Malachi151

I posted this article on the Tektonics forum. I had no idea that J.P. Holding was that big an asshole

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...ad.php?t=90269

LOL

Iasion

Great stuff Geoff :-)

One minor point :

In section
"There is not one single writing from or about Jesus during his supposed lifetime"

I see :

Justus of Tiberias
Jewish historian who lived in Galilee during the 1st century and wrote two preserved works, a history of the Jewish War of 66-70 and a chronicle of the Jewish people from Moses to the death of Agrippa II in 100 CE, covering the period in which Jesus supposedly lived. (Justus may have lived slightly after the supposed death of Jesus)

Justus?
Josephus?


Iasion

Malachi151

Nope, Justus: http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/justus.htm

John Kesler

What were you hoping to accomplish by sending the article to Robert Turkel? :huh:

And you thought that Dr. Gibson was hard on you.

Malachi151

I knew good and well it would be rejected and dismissed, I just thought the reaction was funny. The "good Christian" started out right way with insults and name calling, LOL!

Camio

I found your article very clear, the best summary of the JM theory I have read on the web sofar. The use of extensive quotations in the core of the text is a very good idea. So my comments:

1. You seem to imply that the Gospel of Mark was either meant to be an accurate historical record of the life of one Jesus of Nazareth, or a purely allegorical tale. Yet in ancient times, biographies rarely offered historical accuracy, and often involved mythical elements with a view to morally educating the reader. That's why I think a precise comparison between the ancient biography genre and the Gospel of Mark would be highly welcome instead of the too general comparison you intended to make.

2. Unless I am mistaken, you didn't address the "born of a woman" and "david's stock" references in Paul. Any specific reason? Do you share Doherty's view on them?

3. You spend a lot of space on the "phantom" Jesus. But I was wondering: do we know what this word meant for a first century Marcionite?

If it is something like this:



We are pretty much close to the Jesus myth. But if it is something like that:



i.e. a being with which you can interfere wihout realizing he is a ghost, it is a completely different matter I guess. In a nutshell, what do we know about the concept of "phantom" in the Antiquity?

4. I suppose you didn't intend to put footnotes in your essay so that it wouldn't become too heavy. But sometimes it would be very interesting to have some sources on statements like this one, which is central to your intepretation of the Josephus passage:

5. Why did you include the comparison between Christian and Pagan arts at the end of your essay, since you are obviously no proponent of the syncretic borrowing hypothesis?

That's it for now. Very nice essay, once again! :wave:

Malachi151

Thanks Camio.

Perhaps. But regardless, its not written to the quality even of other histories and biographies of the time. Yes, there were also other forms of biographies, I forget the name for them, that were more mythical in nature, and one could argue that its that type of biography. I don't think that helps the case much, other than perhaps proposing some benign historical core, but this isn't helped much by the fact that our earliest mentions of Jesus, from Paul and others, focuses on his godly nature. The only exception really being the Gospel of Thomas.

True. I didn't mention that for the "James, the brother of the Lord" quote either. I'm working on that now and will add it in a later revision. I'll probably put forward Doherty's views on those passages but not strictly endorse them.

Doherty's position is pretty hard line. Paul can't have conceived of Jesus as a person on earth at all to fit his model, and I'm not sure about that. Its hard to say what the delusional Paul thought of Jesus, I can't make it out from his writings, which may in part be because, as he says in one passage, he changed his message to be whatever his audience wanted to hear.

I couldn't see the first image. It didn't show. Yeah, I don't know exactly what Marcion meant by it either, but I wouldn't only rely on Macion anyway, since I think that Marcion's view of the scriptures was wrong and he wasn't a witness to anything either anyway.

I think that both Marcioin's view of Jesus and the "Catholic" view of Jesus both come from basically the same scriptures. Marcion's view came from Paul and his reading of the Gospels, not some other outside source of information, so its not really that much help anyway.

I think the arguments against Marcion are a bigger piece of evidence than Marcion's views themselves.

Yes, that and also its a lot more work and a pain in the butt and I didn't feel like finding a good source for every claim, some of which come from just past reading in books from the library, etc. If you do footnotes then you have to do them right, just throwing in one here and there is no good.

Maybe I should explain that better in the article, since I really only briefly addressed it. As I said, there was a significant "pagan" influence on "Christianity" after it was adopted by the Romans, but the story of Jesus itself, i.e. Paul and the Gospels, I think are not.

A lot of Christina tradition and the Christian view of Jesus I think was influenced by "paganism", but I don't think the initial story was. The story of Jesus is very Jewish. The worship of Jesus is very "pagan".

Thanks

Camio

Some examples in mind? Actually I was making reference to a book by Charles H. Talbert: What is a Gospel? (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Incidentally I came across a much more recent title by Richard A. Burridge: What Are The Gospels?: A Comparison With Graeco-roman Biography (or via: amazon.co.uk). I don't know this scholar. I am sure other people on this board do. Anyway:

Perhaps worth taking a look at if indeed this is the work of a serious scholar.

But that's precisely where the line is drawn between the cryptic and the mythicist positions, isn't it?


Great!

OK, my bad, let me be more explicit: I was just refering to Marcionites as an example. My point was broader: some christian groups considered Jesus to be a "phantom". Does that mean that they imagined him as some ectoplasm floating in the air, or with the appearance of a real human being, who could eat, talk, shake hands, except that he actually wasn't really human in essence? I think it is an important question to address, since the first proposal is very myth-oriented, whereas the second is not.

Jeffrey (sorry, one more on the list...)

No Robots

Burridge is careful to make clear that the Gospels as we have them are not the original form:

The shift from unconnected anecdotes about Jesus, which resemble rabbinic material, to composing them together in the genre of an ancient biography is not just moving from a Jewish environment to Graeco-Roman literature. It is actually making an enormous Christological claim ... [while] no rabbi is that unique ... writing a biography of Jesus implies the claim that not only is the Torah embodied, but that God himself is uniquely incarnate in this one life, death and resurrection.--p.304

Malachi151

Yes. I'm saying that it wouldn't help a Christian view of the Gospels any. I'll have to look into those books you recommended, but from what I have seen so far, this would be like calling The Book of Enoch a biography of a real Enoch. Far as I know, no one proposes this.

I think it was probably option 2, the view that he appeared like a normal human, but was really a phantom.

As I said, both of the positions, the "flesh" and the "phantom" were taken from the writings about Jesus, neither position came from a knowledge of the person. Both were theological debates.

In all of the debates about the nature of Jesus, no one, on any side, presented any real evidence. They all just put forward theology and scripture.