jakejonesiv

That is an interesting starting point. It seems that you are trying to define the least HJ you can, without giving up the idea entirely.

Jake Jones IV

Clivedurdle

I understand the Eucharist as clear evidence for the mythical alchemic Christ. It is very early - Didache.

All the rest is built around and on this, including the HJ heresy, which is probably an anti-enlightenment concept, equivalent to the counter reformation.

Remember the classic tripartite structure, ritual, myth, drama. The Passion is clearly a play, the ritual - the Eucharist, the myth - Christ sacrificed to save us all.

QED

jakejonesiv

Hi Clivedurdle,

The Eucharist is a traditional mystery rite with esoteric content, unrelated to anything historical.

The most fundamental soterology in the Pauline material is pretty typical of mystery cults. The initiate vicariously shares in the god's deeds and achievements. I suspect you are right that the story of Jesus was acted out in participatory rites. This is the mystical union of the Jesus spirit and the body of Christ, the church.

Here are a few passages.

"Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?" Romans 6:3.


Together with Chestos I have been impaled.
I am living yet I am not living.
Yet in me Chrestos which now is living
In flesh
In belief
I am living of the son of God,
The one who loved me and giving up himself for me.
Gal 2:20

None of this sounds much like Judaism to me, at least not as commonly imagined. I don't know how to derive these concepts from the Hebrew or Septuagint scriptures. This makes me suspect that the original
cult was of non-Jewish origin, and became progressively more Jewish over time.

Josephus referred to a play in which an actor ( a criminal) was crucified as part of the performace. "The Crucified Bandit" (Suetonius, Cal. 57) Martial (7. 4). (Thanks to Joe Atwill for this info).

It supports my contention that "Paul" was crucified before the Galatians in a passion play. Such things really happened.

Jake Jones IV

Didymus

"Giving up..."? Not really. I've been much more in the MJ camp.

Bu you're right; that's one aspect of it, but it's not really at the heart of the idea. More than that, I think it's a very efficient scenario, i.e., it explains the data - and it explains why Paul knew nothing about the life of Jesus - without constantly resorting to weak arguments like "kata sarka" and "other concerns." On the other hand, it serves both Paul and Mark well, by allowing Paul to introduce both a rudimentary biography and mystical elements like 2 Cor 12, and Mark to construct a pseudohistorical, scripture-based biography (to which other pseudohistorical elements were added, of course, by ML&J and the writers of the apocryphals).

Of all the allegedly historical elements in the NT that serve as major pivot points, the crucifixion is the most likely to have a historical origin, and the least likely to have been either derived from Hebrew scripture or thought of as spiritual/sublunar. I have seen nothing from ancient pagan literature that's anywhere near a slam dunk for a crucifixion taking place in the spiritual/sublunar realm, and there's nothing like it in the LXX, notwithstanding the rather vague reference to pierced hands and feet in Psalm 22:16.

(As I recall, jjRamsey made a pretty strong argument that Ps. 22.16 could not have led Paul to invent a crucifixion for Jesus. I disagreed with him at the time, and still do, but although I think it's conceivable, it is a stretch to think that an invented crucifixion would have generated enough heat to start the fire.)

In the first century Roman Empire, a crucifixion, as the cruelest punishment in a list of cruel punishments, and especially an unjust one, would have had undeniable resonance - just as it does today.

There are historical antecedents, however, to the events that led to Jesus' crucifixion. Of the execution of Jesus ben Ananias in about 61 BCE, Michael Turton says

"Like Jesus, he predicted doom on Jerusalem and the Temple, even referring to Jeremiah's prophecy of judgment against the temple (Jer 7:34), just as Mark did in Mk 11:17. Note that the Jewish authorities arrest and beat Jesus ben Ananias and hand him over to the Roman governor, who interrogates him. He refuses to answer the governor, was scourged and then released."

He also charts a parallel with Daniel 6.
http://users2.ev1.net/%7Eturton/GMark/GMark15.html

So the circumstances of the Trial seem to be derived from prior historical events. Turton doesn't think there's historical support for the Trial itself; I haven't discussed with him the possibility that the unadorned crucifixion could be historical. I'll send him excerpts from this discussion; who knows, perhaps I can lure him back into the forum!

Once again, I want to emphasize that I think the proximate cause of the Jesus "rage" that got Paul and his cohorts going was a simple unjust crucifixion. What do we really know about that event? IMO, virtually nothing, except that the victim was a Jew who was almost certainly named Jesus. All else, including the entire Passion sequence, is fictitious: at best, based on a combination of scripture and rumor.

Historically, the biographies of martyrs are most often only footnotes; it's the death itself, and the injustice of it, that captures the imagination. Look at Foxe's List of Martyrs, for example; it pretty well details how all those folks died, but gives us no more than a sentence or two about their lives beforehand.

The Wikipedia entry on Matthew Shepard gives us six lines about his pre-martyrdom life. Then we see page after page about the attack and its aftermath.

Another example is the 1964 slayings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were helping to register black voters in Mississippi. Their deaths spurred national support for the civil rights movement. Even back then, nobody thought too much about the backgrounds of those young men. The focus was the injustice of it all, not the lives of the victims.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything callous or surprising about the attention given to the murder instead of the victim. That's human nature. I'm just pointing out how the injust murder of an obscure person can cause a great stir under the right conditions.

Didymus

J-D

It is a historically verifiable phenomenon that fictitious material is grafted onto the life stories of real people. I’ve mentioned already on this thread the supernatural legends that have been attached to the name of the unquestionably historical Frederick Barbarossa. Nobody supposes that the content of these legends is drawn from Barbarossa’s life, but nobody supposes either that we can therefore conclude that Barbarossa did not live. So tracing sources for Paul’s account of Jesus may show that they have nothing to do with a historical Jesus, but does not show that Jesus never lived at all.All compatible with the hypothesis that Paul grafted his own concocted doctrine onto the life story of a historical individual, palimpsest-style.If we take what Paul says about himself at face value, he was a dissimulator and a prevaricator. Among other things, it follows that his account of his own background is not necessarily reliable. Also, I don’t know of any statement by Paul clearly demonstrating belief in a ‘deified man’. He calls Jesus ‘Son of God’ but not, as far as I know, ‘God’.A lot of stories have been told about Jesus which I can’t credit. Either they are fictitious stories about a fictitious character, or fictitious stories about a real character. I don’t see how you are deciding which you think more likely.But who are the ‘those people’ you are talking about? What is it that the ‘Christ explanation’ was an explanation for, and what made it the right place and the right time for it?Adam and Eve were invented as an explanation of the origin of humanity. We have a better alternative explanation of the origin of humanity which does not require the hypothesis of a founding couple. The existence of a human preacher as its leader offers an explanation of the existence of the first distinct group of Christians. What is the alternative explanation? Also, if we hypothesise the deliberate replacement (by Paul and others) of the teachings of this founding preachers by alien doctrines, then we also have an explanation of what we know about the Nazarenes and Ebionites. What is the alternative explanation for that?

J-D

I take that passage to mean that the doctrine Paul was preaching was heterodox by the standards of Jewish tradition and irrational by the standards of Greek philosophy, and I would think that was true.

jakejonesiv

"The Descent of Inanna" is close. The "humbling" of Jesus in 2 Phillipians is nowhere better precidented than Inanna divesting herself of divine symbols and attibutes as she descends to the underworld. Then she is killed, hung up, and after three days and three nights is brought back to life.

Good point. The hands and feet thing originates with Justin Martyr.

It is true that unjust crucifixtion had resonance, but it didn't have to be historical. The romantic fiction of the time used crucifixtion, mistaken identity, and empty tombs as plot devices.

Yes, I will agree that Jesus ben Anaias becaome part of the Gospel Jesus composite. Josephus, Wars, 6.5.3.

A worthy goal indeed!

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but "Paul" was never in a rage against the Roman authorities. His alleged rage was directed against competing "super apostles" who taught a different gospel from his. Neither does Paul consider the crucifixtion either unjust or unnecessary, he exalts and even wallows in it. It is the mystery of the ages being revealed, not in the death of some obscure preacher (what did he preach??), but in the preaching of the apostles, the alleged Paul himself the foremost. Romans 16:25, Col. 1:26. This is Doherty 101, and nothing in the "kata sarka" (i.e. Catholic interpolations) controversy in any way diminishes Doherty's main point.

Not a Jew, but a docetic phantom that took on the appearance of a man.
Jesus was not the god's original name, but something bestowed after the exaltation.

OK.

Thanks for the thorough reply.
Jake Jones IV

Llyricist

Heh, maybe I misunderstood, but I took "rage" in this case to more like a "fad"... we'll see.

jakejonesiv

Do you have a passage in mind?

Jake Jones IV

Llyricist

No, that's just the way I (mis)understood Dydimus' use of the word.