Roo Bookaroo

Bernard:

Please do not misunderstand the digest of excerpts from "JesusMysteries" I have mentioned to you, as some readers may easily do.

I have to dispel this misunderstanding because it results from my not being clear enough in my introduction to explain the point of the conversation being excerpted and of my digest.

The point of the digest of the conversation in JesusMysteries between Doherty, Hermann Detering and Jake has nothing to do with Paul.
The conversation initially started on the dating of 1 Clement, which does have an impact on assumptions about Paul. But the conversation was rerouted into a discussion about Hebrews 8:4.
And the digest is all about the discussion around Hebrews 8:4.

This became interesting because of the present "Hebrews 8:4 Challenge" going on now here, on this FRDB thread.
This "challenge" has been going on for months now, where Doherty has been pummeled left and right by his critics.
And where Doherty assumes the role of final arbiter, with all the answers to be found in his big book, which de facto, has become, in his eyes, the Bible, or definitive encyclopedia, of all New Testament research. To which he keeps referring all critics.

The conversation on "JesusMysteries" illustrates two methods in interpreting NT texts in general, with Hebrews 8:4 taken as an example. The dispute is about the value of those two methods.

1) The dogmatic method of Doherty.

Hebrews 8:4 is an absolute smoking gun, which leaves no doubt about the whereabouts of Jesus.
His "translations" and interpretations are the only valid ones, that MUST be ADOPTED. They are "ironclad", and deliver a slam-dunk.
It is a pure exercise in "logic", and Doherty is the only one able to understand the "logic" of the passage, and to "demonstrate" it.
His interpretations are irrefutable "demonstrations" and remove any shadow of ambiguity.

All other interpretations are simply wrong, irrelevant, non-sequiturs, gibberish.
All other scholars have been plain wrong until Doherty came on the scene in 1997 at the age of 56.
They try to inject ambiguity where Doherty has proved there's none.

Nobody has been able to refute Doherty's interpretations, and prove him wrong.
Jesus lived exclusively in the spiritual sky, with spiritual "flesh and blood" and never appeared on earth.

2) The open-ended method of Hermann Detering and Jake.

No passage or verse can be interpreted as providing a definitive answer.
Each text is loaded with ambiguity, which is inherent to the territory.
Every passage or verse can be contradicted by another verse or passage.
There is no "ironclad" case anywhere.
No verse or passage is a slam-dunk. And certainly not Hebrews 8:4
What is needed is to the consideration of all the material in the NT texts, the convergence of interpretations, the balance of cumulative evidences.
And a "framework" to make sense of all the material.

This is in fact what happens with every student of the NT. Each one develops his/her own "framework" over time, and gives an interpretation of the material in the light of that framework.
Doherty has chosen his own framework. "Kata sarka" is "spiritual flesh". Speak of an innovation!

3) Doherty then loses his cool, and starts accusing his opponent Jake of
- not having enough Greek to appreciate the subtlety of Doherty's speculations
- not knowing anything about OT midrash.
He is taken to task by Detering, not one to be impressed by Doherty's extravagances and outbursts.
Doherty apologizes, presents various excuses (he's been too much vilipended and mistreated both on FRDB and Amazon).

Upon which the conversation closed.

The interest is in the opposition of the two methods
- Dogmatic interpretation by one researcher, here Doherty's, that excludes everything else.
- Open-ended research, where ambiguity is never removed, but acknowledged, and explains the variety of frameworks.

No wonder that Doherty's framework is ignored by all professional scholars who consider it is just a curious footnote provided by an autodidact who came late to learning Greek and NT studies, and believes he had found the final interpretation that has escaped everybody until he made his entry on stage in 1997.

Grog

Do you have a link to this discussion?

Roo Bookaroo

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusM...&charset=UTF-8

Those are the messages listed with subject "1 Clement" for the last 30 days of JesusMysteries
They are listed here starting at Jan. 16 and proceeding backwards
You'll have to dig out the messages from Jan. 8 to Jan. 13 for Doherty, Hermann Detering and Jake.
The posts for the digest I made are not isolated as such.

EarlDoherty

Let’s start here…

Roo, I’m afraid that you don’t know what you are talking about. Who said that “spiritual flesh” was a copy of earthly flesh? When Cicero says that the gods possess a type of blood and body, is he saying that the gods copied their type of blood and body from humans? Of course not. The gods existed first! The demons (see the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament under "sarx") possessed a kind of flesh. Does that mean that their kind of flesh was modelled on humans? Of course not. The demons existed first! The ancients were simply borrowing terms previously applied to human beings in order to describe the constituent material of the gods and demons, because they didn’t have any other terms to use. They conceived a spiritual material for the gods and co-opted the terms they used for the physical material of humans. What would you want them to call the divine material? Gretzlglob? You are as bad as Bernard. You are both expert atomists. You pick out words and phrases without regard for context or without regard for thinking any deeper than those words and phrases which you automatically interpret in some modern fashion. This is indeed “Ancient Thought for Dummies” (your term)! Only, you are turning the readers into dummies.

As a companion to your atomism, you can only see one meaning or one application for a term. (Moreover, every little sect and piece of writing in the ancient world must be using a term in exactly the same way.) For you and Bernard (and too many others), all words are monolithic. But the mythicist case already takes into account the definition you give to a word like “spirit.” The pure spirit of God and the Son is indeed immortal, unchangeable and death-free. That is why the Son cannot die in the upper heavens, but must descend to a sphere of corruption and death. He takes on (temporarily) an inferior form of spiritual flesh (don’t ask me to give you a laboratory analysis of an idea which is lunatic from the get-go and completely unrelated to reality—not even the ancients could do that), in order to be capable of undergoing suffering and death. So the “spiritual body/flesh” of such a suffering Savior is not going to be the same as the “spiritual body” that Paul refers to as Christ’s own natural material which serves as prototype to the bodies to be taken on by humans after their resurrection. Don’t blame me for the ancients using a common term for different states under different circumstances.

And a mind like Bernard’s declares that gods or spiritual bodies cannot suffer and die in the heavenly world? Even ancient writers prove him wrong. Read my “world of myth” chapter in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. Plenty of suffering and dying there on the part of divine entities and human beings who take on a heavenly body in order to suffer punishment.

So neither dualism nor the “interface” (the channel beween them) can exist because…let’s see, because if we introduce a third element, what’s to prevent us from introducing a fourth, or a fifth, or a hundredth? Ummm, what class of logic is this, Roo? Have you got a name for it? (I can think of a few.) But didn’t the ancients have exactly that system? Heaven + earth + the intermediary Logos/Christ/Son between the two? Are you even denying Philo? Wasn’t that the dominant religious philosophy of the age, pagan and Christian? Even the traditional Jews had an interface in Personified Wisdom.

So what are you saying, Roo? That the concept of dualism could not have existed in the ancient mind? (It still exists in ours, for that matter.) That an intermediary channel is more difficult to envision than dualism itself? Besides, you’re misusing the concept of “interface”. The lower heavens is not an interface in the sense of an intermediary channel. Any more than the last stop on a subway line is an interface between downtown and the boondocks. It’s simply the outer layer in a graded system. One of the problems was that the ancients had evil divine entities, the demons, who were hardly as perfect as the gods, so a sphere had to be supplied for them. But they were still divine, though obviously sharing qualities with human (their evil-ness and rivalry among themselves). For the Jews, they headed evil (i.e., foreign) nations. Consequently, they had to be part of the realm of corruptibility, but still above the earth, since they needed their own home. (The Ascension of Isaiah, ch.7, places them in the first layer of the heavens to which Isaiah and his guide ascend.)

Actually, the “interface” is the entity known as the Son, or Wisdom, or the Logos. He/she/it is the connecting channel, since communication and various forces must transfer between the upper and lower parts of this dualistic universe, and something has to be the carrier. Ergo, an interface, an intermediary. (But no, impossible, says Roo, since that would open up the door to other intermediaries and interfaces.)

Roo tells us that he has placed a “digest” of recent exchanges here and elsewhere onto the Amazon site (as “comments” to his review, which comments are by now rivalling the total length of my website), and we can be sure that he has continued his practice of taking such comments out of context, distorting them, twisting and exaggerating them to make blatantly ad hominem attacks against me. A simple declaration on my part that my analysis of Hebrews 8:4 is such that, unless someone can point out the deficiencies of that analysis, it indicates that only one interpretation can be made of it: for Roo, that turns me into a closed-minded raving dogmatic. (I guess every evolutionary scientist—and there are many—who declare that evolution is the only possible interpretation of the evidence is the same sort of wild-eyed charlatan, regardless of the fact that no creationist has ever made a dent in the evolution conclusion. Sorry, Ted, not even you.)

But my statement is a valid contention, because no one has pointed out such deficiencies, and not for want of trying. Not TedM, not Howard M. on Vridar, not Jake Jones whose lack of knowledge about Hebrews was blatantly evident on JM and I simply pointed it out. (When are we going to get your attempt, Roo?) What Roo has been indulging in here, but in spades on Amazon, is demonization, pure and simple. Vast exaggeration and twisting of comments to create the most damaging and distorted impression of me is his stock-in-trade, and in case anyone misses the point he bludgeons it home by directly levelling the darkest of personal interpretations on those comments, and he has done that here (see posting #211). It is dishonest, disreputable and borders on openly flouting the rules of this board.

Like all fanatics, people like himself cannot be dealt with. Reason, appeals to honesty and integrity, go unheeded. They cannot reach him. He is a determined juggernaut, a berserker who is only interested in steamrollering over me. (And you can be sure these comments will reach Amazon as well, taken out of context and slanted to fit his personal vendetta.) Well, I stand by my writings and my arguments, and I am not going away. I’ll leave it up to others to judge for themselves who is the villain here. And I trust that I will be allowed to defend myself. Unfortunately, Amazon seems to have no restrictions and no rules against anything from disrespect to libel.

Earl Doherty

Roo Bookaroo

Grog:

To help you, here are the 22 post numbers of "JesusMysteries" which I have excerpted for my digest.

Jake Jan 8 #68418

Earl, Jan 8 #68427

Earl, Jan 8, #68432

Hermann: Jan 9 #68445

Earl Jan 9 #68449

Hermann Jan 10 #68450

Earl Jan 10 #68457

Hermann Jan 10 #68458

Jake Jan 10 #68465

Herrmann Jan 10 #68451

Hermann Jan 11 #68467

Earl Jan 11 #68472

Jake Jan 11 *** #68476

Earl Jan 11 #68478

Jake Jan 12 #68482

Rick Jan 12 #68486

Jake Jan 12 8:29 AM # Probably #68483?
Not appearing in the list. Mentioned in Doherty’s answer #68490 Jan*12,*2013 9:55*am

Earl Jan 12 #68489

Earl Jan 12 #68490

Jake Jan 12 #68492

Hermann Jan 13 #68499 (Stupefaction)

Earl Jan 13 #68503 (Meek apologies)

EarlDoherty

Recently here, Roo made reference to Gilbert Murray’s The Five Stages of Greek Religion (or maybe it was Bernard) as something which supposedly demolishes my case about the Hellenistic savior gods and Paul’s Christ. Regardless of who it was, Roo himself has appealed to Murray more than once in his Amazon comments. I think this is the time to set the record straight. Indented paragraphs below are from Murray’s book (from page 160 to 165). Bolding is mine. Along the way, I insert some comments of my own (not indented).

As a matter of fact the whole tendency of Greek philosophy after Plato, with some illustrious exceptions, especially among the Romanizing Stoics, was away from the outer world towards the world of the soul. We find in the religious writings of this period that the real Saviour of men is not he who protects them against earthquake and famine, but he who in some sense saves their souls. He reveals to them the Gnôsis Theou, the Knowledge of God.

Just as the Logos religion of almost all the second century apologists puts it—without making the slightest reference to this “Savior” having been on earth or taught the Knowledge of God from within a human body.

The 'knowledge' in question is not a mere intellectual knowledge. It is a complete union, a merging of beings.

And this is supposed to be a merging of human beings with another human being? No epistle writer ever presents things this way. Paul’s “body of Christ” is a mystical spiritual body, shared in by the souls of the believers on earth. Paul never deals with Christ’s human incarnated body, and never (including in 1 Cor. 35-49) has to address the complications presented by Christ having been in a physical body on earth.

And, as we have always to keep reminding our cold modern intelligence, he who has 'known' God is himself thereby deified. He is the Image of God, the Son of God, in a sense he is God. The stratum of ideas described in the first of the studies will explain the ease with which transition took place. The worshipper of Bacchos became Bacchos simply enough, because in reality the God Bacchos was originally only the projection of the human Bacchoi. And in the Hellenistic age the notion of these secondary mediating gods was made easier by the analogy of the human interpreters. Of course, we have abundant instances of actual preachers and miracle-workers who on their own authority posed, and were accepted, as gods. The adventure of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra shows how easily such things could happen. But as a rule, I suspect, the most zealous priest or preacher preferred to have his God in the background. He preaches, he heals the sick and casts out devils, not in his own name but in the name of One who sent him.

There is no sense here of the “One who sent him” having been on earth in human substance.

This actual present priest who initiates you or me is himself already an Image of God; but above him there are greater and wiser priests, above them others, and above all there is the one eternal Divine Mediator, who being in perfection both man and God can alone fully reveal God to man, and lead man's soul up the heavenly path, beyond Change and Fate and the Houses of the Seven Rulers, to its ultimate peace. I have seen somewhere a Gnostic or early Christian emblem which indicates this doctrine. Some Shepherd or Saviour stands, his feet on the earth, his head towering above the planets, lifting his follower in his outstretched arms.

This is meant to be an image of the human like Jesus of Nazareth? Hardly.

The Gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body of Christian heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the Hellenistic world before Christianity as well as after. They must have been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos. Their Saviour, like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men's minds before the Saviour of the Christians. 'If we look close', says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnôsis, but was already present there under various forms.'

And this Redeemer was thought of as a man on earth, preaching within human flesh? Certainly not.

He occurs notably in two pre-Christian documents, discovered by the keen analysis and profound learning of Dr. Reitzenstein: the Poimandres revelation printed in the Corpus Hermeticum, and the sermon of the Naassenes in Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, which is combined with Attis-worship.

If these sects could envision “the figure of the Redeemer” as entirely spiritual, not present as an incarnation on earth, then the early Pauline-type Christians could also do so.

Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Sôtêr' of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of Jesus or 'Christos', 'the Anointed', tends gradually to supersede. Above all he is, in some sense, Man, or 'the Second Man' or 'the Son of Man'. The origin of this phrase needs a word of explanation. Since the ultimate unseen God, spirit though He is, made man in His image, since holy men (and divine kings) are images of God, it follows that He is Himself Man. He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of whom all bodily men are feeble copies. He is also the Father; the Saviour is his Son, 'the Image of the Father', 'the Second Man', 'the Son of Man'.

Here, too, this Savior, Second Man, Son of Man, is an entirely spiritual figure, with no concept of incarnation to earth. And how could the historical Jesus have been a “feeble copy” of the heavenly Man?

The method in which he performs his mystery of Redemption varies. It is haunted by the memory of the old Suffering and Dying God, of whom we spoke in the first of these studies. It is vividly affected by the ideal 'Righteous Man' of Plato, who 'shall be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified'. But in the main he descends, of his free will or by the eternal purpose of the Father, from Heaven through the spheres of all the Archontes or Kosmokratores, the planets, to save mankind, or sometimes to save the fallen Virgin, the Soul, Wisdom, or 'the Pearl'. The Archontes let him pass because he is disguised; they do not know him (cf. 1 Cor. ii. 7 ff.). When his work is done he ascends to Heaven to sit by the side of the Father in glory; he conquers the Archontes, leads them captive in his triumph, strips them of their armour (Col. ii. 15; cf. the previous verse), sometimes even crucifies them for ever in their places in the sky.

These are pre-Christian concepts of the Redeemer, and you will note that Murray does not portray them as incarnated to earth. In fact, he clearly avoids introducing any such idea. In our surviving documents, the best example of this general picture is the Ascension of Isaiah, to which has been added in a later interpolation a crude account of a life on earth which the rest of the document as a whole does not need, and from which it has in fact been derived. (I.e., Heavenly Christ motifs from outside chapter 11’s interpolation have been reworked to create the account on earth.)

The epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians are much influenced by these doctrines. Paul himself constantly uses the language of them, but in the main we find him discouraging the excesses of superstition, reforming, ignoring, rejecting. His Jewish blood was perhaps enough to keep him to strict monotheism. Though he admits Angels and Archontes, Principalities and Powers, he scorns the Elements and he seems deliberately to reverse the doctrine of the first and second Man.

About the only thing he does not admit is an earthly dimension for his heavenly Jesus, and particularly any earthly agencies involved in his death. Rather he specifies these by a term which refers to the demon spirits.

He says nothing about the Trinity of Divine Beings that was usual in Gnosticism, nothing about the Divine Mother. His mind, for all its vehement mysticism, has something of that clean antiseptic quality that makes such early Christian works as the Octavius of Minucius Felix and the Epistle to Diognetus so infinitely refreshing.

Both of which have no historical Jesus either, though Murray does not recognize that.

He is certainly one of the great figures in Greek literature, but his system lies outside the subject of this essay. We are concerned only with those last manifestations of Hellenistic religion which probably formed the background of his philosophy. It is a strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of, to study these obscure congregations, drawn from the proletariate of the Levant, superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, who still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, who took the 'Word', the 'Spirit', and the 'Divine Wisdom', to be persons called by those names,

What “persons” were the “Spirit” and “Divine Wisdom” taken to be? And identifying the “Word” (or the “Son”) as a human person is utterly missing in the entire epistolary body of literature. As for Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, that was a characteristic of pagan Olympian religion and hero worship, a feature missing from all the Christian pre-Gospel literature.

and turned the Immortality of the Soul into 'the standing up of the corpses'; and to reflect that it was these who held the main road of advance towards the greatest religion of the western world.

Unfortunately, Murray reveals his own Christian-faith background with remarks like these. And yet, even tied to that faith, he is able to present a picture of the religious thought and soteriological system of the ancient world which has no need for a human incarnation, unable even to force himself to insert one into his general description.

The bottom line is: Gilbert Murray”s Five Stages of Greek Religion offers a brief background portrait of this dimension of Greek religion which is the perfect basis for mythicism’s view of a heavenly Christ, and my case in particular. Bernard and Roo simply don’t know what they are talking about. Roo gurgitated thousands of words on Amazon casting scorn on that case and pointing to Murray to back him up, when Murray has done the exact opposite. Besides, apart from this short section, Murray’s subject matter was focused on the evolution of the Olympian gods, not the mystery cult savior gods. The name Osiris, for example, appears only twice in the entire book, both in passing references. Even a longer passage about Sallustius’ allegorical interpretation of the Attis myth has not a word to say about the Attis savior-god cult or the subject of salvation. Nor is there a word about Plutarch's Isis and Osiris. And Roo claimed that here was the proof to be found that my interpretation of the cultic myths was wrong? Perhaps the simple answer is that Roo could find in Gilbert Murray, in a book about Greek religion, no discussion about the mysteries. Nor, for that matter, about Middle Platonism. Apparently he has concluded that they did not exist. This seems to be the level of his deductive methodology.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

I think it is evident to all, Roo, that this undertaking of yours is simply a direct personal attack on me. Not on my arguments, including the ones contained in this "digest" of yours, which you have made no attempt to address, but on me personally. All this work, for something intended as 100% ad hominem. It's a poor substitute for proving me wrong.

My apologies to Hermann and Jake were not "meek." I explained my reasons for some of the remarks I made, some of which lay at Jake's door (and which he chose to continue on FRDB), and added an official "apology." There was nothing meek about it.

And believe me, there is nothing that I said to Jake that was any more objectionable than the mountains of shit that I have taken on this board by the likes of you and many others. So drop the 'holier than thou.' You are tarred with your own hypocritical brush.

I don't expect to see any rebuttal from you to my two recent postings. Other than, perhaps, your usual rants against my writing style. That is about all you are capable of.

Earl Doherty

maryhelena

Well, thanks for that.......

Bottom line in all this Hebrews discussion is - Hebrews can't be used to disprove the JC historicists position. Hebrews contains no 'smoking gun'. No 'time bomb' to topple the JC historicists. The JC historicists have to be 'attacked' on their home ground - the gospel JC story. Firing off dud ammunition, convoluted interpretations from Hebrews or the Pauline epistles, is just one huge waste of time.

Have a look at this quote Hoffmann just put up on his blog:

The "antiquated mythicist ideas..."....

The ahistoricist/mythicist position cannot continue with this idea that Hebrews and the Pauline epistles know nothing about the gospel Jesus figure. As Hoffmann says, this idea is 'antiquated'.

Just as the gospel story contains elements of mythology, virgin birth, beamed to heaven, so, likewise, Hebrews and the Pauline epistles contain elements of flesh, blood and Davidic lineage. In other words; both the gospel story and Hebrews and the Pauline epistles, reflect a connection between flesh and spirit; a connection between matter and mind; a connection between history and timelessness. After all, it is that connection, even in our own bodies, that allows us to live. Without a heartbeat we are dead; without a mind, we are also dead. The NT story does not surrender this very basic fact of life. The gospel story focuses on the earth, on the physical; Hebrews and the Pauline epistles focus on the spiritual. But both contain elements that demonstrate that alongside their specific focus - the other reality is always present.

(and no, the gospel focus on earth, on physicality, does not require that it's JC figure be a historical figure - it simply means that flesh and blood matters, that people matter, that history matters....)

Hoffmann is preparing a new book that he hopes will be a challenge to the ahistoricists/mythicist. If this is the case - then perhaps it's time for the ahistoricists/mythicists to leave the dud ammunition behind them, the convoluted interpretations of Hebrews and the Pauline epistles, and start reaching for a history book....

------------------

Before anyone jumps on me - yep, Hoffmann has no historical basis upon which to date 'Paul'...

stephan huller

In the interest of fairness, I did finally find a reference to a 'heavenly crucifixion' akin to what Doherty is suggesting. It comes from Birger Pearson's discussion of the original Greek text of the Acts of Archelaus:

Pearson and Stroumsa and King all suspect that ώραία is something more than a mere adjective. It is a reference to the primordial figure of Norea/Horaia. But for our purposes the "crucified in the firmament by the Living Spirit" reference which should draw our attention.

maryhelena

Spiritual, heavenly crucifixion stories are just that, stories. They cannot be verified. OK, fine for parallels etc, the Jerusalem above and the Jerusalem below. Theological, or philosophical, interpretations can handle that type of comparison.

Sure, let Doherty keep his heavenly, not on earth, crucifixion for his Pauline JC figure. The issue here is Doherty's dogmatic insistence that Hebrews and the Pauline epistles know nothing about the gospel JC crucifixion story. And it's this Doherty position that has driven the ahistoricist/mythicist position into a cul-de-sac. Doherty has to back out of this position if he wants to be a player in moving the ahistoricist/mythicist position forward.