pretty much disappears and Yahweh comes to be regarded as the one true God. There may be she suggests, some rememberance of the earlier view, and Jesus comes to be regarded as the Old Testament Yahweh the "Great Angel" of the title of her book.

Clearly the trajectory that took Jesus from being a Palestinian Jew "a son of God" to being "God the Son" of later Trinitarianism did not stop there, but inbetween there was clearly a lot of fluidity, as is clear from the ferocious arguments in the 2nd century (and earlier) about the nature of Jesus, was he a real man or not? what kind of divine being was he?

All this later argument appears most probable if there was a real person to start with.

Vorkosigan

Why? Since there was at least one case of that in Jewish literature. For example, Onias III came back to his followers in dreams, right there in Maccabees, which every Jew must have known.

Why would the disciples have ever accepted that he was the savior, if they had traveled all over Judea with him?

It's far more likely that Jesus' saviorhood was invented by someone who had never met him in the flesh, and had visions of him which they then interpreted in accordance with some already extant divine mediator religious belief/program.

Vorkosigan

jjramsey

Perhaps for the reasons that they chose to follow him to begin with.

Or that belief in the resurrection was their way of salvaging their faith from the wreckage of the crucifixion.

BTW, have you ever read Leon Festinger's work When Prophecy Fails?

mikem

I am aware that visions were common. Generally however they were visions of individuals who were religiously significant, like gods. I was not arguing that it was the uniqueness of having visions that led to belief in him as more than human. It was that given that they believed that he was no more than a man, having visions of him would not be expected. In "Pagans and Christians" Robert Lane Fox gives examples of people having veridical visions of the gods in broad daylight. I think that the visions of Jesus were of this order. They maybe had dreams about him as well, but I think that both the Ot and the NT draw a distinction between the two.

Toto

Margaret Barker. "The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God, is reviewed here by Robert Price in the Journal of Higher Criticism.

From here

Doug Shaver

Reply to #11

Vorkosigan,

Great link! Thank you so much.

Doug Shaver

That, or some variation on it, is pretty much the conventional view among secularists and liberal Christians.

The problem is that we would expect documents tracking such a progression to begin with something like the gospels and to evolve over a few decades into the likes of Paul's writings. But the opposite seems to have been what actually happened.

The consensus dating of the gospels makes Mark almost contemporary with Paul -- within a generation or so, anyway. But I have yet to see any clear evidence that any gospel had to have been written during the first century. It does seem likely that some of the stories recorded in them were circulating not very long after Paul's time, but none of them is mentioned by any Christian author known to have written something before 100 CE.

Doug Shaver

Fascinating. The book is on my Amazon wish list now. I'll probably grab it on my next book-buying spree.

In my own thinking, I have relied heavily on the argument from Jewish monotheism to make the case against Jesus' historicity. However, I don't see Barker's particular alternative providing much aid or comfort to the historicists. It's one thing to say that one more god would have been no big thing to Paul's Jewish contemporaries. It's quite another to propose that they would have seen that god in a certain charismatic rabbi. If I correctly understand Price's interpretation of Barker, the deification of any man was still hugely improbable.