Robert Tulip

Hi Grog. Thanks for starting this thread. You commented on a post I wrote on the memetic origin of Christian faith at #779 of the Origins of Christianity megathread.
Here are my comments from that post:
You then commented at #781 in reply ”


I expanded at #794 “”

And at #799 you described Philo’s Logos theory citing Jesus the Branch in Zechariah as a “transition fossil.”

A genetic relationship involves a common source, and a path transmitting the common source through evolution by adaptation, mutation and replication. This is what we see in how Philo's cosmic logos provides a missing link in evolutionary terms between the Christ idea in Solomon, Isaiah and Zechariah and its full enfleshed version in the Gospels. The descent of the eternal Logos to Earth in Philo provides the fertile seedbed of the Christian dogma of Jesus of Nazareth.

Here it is useful to look at the memetic evolution of the concept of Nazareth. This term goes back to the story of Noah, through the Nazirite holy order of Samuel and Samson. It then emerges in Zechariah’s cryptic comment that Jesus has the name Branch (netser), a claim apparently referring to Isaiah 11:1 where Jesus is called Jesse’s Branch – weneser yisay, a name that sounds similar enough to Jesus of Nazareth to explore the etymology.

When the Nazarene Watchers encountered the Roman Empire, my view is that they hid their identity behind the name Jesus of Nazareth, the Root of Jesse. As in John’s statement that Jesus is the true vine, the claim of transmission through a Nazarene holy order indicates a genetic connection between the story of Jesus and its origins in Jewish prophecy. This genetic connection is memetic in structure.

The evolution of the snake in the tree in the Garden of Eden to the snake on a pole described in Numbers 6 to Christ on the cross as described at John 3:14 is a good example of memetic evolution within Christianity.
Punctuated equilibrium is a good example of how memetic evolution follows the same laws of process as genetic evolution. The stable equilibrium of Christian belief in the historical Jesus has been able to resist external selective pressures from science, but a tipping point is inevitably coming in which the old paradigm will break down as a new paradigm is constructed, leading to a period of debate and flux before a settled new consensus emerges in a new dispensation. Yes, and it seems we are living inside a punctuation point, hopefully a colon rather than a full stop. Christian typology can usefully be clarified against the model of biological evolution. Punctuated equilibrium is a good example, and helps to explain the apocalyptic concept of the age as a long period of stability followed by a short disequilibrium, what the Bible calls tribulation, leading into what the creeds see as the New Age of the rule of Christ. Dawkins’ chapter on memes from The Selfish Gene is available in full on line. Dawkins has made ambivalent statements about whether Jesus existed, and his changing views illustrate the memetic evolution of the Christ Myth Thesis as it pushes further into public view. I think that memetic understanding is intrinsically atheist, although it also presents a framework to understand the evolution of myth, in a way that can respect the validity within mythic thought, especially by showing how allegories give myths their power.

spin

*Slap*. I'm offended that such a request for a citation could be considered an offense. :angry:

Michael Knibb has a collection of essays from his career, published by Brill in 2009, Essays on the Book of Enoch and Other Early Jewish Texts and Traditions. Chapter 8 is "The Date of the Parables of Enoch: A Critical Review". He ends with his own tentative (as are they all) date: "the Parables could be seen as being written in reaction to the events of 66–73 C.E." (p.160) (The essay that is this chapter was probably written about 30 years ago.)

aa5874

Your interpretation appears to be fundamentally dependent on Doherty or flawed presumptions and not on the evidence from antiquity.

Essentially, your interpretation of an ONLY heavenly Jesus is baseless and without a shred of corroboration in or out the NT Canon.

The evidence from antiquity does show that the Pauline Corpus was composed by authors who knew the story of Jesus in the Gospels.

1. It is a fact that that Jesus cult writers who wrote about Paul claimed that he began to preach about the Jesus story AFTER it was already known and that Paul PERSECUTED the believers.

2. It is also a fact that there are NO Pauline letters to Churches mentioned by the very author of Acts who wrote about the activities of Paul from time he Persecuted believers until he was in Rome c 59-62 CE.

3. It is also a fact that 2nd century Jesus cult writers did NOT mention the Pauline Corpus, show NO influence by Paul and did NOT acknowledge Paul as the one who evangelized the Roman Empire--it was the 12 DISCIPLES.

4. It is a fact that the Pauline writer wrote about a Crucified and Resurrected Jesus, the Son of God made of a woman --Not an ONLY heavenly Jesus without an earthly mother.

5. It is a fact that Origen claimed Celsus wrote nothing of Paul--Celsus wrote "True Discourse" c 175 CE.

It is irrelevant whether or not Philo wrote about a Logos because Philo did NOT mention any King of the Jews or Messianic ruler called Jesus of Nazareth, did not refer to himself as a Christian and did NOT acknowledge any person called Paul, a Pharisee, of the Tribe of Benjamin who evangelized the Roman Empire.

Based on the Pauline Corpus, Jesus was Lord, the Savior, the Messianic ruler, Equal to God, the Creator and his teachings were supposedly documented and circulated in the Roman Empire yet Philo wrote about a Mad Man called Carabbas who was a laughing stock when he was attired as a King--but nothing of the Jesus and Nothing of Paul.

Philo and Josephus should have been contemporaries of Paul and failed to mention the teachings or influence of the Pauline Corpus on the Jews and the Roman Empire.

Up to the end of 1st century when Josephus completed all his works there is ZERO of Paul the Pharisee and ZERO influence, awareness and acknowledgementof the Pauline Corpus with or without an ONLY heavenly Jesus

There was NO expectation of an ONLY heavenly Messianic ruler by Jews and this is corroborated by Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius. The Jews expected a Physical Messianic ruler c 66-70 CE.

See Wars of the Jews 6.5.4, Tacitus Histories 5 and Suetonius Life of Vespasian.

In fact, Vespasian was believed to be the Predicted Messianic ruler.

So, in a nutshell, your evolution of Jesus belief is wholly erroneous and is known to have NO supporting evidence from antiquity.

You will NEVER produce any writing of antiquity that states the Pauline Jesus was always believed to be in heaven and NEVER on earth.

DCHindley

Of course. :devil:

The last time I looked at the matter, and that cursorily, was in 2010 (it's somewhere in the archives that cannot be named - Oh OK, it's here). While attempting to see iof the text of any of the relevant articles were online, I ran across this.

Ted M Erho, Historical-allusional dating and the Similitudes of Enoch (JBL, Sep. 22, 2011).

It comes second hand from a site that hosts poorly scanned copies of Journal articles, and the formatting is a bit rough, forcing me to spend a while doing my thing with it to make it comprehensible.

CONCLUSION

In sum, the communis opinio on the dating of 1 Enoch 37-71, which relies on the historical-allusional method to argue in favor of an allusion in 1 En. 56:5-8 to the Parthian incursion into Palestine in 40 B.C.E., seems unconvincing. This is due to the compositional mixture of three elements--history, tradition, and methodology-which together form a compound of problematic elements that serves to highlight the unstable nature of various sections of the foundation on which this hypothesis (in all of its variant forms) has been erected. On the one hand, multiple historical problems and contextual parallels challenge this attribution, calling into question the nature of the passage's reflection of actual events, and even its potential embodiment of vaticinium ex eventu in general. On the other, this particular situation contravenes the basic functional requirements of the tool utilized, presenting multiple larger methodological difficulties that demand a more cautious approach, or a new one altogether.

In comparison to the case of the Similitudes of Enoch, it is, in conclusion, perhaps instructive to consider the example of the dating of Pseudo-Phocylides during the past three decades. Initially, in his landmark 1978 study, P. W. van der Horst proposed that the work be dated between 30 B.C.E. and 40 C.E., but a decade later he retracted this to a degree, moving the terminus post quem back to the beginning of the first century B.C.E. (44) More recently, another major study on Pseudo-Phocylides has appeared in the form of Walter T. Wilson's commentary, which, in contrast to the normative course of affairs, further widened this probable compositional time frame to include the entirety of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. and discarded the historical-allusional method as a source of data. (45) This somewhat surprising exegetical maneuver, however, was not without merit in that, although offering less precision, it eliminated the most tenuous and controversial aspects of the dating argument, and thereby would seem to have succeeded in providing heightened certainty in the results.

Although there are differences between this situation and that of the Similitudes of Enoch, the study of the latter has perhaps reached a point at which a similar exchange of dating precision and contentiousness for a less refined and more secure time frame is to be preferred--at least until the advent of advances in this area. Indeed, in many instances the staggering degree of consensus among specialists on the date of this composition has gone unnoticed, hidden behind the unremitting attempts to close the span and place it within more narrowly defined limits. Yet, with the exception of J. T. Milik's widely discredited hypothesis, which possessed only a handful of supporters for a few years, no scholar of early Judaism in the past forty years has ventured to date this document outside of the period 50 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. (46) This, therefore, would seem to be a fitting compromise: collective certainty and confidence in this 150-year span in exchange for speculatively precise smaller ones. (47)

Thus, in contradistinction to the bold claim of Paolo Sacchi quoted in the introduction, the adjective "tentatively" applied to the dating of the Similitudes of Enoch is rightly to be dropped, but in favor of a wider era of consensus rather than a disputed pre-Christian Herodian date. The latter may be correct but is at present the product of an unproven hypothesis, and thus we must await new evidence or arguments that would reopen the discussion with a view toward such a chronological reduction. Indeed, the study of this issue is certainly not closed but has simply reached an interim conclusion: the historical-allusional method is ineffective as a means of dating the Similitudes of Enoch.

(44) Van der Horst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides: With Introduction and Commentary (SVTP 4; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 81-82; idem, "Pseudo-Phocylides Revisited," JSP 3 (1988): 3-30, at 15.

(45) Wilson, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 7.

(46) The publications that accepted the correctness of Milik's theory include E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 347-48; T. W. Franxman, review of J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), Bib 58 (1977): 432-36, at 436; and Matthew Black, "The 'Parables' of Enoch (1 En 37-71) and the 'Son of Man,'" ExpTim 88 (1976): 5-8, at 6-7, although the last added the caveat that earlier material stemming from the first century C.E. was also present in the document. Black subsequently reverted to a date ca. 100 C.E. (noted by Charlesworth, "SNTS Pseudepigrapha Seminars" 321). The last major attempt to place the Similitudes of Enoch outside of 50 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. (excepting Milik) was J. C. Hindley, "Towards a Date for the Similitudes of Enoch: An Historical Approach," NTS 14 (1968): 551-65, who argued in favor of the late Trajanic period, or, more precisely, 115-117 C.E. I am aware of only two additional occasions on which this document was dated outside the aforementioned range since the publication of R. H. Charles's magisterial APOT in 1913, both of which advocated earlier dates: in 1928, Frey ("Apocryphes de l'Ancien Testament," 361-64) associated the book with the aftermath of the Maccabean war, while in the early 1960s J. Coppens ("Le fils d'homme danielique et les relectures de Dan. VII, 13, dans les apocryphes et les ecrits du Nouveau Testament,' ETL 37 [1961]: 5-51, at 23-26) accepted a date prior to 63 B.C.E. on various grounds, especially the supposed lack of allusion to the Romans versus the specific mention of the Parthians. More recently, alternative proposals to the early Herodian hypothesis (some more credible than others) have suggested a number of other periods of composition, such as ca. 50 B.C.E. (Bampfylde, "Historical Allusions," 9-31), the first half of the first century C.E. (Suter, Tradition and Composition in the Parables of Enoch, 24-32; Michel Jas, "Henoch et le ills de rhomme: Datation du livre des paraboles pour une situation de lbrigine du Gnosticisme," RRef 30 [1979]: 105-19), ca. 40 C.E. (Christopher L. Mearns, "Dating the Similitudes of Enoch," NTS 25 [1979]: 360-69), and the end of the first century C.E. (Mathias Delcor, "Le livre des Paraboles d'Henoch Ethiopien: Le probleme de son origine a la lumiere des decouvertes recentes" EstBib 38 [1979]: 5-33; Knibb, "Date of the Parables of Enoch," 345-59).

(47) It should be noted that even when accepting to an extent the theory that 1 En. 56:5-8 alludes to the Parthian incursion in 40 B.C.E., a number of scholars have located the Similitudes of Enoch within the matrix of first-century C.E. Judaism instead, e.g., Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 178; Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone, "The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes" HTR 70 (1977): 51-65, esp. 60; Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.-A.D. 135) (rev. ed.; ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Martin Goodman; 3 vols.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 3.1:258-59; Thomas B. Slater, "One Like a Son of Man in First Century CE Judaism," NTS 41 (1995): 183-98, at 194; Adela Yarbro Collins, Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 191-92.

I'm not particularly impressed by this article.

DCH

spin

Also published in 2011 and without Erho's attitude, Leslie W. Walck in his book The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch and in Matthew (T.&T. Clark) writes the following conclusion to his dating discussion (22-23). I don't hold to it, but Walck is claiming this is a widely held view among specialists on the issue.

[t2]The dating of Par. En. then, can be narrowed by a consideration of these four elements: the kings and mighty ones, the bloodshed, the Parthians and Medes, and the hot springs. These elements reveal social and historical realities in a general way. And yet the realities discerned in these allusions narrow the possibilities for the dating of Par. En. Herod perhaps even served as the model for Par. En’s depiction of the kings and the mighty ones. Herod could be charged with idolatry, and bloodshed. He came to power in conjunction with the Parthian invasion in the middle of the century, and fell prey to intense, tragic, familial mistrust. He also sought relief in the hot springs, but ironically found none, and soon afterward died of his ailments (4 bce). While Herod might have been the model for the author, he was only a model, since the author betrays no details that are specific enough to link these descriptions directly and only to Herod. Thus, these four elements are helpful in narrowing the dating of Par. En., suggesting that Par. En. was written in the late first century bce or early first century ce.

This dating was confirmed by a broad consensus of scholars at the Third Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy in June of 2005.(42) As Paolo Sacchi noted in his summary, “in sum, we may observe those scholars who have directly addressed the problem of dating the Parables all agree on a date around the time of Herod ... given the impressive amount of evidence gathered in support of a pre-Christian origin of the document. The burden of proof has now shifted to those who disagree with the Herodian date. It is now their responsibility to provide evidence that would reopen the discussion.”(43)

(42) See the essays on dating the Parables in Gabriele Boccaccini, Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007) 415–496.

(43) Paolo Sacchi, “The 2005 Camaldoli Seminar on the Parables of Enoch: Summary and Prospects for Future Research,” in Boccaccini, Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man, 510–511.[/t2]

DCHindley

What I find most interesting about the Parables/Similitudes of Enoch is the sense of social outrage over a ruling class that seemed to treat the common people, and their values, as garbage. I am not really sure that this sense of outrage, and glee in imagining what God's revenge upon these folks through the Son of Man will look like, has been related well to the historical clues these commentators put so much stock in.

The Parables of Enoch, as a book, has a great many similarities to other Enoch books such as the Noah fragments of the Book of Watchers, and especially the Epistles of Enoch, where the anti rich animus is also especially strong.

Sometimes I am of the opinion that the Parables/Similitudes was a "mini" version of the other 4 Enoch books (Watchers, Astronomical, Visions and Epistles), which if true, could make it a Christian "imitation" of the "real" (Jewish) Enoch books.

Other times, I am just not convinced that the Parables/Simitudes sound especially "Christian" despite the "son of Man" terminology. After all, the term basically means "the man (who will effect God's will)."

Amen

DCH

Grog

The "son of man" term can have different connotations depending on the context in which it is used. The evolution of the term, and its changing connontations, is itself an interesting subject.

Grog

Thanks, Robert, for you comments. I had noticed that in terms of applying an evolutionary framework for understanding the evolution of the body of thought that we now call "Christian," we seem to be on the same page.

spin

I was just putting together a thread starter on the topic. I'm sure you will contribute!

aa5874

Philo's use of the term "Logos" was NOT part of the early evolution of the Jesus story.

There is NOTHING of the "Logos" or NO reference to Jesus as the Logos in gMark.

Jesus as The Logos is DIRECTLY found in the LATER Gospel of gJohn.

In fact, Jesus is immediately introduced as the Logos in the very first verse of gJohn.

In gMark, it is AFTER the Baptism by John that the Jesus character began to act or display his Divine characteristics and there is no indication that the Markan Jesus was the Logos and God the Creator.

The earliest stories of Jesus, the Synoptics, show that Jesus as the Logos was a Later invention in the evolution of Jesus belief.