Stringbean

You want to read an interesting book checkout this one:

"The Jesus Inquest" by Charles Foster. (or via: amazon.co.uk)

gurugeorge

As in the sketch - the proto-orthodox were in a double-bind, they actually HAD no proof of lineage going back to Jesus while he was on earth, the only actual person in the back of their lineage, or rather the Roman lineage, was "Paul", like everybody else, and possibly maybe a few remnants of the earlier lot of Zealots/visionaries. (Although I picture them more as post-Diaspora Jewish con artists pretending - cf. the description by Irenaeus somewhere of "Polycarp" as running around saying "oh yes I knew John!" And of course, nobody in Rome, post-Diaspora, would necessarily be any the wiser.)

So they had to incorporate his writings, since some of them were known, and "Paul" was known ("Paulus" is a nickname) as the founder for most of the existing sects ("the apostle of the heretics" according to Tertullian), so they (and the Kerygmata Petrou, the now-lost document that formed the basis of the Pseudo-Clementines) split him into a good version ("Paul", who kowtows to their made-up "Peter") and a bad version "Simon Magus" (representing intransigent heresy).

(Again, in the Pseudo-Clementines, there are tantalizing similarities between some biographical elements in "Paul"'s story and the doings of "Simon Magus". Robert Price has gone into this often.)

I am not familiar with those. Where would I find them?

Here, sorry forgot to link.

As I understand it, it's generally accepted by orthodox scholarship that some of the "Paul" letters are highly likely to be forgeries and that even the "genuine" ones may be heavily interpolated ("may be" by apologists, "probably/definitely are" by liberal biblical scholars).

Those two aren't exclusive, remember. The myth is a myth of an entity that was a god (in fact the Son of God) but either took on human form in some way or possessed a human being in some way (there's that range in "heresy"). Doherty's sublunar theory is just one version of "in some way".

The heretics' last gasp was what was much later called "Docetism". I picture them as the remnants of Gnosticism largely incorporated into Catholicism, but unwilling to give up on some element of their spiritual Jesus.

archibald

Ok. That's your scenario. And it's very interesting. I hadn't realised that the 'early church' (that is to say the winning faction) had such trouble with Paul, or that Tertullian described him as 'the Apostle of the heretics'. That is interesting.

Thanks. In all truth, if I were to try to catch up on material such as this, and the Bauer book, I would have to leave the discussion for a while. :]

Personally, I lack the means to allot a probability to how corrupted the epistles are. But I accept that there may be interpolations.

Ok, but let me, before I consider launching into an exploration of early heretic and/or non-orthodox material, ask you one question.

Will I find any actual indication that any group saw Jesus as fictional/mythical/non-earthly?

If not, then is it not reasonable to say that while your scenario may have plausibility, it lacks evidence (aka has a 'missing link'), and that my (HJ) scenario could arguably be considered, by an objective use of the evidence-based standards of rational scepticism, to be marginally better, because it contains a lot of evidence (in overall terms) which has to be explained away, rather than evidence whose very existence is speculation? If, when Jesus 'enters upon the discussions', no one said that he was non-existent, isn't one very good explanation that he likely did, whatever forms of theism may have existed beforehand?

Also, can you think of many other examples of this sort of thing. Where a religious figure becomes 'historical' not long after being 'non-histporical'? It seems quite unusual to me. Unique, almost.

May I just add here that I am not trying to get you to 'switch sides', and that I believe that the same goes for you. It's refreshing to be able to have a dialogue where either party is free to say to the other 'you have a point' without feeling that their own hypothesis is threatened.

andrewcriddle

In its present form the pseudo-Clementine material is late, (ie 4th century). It is clearly based on earlier sources but I have doubts about using it as evidence for Christianity before 150 CE.

Andrew Criddle

gurugeorge

Why would they? They thought that God sent his Son (or an emanation of some kind) to Earth in some kind of human form (either possessing a person or taking on fleshy form in some magical way). THEY THOUGHT THAT REALLY HAPPENED.

But one thing's for sure, the "primary entity" if one might call it that, was the divine being, the human part of the equation was not primary, and not, so to speak, "balanced" either. It's not like that in "Paul" - it's the divine being that speaks to him and gives him his gospel. And in Hebrews, the entity spoken of seems to have very little importance placed on its human aspect.

In fact, the "proportion" and relative quality in the balance between divine/spiritual and human/fleshly seems to have been up in the air for a long time. It's only orthodoxy that insisted on an equal balance in some way - that was part of its Catholicism, trying to have a doctrine that everyone would be happy with.

No, as I said in the other thread, the "missing link" is on the HJ side of the argument - in that you need more than a human-sounding aspect to the story/myth, you need that causal chain, you need a reason to give the HJ hypothesis purchase as the proper explanation of the human-sounding bits.

The only people who seem to have held to a strictly human Jesus were the Ebionites, who are considered heretical too by the Church. In all other forms of Christianity, AFAIK, we have to do with a myth involving an entity that's part divine and part human or human-seeming.

There are other mythical entities like that - how are you going to distinguish between that type of myth, or a mere fiction, or an "urban legend", and a myth that actually has a real historical person at the root of it?

There's no triangulation in the case of Jesus, whereas there is for other historically accepted human beings - otherwise they wouldn't be accepted as historical. And the standards aren't all that high, there just has to be some independent source, and some kind of causal chain that removes the entity in question from the realm of the fictional, made up, hallucinated, etc., and into the realm of physical.

(The superhero example has sometimes been used to try to make this clear. Suppose civilization falls, and some future archaeologists dig up some Batman or Superman comics. Those comics have lots of human-seeming elements to them, along with the fantastical. Does that make it automatically the case that they must have been about real human beings, albeit mythologized? Obviously this is exaggerated, it's an "intuition pump" to draw out the salient logic. Historical investigation can't afford to take anything for granted, not even a long, venerated tradition.)

aa5874

Why are you asserting that you KNOW something for sure when you are an amateur and don't have the languages?

The Pauline writer was NOT a Marcionite in the NT Canon. The Phantom was Only Divine but the Pauline Jesus was God and Man like a MERMAID is FISH AND WOMAN, Jesus was born of the SPIRIT AND a woman.

In the NT Canon, a NON-Heretical writing of the Church, the teachings of "Paul" was compatible with the teachings of the Church that Jesus was God Incarnate.

It is simply contradictory to argue that the Pauline writings were heavily interpolated to be compatible with the teachings of the Church and still turn around and still say the Pauline writings are NOT compatible with the doctrine of the Church.

Now, Hebrews is IRRELEVANT to what the Pauline writers composed.

archibald

Well, that would be some point of agreement between us at least, if we can agree that the evidence we have does seem to indictae that he was thought of as having existed.

Sure, but Paul appears to have been writing about a figure who had already died. I'm not sure how you expect him to communuicate with such an entity except through a vision of some sort.

As for his supposed human existence not having been described as important, it is the centrally most important thing in the epistles. If he had not been thought of as having lived, died and risen, there would be no point in telling people that they could do similar.

If you can't cite a group who thought he didn't exist then it seems to me that your view of the balance is, er, not balanced.

No, the missing link is not on the HJ side. They have evidence that he was thought of as having existed. It is the MJ side who do not have evidence (that I have seen yet) that any group thought he didn't. I do not know how to put this more simply.

I'm not concerned about what his actual composition was thought of as being. I'm more concerned about whether anyone thought he was entirely spiritual, and nothing else. He wouldn't have been the first religious figure to have been granted 'special supernatural powers' and he probably won't be the last either.

One can never be sure. I am trying, at another thread, to explore what objective means there may be.

There is no triangulation for a multitude of minor figures from ancient history.

Josephus alone has many figures not evidenced anywhere else. And that's just Josephus.

If historians had reason to believe that the figures illustrated were thought at the time to have been actual people, then yes, they would take that into proper consideration.

aa5874

Your post is LOGICALLY FALLACIOUS.

It is NOT imperative at all that Jesus must have LIVE, DIED and was RAISED from the dead in order for "Paul" to tell people that they could do similar.

"Paul" claimed Jesus died for our sins, was buried and was RAISED from the dead ACCORDING to the Scriptures.

It is only necessary to BELIEVE.

Ro 10:9 -

gurugeorge

Why would any group think "he" didn't exist? They were Christians, of course they thought he existed! Where do you get the idea that MJ-ers think early Christians would have had to believe that their cult figure didn't exist?

The MJ position (of which Wells and Doherty are two examples) is simply that there's no real human being at the back of the Jesus story (or that, if there was one, he was so distant and unconnected with the Christianity that eventuated that it's pointless to call him "the historical Jesus"), that rather than being a man mythified, Jesus is in some sense "myth all the way down".

The real question is the nature of the "he". You, as a rationalist, are looking at the story and, because you rule the woo-woo bits out of court, you see the human bits and think "ah yes, probably a real human being whose story just got out of hand".

That's just a big, glaring, non-sequitur.

As aa keeps pointing out, ALL THE EVIDENCE in the NT Canon is evidence for a man-god, god-man, or whatever. Nobody at that time apart from a small sect called the Ebionites, who were considered "heretical", thought Jesus was just a man.

The "evidentiaryness" of all that writing is about the god-man. That's the figure they believed existed, that's the figure the NT Canon purports to be convincing proof of the existence of.

Now, since nobody knows who wrote those texts, when, or why, nobody actually knows the real status of those texts. They could be based on eyewitness accounts of a man (who gets mythified), or they could be just mystical confabulation or sheer fiction, or even fraud. The last is unlikely, since it seems pretty clear that many of the authors believed in the existence of the god-man, and it's pretty clear that they believed either that he either possessed a body, took on a body, or had the illusion of a body.

But god-men don't exist. So what's a rationalist to do with all those scribblings?

There are two broad options - ahistorical and historical. To the rationalist "historical" can only mean "real human being at the root of the myth of the god-man". But "ahistorical" can have lots of possibilities - from conscious fraud at one end (unlikely, as above), through fictionalized account of someone believed to have existed, to sincerely-believed-in god-man, etc., etc.

The problem is that the HJ position needs more than the texts themselves, it needs external triangulation - causal chain, something to take the Jesus character out of the realm of "ahistorical" (no real human being there) to "historical" (an entity someone eyeballed, heard, spoke to, or even just contemporarily hear about before they became mythified).

Without that causal chain, the HJ idea is just a floating notion without much backing. "Myth all the way down" is perfectly workable as an alternative, and fits better with the evidence (which, remember, includes the whole history of the early Church as far as that can be known).

I guess this discussion really belongs in the other thread, so I'll leave it here.

aa5874

It does not matter what people of antiquity believed.

Those who INITIATED the QUEST for the "historical Jesus" IDENTIFIED the Jesus of the NT as the Jesus of FAITH and are looking for ANOTHER Jesus.

It was those who INITIATED the QUEST who REJECTED the Jesus of the NT as the historical Jesus.