MrMacSon

Where is the evidence there was a cult deity on this earth??

Where is the evidence the writings attributed to an alleged Paul are based on anything real??

stephan huller

Paul makes clear his ideas are based on Jewish scripture (even in the Marcionite version), Jewish scripture is based on the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch is 'about' a visit by God (or a series of visits) to important individuals culminating in the revelation at Sinai. Since Paul compares the experience of Jesus to that of the Jewish writings and ultimately the Pentateuch one would be right in supposing that this 'experience' recorded in the gospel narrative was based on a divine visitation of some sort.

gurugeorge

Uh, there isn't, that's the whole point. Had there been some sort of evidence in the Pauline writings of a claim to have spoken to something that could have been a human being, then historicism would be on reasonably firm ground.

Suppose you had a sentence in Paul that went "Cephas told me that Jesus had told him in Capernaum that x,y,z", then historicists would have something that could quite reasonably be construed as evidence of a human Jesus at the root of the whole Jesus business.

There isn't anything like that in the Paul writings - there are just things that look like that, IF you have the (much later) gospel Jesus, the gospel "disciples", etc., at the back of your mind when you're reading Paul. But if you don't have the gospel Jesus, the gospel disciples, at the back of your mind when you're reading Paul, then actually, there's NOTHING there like that sentence, nothing that might connect Paul, or any of the people he talks about, to a hypothetical human being called "Jesus", who might form the root of the whole Jesus myth.

That's too broad a question. Beliefs are real, though they may not be about real things. Visions and hallucinations are real, but what they're visions and hallucinations of aren't real, no matter how real the hallucinator or visionary may think they are.

What I've been putting forward here is that "Jesus Christ" was originally a revisionist Messiah concept, placing his advent in the past rather than the future. Now that means of course that those who believed in this concept thought he was a real being (whether "celestial" or "fully man and fully god" or whatever, is almost immaterial, though fascinating in itself). But none of them ever met a human being called "Jesus Christ" or were his disciples. They just thought that this cult figure had existed - they thought that the Messiah, rather than being a divine man-god to come, was a divine man-god who had already been, in a secret, unexpected way, and that they were revealing this secret truth.

Note: the Messiah is a mythical concept of an entity to come. As soon as you put the entity in the past, and say he's already been, he's equally mythical, but now you leave hostages to fortune as to exactly when and where he existed. He will be pinned down to a time and place, in a way that the original ("to come") version didn't have to be. That gap is what's filled in by Christian writing and gospel.

The explanatory gap left when you put the Messiah's advent in the past, instead of the future.

Duvduv

Gevalt.......yes the Nag Hammadi are *different* from the canonical writings. But since we have no polemical writings or apologia from such groups it's impossible to be definitive about how they viewed the the individual canonical texts. There is no reason to discount Mountainman's thesis that there was alot of lampooning undertaken against the official dogma.

And you can also ostensibly throw in what Epiphanius or anyone else "heard" (and for some mysterious reason never SAW) about this or that text. Hearsay doesn't help much if you are trying to pin something down UNLESS YOU ARE DECIDING TO TAKE WHAT IS CLAIMED BY THESE APOLOGISTS ON FAITH AT FACE VALUE.

Toto

Some of them may have been lampooning the official dogma, which would tell you how they viewed the canonical texts. How does that help your case?

Stop shouting.

You are the one taking what Epiphanius says at face value when you claim that the Ebionites used a canonical gospel. I am trying to evaluate the text and make sense of it.

gurugeorge

His ideas are based partly on Scripture and partly on "direct revelation" from (what we moderns would call) a hallucinated entity he called "Christ", "the Lord", etc., etc.

And in this, he's on exactly the same footing as those who came before him.

Scripture and visionary hallucination, those are the only positively-avowed (in the texts) sources we have for the earliest known Christians' acquaintance with any entity that could reasonably be tagged "Jesus Christ".

What historicism would require - some kind of human-to-human connection (e.g. human-to-human discipleship) - is what's absent; the scriptural and visionary human-to-idea/hallucination connection is what's present.

stephan huller

Where do you get this certainty about Paul? is this vision any more incredible than god in sapphire?

gurugeorge

Whatever anyone says is evidence of something, even if it isn't evidence that supports the overt content of what they're saying.

If someone talks bollocks, there's a reason they're talking bollocks, and their bollocks-talk may be evidence of something (e.g. evidence that they're trying to hide something, or that they missed the point of some argument, or whatever).

stephan huller

So what you are saying is that no one ever believed that Moses became God's student on the mountain? It was recognized that this was impossible at the outset. A non-starter? Good luck with that thesis.

gurugeorge

From his own words in Gal 1:12, and the use of the same form of words ("received") in 1 Cor 15:3-8, and from there being no qualitative distinction between the "appearance" of the Lord to him and His appearance to his precursors (such as one might expect if his precursors had been disciples, and he not).

These, taken together, strongly suggest Scripture-bothering and visionary experience all the way down, right down to the first Christians; with GMark (post 70 CE) being the first known writing to hypothesize a pre-crucifixion discipleship on the part of the first Apostles.

Not sure what you mean. Visions are visions, they're not about something real, but they sure seem to be, to those who have them.

The Last Supper is another such report of a direct communication from his Lord (again, "received").

This sort of thing is universal and the actual root of religion. It's a human thing based on the way our brains work to interpret reality using an internal real-seeming model of the world that, under certain conditions, can become unhinged from reality-testing.

Religious ideas, concepts, admixture with philosophy, theology, doctrine, etc., all come much later and are enhtirely secondary phenomena.

First comes: "I sat in a cave for many days and the spirits came to me and told me ..."

The faster this business of figuring out what the ancients thought becomers an interdisciplinary approach, like cognitive science in general, the quicker we'll get an understanding of what ancient religious texts were actually talking about, and how they actually evolved. We won't get that just from looking at texts and archaeology alone, because we'll have no idea what the "terms of art" actually mean.

It's like future archaeologists reading a computer manual that talks about a "mouse" and thinking we were talking about a certain kind of rodent.