Doug Shaver

I have a question for those here (if there be any) who:

• Do not believe in a historical Jesus, i.e. believe Christianity was not founded by some followers of a Galilean preacher who was crucified by Pontius Pilate;
• Do not believe in a historical Paul, i.e. believe the entire Pauline corpus was a forgery;
• Do not believe that Eusebius or anyone more or less contemporary with him fabricated the entire history of Christianity out of whole cloth;

The question: How, when, and by whom did Christianity get started?

DCHindley

Aliens

DCH (tongue firmly in cheek)

Andykiwi

I do believe Saul/Paul existed and probably a guy they based the Jesus character on,
but your question isn't too hard to answer otherwise... just consider this...

How did the various groups collectively know as The Essenes get started?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essenes

Sheshbazzar

The question as posed requires submission to, and consented acceptance of to too many interconnected and prerequisite premises, as prerequisites to the formulating of a reply.
The questions cannot be properly answered given the prerequisites that they has been so fenced around with.

TedM

Can I answer even though I am not a disbeliever in Jesus or Paul's historicity?

It would seem to me that it is possible that some Jews could well have taken the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about a Messiah who had come in the recent past, since it refers to a 'servant' who had been unrecognized but who had become a ransom for sins:

Given the times, a crucifixion seemed a good choice for the method of sacrifice. Given the passion of many of the Jews of the times and their high expectation for the appearance of their Messiah-king, some may have had visions of this savior, and from there a small cult formed, which grew over time. This could have been nourished by some of the ideas Doherty talks about regarding Wisdom and Logos, along with many scriptural passages that were also believed to have been about their long-awaited Messiah-king. For these reasons it could have spread among Jews dispersed outside of Israel fairly quickly. From there more details about the Messiah Savior (appropriately names Jesus) emerged. There were persecutions of course by other Jews that strongly disagreed, but the idea took hold, and perhaps very quickly was greatly strengthened by GMark, as well as 'sayings' by GThomas and the ones by Matthew that Papias referenced. The belief really took off perhaps around 90-120 AD.

At some point there was a need to explain how it grew within the Gentile community since the Messiah had been sacrificed (and couldn't spread the word) and the origins were Jewish, so a Jewish-Greek Paul was invented who fittingly had been one of the persecutors, but who was well-versed in the Jewish scriptures. He would likely have been created before the Gospel Jesus had been fleshed out so much more by Mark and others, so he would not have known much about the man's life. Nor would he have cared----his focus would be on how the Jewish scriptures supported Gentile salvation through this man's resurrection. And he would have been a great traveler-missionary. His sufferings at the hands of Jews would reflect the ongoing strife between actual Jewish and Gentile believers. Of course, that story would be put down in writing, and what better way than to create letters from him to the Gentile communities he visited? Given the late creation of all this info and already widespread and differing beliefs, the result was a mish-mash of many writings, many of which contradicted each other.

DCHindley

Big Shaver,

Oh, this sounds like the position of some JMs (The Jesus on a cross story is a "historicized" form of a "christ" redeemer myth, which crystallized in the late 1st or 2nd century CE, and the Paulines were pseudepigrapha to promote forms of the historized myth).

There are reasons that one can question whether the Jesus on cross story is historical, and the Christ myth either merged with it or developed from it (as a Jesus movement reinvents itself over time in response to historical pressures), and the Paulines can also be interpreted as based on the writings of someone who was not a Christian, but whose writings were adopted and adapted for use by the Christian movement. The latter two possibilities are my positions.

There is an advantage to separating the Jesus movement (which develops into one that treats Jesus as a divine redeemer figure) and the (non-Christian) Paul movements, and positing these two independent movements later merged into one.

The Christ dogma in the Pauline epistles clearly sees Jesus as a supernatural redeemer aka Christ. While I think the Christ dogma in the Paulines is the product of a Jesus movement that reinvented itself over time, it could in theory derive from a Jesus movement that had historicized a cosmic christ myth. So if you can live with a non-Christian Paul whose work was used and abused by Christians, you can have a purely mythical Jesus and a "fabricated" Paul, and sleep easier at night.

Amen

Little Shaver

avi

I agree with Sheshbazaar, so, I will try to address the three questions by ignoring the prerequisites.

When, how, and by whom did Christianity begin?

a. Any political/religious movement requires mobility for the leadership--if the roads are blockaded, and fighting is widespread, then travel becomes unpredictable and precarious. For this reason, I choose 136 CE as the starting date.

b. I believe that the ideology evolved slowly during the subsequent 200 years, until Constantine, then flourished.

c. I think a dozen different sects, begun by dispossessed Jews, wandering southern Europe and the middle east, after their eviction from Palestine by the Romans, in 135 CE, merged and blended with gentiles, banding together for survival. The stress of life, dispossed status, and traveling without much of their life's accumulated ambitions, led them to modify the harsh Jewish code, to soften it, and embrace the Gentiles as brothers..........

avi

aa5874

This is like asking some one to say exactly the birthday, name and profession of his great, great, great, great.........grandfather of the 2nd century.

Once a person is familiar with Beliefs in Gods in antiquity, even at a basic level, it is clear that there were NUMEROUS cults, probably in the hundreds, who believed in all sorts of INVENTED Gods.

Based on the writings of Justin Martyr there were people in antiquity who were called Christians even though they were even called atheists and blasphemers by Justin.

So trying to find out how, when and by who "Christianity" was started is not a real practical inquiry.

However, a far more reasonable inquiry may be a search for when the belief in Jesus the son of God as found in the Gospels was started.

In order to make any determination on the start of the belief in Jesus as the Son of God one MUST first find CREDIBLE sources.

What historical sources from Jesus BELIEVERS are reasonably CREDIBLE in all of antiquity from the 1st century or the supposed birth of Jesus, the Son of God, to the 4th century when Eusebius wrote "Church History"?

CREDIBLE writers of antiquity who were Jesus BELIEVERS MUST be found in order to begin the investigation.

Which writer of antiquity who was a Jesus BELIEVER was HONEST and reported EXACTLY or reported within reasonable accuracy, the actual history of Jesus BELIEVERS as he knew it at that time?

dockeen

Couldn't one frame a similar set of premises / question about pretty much any
religion?

aa5874

And there is at least one religion that could be dated.

The Mormon religion.

Now if we could find some credible sources for Jesus believers then the investigation can begin.

Irenaeus wrote a book called "Against Heresies" but virtually everything he wrote about the authorship, dating and chronology of the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings appear to be erroneous.

And he did not even know the age of Jesus at crucifixion as was commonly believed or the name of the governor of Judea under Claudius.

Irenaeus is NOT credible.

Who are the Credible writers of antiquity who believed in Jesus the son of God?