Toto

Who the hell is talking about derivation?

The question is whether chi rho was used as a monogram for Chronos before it was used that way for Christos.

stonewall1012

first jeffry it is clives assertion that "chinese whispers" combined with CHRONOS somehow accounts for the rise of the belief in Jesus.

toto, as far as I can tell, floats around on these sites and asks a few questions. He's the moderator, I believe, I don't believe Toto actually believe/espouses this theory. I haven't seen him espouse it as much as defend the "plausibility" of the belief.

I may agree with you Jeffery that the connection is questionable but I don't think holding toto accountable is right either.

gurugeorge

No actual evidence, it's just taking "Paul" to have roughly the dates he's believed to have had and working backwards to what must have been a fairly well-developed community (with a fairly well-developed cult) by the time he got wind of it.

From the Christ - by his own admission, he got his gospel (i.e. his version of the "good news of a victory won") direct from the horse's mouth. IOW, from his own visionary experience and inspiration.

I take the Samaritan cue from Detering's suggestion that "Paul"=Simon Magus, a Samaritan "magus", also called Atomos (cognate with Paulus) and mentioned by Josephus. Also from my reading about Samaritans that a) Joshua was a particular cult hero of theirs, b) there were amongst them (according to Acharya S, though I haven't checked this) other Joshua cults, b) the Samaritan version of the Messiah concept was already more of a prophet-like figure than a royal figure.

I think the "Saul"="Paul" connection is so hokey that it points to this aspect of Paul's story in Acts being part of the rewriting of history that Acts indulges in. The thing of him being a Jew then seeing the Christian light may or may not be true. The Samaritan angle isn't all that important - it's just neat because it fits in with the Samaritan traits mentioned above - but this fishy equationof "Saul"="Paul" gives it wiggle room.

To help us decide, I think if we look at the Marcionite version of Galatians, and if we take that as being closer to something original (because simpler, at least, although the full argument would have to be based on the kind of textual analysis that a proper scholar would do), we see that the relationship between "Paul" and the Jerusalem crowd was much simpler and looser than portrayed in the fuller, interpolated version:

The general scenario is that this is something he heard of (in fact it seems like the cult was known), but he got a direct revelation of it himself, and then after some time it occurred to him to check with the original guys who had the idea. But there's no sense that he was particularly intimately linked with them, or had been taught by them. Also, there isn't the attitude to them one would expect, had they been people who'd known the cult figure in person. I mean, if one had a vision of a deified someone who one supposed had died a few years ago, one would talk differently about people who had known that someone personally - he's just not very reverent about them.

Well it's not as if I think they were lining up outside the bishop's house with questions about what colour toilet paper Joshua Messiah used! Just a general tendency over time. What I think they were initially presented with - by "Paul", e.g. - was a myth more like their own - i.e. they weren't initially presented with the kind of detailed "stoic exemplar" biography that later came into existence with the gospels. But I think the posited relative recentness (in the original myth) of the time when this cultic Joshua Messiah must have come to Earth would, over time, have led to attempts to fill in biographical details - e.g. aspirant asks presbyter "but what colour tolet paper did the Anointed One use?", and the presbyter saying something off the cuff. Or, again, people might have made up their own stories - analogously to how superhero fans make up their own stories.

The point is that the relative recentness of the time of the advent of the Joshua Messiah, while seemingly not problematic and not particularly interesting to those before the Diaspora, would have been more intriguing post-Diaspora. And because the events had taken place prior to the Diaspora, you could make up any shit you liked - nobody would be able to check. (I'm of course exaggerating to get the point across - there would have to be some continuity in the snowballing story, and any "retroconning" would have to fit in with what had gone before.)

Again, because prior to the Diaspora, what you have is more obviously a myth. It's the story of god taking on human flesh, coming to the Earth disguised as the lowest of the low, conquering death by crucifixion, and getting the hell out of dodge just as the pissed-off Archons realised they'd been had. (See, the Archons were waiting for the great, kingly victor, and this fellow just zoomed right under their radar. )

Now you don't really need a hell of a lot of detail for this to make sense, because the human side of these events isn't that important - the human side of this Joshua Messiah entity is just a mcguffin. It had to be real, of course - he had to have really been in the flesh - but the details aren't a major part of the purport of the myth of salvation.

But over time, naturally, people will get curious about the details. I think the gospel form is strongly influenced by the idea of the stoic exemplary biography (forget the technical term), and in that, the details of how the exemplar overcomes moral problems, how he deals with authority, etc., are part of the teaching.

At some point, with the circulation of the basic Joshua Messiah sketch, people just start to fill in the gaps naturally - and some kind of basic stories would have evolved.

It may even be that GMark is a kind of literary product - e.g. satire - based on some snippets of this developing Joshua Messiah myth that the author had overheard.

I don't have any clincher facts to back this up, it's all a gossamer of speculation based on trust in scholarship that I've read.

But mystics are less sectarian than ordinary religionists - because of the nature of mystical experience (which, contra Katz et. al., based on a consideration of cognitive science, I believe to be universal) they understand each other across cultural boundaries more readily.

Anyway, the Samaritan angle is, as I said, an added extra free of charge that you can take or leave. I'd still be happy if it was conclusive that the "Jewishness" of Paul in Acts was a truthful portrayal.

The main point of all this is to have a plausible scenario of how a religion could have grown to have a belief in a cultic figure with such a degree of apparent historical detail that we moderns could conceive of the cultic figure as having had a truly historical component.

The key is really just to think about the notion of Messiah, and notice that the Joshua Messiah story is such a neat revaluation of values, such a self-consciously clever reversal of the traditional Messiah tropes, that its far more likely to be an idea than a report of facts.

This, along with the fact that Corinthians I:15 doesn't actually say that Cephas, etc., knew the cultic figure personally at all (Joshua Messiah just "appears" post-resurrection, using a term that is used in the Septuagint to translate a Jewish concept that means "Divine self-revelation").

That missing connection between the Jerusalem crowd and some human being who they personally knew as a Messiah candidate in the usual sense (ie. some nutter who gathers a following) is the real missing link in the whole orthodox Christian story; and, conversely, it supports the notion that we have here to do with mysticism and visionary experience, not just from Paul, but even before him, from the founders.

Later note: just noticed this is going fearsomely off-topic, I apologise. I suggest if we want to discuss this further we should either do it in private or one of us start a new thread.

Jeffrey Gibson

And the evidence for this is???

Jeffrey

Toto

Good grief to you, sir.

If I had access to page 8 of Moeller's book, I could tell you if there is any evidence for this idea, or if this is just another internet urban legend that could be disposed of.

Jeffrey Gibson

I was speaking of the plausibility of the claim that there is a possible link between Chronos and Christ because both words begin with Chi and Rho and why this does not lead to viewing as just as probable a link between Christ and any other Greek word that begins wigh Chi Rho. What is it that makes it "not improbable" in the one case, but (presumably in your eyes) not probable in any of the others?

Jeffrey

Toto

It is not inherently improbable that some one in the ancient world abbreviated Chronos as chi rho. This holds true for any other name that starts with those letters.

In this case, we have an assertion that is widely repeated, that Chi Rho was used as a monogram for Chronos. We are looking for evidence pro or con.

Even if we find evidence in favor, this is still not evidence that Christ was derived from Chronos - only that there might be some connection in the symbols used, which might have influenced some early Romans to think that Christ was related to one of their traditions. The Catholic Church has promoted the idea that all religions contain a pale foreshadowing of the coming of the one true faith (or something along those lines) and this might have been part of their missionary propaganda. The faux Christ-Krishna connection seems to derive from this sort of missionary effort.

If we can find any evidence to support any theory, we can move on. We might be able to add this to our list of unsupported claims, or not.

stonewall1012

Talk about a freakin change of mission! All of a sudden now we're trying to talk about why christianity was bought by the Romans. Holy crap that's been in dispute for centuries... Everyone from the 4rd Century to Edward Gibbon to mr. Toto has their own theories as to why the Romans "converted".

I thought we were talking about the origins of christianity as being in the "chinese whispers" and happenstance that Chronos and Chrestos sound alike.

gurugeorge: perhapse we should take this some where else because I don't even know where to being on analysizing your "theory". Suffice it to say I believe it is a house of cards.

Toto

stonewall: read the title of the thread. Read the opening post. That's the subject.

If you want your side conversation on the origins of Christianity split off, just say so.

stonewall1012

Toto what the heck are you talking about... The opening post claims that christ and chronos are some kind Jupiter and Zeus spinn off. That's what I THOUGHT we were talking about...